A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War
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The “To Whom It May Concern” letter was indeed the last straw for some Lincoln supporters. The treasurer of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, George Templeton Strong, thought “his letter … may cost him his election. By declaring that abandonment of slavery is a fundamental article in any negotiation for peace and settlement, he has given the disaffected and discontented a weapon.”15 Charles Francis Adams, Jr., was shocked by the palpable sense of defeat among the cabinet when he visited Washington at the end of August. (He was on furlough, recovering from an attack of jaundice caused by malaria.) He had transferred from Meade’s staff to an all-black regiment, the 5th Massachusetts (Colored) Cavalry, and was waiting to take up his commission as lieutenant colonel in September. His own convictions about the aim of the war and the necessity of seeing it through remained strong despite his recent experiences in Virginia; but a meeting with Seward left him deeply concerned. “His tone was very different from that of last spring,” Charles Francis Jr. wrote to his father on August 20, “when he seemed to me so buoyant and confident of the future.… I was pained to feel how discouraged he was. He too gave me the impression which all here do, of ‘going it wild’ and not seeing where this thing is going to come out.”16
Contrary to Charles Francis Jr.’s fears, Seward was one of the few politicians not scheming to replace Lincoln or flirting with ideas for a negotiated peace. But “the Tide is setting strongly against us,” warned the editor of The New York Times, Henry Raymond, on August 22. As chairman of the Republican National Committee, Raymond had substantial influence. He saw no hope for Lincoln, barring a sudden military success, unless the administration declared its willingness to consider reunion with slavery intact.17 Even Edwin Stanton, whose longevity at the War Department owed much to his loyalty to Lincoln, decided that it might be worth finding out from the Confederate commissioners what sort of terms the South would be willing to discuss. On August 19, 1864, Judge Jeremiah Black, a moderate Democrat and old friend of Stanton’s, visited Commissioner Thompson in Toronto. Three days after the meeting, Thompson wrote to Mason and Slidell in France that Stanton had sent Black to him because he had lost all confidence in the Republicans’ reelection. “Judge Black has come to me to learn the state of feeling in the Confederate States, and to know whether I was able to say if negotiations for peace could be opened without the ultimatum of final separation.”18 Stanton never did learn the answer, because on August 22 the New York Herald exposed the meeting, which frightened him into repudiating any connection with the visit. Facing treachery in his cabinet, abandoned by the Republican National Committee, and excoriated in the press, Lincoln believed that his chances of reelection were slim. Yet “I honestly believe that I can better serve the nation in its need and peril than any new man could possibly do,” he told Thaddeus Kane, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.19 The following day, the twenty-third, Lincoln put his cabinet to the test: he asked them to demonstrate their loyalty by signing their names at the bottom of a covered document. They did not know it, but each man was committing himself to the war until the last day of the Lincoln presidency, assuming the Democrats won the White House in November:
This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected [read the memorandum], then it will be my duty to so cooperate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards.20
While these somber proceedings were taking place in Lincoln’s office, across the parched park of Lafayette Square, Lord Lyons was writing his assessment of the president’s future. The situation was indeed bleak, but “there is still a possibility,” Lyons insisted to Lord Russell, “of some military successes before the winter, which might make a great change in public feeling.”21 Lyons had hoped for some sign of progress before he left for Canada to discuss with the governor-general, Viscount Monck, how to restrain Confederate operations in North America. The trip had been planned since July, but Lyons was loath to leave the legation before at least some of his cases were settled. “I heartily wish I could get away from Washington, and go at once to Canada,” he had written to Russell on August 9, “but with two Members of the Legation away on account of their health, and two more ailing, I am afraid the work cannot be done at all without me.”22
Those unresolved cases included that of Mary Sophia Hill, who had written again to the legation. She had been tried in a military court and a verdict apparently reached. “But no official statement has been made, or any public verdict given, nor can I get any satisfaction,” she wrote in a shaky hand on August 20:
I have been tried according to their own laws, and after four weeks, common justice, I should think, would demand a verdict … the shocks my nervous system has received from the confinement and from the rough treatment I received from my jailer and assistant, as well as the excitement of my trial, and now four weeks suspense as to result, will make me an invalid for life and has very nearly upset my reason. I am not, never ever have been, guilty of the charges brought against me.… But there seems a spirit of bitterness against HM’s subjects here, and very little law or justice for them.23
Lyons agreed that the law and justice were becoming two quite separate entities for British subjects. Whether Mary was as innocent as she claimed would make no difference, he was quite certain, in her treatment by the military authorities. It was only a gross injustice—resulting in the death of a conscripted Briton—that had recently forced a change in the War Department’s approach to disputed enlistments so that alleged British subjects were removed from the battlefield while their cases were under review.31.3
At the end of August, Lyons decided he could not take another day in the capital: “The thermometer in the House literally stands as high at midnight as at noon.” He ordered his two favorite attachés, Edward Malet and George Sheffield, to be ready to leave for Canada with him on the thirtieth. The new secretary, Joseph Burnley, would just have to do his best.
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The Canadian authorities had warned London that the Confederates in British North America were not only “hostile in spirit” to the North but also “prepared to give expression to that hostility in overt acts.”25 Fitzgerald Ross was astonished by the brash behavior of the Confederate community on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. He and Colonel Grenfell had arrived at Clifton House in mid-July to find the hotel awash with conspiracies. “The ‘season’ had hardly yet commenced,” wrote Ross, but the place was so busy that it seemed to be in midflow. Scores of survivors from John Morgan’s failed raid into Kentucky were hanging around the colonnaded hotel and were “delighted to meet their old Colonel again.” In his travel account, Ross tried to make the meeting sound coincidental and harmless. The Morgan raiders passed the time “talking Secesh politics and plotting mischief against the Yankees,” he wrote, as though the conspirators were nothing more than nostalgic veterans who liked to reminisce about the glory days and plan the occasional nuisance.26
Ross’s breezy memoir left out the real details of their stay at Niagara. It was the week of Commissioner Clement C. Clay and James Holcombe’s peace conference with Horace Greeley; it was also the week that Grenfell was reunited with the Confederate agent Thomas Hines.31.4 27 Grenfell sent a mysterious letter from Niagara to his daughter, Mary. “There is still work to be done and I am awaiting events,” he wrote, before warning her that he was planning to disappear “for a month or so I hope, before I again get into the saddle.… It is impossible to give a safe opinion upon what may take place in the South within the next three months, but they cannot subjugate it, never, never!”28 Ross parted from Grenfell at the end of July and returned to England in the autumn, intending to write a book about his adventures in the South. He never imagined that the “mischief” had actually grown into a conspiracy involving the exiled Copperhead Clement Vallandigham and the underground group the Sons of Liberty.
Far more popular in the Northwest than anywhere else in the country, the Sons of Liberty nevertheless attracted an eccentric constituency, and its numbers fluctuated wildly from a few thousand across the country to 18,000 in Indiana alone.30 The grand commander of the organization, an Indiana printer named Harrison H. Dodd, needed Vallandigham since the Sons of Liberty was in danger of collapsing unless it could find a national figure sufficiently credible to attract more members. Vallandigham needed the Sons of Liberty almost as much; his resounding defeat in the 1863 election for governor of Ohio had been a major setback. General McClellan looked certain to win the Democratic Party’s nomination for president unless Vallandigham used the organizing capabilities of the Sons of Liberty to force his way into the selection process.
Thompson and Captain Hines’s first meeting with Vallandigham took place at Windsor on June 11, 1864. “On my arrival here I heard that there was such an organization as the Order of the Sons of Liberty in the Northern States, and my first effort was to learn its strength, it principles, and its objects, and if possible to put myself in communication with its leading spirits,” Thompson reported back to Judah Benjamin. “This was effected without much difficulty or delay. I was received among them with cordiality, and the greatest confidence at once extended to me.” His investigations into the society revealed that the membership was not as large as Vallandigham had boasted to him, but
its organization was essentially military. It had its commanders of divisions, of brigades, of regiments, of companies. The belief was entertained, and freely expressed that by a bold, vigorous, and concerted movement the three great Northwestern States of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio could be seized and held. This being done, the States of Kentucky and Missouri could easily be lifted from their prostrate condition and placed on their feet, and this in sixty days would end the war.31
Vallandigham was hedging his bets. He was hoping to lead the Democrats to victory in the presidential election, but was prepared to reap the fruits of an armed uprising in the Northwest if his political ambitions failed. He was counting on Thompson to provide the arms and explosives for his members.
Thompson did not care whether Vallandigham wanted reunion or Southern independence so long as he was committed to fomenting a revolution in the North. He agreed to fund a joint venture between his Confederate raiders and Vallandigham’s Sons of Liberty to make a coordinated attack on the three prisoner-of-war camps in Illinois and Indiana. The prisoners would provide a ready army to help the conspirators stage a coup d’état in the Northwest, and as soon as this was accomplished, they would return to the South to help finish the war. Thompson hoped that the prison break would bring an additional fifty thousand fighters to the Confederacy.
Captain Hines, Colonel Grenfell, and some sixty former members of Morgan’s brigade were to attack the prisons; the Sons of Liberty would have the responsibility for rounding up the chiefs of the local legislatures and disposing of them. “All they need now is an ‘occasion,’ as they style it, to rise and assert their rights,” Thompson had reported to Benjamin on July 7.32 There was no attempt at any strategic planning, no discussion as to which camps would be liberated first or how the army of liberated prisoners would be fed, transported, and clothed; but this did not stop Thompson from writing hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of checks. Confederate sympathizers and corrupt middlemen shipped cartloads of revolvers hidden in boxes marked “Sunday school books” to Ohio and Indiana. New York proved to be especially fertile ground for obtaining illicit guns and ammunition.
All the Confederates had assigned themselves aliases, which fooled no one and only served to give the conspirators a false sense of security. “Dear Hunter [the alias used by Thomas Hines],” wrote Grenfell on July 31 from Collingwood on the Canadian side of Lake Huron, “there is fair fishing round the place but better further North … if any news write immediately.”33 Grenfell was waiting for Hines to give him the signal to go south to Toronto, which was the agreed rendezvous point for the plotters. However, the date for the uprising was proving difficult to pin down with the Sons of Liberty, and the “occasion” had been pushed back several times. Vallandigham had returned to Ohio, hoping to be arrested by the authorities in the belief that this would provoke a public backlash violent enough to spark a revolt. But to his dismay, Lincoln gave orders for the troublemaker to be ignored, which deprived Vallandigham of the intoxicating power of indignation. Ironically, Grant’s military failures in Virginia had also weakened the Sons of Liberty’s resolve, since public weariness with the war made it seem likely that democracy rather than conspiracy would soon bring peace. Representatives for the Sons of Liberty tried to cancel the mission, telling Hines and Thompson on August 8: “The more we think of it the more thoroughly are we convinced that it will be unsuccessful.”34
The organization had been successfully infiltrated and arrests were already beginning to take place, including those of fifty leading men from the Sons of Liberty in Kentucky on July 30. Two days later the state’s grand commander, Judge Joshua Bullitt, was seized as he stepped off the ferryboat on his return from a conference with Thompson and Hines in Canada. A search of his belongings revealed a satchel full of gold, a check for $10,000 signed by Jacob Thompson, and many incriminating papers.35 The leaders of the Indiana chapter, including Harrison Dodd, were arrested three weeks later. The Confederates were equally guilty of jeopardizing the mission. They knew U.S. detectives were tailing them but failed to alter their behavior. The same basic ciphers were used, the same routines followed, and there was much careless talk in public places. By now the Federal authorities had a clear idea that some sort of attack on Camp Douglas was being planned in a joint Copperhead-Confederate operation.
Thompson and Hines would not be put off, however, and managed to pry out of the Sons of Liberty a new date for the uprising. It would now take place on August 29 in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention. The obvious wavering of the Sons of Liberty made the Confederates anxious, but they reckoned that even if only half the promised five thousand members actually came, there would still be a reasonable chance of success. Hines sent out the long-awaited signal for his followers to convene in Toronto. On August 24 Thompson handed Hines his written orders and $24,000 to cover the expenses of the mission. Over the next few days, Grenfell and sixty others slipped into Toronto. Each man was provided with $100 in cash, a pistol, ammunition, and a return train ticket to Chicago. Hines outlined the plan: they were to travel inconspicuously, in groups not larger than three or four. Once in Chicago they would meet at the Richmond House hotel for the rendezvous with the Sons of Liberty. One force would make for Camp Douglas to liberate its 5,500 inmates. The other would travel two hundred miles west to Rock Island Barracks to release its 9,000 Confederate prisoners.
Grenfell left with Hines and a couple of others on August 26. He chose as his costume for the occasion a gray hunting suit, in the same hue as the Confederate uniform, two sporting guns, and a yellow-spotted hunting dog—a loud disguise entirely characteristic of
him. When one of Grenfell’s traveling companions pointed out that the suit would probably cause him to be arrested the minute he stepped off the train, he replied: “I have my English papers, and my gun and my dog, and if they ask me what I am doing, I will say I am going hunting.”36 The party reached Chicago on August 28 and proceeded straight to Richmond House. Grenfell signed the register under his own name. Hines, on the other hand, kept to his alias of Hunter. The Confederates had a suite of rooms—all labeled “Missouri Delegation”—which was deemed a sufficient disguise to allow them to blend in with the thousands of real delegates who were crowded four to a room in the city’s overburdened hotels. (The plumbing, which had so irritated Anthony Trollope during his stay in the city, remained unimproved.)
That night, the Confederates and Sons of Liberty met for the first time since the secret conferences in Canada. They revealed “that something had gone wrong”: no orders had been sent to the forty thousand members in Ohio or the fifty thousand in Indiana. By way of exculpation they pointed out that the mission had already been exposed in several newspapers and that Camp Douglas had received additional Federal troops.37 The Confederates were incensed. It seemed impossible that the hundreds of thousands of dollars funneled to the Sons of Liberty would fail to produce a single fighter. Outside the hotel windows the city was heaving with antiwar protesters, many of them obviously wearing sidearms. At least some of them, Hines insisted, would be eager to see a little action.
The embarrassed conspirators agreed to supply the Confederates with five hundred men by the following evening. The Camp Douglas plan would be abandoned, and the less guarded prison at Rock Island would become the sole target. Under the new plan, one of Hines’s deputies, John Castleman, and twenty Confederates would accompany the Sons of Liberty, while Hines and the remaining fifty would provide support by cutting the telegraph wires and stopping all trains in and out of Chicago. With the help of the prisoners from Rock Island Barracks, they would commandeer the trains and head two hundred miles south to Springfield, the state capital. In a few hours, Illinois would be theirs.