A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (117 page)

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.

The Confederates waited uneasily for the sun to set. Outside, excited crowds tramped to and from the convention hall. Vallandigham avoided Richmond House: he was far too busy squeezing and working the delegate system. Prison breaks and political assassinations could not have been further from his mind. Only Charles Walsh, the leader of the Chicago chapter of the Sons of Liberty, and a couple of sidekicks bothered to return to Hines’s rooms. He did not have five hundred men, or one hundred men, or even fifty men, although he thought he might be able to find twenty-five if given enough time. When the Confederates insisted this was not enough, Walsh suggested November 8—the day of the election—as the new date for the prison liberation. Hines agreed through gritted teeth, swearing he would hold them to that day no matter what the cost. Once the Sons of Liberty left, the Confederates passed the rest of the night pondering their options. The snippets of news that filtered along the corridors of the hotel indicated that Vallandigham had failed to derail McClellan’s bid for the Democratic Party’s nomination. Just about every expectation held by Hines, Grenfell, and the rest had turned out to be wrong. There was no seething undercurrent of revolution, no paramilitary organization of well-armed fighters, no willingness in any quarter to take risks.

It was too dangerous for the Confederates to remain in Chicago. Hines outlined their choices during a noisy meeting of the disappointed volunteers: they could use their tickets to return to Canada, attempt to sneak home, or stay with him and hide out in southern Illinois until November 8. Twenty chose Canada; another twenty-five said they would go south. The rest agreed to help Hines build a force from scratch among the Illinois members of the Sons of Liberty. Grenfell, as usual, made a fourth choice. He would maintain the hunting charade and shoot prairie chickens around Carlyle, Illinois, until called to duty.
³⁸
“Tell the girls I am alive and well, although engaged in rather dangerous speculations, which you will know more of, probably, bye and bye,” he wrote on August 31 to the Grenfell family business manager in London.

The North West states are ripe for revolt. If interfered with in their election they will rise. All this is in favour of the South.… We are on the eve of great events. Abe Lincoln will either have made peace, or made himself a military dictator, within the next two months. In the latter case the N. W. Provinces secede, and there comes a row. Either course aids the South.
³⁹

Jacob Thompson shared Grenfell’s delusion that the Northwest was smoldering with revolutionary aims. The Copperhead leaders were cowards, he claimed to Judah Benjamin, but “the feeling with the masses is as strong as ever. They are true, brave, and, I believe, willing and ready.”
⁴⁰
Indeed, Thompson was angry with Hines for giving up so quickly on the Chicago expedition. He refused to work with the Confederates who returned to Toronto, calling them “deserters.” Thompson blamed everyone for the mission’s failure, including Clay and Holcombe, whom he accused of weakening the Copperheads’ resolve by having dangled the prospect of a negotiated peace at the Niagara Falls conference in July.

Thompson had become a bitter and vengeful man since his arrival in Canada; during his absence from home, Federal soldiers had burned his Mississippi plantation and assaulted his wife. Isolated from friends and family and surrounded by like-minded fugitives, Thompson turned his personal grievances into an excuse to inflict the greatest possible suffering on the North, and in particular on Northern civilians. Nothing, he complained to Clay, should distract the Confederates from delivering the message of violence.

^31.1
Stanley had returned to the North from Wales in January 1863, having failed to reconcile with his family or to find satisfactory employment. But he had fared no better in America, and after working at various jobs he joined the U.S. Navy on July 19, 1864. He was assigned to USS
Minnesota
as a ship’s clerk, a light position that would expose him to danger only if the vessel received a direct hit. Otherwise, he anticipated a summer of little excitement other than the occasional chase of an unarmed blockade runner.
⁸

^31.2
On December 7, 1863, seventeen Confederate sympathizers—many of them British—had boarded the steamer
Chesapeake
in New York and hijacked it once they were in international waters. The intention was to turn the vessel into a privateer, but the adventure quickly degenerated into farce. The
Chesapeake
ran out of coal and most of the crew deserted. The vessel was captured by a U.S. warship and towed into Halifax harbor on December 15. Once it became known that a Canadian was among the prisoners, a furious crowd took over Queen’s Wharf, determined to free him. Five more U.S. Navy ships appeared in the harbor and a tense standoff ensued. Finally, on December 19, the U.S. naval officers bowed to pressure and all the prisoners were rowed to shore, whereupon the crowd “rescued” the Canadian. Holcombe had been ordered to find any legal argument, no matter how weak, to claim the
Chesapeake
as a Southern prize. But to his embarrassment he discovered that none of the Chesapeake privateers were actually from the South, and the Confederates had no claim to their services or the vessel.

^31.3
The victim was Andrew Cunningham, a British subject who had been kidnapped and forced into the 39th New York Volunteers on January 8, 1864. Lyons was alerted to his plight on February 11 and immediately petitioned for his release. The facts regarding Cunningham’s kidnapping were never in dispute, but even so the usual delays followed. Finally, on June 7, 1864, after considerable nudging from Lyons, Seward gleaned from the War Department that Cunningham’s release had been ordered. Six weeks went by without further communication on the subject. Seward had completely forgotten about Cunningham when, on July 23, 1864, he received a sheepish note from Charles Dana, assistant secretary of war. They had been unable to find Private Cunningham because he had been killed in battle on May 10, 1864, four weeks before his discharge.
²⁴

^31.4
The Confederate government believed there were four hundred escaped prisoners of war hiding out in Canada and Nova Scotia. James Holcombe had been ordered to advertise in local newspapers that he had the means to pay for their passage home. But his efforts to locate the missing four hundred yielded only six Confederates. Hines, on the other hand, had no trouble locating the survivors of Morgan’s brigade, whom he trained for his operations against the North.

THIRTY-TWO
The Tyranny of Hope

Clinging to power—How to orchestrate a public protest—Rose Greenhow makes her decision—Petitioning for peace—Atlanta

L
ord Palmerston was facing the prospect of defeat in the twilight of his parliamentary career. “They [the opposition] have had their Meeting and have agreed upon a vote of Censure,” Palmerston wrote to Gladstone on June 28, 1864, after Lord Russell’s peace conference in London ended embarrassingly for the British government, without an armistice agreement between Germany and Denmark. Palmerston could not escape the truth that it was his own pugnacious declaration the previous July—that Denmark could always rely on Britain’s support—that had started the government’s woes. The Danes had believed him; the French resented him; and the Germans had known he was bluffing—even if it was some months before Palmerston realized it himself.