During the six months of his command, General Sweet had come to agree with Captain Sponable that there seemed no way of suppressing devilment among the Morgan prisoners, especially the 2nd Kentucky group. There was one man among them, however, who could be used. Sweet had already used him as a petty informer, and in the first week of November the General was ready to use him as a spy. He was James T. Shanks.
Back in the early spring of 1863, when Morgan’s regiments were strung out around McMinnville, Tennessee, Shanks had forced an acquaintance with St. Léger Grenfell who then introduced him to Morgan. It will be remembered that Shanks claimed to be a captain from Texas, whose company had been combined with another after suffering heavy casualties in the Stone’s River fighting. Morgan accepted him at his word, and sent him out to Woodbury for picket duty with the 2nd Kentucky.
Morgan never gave James Shanks a command, and Shanks never forgave the General for this omission. During the raid across Indiana and Ohio he was attached to Hines’ scouts, and Hines never liked or trusted him.
But in early November of 1864, the commandant of Camp Douglas decided that Shanks was a valuable man. General Sweet knew that Shanks was acquainted with some of the conspirators in Chicago. If he could persuade Shanks to “escape” and find the leaders, talk with them, learn their plans, then Sweet would have evidence to make arrests before the plot against Camp Douglas could be put into operation.
On November 3, Sweet summoned Shanks to his headquarters and presented his proposition. If Shanks would act as his spy and later take an oath of allegiance to the Federal government, the General would arrange for his release from prison. Shanks agreed to accept the offer.
Sweet now gave Shanks the names of suspected Confederate sympathizers in Chicago to whom he was to go for aid after his “escape” was arranged. Through these people he was to find his way to the leaders of the conspiracy.
The “escape” was cleverly contrived. One of Sweet’s trusted agents was to drive the regular garbage wagon into camp on the following afternoon. Shanks in the meantime would inform his barracks mates that he was going to try to escape by hiding in the back of the wagon; he would ask them to aid him by engaging the driver in conversation while he crawled into the vehicle.
The plan worked to perfection. General Sweet himself was standing near the exit gate when the wagon was halted for guard’s inspection. Sweet waved the guard aside. “Let the driver pass,” he said, and the wagon rolled on through the gate.
In a few hours, James Shanks was in the home of Buckner Morris, a former judge who had once campaigned for Governor of Illinois. For some time, Judge Morris and his wife had been aiding escaped prisoners; they believed Shanks’ story that he was an escaped prisoner of war, and gave him thirty dollars to help him on his way. Shanks later marked the money and passed it on to General Sweet for evidence.
From the Morris home, Shanks moved into a wider circle of Confederate sympathizers and Copperheads. By the evening of November 6 he had found his way to the Richmond House, to his surprise discovered that St. Léger Grenfell, the man who had introduced him to John Morgan, was registered there. Shanks sent up a note to Grenfell asking permission to see him.
When Grenfell received the note, he could not recall who James Shanks was. He stepped into the adjoining room and asked Tom Hines if he knew such a man. Hines remembered Shanks; he warned Grenfell not to trust him.
Although the Englishman was feeling unwell, he courteously agreed to see Shanks. “I went to his room,” Shanks later testified, “and told him who I was and where I was from, told him I had just escaped from Camp Douglas, that I was under a parole of honor not to attempt escape; that I had forfeited that parole and was now in a precarious position. He expressed solicitude in my behalf.…He asked if the prisoners in Douglas would co-operate with any assistance from outside; I replied that they would.”
But Shanks did not learn any details of the conspiracy from Grenfell. It was not until one of the young Confederates from Canada entered the room that Shanks’ mission of betrayal began to look more promising. The visitor was Lieutenant John J. Bettersworth, who was using the name of Fielding. Bettersworth revealed casually that he would be leading one of the attacking parties against Camp Douglas, and from that moment Shanks clung to Bettersworth as closely as a brother.
As the evening wore on, Shanks announced that he had decided to take a room in the Richmond House, and invited Bettersworth to join him for a drink. The drink lasted until well after midnight, Shanks keeping the young Lieutenant’s glass always filled. Bettersworth’s tongue loosened. As he became more and more communicative, he boasted that more than a thousand armed men would be ready to make the attack on the prison camp. He also told Shanks the names of the conspiracy’s leaders, enough about them to aid General Sweet considerably in his efforts to stamp out the plot and convict the plotters.
“We were to have another meeting the next morning at eight o’clock,” Shanks testified. “Fielding [Bettersworth] left my room about half past one or two o’clock, and he said as he left, ‘Perhaps I may return before that hour, and I will give a certain rap, so that you will admit me.’ When I woke up I found I was arrested. This was the Richmond House and was about three o’clock in the morning of the 7th of November.”
What Shanks had not known was that some of General Sweet’s officers in plain-clothes had been following him everywhere he went. By midnight of November 6, Sweet decided that his spy had led him to enough of the leaders of the conspiracy for him to move in and make arrests, including Shanks whom he did not trust.
St. Léger Grenfell was the first to be taken. The ailing Englishman had not been able to sleep because of a malarial chill, and Sweet’s executive officer found him sitting before a fire in his hotel room, drinking brandy, his dog at his side. A Chicago Tribune reporter described Grenfell as a “Southern aristocrat,” his dog as “a bloodhound of the genuine Southern stamp.”
They picked up Shanks next, but Hines and Bettersworth had disappeared and Shanks could identify none of the other Confederates registered at the Richmond House. A few hours later Sweet’s patrol surrounded the homes of Buckner Morris and Charles Walsh, landing a bigger haul—three of Hines’ chief lieutenants—Ben Anderson, Richard Semmes, and George Cantrill, the latter a former Morgan officer. But they still did not have the leader of the conspiracy.
They almost caught him at the home of Dr. E. W. Edwards where Hines was meeting with Colonel Vincent Marmaduke, who had brought a small group of Missouri Confederates into Chicago for the raid. While Sweet’s men were banging on Edwards’ door, Hines hid in a box mattress on the bed where Dr. Edwards’ wife lay ill.
The patrol entered, capturing Marmaduke and searching the house thoroughly, but they did not find Tom Hines. Sweet put a guard on the house, however, and for twenty-four hours Hines was a prisoner. To arrange for Hines’ escape, Dr. Edwards announced that his wife was dying, and during the following rainy afternoon friends and neighbors came in by groups of twos and threes to pay their last respects. The guards paid little attention to these harmless visitors, did not notice a slender young man who left under an umbrella with a girl at his side. An hour or so later, Tom Hines was boarding a train for Cincinnati. He had made his last try at freeing the Camp Douglas prisoners.
Regardless of whether General Sweet had made the arrests when he did, it is unlikely that Hines would have gone ahead with plans to raid the prison. The plot had leaked badly. By Sunday, November 6, too many people knew the secret.
In its late Sunday edition, the Tribune published a story about the arrival of sixty “butternuts” on the Chicago, Alton & St. Louis Railway. The newspaper assumed that they were guerrillas come to create a disturbance in Chicago. In its early Monday edition, the Tribune was predicting a raid on Camp Douglas.
As Hines and his associates always read the newspapers carefully, it seems improbable that they would have continued with their plans in the face of such widespread public knowledge of their intentions
.
The man who may well have been the least guilty of the group arrested by General Sweet was the most severely punished—the romantic Englishman, St. Léger Grenfell. After a long trial lasting from January to April, 1865, the accused were sentenced to prison for varying lengths of time—all that is except Grenfell. The court could not conceal its resentment of his foreign citizenship and sentenced him “to be hung by the neck until he is dead, at such time and place as the commanding general may direct.”
Had the war not ended about this time, Grenfell no doubt would have been executed. Instead his sentence was commuted by President Andrew Johnson to imprisonment for life, at hard labor, at Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas.
To the very end Grenfell insisted that he was innocent, and aside from the unreliable testimony of James Shanks there is nothing in the trial record but hearsay to prove his guilt. “Had I not been arrested, I should have left for Canada by the morning train,” he declared, and no one could prove he did not mean what he said.
At Fort Jefferson he was the prison gardener, and became a friend of Dr. Samuel Mudd, the physician who attended John Wilkes Booth’s injured leg and was unjustly accused of participating in the Lincoln assassination plot. “A learned physician, Dr. Mudd,” Grenfell noted in one of his letters, “has descended to play the fiddle for drunken soldiers to dance to or form part of a very miserable orchestra at a still more miserable theatrical performance.”
For almost three years, the dauntless old cavalryman lived out his days on that moated coral island off Key West. His friends of the 2nd Kentucky, civilians again, tried to gain a pardon for him—Basil Duke, John Castleman, Tom Hines, Charlton Morgan, Henry Stone and others—but being former Confederates they had little influence with President Johnson.
On March 7, 1868, Grenfell made an almost impossible bid for freedom. With three other prisoners he attempted escape in an open boat, but soon after they put out to sea a storm arose and none of them was ever heard of again.
The survivors of the old 2nd never forgot Colonel George St. Léger Grenfell. He had taught them the fine points of the science of cavalry; he had come as close to being a genuine alligator horse as an Englishman could. “Kings, lords, and mighty warriors,” one of them wrote in salutation, “have gone down to graves in the briny sea, but the blue waters never closed over a braver heart than that of St. Léger Grenfell.”
5
After the November fiasco in Chicago, Tom Hines journeyed to Ohio, visited his sweetheart, Nancy Sproule, and persuaded her to join him in Covington, Kentucky, where they were married. After a hazardous honeymoon in Union-held Kentucky, Hines took his bride to Richmond where he received new orders to return to Canada for further service with the Confederate mission. But there was little more cloak-and-sword work that Hines or any of the others could do now that would have any effect on the course of the war.
Disillusioned with the Copperheads, the Confederates in Canada engaged in a few audacious adventures on their own. Bennett Young, one of the original Quirk scouts, led a small raiding force (including some former Morgan troopers) across the border to St. Albans, Vermont, robbing the banks, and startling all of New England. The Vermonters captured Young, but could not hold him. In a border incident which almost developed into a localized war between Vermont and Canada, Lieutenant Young was taken into protective custody by Canadian soldiers, was later tried and given his freedom.
Then in late November the reckless Lieutenant Colonel Robert M. Martin, who had commanded the remnants of the 2nd Kentucky at Chickamauga, made a wild attempt to burn the city of New York. Martin had persuaded the Confederate Secretary of State, Judah Benjamin, that he could carry off this daring venture, and Benjamin had sent him to Canada to operate under the official mission.
With Lieutenant John Headley, another Morgan officer, Martin gathered a small group of the Canadian expatriates and slipped into New York. Martin’s entire plan was based on the use of Greek fire, a liquid combination of sulphuric acid and other chemicals which when exposed to air would ignite. Its advantage to a saboteur was that the fire would not break out until the user had time to leave the point of sabotage. “Greek fire,” one of the conspirators said afterward, “was one of the great humbugs of the war.”
It certainly did not work too well for Robert Martin and his comrades. A gross of bottles containing the mixture was distributed among them, and on the night of November 25 they tried to start thirty-two fires in New York. Barnum’s Museum and ten hotels were set to blazing, but the other ignitions failed.
Their efforts, nevertheless, caused considerable damage and created a great sensation for a few days, the New York Herald headlining: ATTEMPT TO BURN CITY. DISCOVERY OF A VAST REBEL PLOT. ONE OF MORGAN’S GUERRILLAS IMPLICATED.
Lieutenant Colonel Martin and his party escaped back to Canada, but that was about the last of the cloak-and-sword adventures involving Morgan men. The so-called Northwest Conspiracy was rapidly fading away as the war moved toward its inevitable end.
6
After General Sweet demolished the Confederate plot to raid Camp Douglas on November 7, he tightened discipline in the prison. Aside from the few plotters captured, those who paid the price of failure were the objects of the raid—the prisoners.
On January 15, 1865, Captain Sponable’s inspection report listed 11,700 prisoners in Camp Douglas, the largest number recorded to that date. The Morgan men had dwindled to a minority, but they were still on Sponable’s black list. Life was especially miserable for the survivors of the 2nd Kentucky during the last winter of their imprisonment.
Almost every one of the several accounts written by Kentucky boys who endured that winter mentions a certain instrument of torture designed by the Captain for the Morgan prisoners. This was “Morgan’s mule,” a wooden frame variously described as being eight to fifteen feet tall, with a two-inch scantling set edgewise across the top. For punishment the Kentuckians were forced to mount and sit astride. “After remaining there a while, one felt as though the spinal column was being pushed out at the top of the head.” Private J. M. Lynn told of “painfully straddling the sharp-edged piece of timber, with feet dangling in the air, sometimes heavily weighted.” Describing a similar experience, P. H. Prince said the guards took him off “to the wooden horse called Morgan” and put him astraddle, then tied half of a coal stove to each leg and stuck bayonets in him.
“Frequently men sick in the barracks were delirious; sometimes one or two in a barracks were crazy,” said Thomas Henry of Company E. “These were the cause of a whole barrack of men being mounted on the horse.…Sometimes the Yanks would laugh and say, I will give you a pair of spurs, which was a bucket of sand tied to each foot. I have seen men who had been left in this condition until the skin and flesh was cut nearly to the bone. Men in winter would get so cold that they would fall off. When warmed they were put back.”
A form of punishment especially repugnant to these proud Kentuckians was that of being flogged. On one occasion in Tennessee, the 2nd Kentucky boys had risked courts-martial to avoid flogging a deserter; they considered such punishment too humiliating either to be given or received.
During that winter of early 1865, Captain Sponable acquired two assistant “inspectors of prisoners,” one known among the Kentuckians as “Prairie Bull” McCurley, the other simply as “Billie Hell.” Both these sadistic guards carried leather straps which they used unmercifully, frequently ordering the Morgan prisoners “to reach for grub,” which meant to stand in line stiff-kneed and lean forward touching the ground with their finger-tips while Prairie Bull and Billie Hell applied their leather whips.
In his account of this period, T. M. Page recorded a “midnight frolic of drunken guards who dragged a score of prisoners from bed and flogged them with cartridge belts.” Private Henry said the Company E men were once ordered in turn to lie naked across a barrel, the guards “using their belts which had a leaden clasp with a sharp edge; the belt would often gather wind so as to turn the clasp ed
gewise; every lick inflicted thus cut entirely through the skin.”
Even more degrading was the punishment given a hungry prisoner caught taking a bone out of a slop barrel. J. S. Rosamond told of how he was ordered to get down on all fours and walk around the bone, growling and barking like a dog for half an hour or so, and then was forced to grovel in the dirt and gnaw at the bone.
It was the belief of the Kentuckians that if they had been guarded by soldiers with combat experience such humiliations would never have been inflicted upon them. In that winter all the guards were garrison troops, who for one reason or another—physical, moral or mental—had been ruled exempt from battle duty.
On occasions, these troops who were considered unfit to carry arms on the fighting line used their loaded weapons with deadly effect upon the unarmed prisoners. “If any one of us was heard to whisper at night,” said Private Henry, “or the least ray of light was seen, the guard would fire into the barracks at once. In each barrack there was only two stoves to two hundred men, and for a stove to warm one hundred men, it was frequently red hot. When taps were sounded the fire in the stove could not be put out immediately.” According to T. B. Clore of the 10th Kentucky, the guards did not need the excuse of whispers or lights to open fire. “I have known them to be passing along at the dead hour of the night and just for downright meanness fire into the barracks where we were asleep. As a protection many of us nailed a board across the head of our bunks and filled in between that and the outside boards with earth and stones.”