by John Boyko
Toronto’s George Denison was among the many Canadians whom Thompson came to know and rely upon. Denison came from a wealthy and influential family. He was well educated, a lawyer, a one-time city alderman, and founder of both the Canadian Rifle Association and the Queen’s Plate horse race. Denison was also a militia lieutenant colonel and commandant who used his inherited wealth and political power to advocate for increased support for the militia, with special attention on cavalry. His 1st Toronto Independent Troop of Cavalry became the governor general’s body guard.
Denison regularly visited Thompson at the Queen’s and often welcomed him and his compatriots to his large estate for dinners and quiet afternoons.42 Denison later wrote: “I was a strong friend of the Southern refugees who were exiled in our country, and I treated them with the hospitality due to unfortunate strangers driven from their homes.”43 Denison was concerned that Thompson and his people were beset by Union agents who hindered their efforts, and he did all he could to help. He was to help a great deal, and paid a handsome price for doing so.
THE NIAGARA PEACE INITIATIVE
Throughout his time in Canada, Thompson juggled a number of people, plans and plots. One of his first initiatives began with meetings in Montreal and Toronto about an idea to distract the North with the intention of influencing the upcoming presidential election. Thompson met with Clay, who in turn met with Copperheads William “Colorado” Jewett and George Sanders. Jewett was an influential Copperhead leader who had been travelling throughout the Midwest for over a year, stirring up support for the movement. He had come to Canada in the fall of 1863, delivering speeches in which he urged listeners to exert pressure on Britain to help negotiate an end to the war. He conducted a number of interviews with Canadian newspaper editors, to whom he regularly submitted open letters.44 Following the tour, he offered his services to Thompson.
George Sanders was the former editor of New York’s Democratic Review. He was a navy purchasing agent before the war and had been arranging arms purchases for the Confederacy since the first battle at Bull Run. Davis recalled him and then sent him to Toronto to help Thompson, with specific instructions to create support for the Copperhead peace movement. He had arrived on June 1, 1864. Sanders was witty, eccentric, and alternatively an infuriating and charming man, who became an instant hit on the Montreal cocktail circuit.45
With Thompson’s encouragement, Holcombe, Clay, Jewett and Sanders devised a plan whereby a meeting would be held and a framework for a peace settlement established. For it to succeed, they needed a Northerner with gravitas. When their first choices did not work out, they involved newspaper publisher Horace Greeley. Jewett and Sanders told Greeley that they were fully empowered by Jefferson Davis to negotiate a peace arrangement with Lincoln, and only needed a well-positioned Northern intermediary such as him to begin the process. Greeley bought the ruse and within days welcomed Jewett to his New York office.46 The con was on.
Greeley was an influential Republican Party leader and friend of William Seward, who had founded the New Yorker and then the unashamedly partisan New York Tribune. His opinions were read and considered in the United States, Canada, the Maritimes and around the world. Most famously, on August 20, 1862, Greeley had filled the Tribune’s front page with an open letter to Lincoln entitled “The Prayer of Twenty Millions.” The letter criticized Lincoln for his conduct of the war and most blisteringly for his having missed the opportunity it offered to free all the slaves in Union-held territory. Lincoln had responded two days later with an open letter of his own in which he stated his goal for the war more clearly than he had ever done, arguing that his first and only objective was the preservation of the Union with the eradication of slavery simply a possible tactic to attain that end.
On July 7, 1864, Greeley wrote to Lincoln about his having been contacted by rebels in Niagara Falls, Canada. He detailed all that they promised and wanted. Greeley had obviously given thought to Jewett’s conversation, however, for he told Lincoln, “Of course I do not endorse Jewett’s position averment that his friends at the Falls have ‘full power’ from J.D., though I do not doubt that he thinks they have.”47 Greeley argued that a meeting should nonetheless take place. Pressuring Lincoln to agree, Greeley wrote: “I therefore venture to remind you that our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country, also longs for peace—shudders at the prospect of fresh conscriptions, of further wholesale devastations, and of new rivers of human blood; and a wide-spread conviction that the Government and its prominent supporters are not anxious for peace.” Greeley listed what he thought would be six conditions for peace. The first two were: “The Union is restored and declared perpetual.… Slavery is utterly and forever abolished throughout the same.”48
Lincoln shared Greeley’s doubts about the Confederates in Canada but could not afford to be seen as lacking interest in ending the war, and so he responded that he would meet anyone sent from Davis to discuss peace. He echoed Greeley’s note, however, and wrote that any discussions would be based on the restoration of the Union and the abolition of slavery.49 Excited by this even tepid support, Greeley abandoned his reserve and wrote to Lincoln that he had become convinced that Clay, Sanders and Thompson were fully empowered by Davis to carry on negotiations. Lincoln displayed impatience with a rather sharp response stating that he did not want another letter but to meet the men. Lincoln offered safe conduct for Thompson, Clay, Holcombe and Sanders to come to Washington.50
The president sent his personal secretary, Major John Hay, to Greeley’s New York office on July 16 to move the process along. Through Hay, Lincoln urged Greeley to proceed and reiterated his offer of safe passage to Washington for the Confederates. With this support, Greeley took a train to the American side of the falls.
Greeley settled into a suite of rooms, surrounded by reporters from his own and other papers. Over the next three days, he sent cables and then crossed the suspension bridge to meet with Holcombe and Sanders at Clifton House on the Canadian side. Thompson remained in Toronto. Greeley told them of Lincoln’s offer of safe passage and tried to persuade them to return with him to Washington. The Confederates balked. With each meeting, Greeley felt his hopes fade. Sanders finally admitted that they were, in fact, not accredited by Davis and only wanted to hear what Lincoln had to say on the matter of peace.
That evening, Hay arrived at Greeley’s hotel with a handwritten letter from the president dated July 18. Addressed “To Whom It May Concern,” the brief letter said:
Any proposition which embraces the restoration of peace, the integrity of the whole Union and the abandonment of slavery, and which comes by and with an authority that can control the armies now at war against the United States, will be received and considered by the Executive Government of the United States, and will be met by liberal terms on other substantial and collateral points, and the bearer thereof shall have safe conduct both ways.51
Greeley worried not only that he had been duped by Thompson’s Confederates but that he had erred in not being clear with them from the outset regarding these preconditions. He and Hay argued over the next step and finally agreed to take Lincoln’s letter to Clifton House the next day. Sanders and Holcombe were aghast, or at least feigned being so. They told Hay and Greeley that Lincoln’s pre-conditions were unacceptable and interpreted them to mean that the president was not serious about wanting peace. The talks ended in acrimony and accusations. Greeley left for New York. Hay stayed another day and met Sanders and Holcombe again, but then he left too with the realization that the entire episode had been a ploy.
Over the next several weeks, newspapers in the North, South and Canada carried articles about what were widely interpreted as botched peace negotiations. Clay sent an open letter to the Associated Press that was printed in a number of newspapers. He spoke of how Holcombe and Sanders had arrived ready and able to negotiate peace but that they had been hoodwinked by a double-crossing president who wanted only war. Clay also wrote accusingly of the process: “a rude withdrawal of a
courteous overture for negotiation at a moment it was likely to be accepted.… If there be any citizen of the Confederate States who has clung to the hope that peace is possible, Lincoln’s terms will strip from their eyes the last film of such delusions.”52 Lincoln’s letter had handed Thompson’s men an outstanding propaganda opportunity.
Greeley obtained Lincoln’s permission to publish many of the letters that had passed between him, the president, and Thompson’s men. It did not help. The story of what happened changed with each new telling, but a consensus developed that Lincoln had begun to bargain in good faith and then, having suddenly changed his mind, presented preconditions that he knew the South could never accept.53 The newspaper coverage smeared both Greeley and Lincoln, with the editor appearing to be a naive and amateur fiddler and the president a cold warmonger, uninterested in peace.
Even loyal Republican and Lincoln supporters criticized the president’s handling of Thompson’s Niagara Falls initiative because the “To Whom It May Concern” letter clearly stated that the war was being fought not just for the restoration of the Union but also for the emancipation of slaves.54 Critics were, of course, ignoring Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Emancipation Proclamation. Henry Raymond, editor of the New York Times and chairman of the Republican Party’s National Committee, nonetheless told Lincoln that after the Canadian meetings, the electoral tide had turned against him and the party. If elections were held soon, he told the president on August 22, he would be defeated and the party would lose in Congress and in states across the North.55
Thompson’s Niagara Falls initiative also led members of Lincoln’s cabinet to begin conspiring against him and testing the waters for a run at the Republican presidential nomination. On August 19, Thompson met in Toronto with Judge Jeremiah Black, who had been sent by Lincoln’s secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, to ask his opinion about the strength of the Copperhead movement and whether a new Republican contender in 1864 could be nominated if he advocated a negotiated peace with slavery left untouched. 56
Lincoln told New York secretary of state Chauncey Depew that he had suspected from the outset that Davis had not accredited Thompson’s men in Canada and that the negotiations would end in failure. With the political fallout mounting, and then Greeley making a public display of having pushed him to act, Lincoln was pressured to make a statement. He confided to Depew, “The attention of the whole country and of the army centred on those negotiations at Niagara Falls, and to stop the harm they were doing I recalled Mr. Greeley and issued my proclamation ‘To Whom It May Concern.’… Their mission was subterfuge. But they made Greeley believe in them, and the result is that he is still attacking me for needlessly prolonging the war for purposes of my own.”57 Lincoln decided to say nothing.
Thompson had won, for Lincoln had been embarrassed, Northern political fissures widened and the Copperhead movement boosted. Lincoln asked his cabinet: “Does anyone doubt that the only thing the Confederate agents were authorised to do was to assist in selecting and arranging a candidate and a platform for the Chicago convention?”58 He was partly right. The Niagara Falls fiasco would indeed reverberate at the Democratic Party convention in Chicago, but a great deal would happen first.
THE PHILO PARSONS ON LAKE ERIE
Confederate Captain Charles Cole had a chequered military career. He had served with General Nathan Bedford Forrest, been captured and imprisoned. He then escaped and, although he never mentioned it, was also expelled from the army on account of theft and dishonesty.59 In the summer of 1864 he was in Sandusky, Ohio, on his way to hide among other Confederates in Canada, when he heard of Thompson’s operations. He wrote to Thompson in July, offering a new twist on an old idea. Cole’s plan was to steal the Union steamer Michigan, which protected the Johnson’s Island prison, and then use it to spring the two thousand or so imprisoned Confederates, who could then be organized to launch raids from Canada that would wreak havoc on the North.
Thompson warmed to Cole’s idea and asked him travel Lake Erie to become acquainted with the schedules and security arrangements of various harbours. He was also to ingratiate himself with the Michigan’s captain and crew. Thompson sent Cole four thousand dollars, which he quickly spent on a luxury hotel suite and new clothes for himself and his girlfriend in order to assume the guise of a wealthy oil man.60
Confederate navy captain John Beall had worked under the direction of Confederate navy secretary Stephen Mallory to help build a volunteer navy of eighteen ships that acted like a secret coast guard. He had lived in Toronto for a few months in 1862 and in the spring of 1864 had returned. Thompson contacted him about Cole’s plan and he was soon recruiting twenty Canadian-based Confederates to execute it. Their mission would be to take over the American steamer Philo Parsons at Detroit, release her crew, and then go on to Sandusky, where they would pull alongside the Michigan, on which Cole would be waiting. Beall and Cole would then coordinate efforts to capture the Michigan and move her quickly to the suddenly vulnerable prison. It all made sense. Thompson gave $25,000 to a courier named Bennett Young, who took it to Beall at Buffalo’s Genesee House. Beall met with Cole at Sandusky, and then stole back across to the border to Windsor to finalize his plans.
One of Beall’s recruits was ammunitions agent Bennett Burley. Burley, or Burleigh as he was known in Canada, had come from his native Scotland to try to sell a new underwater mine to the Confederacy, but the mine did not work. He had then become a member of Beall’s privateers and, for the last number of months, had been living in Canada, where he orchestrated the purchase and delivery of ammunition being manufactured for the Confederacy in a small foundry in Guelph.61
Cole connived for several weeks, befriending the Michigan’s crew. He was often on the ship and several times hosted generous dinners for the captain and officers at his hotel or on a rented ship. He also visited a number of Johnson’s Island prisoners and told those he trusted of the date of the Michigan highjacking and jailbreak.
On September 18, Beall boarded the Philo Parsons in Detroit. He somehow talked the captain into making an unscheduled stop to pick up a group of young men and then sixteen more men came on board at Amherstburg, carrying a large box and some rope. At 4:00 p.m., after stopping again at Kelley’s Island, the box was opened, the men armed themselves, and Beall informed the captain that he was commandeering the ship. Many heavy objects were thrown overboard to make it faster. Beall ordered it to steam at top speed for Middle Bass Island, about ten miles from Johnson’s Island, to gather wood for fuel. Passengers and crew were put ashore.
A small steamer called the Island Queen then unexpectedly approached, and a half-hour skirmish ensued. Shots were fired and the ship’s engineer hit in the face before Beall’s crew prevailed. Beal declared the Island Queen taken in the name of the Confederacy. Its crew and passengers, including twenty-six unarmed Union soldiers from the 13th Ohio Regiment who had put up a gallant struggle, were put ashore. A couple of men were held back as potential hostages. A passenger was found to have eighty thousand dollars on him, but Beall allowed him to keep it. The Island Queen, too small to be of much military use, was scuttled and sunk. By then, it was 9:00 p.m., the appointed hour, and from a safe distance, Beall and his men watched the Michigan and awaited its signal. And they waited.
Cole had been betrayed. On the day it was all to happen, he had invited the Michigan’s officers to dinner but, with the meal and drugged wine ready to be served, a group of soldiers burst in and arrested him. Cole was charged with being a spy and locked up on Johnson’s Island.
Not knowing Cole’s fate, Beall ordered the Philo Parsons closer to Sandusky where, under the light of the full moon, he was startled to see the Michigan‘s lights ablaze and crew standing ready on deck. Seventeen of Beall’s twenty crewmen promptly mutinied. A deal was made and the ship turned back into the lake. Most of the crew and the hostages were let off at Fighting Island in the Detroit River. The ship then steamed to Windsor. The remaining crew stole everything of value, including
a piano, and then scuttled the ship.
Burley fled back to the foundry in Guelph. Beall took a train to Toronto and reported to Thompson at the Queen’s Hotel. Thompson told him that the Michigan–Philo Parsons escapade was front-page news in Canada and Northern states. On Thompson’s advice, Beall decided that it was time for a hunting trip and promptly left for the Muskokas, north of the city.
When informed of Cole’s fate, Thompson wrote a letter of protest to Colonel Hill, Johnson Island’s commandant of post. He argued that Cole had done nothing wrong and that it was illegal to hold him solely for being suspected of contemplating an illegal act. Further, Thompson argued, “If you can justly condemn Captain Cole as a spy, every soldier and officer of the United States coming within the armies or limits of the Confederate States could be tried and condemned as such. We admit your right to return him to prison as a recaptured prisoner, but any other punishment, in our judgment, would be against justice and the law.”62 Cole remained behind bars.
Not satisfied to stay in hiding, Beall sent an article to the Toronto Leader that sought to explain and justify his actions by directly addressing Canadians: “The United States is carrying on war on Lake Erie against the Confederate States (either by virtue of right or sufferance from you), by transportation of men and supplies on its waters; by confining Confederate prisoners on its islands, and lastly, by the presence of a 14-gun steamer patrolling its waters. The Confederates clearly have a right to retaliate, providing they can do so without infringing on your laws.”63
Many American newspapers used the Philo Parsons episode to renew their anti-Canadian rhetoric. The Detroit Tribune, for instance, reported in an editorial that was reprinted in the Globe, “These pirates have grossly violated the rights of asylum to Canada, and if our neighbours were animated by one spark of generous humour they would feel insult that has been perpetrated as keenly as ourselves, but the bitter and senseless prejudice which has warped their feelings has also blunted every sense of honour and propriety.”64