A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (127 page)

By November 16, 1864, the
Georgian
had been repaired and was sailing west toward Sarnia on Lake Huron to pick up the rest of her weaponry when Monck’s agents finally achieved their first success against the Confederates. They intercepted the shipment before it reached Sarnia and found a large quantity of arms in three boxes marked “potatoes.” The trail led straight back to Burley, who was arrested in Guelph the following day and taken to Toronto to face a trial for extradition to the United States. At first, the detectives thought they had captured Beall, and their confusion enabled him to go into hiding before they realized their mistake. The rest of the
Georgian
’s crew also scattered, leaving only Burley to take the blame for the plot. Thompson was prepared to kill civilians for the cause of Southern independence, but he was less insouciant about risking the lives of his own men. He hastily wrote to the Confederate navy secretary, Stephen Mallory, asking him to forward documents proving Burley’s naval commission so that the charge of piracy—which carried a death sentence—could not be made against the Scotsman.
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Disappointed by the sudden unraveling of the Lake Erie plan, Thompson waited anxiously for the outcome of the plot to set New York afire on November 25. There had been no word from Lieutenant Colonel Robert Martin or Captain John Headley since their aborted attempt on the seventh. But the departure of General Butler and his Federal troops on November 15 gave Thompson hope that they would still carry out the mission. The small Confederate cell was more determined than ever “to let the Government at Washington understand that the burning homes in the South might find a counterpart in the North,” as Headley recalled.
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They were planning to use a new kind of incendiary bomb based on Greek fire—a mixture of phosphorus and carbon bisulfate—which could be transported easily in small bottles and produced a powerful explosion when exposed to air. The targets were New York City’s hotels. The conspirators were to travel around with large satchels, and one by one leave the bottles in prebooked bedrooms.

On November 24, the day before the attack, Headley picked up the chemical concoction from a Southern sympathizer and carried it in his suitcase on a streetcar up the Bowery:

I soon began to smell a peculiar odour—a little like rotten eggs—and I noticed the passengers were conscious of the same presence. But I sat unconcerned until my getting off place was reached, when I took up the valise and went out. I heard a passenger say as I alighted, “there must be something dead in that valise.”
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Only six of the original eight took part in the plot on the twenty-fifth, two having lost their nerve. Each man put ten bottles of the Greek fire in a satchel and spread out through the city. They visited nineteen hotels in all, as well as two theaters and Barnum’s Museum. But the Confederates had ignored the basic rule of arson—that fire requires oxygen to burn—and had planted the Greek fire in locked bedrooms and closed cupboards, causing the flames to peter out of their own accord.

One of the hotels set on fire, the Lafarge, was adjacent to the Winter Garden Theatre at Broadway and Thirty-first, where the three Booth brothers, Edwin, Junius Brutus, and John Wilkes, were playing together for the first and last time in their careers, giving a charity performance of
Julius Caesar
to raise money for the Shakespeare statue fund for Central Park; John Wilkes Booth was playing Mark Antony, and his more famous brother Edwin was Brutus. John Wilkes, a member of the Sons of Liberty, was already deep into his own plot, although at this time the scheme was limited to kidnapping Lincoln and forcing the release of all Confederate prisoners in exchange for his freedom. Booth had been meeting Confederate agents in Canada, but the fragmented structure of their operations meant that he knew nothing about the New York conspiracy, and the arsonists were unaware of whose life they were risking when they set fire to the Lafarge. As news rippled across the auditorium that the hotel next door was burning, there were screams from the audience and people began to rise from their seats. “The panic was such for a few moments that it seemed as if all the audience believed the entire building in flames,” reported
The New York Times.
But in that split second between calm and a stampede, Edwin Booth stepped forward and reassured the audience that the theater was not itself on fire: “In addition … Judge McCunn rose in the dress circle, and in a few timely remarks admonished them all to remain quietly in their places, and at the same time tried to show them the danger which would attend a pell-mell rush for the doors, and especially the uselessness of it.”
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The fires caused mass panic throughout the city, but no recorded deaths. By the following evening, newspapers were carrying full descriptions of the six suspects, who all decided to leave for Toronto on the eleven o’clock train. They slipped into their berths and waited, fully dressed and armed, in case detectives boarded in pursuit. Much to their surprise, they reached Canada without being recognized. U.S. detectives came looking for them but returned to New York empty-handed.
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General Dix announced that “such persons engaged in secret acts of hostility” would be caught, tried, and executed “without the delay of a single day.”
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The treasurer of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, George Templeton Strong, thought the arson attempt proved “that the South is thoroughly rotten, and the Confederacy a mere shell.”
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Such was the fear in the city that several newspapers called for Southern citizens to be rounded up and expelled, and Dix ordered all Southern refugees to register their names with the police department.

In the midst of the public outpouring of anger against the South (and at the British for harboring the conspirators in Canada), Mary Sophia Hill turned up without warning at the New York consulate to request Archibald’s assistance. She had come to complain about her trial and banishment from New Orleans, but Consul Archibald was less interested in the dangers she had overcome to reach New York than in the threat to her safety now that she had arrived. He purchased a ticket for her on the next steamship to England and made sure that she was on it.

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Lord Lyons had not left his bedroom for more than a month, during which time Seward had continually assumed that in one more week or so the minister would reappear, looking tired, perhaps, but otherwise well. He was shocked when Lyons informed him on December 4 that he was leaving for England in two days’ time. “I agree with you that it is best that you go away for a time,” Seward answered Lyons’s note by return messenger. “And yet I feel that my cares and difficulties will be seriously increased by your withdrawal.”
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Lord Russell had hoped to keep Lyons in Washington for the duration of the war, and he was still counting on him making a full recovery after a month or two in England. He made it clear to Lyons that this was a respite rather than a transfer from his post. But the minister cared only that he was going home; he wrote to his sister, telling her to prepare an extra place for Christmas dinner.
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The doctors had diagnosed his headaches as neuralgia, and he had been warned that the pain could become worse before it went away. Fortunately, his worries about the transatlantic crossing were soothed by George Sheffield, the last of the old guard at the legation, who offered to escort the invalid home. The suddenness of the decision—there were no farewell banquets and no time to engrave a watch or some such memento—imparted a sense of crisis to the news. On December 5, the morning after he received Lyons’s note, Seward wrote to Charles Francis Adams urging him to impress on Lord Russell “how deeply this incident is regretted by this government, and how desirous we are for Lord Lyons’s recovery and return to our country.”
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A week later, on December 12, Lyons was helped up the gangplank of the
China
in New York by Sheffield. Within only a few hours of the minister’s departure, Seward’s fears about his burdens increasing came true. The extradition trial in Montreal of the St. Albans raiders ended suddenly after the magistrate in charge of the case, Judge Charles Coursol, ordered their discharge on grounds so technical that the explanation introduced a new and arcane area of debate for the Canadian judiciary. The pro-Southern audience in the courtroom swarmed the prisoners, cheering and shouting as they were led down the steps. By the time the news reached Lord Monck in Quebec City, the raiders had fled the area. General Dix had no qualms about sending his troops into Canada to find them. “All military commanders on the frontier” were ordered to chase and, if necessary, shoot the Confederate guerrillas “wherever they may take refuge.” But even before Dix issued his proclamation, Monck had ordered new arrest warrants. “The police are making every effort to prevent their escape,” he informed the legation.
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Monck’s attempt to demonstrate his seriousness to Seward was undermined by an incident three days later that once again involved John Yates Beall. On December 16, a small team led by Beall tried to intercept a train taking seven Confederate generals from Johnson’s Island prison to Fort Lafayette in New York. They failed to stop the train or find the generals, and two Union detectives captured Beall and another guerrilla on the American side of Niagara. “All the efforts of Confederates … had failed,” lamented Captain Headley. “Now many of our best men were in prison. Burley at Toronto. Cole at Sandusky. Young and his comrades at Montreal. Beall and Anderson in New York City. Grenfell, Shenks, Marmaduke, Cantrill and Travers at Chicago.”
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John Yates Beall suffered the same fate as Robert Cobb Kennedy, one of the New York arsonists. He was taken to New York, where he was found guilty by a military court of spying and piracy and was executed on February 24, 1865. Right up until the last moment he refused to accept the charges against him, claiming he was a Confederate naval officer and neither a spy nor a pirate. “It is murder,” he is alleged to have said before mounting the gallows. “I die in the service and defense of my country.”

Beall’s conviction not only appeared to validate the desperate measures called for by General Dix, but also lent credence to those who argued that Britain deserved to be punished for allowing these plots to be nurtured in her territories.
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Yet Seward, who might have been expected to inflate his rhetoric for maximum effect, surprised observers by moving swiftly to maintain calm along the Canadian border. He countermanded General Dix’s order, though he begged the legation secretary, Joseph Burnley, to keep quiet about this action until the fuss had died down. Seward also labored hard to manage the increasingly belligerent stance against Britain adopted by Congress. Charles Sumner’s transformation into Britain’s harshest critic was now complete, and he was leading the Senate movement for retaliatory steps to be taken against the mother country. His first target was the ten-year-old Reciprocity Treaty—a free trade agreement with Canada—which was scheduled to end in June 1865. Using his position as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Sumner pushed through a resolution for the treaty’s suspension after June; he also attacked the Rush-Bagot Treaty of 1817, which limited the militarization of the Great Lakes, and prepared a list of grievances, beginning with the Queen’s proclamation of neutrality in 1861, which he intended to be the basis of a campaign for massive financial restitution from Britain.

Charles Francis Adams, Jr., had breakfast with Sumner in Washington in December and thought that he was half sane at best “and now out-Sumners himself.”
¹⁵
The senator’s brave and often lonely fight to achieve equal rights for Negroes had become lonelier of late because of his tendency to alienate potential allies.
¹⁶
Rather than being an asset in the White House’s campaign to pass the Thirteenth Amendment, which expanded the Emancipation Proclamation to all U.S. states and not just those in rebellion, he was regarded as an obstacle to the deal making that had to be done to achieve its passage. The Senate had passed the amendment in April 1864, but it had been stalled in the House since.

Sumner’s power in the Senate was waning. Lincoln no longer listened to him or trusted him. (Sumner owed his frequent appearances at the White House to Mary Lincoln, whom he assiduously courted.) Seward no longer feared him, but, according to Charles Francis Jr., he would exile Sumner as Minister to Anywhere if he could. Lyons had come to Washington believing that Sumner was the greatest man in American politics. Five years later, he considered him a self-aggrandizing, sneaky Savonarola who tainted the very causes he affected to espouse. “If that man ever gets into power he will, under some highly moral pretence, sacrifice the highest public interests to his position,” Lyons complained to Professor Goldwin Smith, who happened to be a fellow passenger on the
China.
Of all public men in Washington, “he is the one for whom I have brought away the least respect.”
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Lyons’s regard for Seward, on the other hand, had matured from barely concealed contempt to admiration. After an acrimonious beginning, each had learned and benefited from their forced collaboration. The politician had become a true statesman, the diplomat a true ambassador.