Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (153 page)

21
. Frank L. Klement,
The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandigham and the Civil War
(Lexington, Ky., 1970), 262–78; Gray,
Hidden Civil War
, 172–74.

22
. Greeley to Lincoln, July 7, 1864, Lincoln to Greeley, July 9, 1864,
CWL
, VII, 435.

not prevent it from becoming a crucial factor in the calculations of both governments in 1864.

To the War and State departments in Richmond came reports from Confederate spies of "a perfect organisation . . . of formidable character" in the lower Midwest variously known as the Knights of the Golden Circle, the Order of American Knights, or the Sons of Liberty and containing half a million members "for the purpose of revolution and the expulsion or death of the abolitionists and free negroes."
²³
Perhaps the most influential such report came from Captain Thomas C. Hines, a Kentuckian and a scout with John Hunt Morgan's cavalry division which had done so much damage behind Union lines in Kentucky during 1862–63. In July 1863 Morgan had led a raid across the Ohio River into the North. After a long chase through southern Indiana and Ohio, Union cavalry had finally captured Morgan and most of his men, including Hines. Imprisoned in the Ohio penitentiary, Morgan and Hines along with several other officers made a spectacular tunnel escape in November 1863. They returned to the Confederacy after thrilling adventures of derring-do. These credentials helped Hines persuade southern leaders of the potential for Canadian-based sabotage operations against the North. In a secret session on February 15, 1864, the Confederate Congress appropriated $5 million for this purpose. Jefferson Davis dispatched Hines to Canada with instructions to take charge of other escaped rebel prisoners there and to carry out "appropriate enterprises of war against our enemies." On his way through the North, Hines was to "confer with the leading persons friendly or attached to the cause of the Confederacy, or who may be advocates of peace, and do all in your power to induce our friends to organize and prepare themselves to render such aid as circumstances may allow."
²⁴

The Confederate government also sent a number of civilian agents by blockade-runner to Canada. Leaders of this group were Jacob Thompson, a former U.S. secretary of the interior in the Buchanan administration, and Clement C. Clay, former U.S. senator from Alabama. Both men had many friends among northern Democrats. During

23
. Oscar A. Kinchen,
Confederate Operations in Canada and the
North (North Quincy, Mass., 1970), 29–30; Larry E. Nelson,
Bullets, Ballots, and Rhetoric: Confederate Policy for the United States Presidential Contest of
1864 (University, Ala., 1980), 19–20; Jones,
War Clerk's Diary
(Swiggett), II, 155.

24
.
Journal of the Confederate Congress
(Washington, 1905), VI, 845; Secretary of War James A. Seddon to Hines, March 16, 1864, in James D. Horan,
Confederate Agent:
A Discovery in
History
(New York, 1954), 72–73.

the summer of 1864 these rebel agents conferred with dozens of Peace Democrats (including Vallandigham before he returned to the United States) at various cities in Canada, especially St. Catherines near Niagara Falls. They plotted a fantastic variety of activities ranging from Confederate subsidies of Democratic newspapers and of peace candidates for state offices to the capture of a Union gunboat on Lake Erie and the liberation of Confederate prisoners at Johnson's Island on that lake and at Camp Douglas near Chicago. Some of these operations actually occurred. Thompson channelled funds to newspapers, to organizers of peace rallies, and to the Democratic candidate for governor in Illinois. Rebel agents distributed weapons and canisters of "Greek fire" to copperheads. Hines's arson squad of southern soldiers who had escaped from Union prisons filtered back into the states and managed to destroy or damage a half-dozen military steamboats at St. Louis, an army warehouse at Mattoon, Illinois, and several hotels in New York City. They also carried out a daring raid across the border to rob the banks of St. Albans, Vermont. In an official report on his mission, Jacob Thompson claimed that subsidized copperheads had burned "a great amount of property" in northern cities. "[We must continue] to burn whenever it is practicable, and thus make the men of property feel their insecurity and tire them out with the war."
²⁵

The success of Canadian-based rebel operations, however, was inhibited by two contradictions. First, Hines and his colleagues were trying to prod
peace
Democrats into
war
against their own government. A few bellicose copperheads did hide caches of arms in anticipation of the glorious day of insurrection against Union arsenals and POW camps. But that day never came, for these "leaders" could not mobilize their followers. The vast army of Sons of Liberty ready to rise and overthrow

25
. Thompson to Judah P. Benjamin, Dec. 3, 1864, in
O.R.
, Ser. I, Vol. 43, pt. 2, pp. 930–36. Much of the information in this paragraph is drawn from Kinchen,
Confederate Operations in Canada
, and Nelson,
Bullets, Ballots, and Rhetoric
, which are scholarly studies based on captured Confederate documents and on the papers of Confederate officials; and from Horan,
Confederate Agent
, a somewhat sensationalized account heavily dependent on the memoirs of Hines and other Confederate agents. Even Frank Klement, the leading historian of the copperheads who considers most evidence of their conniving with rebels to be a tissue of "rumors, conjecture, and fancy" woven by Republicans for political purposes, admits that Confederate agents turned over money and arms to several Peace Democrats in 1864. Klement,
Dark Lanterns: Secret Political Societies, Conspiracies, and Treason Trials in the Civil War
(Baton Rouge, 1984), 33, 154–77.

Lincoln's tyranny turned out to be a phantom. No fewer than five planned "uprisings" died a-borning.

The first was intended to coincide with Vallandigham's return to Ohio in June. His expected arrest was to be the signal. But the administration left Vallandigham alone. Hopes next turned to the Democratic convention scheduled to open in Chicago on July 4. Anticipating an attempt by the government or by Republican vigilantes to interfere with the gathering, the Canadian plotters intended to fan the ensuing riot into a rebellion. But the uncertain military situation caused the Democratic National Committee to postpone the convention until August 29. Impatient Confederate agents now demanded action on July 20, after Lincoln announced his expected draft call. Hines and his ex-soldiers would "start the ball" and the legions of copperheads would take their arms out of hiding to "join in the play." Thompson was confident of success; a Chicago Democrat had promised two regiments "eager, ready, organized, and armed"; Indiana Sons of Liberty were prepared "to seize and hold Indianapolis and release the prisoners there." Lincoln did issue a draft call on July 18, but copperhead leaders were getting cold feet. One of them confessed himself "overwhelmed with the responsibility of speedy action on so momentous a subject."
²⁶
Others echoed this sentiment; with a groan of exasperation, the rebel agents called off the operation and summoned a half-dozen Sons of Liberty to St. Catherines for a meeting.

The southerners insisted on an irrevocable date of August 16 for an uprising. Again the copperheads demurred, fearing that Federal troops would easily crush them unless a Confederate invasion of Kentucky or Missouri took place at the same time. Unable to promise such an undertaking, the agents agreed to a final postponement until August 29, when the throngs at the Democratic convention would provide a cover for Hines's commandos and Sons of Liberty to gather for an attack on Camp Douglas to release the prisoners. Hines brought seventy men armed with revolvers to Chicago, where they mixed with the crowds and hunted in vain for their allies. They found only a few, who explained that infiltration by Union agents had led to the arrest of several leaders and the strengthening of the guard at Camp Douglas. The plot collapsed. One disappointed copperhead declared angrily that there were "too many political soldiers in the Sons of Liberty. It is as hard to make a real

26
. Thompson to Benjamin, July 7, 1864, James P. Holcombe to Clement C. Clay, July 10, 1864, quoted in Kinchen,
Confederate Operations in Canada
, 55.

soldier out of a politician as it is to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear."
²⁷

In truth, the mainstream Peace Democrats shrank from violent counterrevolution in part because their chances of overthrowing Lincoln by legitimate political means seemed ever brighter as the weeks passed. The civilian Confederate agents in Canada recognized this and encouraged the process with rebel gold. But here a second contradiction arose. For Confederates the goal of peace was independence. But most northern Democrats viewed an armistice as the first step toward negotiations for reunion. Thompson and his fellow agents tried to resolve this contradiction with vague doubletalk. They focused on the need for an armistice now, to be followed by a cooling-off period which, they assured Peace Democrats, could lead to "a treaty of amity and commerce . . . and possibly to an alliance defensive, or even, for some purposes, both defensive and offensive." If Peace Democrats wanted to believe that such a process would eventually produce reunion, the Confederates were careful not to dispel this "fond delusion." They well understood that any cessation of the fighting, in the context of midsummer 1864, would be tantamount to a Confederate victory.
²⁸

Lincoln understood this too; that was why he insisted in his letter to Greeley on reunion and emancipation as
prior conditions
of peace negotiations. Knowing full well that Jefferson Davis insisted on independence and slavery as prior conditions, Lincoln hoped to provoke the southern agents into saying so and thereby demonstrate to the northern people that peace with Union was possible only through military victory. But on this occasion the rebels outmaneuvered Lincoln.

On July 18, Greeley and John Hay, the president's private secretary, met in Niagara Falls, Canada, with Confederate agents Clement Clay and James Holcombe. Hay handed them a letter from Lincoln offering them safe conduct to Washington to discuss "any proposition which embraces the restoration of peace, the integrity of the whole Union, and the abandonment of slavery." Clay and Holcombe had no authority to negotiate
any
peace terms—that was not their purpose in Canada—much less these terms, which amounted to Confederate surrender. So the Niagara Falls conference came to nothing. But the southerners saw a chance to score a propaganda triumph by "throw[ing] upon the Federal

27
. Quoted in
ibid.
, 72.

28
. Clement C. Clay to Judah P. Benjamin, Aug. 11, 1864, in
O.R
., Ser. IV, Vol. 3, p. 585; Nelson,
Bullets, Ballots, and Rhetoric
, 82–85.

Government the odium of putting an end to all negotiation." They sent a report of the conference to the Associated Press. Saying nothing of southern conditions for peace, they accused Lincoln of deliberately sabotaging the negotiations by prescribing conditions he knew to be unacceptable. "If there be any citizen of the Confederate States who has clung to the hope that peace is possible," wrote Clay and Holcombe, Lincoln's terms "will strip from their eyes the last film of such delusion." And if there were "any patriots or Christians" in the North "who shrink appalled from the illimitable vistas of private misery and public calamity" presented by Lincoln's policy of perpetual war, let them "recall the abused authority and vindicate the outraged civilization of their country."
²⁹

The response was all the Confederates could have hoped for. Zebulon Vance exploited the affair in his gubernatorial campaign against peace candidate William Holden in North Carolina. Southern newspapers used it to paint lurid new strokes in their portrait of Lincoln the monster. In the North, reported Clay with delight, "all the Democratic presses denounce Mr. Lincoln's manifesto in strong terms, and many Republican presses (among them the New York Tribune) admit it was a blunder. . . . From all that I can see or hear, I am satisfied that this correspondence has tended strongly toward consolidating the Democracy and dividing the Republicans." Greeley did indeed scold Lincoln for giving "to the general eye" the impression that the rebels were "anxious to negotiate, and that we repulse their advances." If nothing was done to correct this impression, "we shall be beaten out of sight next November."
³⁰