“Must you point that weapon at me?” I asked, as if in high dudgeon.
“We’ve already arrested one woman tonight, ma’am.”
“Who, pray tell?”
“Mrs. Buckner Morris.”
“I trust I don’t seem that fatuous.”
“No ma’am.” He smiled and lowered the weapon. “You’re not screaming that you’re proud to die for the rebel cause.”
“My fiancé is a captain in the Union Army, Corporal. With General Sherman in Georgia.”
The man with the lantern had searched our armoire, carefully moving each dress to make sure no one was hiding behind it.
“Guess there’s no one here.”
I’ll never know why they didn’t search under the beds. Perhaps I intimidated them. I certainly had tried to do so.
“Sorry to disturb your sleep, ma’am,” the corporal with the gun said, and they left the room. They closed the door softly.
I held my breath to make sure they were gone. They rummaged about the rest of our floor and found no one. Someone, however, stole $500 of Daddy’s money. We could have used that to hire a better lawyer during his trial. They tramped noisily down the stairs. I waited till I heard the last of their footsteps.
“Are you all right, Tom?”
“Yes, Miss Letitia. I’m powerful—”
“Remain there,” I commanded, cutting off his expressions of gratitude which might yet prove premature. “I will go to console my mother. When they have left, I will lead you out of the house.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I threw on my robe, slipped out the door, and strolled regally downstairs.
My mother and brothers and sisters were in the parlor with two Union officers, one of them Colonel Sweet who, at thirty-one years old, reminded me of a child, a child with a fever.
Mary and Maggie were harassing the two of them fiercely. Naturally, I joined in.
“I suppose you expect to win a general’s star, Colonel Sweet, for this night of infamy.”
He turned to me and considered me with his wide, empty eyes.
“I am sure the Union will reward me as it sees fit.”
“You have also won yourself a place in the deepest pits of hell.”
My family stopped weeping. There was a moment of eerie silence in the room. No one dared to talk to Colonel Sweet that way.
“You keep a civil tongue in your head, young woman, or you’ll spend your night in the White Oak dungeon in Camp Douglas with your friend Mrs. Buckner Morris.”
“I would be delighted to do that, Colonel, though that fatuous Mrs. Morris is no friend of mine. Wouldn’t it look good in your Chicago Tribune that you, an officer who has never seen combat, would imprison and torment the fiancée of a decorated Union officer who at this moment is fighting with General Sherman.”
A gasp went round the room.
Colonel Sweet backed down.
“You will take me to your father’s study and show me his papers,” he said as the flush of anger died from his pasty face.
I noted that the captain with him had a pistol in his hand. The contempt of the rest of The Irish Lace and the wailing and weeping of the Walsh family had evidently left them in fear of their lives.
“I will take you to my father’s library, sir. You may examine whatever you wish. I, however, will not assist you.”
“Come along, Captain,” he ordered. “We’ll see what incriminating papers this Copperhead has left for us.”
“My father is not a Copperhead, Colonel. Neither is he a poltroon.”
Later, when I reported the details of that evening to the good Captain Murray, he burst into laughter at my use of the word “poltroon.”
“You certainly must have scared the living hell out of him to be able to get away with calling him that,” the good Captain observed “He was wounded in action at Perryville, so he wasn’t exactly a coward.”
“He wasn’t a hero, was he?”
“Well, from what I’ve heard, his regiment broke and ran. If his friends had not obtained his appointment to Camp Douglas there probably would have been an investigation of his conduct. Not a hero by any means, but not a coward, either.”
Captain Murray’s laughter, however, did not deter him from the rather passionate embrace in which he had imprisoned me, poor dear man.
I had decided by then that this is the way we would have to deal with the Union Army. My sisters agreed and that was the strategy we pursued through the horrors of the trial.
Needless to say, my good Captain, I do not use words like “fatuous” or “poltroon” in my ordinary conversation.
“Only when fighting off the Union Army. Not all of it, I hope.”
In response, I rested my cheek against his.
“Not quite all of it, Captain.”
Colonel Sweet and his sycophantic officer ransacked Daddy’s library. Naturally, they found nothing.
“If my father were truly a Copperhead, you may depend on it, Colonel, he would have left nothing here for you to find.”
Each time they discarded a pile of papers on Daddy’s desk, I would straighten them out and return them to their proper receptacle. Whenever they moved a piece of furniture, I would move it back to its proper place.
“He was foolish enough to participate in a conspiracy, Miss Walsh.”
“No, sir. There was no conspiracy, as you well know. He was, however, foolish to trust your degenerate spy Mr. Shanks.”
They both turned and glared at me venomously.
“Shanks is a prisoner, not a spy. He may cooperate with us.”
“You may swear a perjurious oath to that, Colonel, and yet you will win no one’s belief.”
That was an accurate prediction. He did perjure himself, as both he and Shanks did often during the trial, and no one believed either of them.
“I told you that you would find nothing,” I said triumphantly as they walked out of the room.
They did not have the grace to thank me. Nonetheless, I shouted after them, “You’re quite welcome!”
They finally took their leave.
“Do come again!” I yelled as I slammed the door.
Then I set about calming the family and getting them to bed.
“There will be hard days ahead. We must be prepared to fight them every inch of the way.”
At that moment, I did not expect to see my father ever again. I felt quite certain that the legal niceties had been brushed aside and that he would be shot or hanged the next day.
I reckoned without the need that both Sweet and the Tribune felt for public approval and acceptance of this ridiculous conspiracy.
Nevertheless, unless I offered the others an illusion of bravery, they would not hold up under the strain we would face in the days and weeks to come.
After everyone was in bed and, I hoped, asleep, I carefully explored the outside of the house in all directions through the windows. There were no brave prison guards of the Union Army in sight. I returned to my own bedroom and whispered to Tom Hines, “Come out very quietly, Tom. I believe my sisters are both asleep.”
Noiselessly, he slipped out from under the bed and tiptoed in the dark out the door of the bedroom.
I followed him just as quietly.
We had gaslight in the house, of course, though not in all the rooms at that time. But I risked neither light nor candle as I led him down the stairs and out of the house through the kitchen. A quarter moon shed some light on the yard. It had turned bitter cold. I remembered that my only outer garment was my robe.
Tom laughed softly and then whispered, “Mandy will never believe that I spent part of the night in a bedroom with three beautiful young women and never once had a temptation concerning them.”
“You do not flatter us, sir, with that comment.
We both laughed softly.
I conducted him to the barn, helped him to saddle one of our horses, and pointed the path through the dead prairie grass he must follow if he wished to avoid Colonel Swee
t’s patrols.
He bent down from his horse and kissed my forehead.
“Thank you, ’Titia. I have no understanding of why you’re doing this for me.”
“A wedding present for Mandy.”
“I trust that in God’s time you will meet her, and on a much better day.”
“You let him kiss you!” Captain Murray would later protest in mock horror.
At that moment, he was caressing me most provocatively, not quite beyond the boundaries of what was acceptable to a refined Catholic girl, but close enough to them. I realized that we must marry soon. It was not that I did not trust him, but I was no longer sure that I trusted myself.
“On the forehead, Captain. I thought it was a perfectly appropriate reaction in the circumstances.”
“You saved his life, ’Titia. You realize that, don’t you?”
“Naturally.”
“I’m glad you did. Too many men died in the war as it was.”
I knew that was what Paddy, poor dear man, would say.
The next day we read horrid headlines in the Tribune:
A General Sack of the City Intended—Plunder, Rapine—Fire—Bloodshed in the Streets of Chicago
Based on Colonel Sweet’s report, they also described poor Daddy as “General Charles Walsh” when everyone in Chicago knew that his name was John Walsh and that he was not and never had been a general.
I wondered if anyone could believe such nonsense. Most people did not. Rather, they reacted with the sanity of the Times: “That such an attack was contemplated by half a dozen rebels is probable, but that they could have relied upon any local assistance in the undertaking is wholly improbable.”
When the dust had settled a couple of days later, everyone saw clearly how improbable the “Conspiracy” had been. Colonel Sweet with his elaborate organization of spies and detectives had managed to arrest fewer than 100 men and found only the handful of weapons in our barn. With these resources, the “conspirators” were to take on more than 1,000 guards and other troops at the Camp and then sack the city?
It was too absurd.
Mr. Lincoln thought it was a bad joke and promptly released several of the prisoners, including Mr. Thompson, who, as the chief commissioner, could well have been charged as the head of the conspiracy.
If Mr. Lincoln, God be good to him, had lived into the summer, no one would have gone to jail.
I note that I have never prayed for Mr. Lincoln before. That has been very unchristian of me.
But, to satisfy the readers of the Tribune and to promote Colonel Sweet’s career, it was necessary to go through the motions of a trial.
Daddy and the others were tried by a military court in Cincinnati, thus (as our lawyers pointed out) violating two provisions of the law: Military courts were not permitted to try civilians and the prosecutor was not allowed to transfer the accused from one jurisdiction to another.
However, the law was not important in this trial. All that mattered was the public event and the conviction of as many defendants as possible. It was comic opera, though, as it turned out, deadly comic opera for some of the men.
Daddy had decided that Mommy must stay home with the younger children and that The Irish Lace might come to the trial, “if they wished.”
Naturally, we wished. We arrived in Cincinnati in January spitting fire and continued to do so till April, after General Lee had surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse. Both to the swarms of journalists and on the witness stand we said that the General (he had finally received his tarnished star) was a liar, a perjurer, a poltroon, a maniac, a pervert, and (in my words) “a sick, filthy, lying snake.”
I also told the court that Judas had been rewarded with thirty pieces of silver and General Sweet with two pieces of gold.
This wild behavior won us the reputation of being “high-spirited and beautiful young women who are intensely loyal to their father.” They also won us many approving laughs from the members of the military court and the spectators in the courtroom.
“Keep it up,” Daddy’s lawyer told us. “You’re winning much support for your father. No one is going to vote for the death sentence of the father of women like you.”
After he became a lawyer himself, Paddy said that was a strange remark for a lawyer to make during a trial.
“It was not a trial, dear one. It was a farce, an entertainment, a comic opera. All that was lacking was that we three should sing. We actually thought of doing that, too. You’ve read the reply of Judge Burnett to our lawyers’ charges that the court had no jurisdiction. He read the whole thing—all fifty pages of it—out in court, putting most of the spectators to sleep but causing great laughter among the lawyers with its pompous and specious arguments. Even some of the other members of the military court snickered.”
“A weak argument,” he agreed.
It was not all comic opera, however. Twelve of the prisoners died in jail, probably from smallpox. A Mr. Anderson, a very confused man who had nothing to do with anything, hanged himself in jail. His own crime was muttering some demented threats to the Union in the hearing of Sweet’s spies. Daddy did not even know most of the other men, including those who died. Many of them, he told us, were opportunists who had drifted into Chicago at election time because of rumors of violence and destruction.
“Some of them are certainly scoundrels,” he told us. “However, they violated no laws and ought not to have been dragged into this pestiferous jail.”
We worried that Daddy might get smallpox too, but, praise be to God, he did not.
He worried about us, too. I assume we were in some danger of contracting the disease, but we simply dismissed that as foolishness. We were young and angry and perhaps even “high-spirited” as the papers kept saying. We were afraid of nothing.
Presumptuous little fools, I say of The Irish Lace as I look back on them. But secretly I am proud of their courage and loyalty and happy to have known them at one time.
As the trial dragged on, we became more confident that Daddy would be spared the death penalty. The war was almost over (and would be over before the final verdict), the charges were exposed as the frauds they were, the military court was bored, and the journalists had lost interest.
Daddy’s lawyer told us, “There’ll have to be some convictions to satisfy the Tribune and the black Republicans in Congress. But the sentences will be light. Your father will be free before the year is over.”
Daddy was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison; Colonel Marmaduke was acquitted, as was Mayor Buckner Morris. Mr. Semmes was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison. He was soon pardoned. Mary Morris proudly proclaimed her loyalty to the Confederacy and was banished back to it, which, since the war was over, meant nothing.
Colonel St. Leger Grenfel was sentenced to death, a punishment which shocked the courtroom. He had not been at the meetings at our house those last two nights. The only evidence against him came from Mr. Shanks, who was clearly a perjurer, though a clever one. Daddy said later that the court needed one scapegoat to sentence to death, “to feed the hungry lions at the Tribune.” The judges expected him to be pardoned They convicted him because he was English and there was little love lost for the English in the North because of their blatant support of the Confederacy.
Also, there were no powerful people to intercede for a foreigner.
However, General Sweet, of all people, did intercede for him, perhaps in a rare moment of troubled conscience. The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment at Fort Jefferson in Florida. It was a very bad prison, and three years later he died attempting to escape. Poor man, he was utterly harmless, if somewhat reckless. None of the real Confederate leaders took him seriously. He was never able to tell his “conspiracy” stories to drawing rooms of awed ladies.
If he was not murdered by Sweet and the court, then murder has never been committed in this country.
As you know Daddy was pardoned after a year. The “conspiracy” was quickly forgotten, except
by the people at the Tribune. Mayor Morris died in poverty a few years ago. His wife, who had never returned to him after the trial (she was too busy acting as First Lady to her brother the Governor of Kentucky), had the decency to try to return for the funeral, but was prevented by particularly bad Chicago winter weather.
Captain Hines did return safely to his Mandy, whom he married at the end of the war. I received a cordial note from her informing me about the wedding and thanking me for saving Tom’s life. She also said that, amazingly, their two families had reconciled.
I replied with equal cordiality and offered expressions of my congratulations and best wishes. I also said that I hoped we would meet sometime.
Tom became a lawyer, just as my dear Paddy did, and a judge on the Kentucky appellate court. They visited Chicago in 1875 after the fire, and stayed at the new Palmer House. We ate supper with them there and then invited them back to our new home on Washington Boulevard
Tom had lost some of his curly hair and added a few pounds of weight in compensation. He had matured considerably but still to some extent substituted dash and courtesy for real intelligence. Patrick Murray possessed such an intelligence to an almost alarming degree.
Both couples enjoyed their time together. Mandy, a very pretty little woman, hugged me privately and, with considerable tears, thanked me for saving her man’s life.
She showed no signs of jealousy, but there were no reasons for it.
“So you really spent several hours in my wife’s bedroom,” Paddy demanded, his voice loud as if he were willing to start a fight. But his eyes twinkled and his lips spread in a big smile.
“I did, sir,” Tom replied, his eyes twinkling, too.
“I wasn’t your wife then,” I said, just to keep the facts straight.
“In proximity to her bed?”
“Indeed, sir, about as close as I could get to it without actually being in it, as a matter of fact.”
“And herself not fully clothed, either?”
“All I can say is that when we went into her bedroom, she was wearing a very pretty frock; and when she led me out of the house, she was wearing an equally fetching robe.”
Irish Lace Page 18