Civil War Chicago by Karamanski Theodore J.;McMahon Eileen M.;

Author:Karamanski, Theodore J.;McMahon, Eileen M.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2014-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

In November 1864, rebel agents returned to Chicago with the intent to join with the Sons of Liberty in the city and free the Camp Douglas prisoners on the eve of the presidential election. Ernest Duvergier de Hauranne was a witness to the collapse of their plans. The son of a prominent French family, de Hauranne was in Chicago to observe American democracy at work. What he saw instead was the last gasp of Civil War partisan passions pathetically played out in the streets of Chicago.

November 7, 1864

This morning on awakening the city learned with amazement that it had just escaped a terrible calamity. A vast conspiracy had been exposed, a plot organized by the Democrats and the Rebels that was to have been carried out tomorrow. According to the posters outside the offices of Republican newspapers, there was a plan to free the ten thousand prisoners-of-war at Camp Douglas and to furnish them with arms for looting and burning the city. The crime was engineered by the “Sons of Liberty” and the conspirators have accomplices in Chicago. Two or three colonels, a captain and a judge . . . and a number of city employees and militia officers have been clapped into prison. Sixty guerrillas sent from the South were captured while they were awaiting the signal. The authorities have seized two wagons loaded with arms and munitions of war. All this . . . is proclaimed by the laconic, mystifying and seemingly panic stricken posters around which people crowd together as if in a state of shock. At the office of the Evening Journal the goggle-eyed crowd can see formidable samples of the arsenal with which the ten thousand Rebel prisoners were to have been equipped: one large horse pistol, one army revolver, one small pocket pistol in its case, a little powder flask and a box of cartridges the size of a watch. The conspirators’ entire armament could be packed in a candy-box.

I almost forgot to mention the most terrifying weapon of all, the one most certain to spread panic—a large, rusty knife that looks like the stub of a broken cavalry saber—“found . . . under the shirt of a man who answered, when questioned as to the knife’s purpose: ‘It’s to cut the abolitionists’ throats!’ ” You see what kind of stage effects are used to arouse the indignation of the most enlightened people in the world! The Republicans pretend to be filled with righteous indignation; the Democrats, taken by surprise or at least pretending to be, claim that they are the victims of an atrocious hoax. They say the whole thing is just a crude trick, a pretext for intimidating arrests and threatening troop movements; the accused are called spies and accomplices of the authorities, and the alleged guerrillas are said to be hirelings of the police. Thereupon a new poster appears and the Republican papers run new articles giving more details of the conspiracy; they tell how the guerrillas got drunk in a tavern and how, when the “wiskey” [sic] had loosened their tongues, the Republic was saved.

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