By Saturday evening, August 27, all the members of Hines’ daring expedition had signed in at the Richmond House on the corner of Lake Street and Michigan Avenue. Above the doors of the rooms assigned to them they hung signs which read “Missouri Delegation.”
Meanwhile steps were being taken to inform the prisoners at Camp Douglas to be prepared for deliverance on the night of August 29. The next move was up to the Copperheads.
2
Through the Camp Douglas grapevine, certain trusted leaders among the Morgan prisoners learned during the week-end of August 27 the electrifying news that Captain Hines and others of their comrades were planning to raid the stockade on Monday night. For weeks there had been rumors of such action, but few had believed them. Now that freedom seemed almost within their grasp, those who knew of the plot found it almost impossible to keep the secret.
More than a year had passed since their arrival at Douglas from Camp Morton. After the big breakout of December, only a few others had escaped, and the past nine months had been hard and dreary.
All remembered well how Colonel De Land had clamped down on them after the big escape, how severely he had punished the men who were recaptured. The first seven of these recaptured men were marched out before the assembled prisoners and tortured with thumbscrews until they fainted with pain. Others were tied up by their thumbs with their toes barely touching the ground. “I saw men punished thus,” said Private Thomas D. Henry of Company E in a sworn statement, “until they would grow so deathly sick that they would vomit all over themselves, their heads fall forward and almost every sign of life become extinct; the ends of their thumbs would burst open; a surgeon standing by would feel their pulse and say he thought they could stand it a little longer. Sometimes he would say they had better be cut down.”
After this, De Land did not remain for long as commander of Camp Douglas. On December 16, the Union Commissary General of Prisoners, William Hoffman, ordered him replaced by Brigadier General William W. Orme.
The boys gave Orme credit for making an initial effort to improve conditions in Camp Douglas, but the General soon appeared to lose interest in his charges and left much of the administrative detail to his inspector of prisoners, who in the words of Private Henry was “a fiend named Captain Wells Sponable.”
For petty offenses Sponable freely administered both physical and mental cruelties. When he discovered how important reading matter was to the prisoners, Sponable seemed to delight in depriving entire barracks of every form of literature. More than anything else the boys wanted newspapers so that they might know how the war was going, but after Sponable took charge they rarely saw one.
Raw winter weather settled down over the lake front, with nights that were bitter cold in the barracks. “The suffering of the prisoners was great in the extreme,” one of them wrote. “I have seen great, stout-hearted men who had faced death in many forms weep from the intense cold.”
Many days they were confined to their barracks, passing the dragging hours at playing seven-up, poker and dice, staking their food allowance or clothing and blankets. Some played checkers and chess, whittled, or slept around the clock. They washed their clothes, waited for meals, plotted escapes, or endlessly discussed the probabilities of exchange—a subject which became an obsession with most of them. Others relapsed into apathy, caring for nothing, thinking of nothing, huddling in corners, sitting for hours staring into space.
Lack of exercise, unbalanced diet, and crowded quarters inevitably led to continued sickness. In an inspection report of January 18, Surgeon Edwin D. Kittoe declared Camp Douglas “very objectionable as a depot for troops…The barracks and grounds in the northwest square, occupied by Morgan’s men were preeminently filthy.…Privies removed and sinks imperfectly covered so that the filth is seeping up through the ground. When there is rain the grounds are flooded with an infusion of this poisonous matter…prisoners too much crowded…must prove a fruitful source of disease.”
The epidemics predicted by Kittoe were raging two weeks later, the post surgeon reporting to Commissary General Hoffman on February 2 that of 5,750 prisoners in Douglas, 2,443 were sick. In that month the dreaded smallpox was added to the list of diseases, and by April, 1864, “had carried many to their final resting-place out on the cold cheerless prairie.”
In May, Brigadier General Benjamin Sweet replaced Orme as prison commandant, and soon after Sweet’s arrival, the Morgan men started a tunnel—their first in several months. “The Federals found the tunnel,” Private J. M. Lynn wrote afterward, “but could not find the men who had the intolerable impudence to thus try to regain their precious liberty. The Kentuckians were the suspected parties, so the 1oth Kentucky and a part of the 2nd Kentucky were ordered up near headquarters, one hundred and fifty in all, and forced to huddle up in a mass. The commander of the prison [General Sweet] came out of his office, and instructed a corporal to demand that some one step over the line and tell the names of the men who had dug the tunnel. The corporal did so, and after waiting a minute and no one moving forward, he returned to the commander, reported, received fresh orders, and came back to within ten feet of where Sergeant Beck and myself were standing and whispered to one of the armed guards near us. Instantly the guard cocked his musket, and fired into the helpless mass of prisoners. The bullet struck William Coles, killing him, and the buckshot wounded Henry Hutchins in the groin, passing through and tearing his hip frightfully. His suffering was terrible and pitiful, and he did not die till morning.…I would solemnly swear before any court, to the truthfulness of this account.”
Yet even this did not stop efforts to escape. Camp Douglas records for August 10 note that Private Harvey Heisinger, Company E, 2nd Kentucky Cavalry, was shot while attempting to escape. In giving testimony, the sentinel who fired on Heisinger said: “Saw a prisoner crawling on his hands and knees outside the fence and under the parapet on which I was stationed. Did not halt him, but fired and hit him.”
This was the situation, then, within the high board walls of Camp Douglas late in August, 1864. The prisoners had reached a point of reckless desperation where they were willing to risk all, life itself, rather than remain there. When word came from Captain Tom Hines that deliverance was at hand, it was like a reprieve from the grave, a sign from Heaven.
But the promised deliverance did not come. All day of the twenty-ninth, there was an unusual restlessness among the prisoners, a tenseness that worried the guards. When night came and the evening gun sounded, they moved unwillingly to their barracks. Many a man among the prisoners lay awake all night, listening, listening, but there were only the usual familiar sounds—the rattle of horse trolleys on Cottage Grove Avenue, the faraway hooting of trains and boats, the monotonous calls of pacing sentinels on the parapet. Tom Hines had failed them.
3
But it was not so much Captain Hines who had failed the prisoners as it was the Copperheads who had failed Hines. During the weekend of August 27, Hines and Castleman met several times with Charles Walsh, a Chicago politician and local leader of the Sons of Liberty. Walsh and his associates made grandiose promises at first, assuring Hines that thousands of Copperheads were gathering in Chicago and would be ready to strike on Monday night. As to the actual details of an armed raid against Camp Douglas, however, the Sons of Liberty were quite vague. They seemed to be willing to have Hines and his seventy-four Confederates storm the prison walls while others were somehow magically overthrowing the Illinois and Indiana state governments.
Hines rode out on a trolley car to reconnoiter Camp Douglas, and a few minutes’ inspection of the bristling defenses convinced him that at least a thousand armed men would be needed to insure a successful attack.
Sunday morning he arranged a final meeting with the Copperhead leaders, stipulating that he must have a thousand men to take Camp Douglas. Walsh nodded sympathetically; he was sure that many more than a thousand would willingly join in the venture, and arms were certainly available for them in the vastness of Chicago.
The problem was to bring men and arms together.
For several minutes Walsh consulted with his associates, finally offered a counterproposal to Hines’ demand for a thousand men. If Hines would arrange with the Confederate government to guarantee a massive invasion of Kentucky and Missouri, then the Copperheads would guarantee an armed uprising in Illinois, Indiana and Ohio, freeing all prisoners of war in those states.
At this, Hines almost lost his temper. Such an arrangement would require months of planning and co-ordination, even if the Confederate government was willing and able to launch the invasions. He had spent two months already planning, postponing, and re-planning—with everything focused upon the date of August 29, only twenty-four hours away. To have the Copperheads now propose a plan which would delay matters indefinitely was almost too much for him to bear with equanimity.
But he restrained himself. Even if these men were only a pack of wild dreamers, their sound and fury more vocal than actual, they were his only allies for the time being. He remembered that John Castleman, just returned from a quick trip to Rock Island, had said that it would be much easier to capture the prison there than the one at Douglas.
“Give me five hundred men,” Hines said to Walsh, “and we will attack and capture Rock Island.”
Again the Copperheads were doubtful if five hundred men could be armed and ready by Monday night.
“Then give me two hundred!” Hines cried.
Walsh thought that might be possible. He agreed to try for five hundred, and the meeting was adjourned for a few hours while trusted messengers were sent out through the city to enlist volunteers. All afternoon Hines paced his hotel room, frustrated by these impractical visionaries forced upon him by necessity.
Late that evening when Walsh reported the results of his recruiting canvass, he told Hines that he had the promises of twenty-five men.
Tom Hines knew there was nothing more that he could do now. He gathered his little army of seventy-four in the Richmond House and informed them the game was up for the present, but that he intended to make another attempt some time in the future. He still had confidence in certain members of the Sons of Liberty in southern Illinois. Given a few weeks’ time in which to drill these men in the use of arms, he believed the original plans might be carried out later in the autumn.
After selecting twenty-two men to go with him and Castleman to southern Illinois, he advised the others that he did not wish to hold them any longer; it would be too dangerous for all of them to stay together as a unit. About half the volunteers decided to return to Canada where they would be available when Hines needed them, the others, having little faith in the Copperheads, decided to try to make their ways back through the lines to the Confederacy.
A few hours later, Hines and Castleman with their reduced squadron were on an Illinois Central train bound south for the towns of Mattoon and Marshall in the southern part of the state. St. Léger Grenfell, with his gun and dog, went still farther south to Carlyle to join his English friend, Baxter, for the shooting season.
By early autumn, Hines and his boys had converted Marshall, Illinois, into a center of Copperhead activities; the town was also a sort of underground railway station for escaping Confederate prisoners. Private Henry Damon, one of Castleman’s D Company troopers, who had been captured at Cynthiana in June and sent to Rock Island, escaped in September and went directly to Marshall. “To my surprise,” he said, “I found comfortably established at the leading hotel, several of my comrades from whom I had parted at Cynthiana.”
In the first week of November, Hines and several of the boys who had returned to Canada started traveling in small groups to Chicago. There they met the others from southern Illinois, who had come up with a number of trusted Copperheads. And either by coincidence or by plan, St. Léger Grenfell returned from his long hunting trip to Carlyle, registering with them at the Richmond House.
The night of November 7—the eve of the important Lincoln vs. McClellan election day—had been selected as the time for action. And this time—as he had not done in August—Hines had worked out a detailed plan for storming the prison. The attacking force would divide into four sections, each to gather after dark on one of the four sides of Camp Douglas. Arms would be waiting in carts and wagons for quick delivery to the released prisoners. A skyrocket would signal the moment of attack, the four separate forces moving simultaneously against the prison. At the same time other designated parties in and around Chicago would cut telegraph wires, set fire to railroad depots, and seize Federal ordnance warehouses. After that, the Copperheads could take over if they wished; Hines and the freed prisoners would be moving through Indiana, seizing horses, and possibly raiding Camp Morton on their way south.
It was an excellent plan. Practically all of those who were to be involved in it thought so. Even the Federal authorities around Chicago—who by this time knew almost as much about it as the originator himself—admired its daring.
4
The Camp Douglas inspection report of November 6 was briefly worded, almost routine: “Conduct, good, with the exception of a part of Morgan’s command.” On that same day the prison commandant, General Benjamin Sweet, sent a warning message to General John Cook in Springfield, informing him that Chicago “is filling up with suspicious characters, some of whom we know to be escaped prisoners, and others who were here from Canada during the Chicago convention, plotting to release the prisoners of war at Camp Douglas.”
How General Sweet first learned of the raid plot is not clear from the records, but it is probable that he discovered it as early as the spring of 1864 while reading prisoners’ letters. He was huddled up one cold night close to his office stove censoring letters when suddenly the heat brought invisible writing into view across one page: “The 4th of July will be a grand day for us. Old Sweet won’t like it.” The 4th of July, of course, was the first date set by Tom Hines for an attack on the prison. General Sweet did not know this at the time, but he was suspicious, and after that first discovery he spent many hours reading both incoming and outgoing letters.
Through the tense days of August he had observed increasing restlessness among his prisoners. Conditions were bad, he admitted to Washington. He needed more barracks for the new captives; he needed more medical officers for the older ones who were ill much of the time because of long confinement.
Early in September, after the prisoners’ hopes were dashed by Tom Hines’ failure to act on August 29, and after they learned of John Morgan’s violent death, Sweet noted a mutinous sullenness among the Kentuckians. “The prisoners of war are more uneasy than usual,” he reported. “The garrison is prepared for any trouble.”
On October 16, General Joe Hooker, who had been removed for incompetence after the battle of Missionary Ridge and was then assigned to command of the district encompassing Chicago, paid a visit to Camp Douglas. Hooker and an imposing staff of colonels rolled through the gates in carriages about three o’clock in the afternoon. General Sweet greeted Fighting Joe with a thirteen-gun salute, paraded the garrison troops before him, and then escorted the distinguished visitor through the prisoners’ quarters. As they passed down the line of bedraggled Kentuckians, loud hoots sounded from a section of the Morgan men, followed by cries: “Bread and meat! Give us bread and meat!”
Sweet was frozen with embarrassment; Captain Sponable’s face was a mixture of horror and rage. But General Hooker ignored it all, complimented Sweet on the condition of the camp, and as he took his leave, blandly assured the newspaper men with his party that “Camp Douglas is the best prison camp in the United States.”
The dust of Joe Hooker’s departing carriage was scarcely settled before Captain Sponable sought his revenge upon the Morgan regiments. His first action was to stop all rations.
Within a day or so, the Kentucky boys were reaching a point of desperation. Those who had a little money purchased smuggled bread from the guards, dividing it among their comrades. Then on the evening of the third day of Sponable’s s
tarvation punishment, the camp coal wagon made deliveries in the Morgan prisoners’ area. When the coal distributor entered the barracks of the 2nd Kentucky to make a delivery, a large black dog followed the man inside.
The boys in the barracks recognized the dog immediately as Captain Sponable’s setter. As soon as the coal distributor left, they threw a blanket over the animal.
By the next morning Sponable missed his dog, and posted notices on the barracks bulletin boards offering ten dollars’ reward for its return. Some time during the day, an anonymous wit of the 2nd Kentucky scribbled a couplet underneath the reward notice:
For want of meat
That dog was eat.
“Well do I remember the time and circumstance,” Private H. D. Foote recalled afterward. “The dog—a fine, large, fat, black setter-followed the coal wagon into camp but did not return with it. It was, I think, more of a thrust at Captain Sponable than real hunger that caused the dog to be killed, although it was most assuredly eaten.…One day the dog was missing; the next day the advertisement appeared on the bulletin board, with the little epitaph. While this was being read, the dog’s meat and bones were boiling in the big kettle, and it made a fine dish of stew. The next day the pit cleaner found the head and hide of the dog. Then the wrath came.”
According to a letter written by Private William Christian and a later account by Private T. B. Clore, Captain Sponable acted immediately, and he seemed to have no doubts as to who the culprits were. “The 2nd Kentucky was ordered into line and marched to Captain Sponable’s headquarters.” An early snowstorm had blown off the lake that day, covering the ground with two or three inches of gritty snow. Sponable ordered the three hundred men into open formation, then commanded them to drop their trousers and underdrawers and sit in the snow. “One of the guards stood at the head of the line while the others stood in the rear and discovered that some of the miserable fellows had pulled their coat tails down for partial protection to their nudity. Every one that was detected was mercilessly kicked in the back with the heavy shoes of the brutal guards.” Sponable kept them there for two hours.