Double Death

by Gavin Mortimer

  The World ran with the story on Sunday, December 10, publishing a photo of an elderly Lewis along with embellished information about his wartime activities. There was no mention of Timothy Webster or John Scully, but the paper made much of the Lord Tracy escapade. The World also warned in its final paragraph that if assistance was not forthcoming from friends or family, Lewis, “a faithful servant to his country … will be buried by the city in Potter’s Field with only a number to indicate where he lies.”

  The report left Mary Lewis in a state of great distress. She had no intention of allowing her father to be buried in an unmarked grave. She emptied her savings to pay for the funeral expenses, and Anson Barnes contributed something toward the cost. Barnes also approached the Pinkertons in the hope that as they have “established a private burial ground near Chicago for the internment of the bodies of his [Allan Pinkerton’s] faithful employees the agency will aid.” Nothing came of the request.

  On Thursday, December 14, the New York Daily News reported that Lewis was to be laid to rest in Torrington, Connecticut, in a service paid for by his family, and that “in accord with his wish, flags of the United States and Great Britain were to be buried with him.”

  But poor Pryce Lewis was not allowed to rest in peace. On Sunday, December 17, the New York Times evoked the ghost of Allan Pinkerton in a shabby, idle article hacked from the pages of the Spy of the Rebellion. Don’t believe the “glowing accounts of his service to the North,” taunted the paper, because “forty nine years ago Timothy Webster, the greatest of Union spies, was hanged in Richmond after Pryce Lewis had betrayed him to save his own neck. The death of that brave man was as much on Pryce Lewis’s soul as if Lewis had cut his throat … it is an old commonplace that such deeds do not prosper—a commonplace too often proved untrue by the subsequent history of those who perform them. In Pryce Lewis’s case the old smug commonplace came true … the ghost of Webster, the heroic man who looked death in the eye without a tremor, and who met it at last with a tranquil smile, may have gazed upon that mass of pulp lying on the busy street and thought of retribution.”

  For a second time Mary Lewis was devastated by the thoughtless words of a New York paper. She wrote the Times, correcting its story and condemning its “lies about my father.” The paper refused to print an apology, so Lewis turned to Barnes and pleaded with him to restore the reputation of a man who had been traduced in life and now in death. Barnes took on the responsibility and tried for several weeks to persuade a paper to run the truth about Pryce Lewis. No one appeared interested, until the story landed on the desk of William Inglis, a veteran reporter for Harper’s Weekly. The tale appealed to him, not just its adventure and intrigue but also its injustice, and on January 30, 1912, Inglis’s full-page exposé appeared under the headline a REPUBLIC’S GRATITUDE: WHAT PRYCE LEWIS DID FOR THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT, AND HOW THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT REWARDED HIM.

  Inglis revealed what had really happened in Richmond in the spring of 1862. John Scully was the man who had betrayed Timothy Webster, not Pryce Lewis. Lewis was imprisoned for nineteen months in “loathsome surroundings” and returned to Washington “broken in health.” But it wasn’t Lewis’s fortitude in surviving a Richmond prison that impressed above all else; it was his journey through the Kanawha Valley in July 1861. By dint of his courage and boldness he “had achieved more than a hundred soldiers” and merited the gratitude of a nation. Instead he had been neglected by the government.

  In the same month in 1912 that Harper’s Weekly published Inglis’s piece, an article appeared on the other side of the Atlantic in the Montgomeryshire Express, a modest publication popular with the people of Newtown. Contained within the article was an extract from an American newspaper describing Pryce Lewis’s wartime espionage, along with an accompanying letter from John Owen, for many decades a resident of Blackinton, Massachusetts, but a Newtown lad deep down.

  Dear Mr. Editor,

  As I am always interested in reading your accounts of old Newtown folks in the Express I thought you might be interested to read the clipping which I enclose. Mr. Price [sic] Lewis lived with his parents when a boy at the White Lion, Penygloddfa. I don’t know who would be likely to remember him as a schoolmate. We were quartered in a room above the Green Tavern, and one Edward Morgan, the teetotaler, was our teacher. That was between 60 and 70 years ago. We Welsh-Americans don’t think our Government did the square thing with our friend Price Lewis. If they could not pension him they could have made him a present of a few thousand dollars so that he might have ended his life in comfort.

  A P P E N D I X 1

  The Baltimore Plot

  The so-called Baltimore Plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln received a blast of fresh publicity in January 2009 when President-elect Barack Obama retraced the final 135 miles of Lincoln’s journey in February 1861 prior to his own inauguration in Washington. Dozens of newspapers carried stories about the putative assassination plot, with a number describing Allan Pinkerton’s role in thwarting the conspirators.

  Unfortunately, the weight of historical opinion agrees that there was never any plot to murder Lincoln, at least not a serious one that went beyond bravado. Colonel Ward H. Lamon, Lincoln’s bodyguard, was the first to break ranks and openly cast doubt on the legitimacy of a “plot,” writing in his 1872 memoirs (The Life of Abraham Lincoln from His Birth to His Inauguration as President), “It is perfectly manifest that there was no conspiracy—no conspiracy of a hundred, of fifty, of twenty, of three; no definite purpose in the heart of even one man—to murder Mr. Lincoln at Baltimore.” Pinkerton, added Lamon, was merely “intensely ambitious to shine in the professional way … it struck him that it would be a particularly fine thing to discover a dreadful plot to assassinate the president elect, and he discovered it accordingly.”

  Pinkerton’s supporters, however, accused Lamon of lying and said he was motivated by revenge, having been described by the Scot as “a brainless, egotistical fool.” A decade after Lamon’s biography, Pinkerton released his own memoirs in which he devoted much space (sixty pages) to detailing how close Lincoln was to death and how, but for him, the wicked assassins might have been successful.

  The first serious and impartial analysis of the plot came in 1900 when George L Radcliffe, later an adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and a Maryland senator, received a doctorate of philosophy in history at the Johns Hopkins University for a thesis that examined the Baltimore Plot. Radcliffe had interviewed many people present in Baltimore at the time of the incident, including Cipriano Ferrandini (who died in Baltimore in 1910), and concluded that the plot was a Pinkerton fabrication.

  Fifty years later, in March 1950, the Maryland Historical Magazine published a long article by Edward Stanley Lanis, in which the author rubbished the idea that Lincoln’s life had been in danger as he headed to his inauguration. “During the Civil War when Mayor George Brown, Marshal George B. Kane, several newspaper editors—all from Baltimore—and members of the Maryland legislature were being locked up in federal prisons on charges of disloyalty to the Union, Ferrandini remained a free man,” wrote Lanis. “That these men were arrested and the barber left free was all the more remarkable because Allan Pinkerton and his agency, now working for both the State and War Departments, had assisted authorities in rounding up suspected traitors but had left the barber alone.” Lanis went on to reveal that in the chaotic days following Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865, Pinkerton did not disclose to General Lafayette Baker, the chief of the secret service, “Ferrandini’s connections with the alleged earlier assassination plot—information which might have linked John Wilkes Booth with Ferrandini, for Booth was known to have frequented Baltimore.”

  There can only be one reason why Pinkerton held back the information from Baker: because Ferrandini had never been involved in an earlier attempt to kill Lincoln, except in Pinkerton’s rich imagination. The definite proof cited by Landis that there was no plot was the fact that “to the end of his days, Pinke
rton never permitted disinterested parties to examine the papers which persuaded [Norman] Judd and others to put pressure on Lincoln to flee from a danger largely imaginary.”

  Some writers have disagreed with Landis and come down on the side of Pinkerton, but this writer, having studied all the evidence, particularly Pinkerton’s long track record of distorting the truth for his own gain, takes the view that there was never any serious attempt to kill President Abraham Lincoln as he passed through Baltimore on his way to Washington in February 1861.

  A P P E N D I X 2

  The Trial

  While Pryce Lewis’s memoirs are a fascinating and concise account of his work as a Civil War spy, there is one aspect in which they are inadequate: the trial of Timothy Webster, and who exactly said what. In Lewis’s defense, one must remember that at the time of the trial he was not only physically exhausted, having spent several weeks in a small, damp prison cell, but also mentally shattered. Just days before he appeared as a defense witness for Webster, Lewis had been scheduled to die. In addition, Lewis only appeared briefly at the trial and therefore was able to describe just the events relating to his testimony. Unfortunately, the notes of Webster’s trial, along with those pertaining to Lewis and Scully, were lost at the end of the war. Thus the best surviving contemporary account is the article published by the Richmond Dispatch on April 30, which was later reproduced by several Northern newspapers. The Dispatch reported that Webster faced two charges or specifications: that on April 1, 1862, “being an enemy alien and in the service of the United States, he lurked about the armies and fortifications of the Confederate States in and near Richmond” and that on July 1, 1861, “[he] did lurk in and about the armies and fortifications of the Confederate States at Memphis, in the State of Tennessee.”

  The first charge was clearly spurious as on that date Webster was confined to his bed in the home of William Campbell, while the second charge would have been hard to prove nine months down the line (and indeed he was acquitted on this count).

  In reality, both charges were manufactured to put Webster in the dock, probably why the documents were later destroyed. The Confederates had enough circumstantial evidence from inquiries made in Baltimore to convince themselves that Webster was a double agent. And they also had the word of John Scully.

  Again, the precise nature of Scully’s confession was never made clear, not by the Confederate newspapers, nor Pryce Lewis, nor Allan Pinkerton. The Richmond Dispatch said he “let the cat out of the bag,” while Pinkerton in The Spy of the Rebellion wrote that Scully, “yielding to the influences which he could not control, had told his story, and had given a truthful account of all his movements.” Yet in his memoirs Lewis described receiving a note from Scully in which the Irishman said, “I have made a full statement and confessed everything.” But later, after Lewis’s interview with Judge Crump, he “concluded that Scully had not made a full statement.”

  In fact Scully appeared to have remained loyal to Lewis throughout his interrogation, refusing to reveal the latter’s journey through the Kanawha Valley in July 1861, as well as the trip to Chattanooga that Lewis had planned to take once they had wrapped up business in Richmond.

  Nor did Scully seem to tell Winder’s men much about Webster, if the best the court could come up with were two specifications, one of which was risible. Did Scully also tell the Confederates about Webster’s journey to Memphis in July 1861? More likely the rebels had eyewitnesses willing to testify that Webster had been in Tennessee during this time, such as the pompous army doctor named Burton, and the court-martial preferred to concentrate on one additional charge other than the one of spying in and around Richmond. To list all the Southern cities and towns that Webster had visited in the past twelve months would have been a considerable embarrassment to the Confederate authorities, and revealed the extent of the damage caused by Webster’s espionage.

  In all probability, Scully confessed two things: first, that he was still in the employ of the Federal secret service, and second, that he came to Richmond to deliver a letter from Allan Pinkerton to Timothy Webster. This confession, while not direct proof that Webster was a Northern spy, was enough for the rebels to hang him.

  Lewis maintained in his memoirs that he said nothing to incriminate Webster, merely acknowledging to the prosecution that he came South to deliver a letter to Webster. Bizarrely, however, Lewis didn’t mention if the prosecution asked who wrote the letter and what, therefore, was his response. It’s inconceivable that Lewis was not asked this question, and peculiar that Lewis did not address this issue in his memoirs.

  In 1945 Harriet Shoen, a friend of Mary Lewis, Pryce’s daughter, sent the memoirs to Colonel Louis A. Sigaud, who, during the First World War, had commanded the Corps of Intelligence Police of the American Expeditionary Force to France, and later wrote several books and articles about Civil War espionage. Sigaud scrutinized the memoirs, describing them as “very interesting” but highlighting inconsistencies with regard to Webster’s trial. Specifically, Sigaud found it “exceedingly difficult to believe that Lewis was not questioned at all as to his call upon Webster with Scully, their delivery of the letter to him, their employment by the Federal Government and the fact that the alleged Scott letter was a fake.” This gave Sigaud “the impression that much is being left unsaid and perhaps deliberately.” Did Lewis admit during Webster’s trial that the letter came from Pinkerton? Sigaud thought he might have, though his suspicions were based on inference rather than hard evidence. Ultimately, however, Sigaud concluded that neither Scully nor Lewis was to blame for Webster’s fate but that “primarily Pinkerton was responsible for he slipped up by sending men to Webster who ran the risk of identification in Richmond by Southerners who had met them in Washington.”

  A P P E N D I X 3

  Pinkerton’s Military Espionage

  When Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865, Pinkerton lamented the fact that had he been in charge of the president’s security Lincoln would not have been slain. It was yet another extravagant claim by Pinkerton in a war in which his detective agency had underperformed, at least militarily. Edwin Fishel, a longtime intelligence agent for the U.S. military and government, wrote in his book The Secret War for the Union: Military Intelligence in the Civil War that Pinkerton deserved some credit. Prior to the Civil War espionage was “not conducted by a recognizable organizational entity.” Pinkerton’s agency, working as part of McClellan’s army, was an innovation in that sense, but it could have been so much more effective if better coordinated. As Fishel wrote, Pinkerton should “have received reports from the cavalry and the other sources [such as the Balloon Corps] not under his control and synthesized the information from all the sources into a comprehensive picture.” Instead, Pinkerton placed too much importance on firsthand testimony, rambling accounts given him by fugitive slaves and rebel deserters. This information was often included in the reports Pinkerton passed on to McClellan, even though it hadn’t been verified by other sources.

  Pinkerton was also guilty of failing to exploit the loyalty of some of the thousands of Virginians who lived under Confederate rule but whose allegiance lay with the Union. Why, for instance, didn’t Pinkerton make an approach to Elizabeth Van Lew? By the end of 1861 her sympathies were well known in Richmond, and, working with Pinkerton, she could have established a network of informants throughout Richmond and Virginia. Instead, Pinkerton tried to insinuate his operatives into rebel strongholds, the most glaring case being E. H. Stein, who spent months in the rebel capital working as a barman yet who was unable to carry out any productive espionage because he was under constant surveillance. Similarly Timothy Webster, instead of placing himself at the heart of the rebel underground, should have used his charisma and cunning to win the confidence of Northern sympathizers in Virginia, men and women whose roots were known and trusted by their Southern friends, and groom them as spies. But Webster took all the risks himself, relying on his charm to see him through. It worked for
a while, but then people began to delve into his background. How long had he lived in Baltimore, this man who always evaded capture? Where did he get his money? Who were his friends in the prewar days? Pinkerton didn’t appear to understand that deep roots are always the hardest to pull up, as Elizabeth Van Lew was to prove later in the war when she provided much valuable information to the Bureau of Military Intelligence.

  Another of Pinkerton’s grave failings concerned Pryce Lewis. Lore has it that Webster was Pinkerton’s ablest spy, but that accolade should be shared with Lewis if not handed to him outright. It was he who spent three weeks traveling through western Virginia in July 1861, noting the strength and morale of Wise’s men in one of the most audacious missions of the entire war. He dined with Colonel Patton, inspected military fortifications, visited rebel camps, took a hotel room opposite General Wise and drank native wine with a Confederate major. When Lewis handed this information to General Jacob Cox, it persuaded him to advance against General Wise. The result was the capture of Charleston and the Kanawha River, not only an important strategic gain but a crucial morale boost for the Union coming in the wake of the Bull Run disaster. As the New York Times wrote on September 18, 1861, “nowhere else on all the theater of war have the Union armies so well sustained their cause as in Western Virginia … Gen. Cox enjoys the unquestioned honor of winning the important valley of Kanawha for the Union … what is Bull Run for the rebels by the side of it?’