Double Death

by Gavin Mortimer

  On the eighth day Lewis received a visitor, George Clackner, the enigmatic detective from Baltimore. He cursed when he saw the irons and demanded they be removed immediately. Apologizing for the indignity, Clackner helped Lewis to his feet and explained that he was to be tried by court-martial.

  Outside the prison gate two armed guards were waiting to escort Lewis to the City Hall, but Clackner dismissed them, saying he could manage the prisoner on his own. Clackner marched Lewis along Broad Street toward the City Hall. There was a bit of small talk, a brief description of the prison break, and then Clackner mentioned that he had a little errand to run before they went to the City Hall. They turned down a side street and entered a hardware store. Clackner told his prisoner to wait at the entrance while he attended to some business. Lewis did as he was told as Clackner chatted with the owner, seemingly unconcerned about the prisoner at the door. Lewis was puzzled at the lax security, and “it occurred to me that here was an opportunity to escape.” But was it a trap? Were the two armed guards waiting around the corner to shoot him as he fled? Had he felt stronger, Lewis might have run the risk and bolted. But eight days chained hand and foot had stripped him of his strength. He stood by the door and waited.

  Clackner finished his errand and handed Lewis to the City Hall authorities without another word. After a few minutes Lewis was taken upstairs to a large room, where he was introduced to William Crump, the judge advocate of the court. He asked Lewis if he wished to have a counsel. No, said Lewis. Crump advised him to think about it, particularly as “your friend Scully employed counsel.” The remark threw Lewis, who had no idea Scully had already been tried.

  Lewis accepted the proposal and was given Scully’s counsel, a Mr. Gilmer. When the lawyer arrived from his office at the corner of Bank and Main streets he showed the prisoner into a side room and came straight to the point. He wasn’t cheap. From Scully he’d received “one hundred dollars in gold,” and he expected the same from Lewis. He could have it, replied the Englishman, provided he told him what had happened to Scully. Gilmer gave a brief account of the trial, how “Scully admitted that he had been in the United States government service, but becoming disgusted and being a foreigner, he had left.” Gilmer advised Lewis to adopt the same defense. One further thing, added Gilmer, beware the Morton family. They would be called as witnesses, and they “were very bitter.”

  The trial began the following day, after Lewis had been given time to rest, eat and wash. He stood before a court-martial consisting of the judge advocate, a colonel acting as the president of the court and six field officers of lower rank.

  There were several charges laid before the defendant, the principal accusations being that Pryce Lewis was an enemy alien in the employ of the Lincoln government and that he been “found within the fortifications of Richmond taking a plan thereof.” Lewis pleaded not guilty to all charges.

  Over the following three days the prosecution called a number of witnesses to prove otherwise. Mrs. Morton, her two daughters, and her two sons took the stand, all testifying that the man in the dock was the same man who had led the search of their former home in Washington. Yet far from exacting revenge, Mrs. Morton wished to emphasize that Lewis “had behaved gentlemanly in her house.”

  Next General Winder testified, followed by his detectives, including Samuel McCubbin, Philip Cashmeyer and George Clackner. The latter confirmed to the court that he’d seen the letter brought to Timothy Webster by the defendant, and that its writer, Scott from Baltimore, was known by Clackner to be loyal to the South. The claim surprised Lewis, who looked hard at Clackner and wondered once more “if he had left me near the store door to give me an opportunity to escape.”*

  When Lewis was called to the stand his counsel asked him few questions. Instead Mr. Gilmer confined himself to the “theory of defense.” He told the court that it was well known in Richmond that following the Union army’s calamitous defeat at Manassas (Bull Run) the previous July, many of their officers had deserted to the Confederate army. And that, blazoned Gilmer, waving a finger at Lewis, was what the accused had done. But Lewis knew he was wasting his breath. After the prosecution had rattled off a few perfunctory questions, the prisoner was marched from the court to await his fate.

  Lewis was escorted to Castle Godwin prison and left in a cell with his wrists shackled. The next day he was taken downstairs to a comfortable room with a fire. Lying listlessly in a cot in front of the fire was John Scully, who looked up at Lewis and “burst into tears.” One of the jailors removed Lewis’s handcuffs and told him his companion needed succor. Lewis was shocked at what he saw. Scully was “haggard and woe-begone [but] suffering more from mental anxiety than bodily pain.” He wanted to go home to Chicago, he said, weeping, to kiss his wife, and hug his children, little Lizzie and Tom. It would be Tom’s first birthday soon. The thought tortured him. He didn’t want to die.

  Don’t talk nonsense, said Lewis, trying to console his friend, “they could not hang us on the ridiculous charge of taking plans of fortifications.” They sat up most of the night talking, and by dawn on Tuesday, April 1, Scully was thinking more positively. Lewis had convinced him that within a matter of days McClellan would be marching through the streets of Richmond, followed no doubt by Pinkerton holding the general’s hat. Scully raised a smile. We’ll be all right, Lewis reassured him.

  After breakfast the pair dozed in front of the fire. They were woken sometime later by the arrival of their jailor, accompanied by two men they didn’t recognize. One was tall and athletic with sandy-colored hair and a goatee of the same hue. He introduced himself as Captain Archibald Godwin, provost marshal of Richmond, after whom the prison had been named. The second man was Captain George Alexander, assistant provost marshal, short but stocky with an olive complexion and an elegant black mustache.

  Captain Godwin removed a document from the pocket of his uniform. He asked John Scully and Pryce Lewis to confirm their names, then pronounced that both men were “to be hanged by the necks until we were dead on the 4th of April between ten and two o’clock.”

  The condemned men were told they could have anything they wished in the remaining three days of their life, and then Godwin and Alexander departed. Lewis put a consoling arm around his friend’s shoulder and told him they were in this together and must bear up. Scully rebuffed his companion, saying Lewis could not know how he was feeling for he didn’t have a wife and children.

  Scully was soon seized by a manic energy. He would write, yes, he would write letters to everyone who had the power to help. To the Catholic bishop of Richmond, to Gilmer their lawyer, to the British consul. He told Lewis he had written to the consulate a week earlier but had received no reply. Scully suggested Lewis write, too, and the Englishman thought it worth a try. He called for some paper and a pencil; then he wrote to the British consul stating his case and asking to see him immediately. He entrusted the letter to Father McMullen, a priest at the city’s St. Peter’s Cathedral, who made daily visits to Castle Godwin to offer spiritual relief to some of the 250 inmates. McMullen gave his word that he would deliver the letter to the consul. Then he asked if he could be of assistance in a more spiritual way. Lewis declined the offer, explaining that he was not a religious man. For Scully, however, the appearance of Father McMullen was a balm for his anguished soul.

  Once the priest had departed, Scully and Lewis sat before the fire and talked about the past and future. A subject that troubled them was Tim Webster. Scully told Lewis Webster had given a statement in his defense during his trial. How had he looked? inquired Lewis. Scully explained that Webster had been too ill to attend the court-martial in person, so he and the court-martial had gathered around Webster’s sickbed to hear his evidence.

  Webster had been staunch in his defense of Scully, describing him as a friend from Baltimore who “was always in the company of known Secessionists, and was considered by them to be a good friend to the South [and] so far as he had any knowledge … he was what he assumed to be, and
that his appearance in Richmond was a surprise to him.” When it was put to Webster that Scully might be in the employ of the Federal government, the sick man had dismissed the idea as impossible.

  Lewis told Scully the news was encouraging because “suspicion that would naturally attach to Webster from the circumstances of our arrest” remained for the moment only that, suspicion. Winder and his men still lacked the hard evidence to bring Webster before a court.

  *Lewis was never able to unravel the enigmatic Clackner. In November 1862 Winder reorganized his force, and Clackner was fired. He finished the war as a lowly warden at Libby Prison.

  C H A P T E R T W E N T Y

  “Keep Your Courage Up”

  BY APRIL 1862 a semblance of order had been restored to the British consulate in Richmond. Acting Consul Frederick Cridland was no longer besieged by dozens of fretful Britons demanding permits, money and safe passage home. Most had long since left Richmond, and Cridland was toiling less hard for his monthly wage of twenty-one pounds.

  He had indeed received a letter from a Mr. John Scully on March 28, though it was a rather vague, poorly written correspondence with no mention of an imminent execution. Nevertheless, Cridland “sought and obtained an interview with the officer presiding at the Court Martial which had condemned Scully and became convinced that the evidence produced against him left no doubt of his guilt.”

  The letter handed him by Father McMullen on Tuesday, April 1, was altogether more alarming. Not only had it been written by an educated, articulate man, but one under the sentence of death. Cridland, reluctant as he was to interfere “in the cases of persons who had evidently violated Her Majesty’s Proclamation,” nonetheless considered he would be failing in his duty as acting consul if he did not follow up the letter. Cridland had applied to see the prisoners the day he received the letter, but the request was refused. On Wednesday he tried again, with more insistence, and he was granted an appointment on Thursday, April 3, the day before the execution.

  As the acting British consul strode to Castle Godwin, a mile and a half to the west laborers began erecting a gallows under a grove of oak trees on the Camp Lee Fair Grounds.

  Cridland was shown to the cell occupied by Lewis and Scully, and introductions were made. Neither Lewis or Cridland made any reference to the letter that Lewis had written to the consul from Charleston nine months earlier asking for a pass to Richmond; in all likelihood Cridland never received the letter. The diplomat soon got down to business, explaining that he had discussed their case first with the court-martial officer, then with Gilmer. It wasn’t good. They’d repeated to Cridland the report of General Winder: that the two spies had been under surveillance from the moment they arrived in Richmond and that the detectives had judged “their movements very extraordinary and suspicious.” To sum up, declared Cridland in a pompous tone, “there is enough evidence against you to hang a hundred and eleven men.”

  Lewis was flabbergasted at Cridland’s attitude and asked if he’d seen the evidence. The consul admitted that he hadn’t, though he had asked. The confession riled Lewis, who accused Cridland of not doing enough to help them. Cridland, impressed with the clarity of Lewis’s outburst, adopted a more conciliatory approach, and soon they were deep in conversation, reviewing in detail every circumstance that had brought Lewis and Scully to this woebegone moment.

  “Keep your courage up” were the last words Cridland said to Lewis and Scully before departing. For their part, the two prisoners begged him to keep his word and seek an immediate interview with the Confederate government. They had less than twenty-four hours to live.

  Cridland walked a few blocks west from Castle Godwin to the secretary of state’s office in the front part of the Treasury Building devising his strategy. There was no time to ask Lord Richard Lyons in Washington to intercede on the men’s behalf, nor did Cridland consider that he alone possessed the diplomatic weight to exert sufficient pressure on the Confederate government. He must tread carefully but firmly; diplomacy of the highest order was required. No threats, but perhaps he might employ one or two subtle hints apropos Her Majesty’s government and its relations with the South.

  Judah Benjamin, the secretary of state, and George W. Randolph, the secretary of war, rose when Cridland was shown into the room by the chief clerk. Cridland expressed his gratitude for the extraordinary interview and then set out the nature of his call. He had come straight from Castle Godwin, where two British subjects, “John Scully and Pryce Lewis acknowledged to me that they had been employed as spies in Washington and paid as such by the Federal Government.” That point was indubitable, Cridland emphasized, adding that he was well aware of Her Majesty’s Proclamation of Neutrality in which the queen had warned all British subjects from interfering in the American conflict. That wasn’t the issue. What concerned Cridland was the revelation that “the prisoners had been tried and condemned to death at a moment when it was utterly impossible for either of them to obtain any evidence in their favor from Washington.” He, too, had requested to see the evidence against the two men, but this had been refused. Surely this went against all judicial protocol? Cridland would be happy “to write to Lord Lyons in order to obtain evidence should the execution be postponed,” but of course that was a decision to be made by the Confederate government.

  The interview concluded with “no promise” from either Randolph or Benjamin. Cridland thanked the men for their time, and they in return were grateful that the matter had been brought to their attention.

  To his friends, the fifty-year-old Judah Benjamin was “the brains of the Confederacy”; to his enemies he was “the hated Jew.” John Beauchamp Jones, who had worked as Benjamin’s clerk when he was secretary of war, despised his religion but respected his “intellect, education, and extensive reading, combined with natural abilities of a tolerably high order.”

  When Cridland sat before him on the afternoon of Thursday, April 3, 1862, Benjamin had been secretary of state for a mere six days, having succeeded LeRoy Pope Walker. His replacement as secretary of war, George Randolph, was thus similarly inexperienced in his new position. While Randolph was considered a competent lawyer, Benjamin’s brilliance bordered on genius. He had been elected to the Senate in 1852, rapidly gaining a reputation as one of the Democratic Party’s most eloquent and powerful orators. The Southern Anti-Semites may have detested Benjamin, but he was a favorite with President Davis, who admired his blunt honesty and valued his cool judgment.

  Benjamin enjoyed his work. Sixteen-hour days weren’t unusual, with or without a war, and the question of the two British prisoners must have appealed to his legal mind. Having been born in the West Indies to English parents, Benjamin was an Anglophile, but he, like everyone else in the Confederate government, was losing patience with the British.

  In the months following Queen Victoria’s Proclamation of Neutrality, the British government had maintained a discreet distance on the “American war question” and made no attempt to lift the Union blockade of Southern ports. Not so the country’s press, which was overwhelmingly inimical to the North. The spectacular failure of the Union army at Bull Run in July 1861 was greeted with thinly veiled glee by most newspapers with the London Times describing it as a “cowardly rout, a miserable, causeless panic, and disgraceful to men in uniform.”

  American papers in the North retaliated with splenetic attacks of their own. Harper’s Weekly told its readers to ignore the “short-sighted selfishness” of Britain, while reminding them that the London Times was “the exponent of that British public opinion which allowed George Third to hire Hessians to fight his battles against the sons of Englishmen.”*

  The New York Times warned Britain that “a profound indignation is felt by the larger part of the American nation, and it is not likely to be allayed for years to come.” The insults traded across the Atlantic delighted those in the South. Mary Chesnut, the wife of a Confederate soldier and politician, told her diary on July 5, 1861, “The [London] Times reflects the sentim
ent of the English people. How we do cling to the idea of an alliance with England.”

  Yet just a few weeks later, on August 26, Chestnut was rebuking William Russell, the Times’ august war correspondent, for his antislavery polemic. Russell was the most influential reporter of the day on either side of the Atlantic. Since March 1861 he had been traveling through the Southern and Eastern states, filing regular dispatches on what he found. Russell was an impartial observer; he admired the determination and courage of the Confederate army, while questioning similar attributes in the Northern forces; he liked the hospitality he encountered in the Southern states and felt intimidated by the hectoring that emanated from certain Union politicians. But what Russell detested above all else was the institution of slavery. Reaching one Southern plantation, he had found it run like “a hideous black harem.” How was it, Russell asked, that one could have anything but contempt for a man who “holds his head high and poses as the model of all human virtues to these poor women whom God and the laws have given him, [and] from the height of his awful majesty he scolds and thunders at them as if he never did wrong in his life?” Russell’s antislavery polemic touched a raw nerve with educated Southerners like Mary Chesnut, many of whom knew of the depravities practiced on plantations, but who had chosen to purge their consciousness of such thoughts. They didn’t take kindly to an outsider reminding them of the evil that lay among the tobacco plants and cotton fields.

  As summer turned to autumn, the Confederacy’s desperation for British assistance deepened. Cotton hadn’t brought “England to its knees,” as one Southern paper had so confidently envisaged earlier in the year, and Northern newspapers seized every opportunity to remind the rebels of the fact. In September 1861 Harper’s Weekly reported that the viceroy of Egypt had notified the British government that the productive cotton capacity of the country would be “increased to an unlimited extent,” while “the Nicaraguan Embassador [sic] in London offers it free grant of land in Nicaragua to settlers who propose to raise cotton.”