A Vast and Fiendish Plot: by Clint Johnson

Author:Clint Johnson [Johnson, Clint]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, Civil War Period (1850-1877), State & Local, Middle Atlantic (DC; DE; MD; NJ; NY; PA)
ISBN: 9780806531311
Google: rSvbkYO5pUAC
Publisher: Kensington Books
Published: 2010-01-15T00:33:08+00:00

Chapter 13

“New York Is Worth Twenty Richmonds”

After the August failure to rally the Copperheads in Illinois to free the Confederate prisoners at Camp Douglas and the October failure on the part of twenty-one Confederates to burn down St. Albans, Vermont, and create a panic in New England, Thompson, Clay, and Sanders were desperate for some kind of success. Every mission the Confederate Secret Service commissioners approved and launched, big or small, had failed. Nothing had worked since the Confederate commissioners had arrived in Canada.

In July 1864, they had tried simple subterfuge to trick the United States into ending its war against the Confederacy. Clay and Sanders, without authorization from anyone in power in Richmond or even Thompson in Toronto, held a series of peace talks in Niagara Falls, New York, with Union representatives, including newspaper editor Horace Greeley and Lincoln’s personal secretary John Hay. A suspicious but willing Lincoln sent letters along with Hay laying out his terms that the South had to return to the Union and free its slaves before there would be peace. Clay and Sanders insisted that the Confederacy must remain independent.

The talks ended almost as soon as they had begun with Greeley looking like a foolish tool of Canadian Confederates who had no power to speak for the government in Richmond. Clay and Sanders had intended to trick Lincoln into talking about a forced peace treaty right before his election, but instead, Lincoln successfully portrayed the supposed peace talks as an example of how the Confederates were trying to manipulate Union opinion by using well-known public figures like Greeley.

“Greeley is like an old shoe, good for nothing new, whatever he has been. Like an old shoe, he is so rotten that nothing can be done with him. He is not truthful; the stitches all tear out,” said Lincoln in a cabinet meeting.

Then the Confederates tried to open up a second war front by freeing thousands of Confederate soldiers behind Union lines. The often-delayed summer plot led by Thomas Hines to free the Confederate prisoners held in Northern prison camps near Chicago and Alton, Illinois, had not advanced beyond the Confederates waiting in a Chicago hotel room for a Copperhead army that never materialized.

When Hines’s plan to free the prisoners by a land attack did not work, thought turned to freeing them with a water attack. Among the first Confederates to listen to these waterborne attack plans were two experienced Confederate scouts who had been sent north to get something moving.

Lieutenant Colonel Robert Martin was twenty-four years old, six feet tall, and 160 pounds. He had been “straight as an Indian” before a Union rifle ball struck him in April 1863, leaving him to walk with a stoop. With clear blue eyes, thick wavy hair, and a Van Dyke–style beard and mustache, the officer who had been a Louisville merchant before the war immediately left behind that mundane existence when he joined the Confederate army in April 1861. Martin was a true believer in the Confederacy, volunteering for its army weeks before Kentucky discussed leaving the Union.

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