The Dark Intrigue: The True Story of a Civil War Conspiracy - Hardcover

Van Der Linden, Frank

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1555916104 ISBN 13: 9781555916107

Publisher: Fulcrum Publishing, 2007

Synopsis

The Dark Intrigue tells for the first time the incredible story of how leaders of an American political party, during the Civil War, conferred cordially with enemy agents in a foreign country in a scheme to oust the president of the United States and enforce peace without victory.

Most Northerners initially supported Abraham Lincoln's war against the Southern Confederacy to save the Union. But later, many turned against it when the death toll soared above a half million. Hoping to recapture the White House as a "peace party," leading Democrats met with Confederate agents in the summer of 1864 and discussed ways to end the war-not win it. Lincoln charged that one Confederate agent, C. C. Clay, had convinced the Democrats to orchestrate an armistice. This intriguing book reveals letters from Clay that confirm Lincoln's suspicions. A fascinating read, The Dark Intrigue brings an important piece of Civil War history to light.

 

About this title

About the Author

Frank van der Linden became a Civil War historian after nearly half a century as a Washington newspaper correspondent, covering Congress and the White House. He first interviewed President Harry Truman at a poker party for congressional Democrats in 1945 and closed his White House career with President George H. W. Bush.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The DARK Intrigue

The true story of a Civil War conspiracyBy Frank van der Linden

Fulcrum Publishing

Copyright © 2007 Frank van der Linden
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-55591-610-7

Contents

Preface..........................................................................ixChapter One "McClellan for President"...........................................1Chapter Two Barlow Commands the Boom............................................7Chapter Three Stanton Smears McClellan..........................................11Chapter Four McClellan's Fateful Letter.........................................19Chapter Five "Little Mac Is Back!"..............................................26Chapter Six "Plenty of Rotten Old Democrats"....................................33Chapter Seven Separate Peace Urged on the Northwest.............................38Chapter Eight Arbitrary Arrests.................................................41Chapter Nine Democrats' Intrigue with British for Peace.........................47Chapter Ten "Treason Is Everywhere".............................................53Chapter Eleven "Don't Care a Damn"..............................................59Chapter Twelve Lincoln Exiles Vallandigham......................................66Chapter Thirteen "The Great Dead Rabbit"........................................72Chapter Fourteen Bloody Chaos in New York.......................................80Chapter Fifteen Antiwar Feeling Rises...........................................86Chapter Sixteen Dahlgren's Fatal Raid...........................................94Chapter Seventeen Confederates' Intrigue in Canada..............................99Chapter Eighteen Federal Spies Find Disloyalty in the North.....................107Chapter Nineteen Gold Gamblers and Shoddy Rich..................................112Chapter Twenty Vallandigham Returns.............................................117Chapter Twenty-One Jubal Early's Raid Spurs Calls for "Mac".....................122Chapter Twenty-Two Sanders, Rebel Agent,Woos Democrats..........................127Chapter Twenty-Three A Machiavellian Scheme.....................................138Chapter Twenty-Four Lincoln Scents the Dark Intrigue............................145Chapter Twenty-Five A Spy Exposes Plot for Revolt...............................151Chapter Twenty-Six Lincoln Fears Defeat.........................................158Chapter Twenty-Seven Peace Democrats Oppose McClellan...........................166Chapter Twenty-Eight Mint Juleps and Sherry Cobblers............................173Chapter Twenty-Nine "This Damned War Must Be Stopped!"..........................179Chapter Thirty Democrats Promise Armistice......................................187Chapter Thirty-One Seward Proves the Dark Intrigue..............................196Chapter Thirty-Two Pendleton and Belmont Assailed...............................205Chapter Thirty-Three Hood Moves North...........................................213Chapter Thirty-Four "Treason" Trials in Indiana.................................217Chapter Thirty-Five Illinois Democrat Takes Rebel Gold..........................226Chapter Thirty-Six Rebels Betrayed in Chicago...................................234Chapter Thirty-Seven New York in the Balance....................................240Chapter Thirty-Eight Lincoln's Great Victory....................................245Chapter Thirty-Nine The Last Nail in Slavery's Coffin...........................252Chapter Forty Aftermath.........................................................257Abbreviations....................................................................263Notes............................................................................265Bibliography.....................................................................295

Chapter One

"McClellan for President"

THE McCLELLAN FOR PRESIDENT campaign began almost as soon as the youthful general emerged as the first Union hero of the Civil War. The Young Napoleon rose to instant stardom when some Ohio and Indiana volunteers under his command routed Confederate troops in three small-scale battles in the mountains of western Virginia in June 1861. After the Federal Army suffered its first defeat, July 21 at Bull Run, and stumbled back across the Potomac from Virginia like a frightened mob, the handsome warrior was summoned to Washington July 26. The next day President Lincoln appointed him chief of the Army of the Potomac charging him with building the defenses of the capital and transforming demoralized soldiers into an army capable of defeating the Confederacy.

When the deeply worried president and the self-confident general met at the White House, they were a study in contrasts: Lincoln, tall, raw-boned, awkward, with long arms and legs and huge hands and feet, towered over the much shorter McClellan who was aptly nicknamed "Little Mac." Lincoln, born in a log cabin in Kentucky, rose from his dirt-poor youth, educated himself, became a successful lawyer in Illinois and a one-term congressman who still felt ill at ease in society; he was fond of regaling other men with funny, sometimes earthy stories. McClellan, the privileged son of a Philadelphia physician, excelled at the U.S. Military Academy, became a brilliant engineer and railroad executive, spoke French and mingled easily in high society, and was sure of his personal and intellectual superiority over mere politicians. Politically, the two men were far apart-Lincoln first a Whig, then a Republican, McClellan, a lifelong Democrat.

Graduated second in the legendary West Point Class of 1846, McClellan had proved his courage under fire in the Mexican War as an engineer on the staff of Gen. Winfield Scott. At age thirty, he was the youngest of three men chosen by President Franklin Pierce's secretary of war, Jefferson Davis, to go to Europe to study tactics of armies involved in the Crimean War.

Tiring of the peacetime military routine, McClellan gave up his commission and became chief engineer of the Illinois Central Railroad at Chicago; he then moved up to become president of the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad, with headquarters at Cincinnati. His connections with powerful railroad executives would become important in his later quest for the presidency. Now, at age thirty-four, the former captain found himself suddenly a major general, second in rank only to General Scott. The quick elevation went straight to his head.

"I find myself in a new and strange position here-the President, General Scott and all deferring to me-by some operation of magic. I seem to have become the power of the land," McClellan wrote to his wife, Ellen Mary Marcy, daughter of Army Captain Randolph B. Marcy. The couple had been married the year before, and she was in Cincinnati awaiting the birth of their first child. McClellan exulted: "I almost think that, were I to win some small success, now, I could become Dictator or anything else that might please me-but nothing of that kind would please me-therefore, I won't be dictator. Admirable self-denial!"

At a White House state dinner, the British ambassador assured a visiting French officer in McClellan's presence that McClellan would become the next president of the United States. McClellan responded with a smile. To his wife, he wrote:

As I hope one day to be united forever with you in heaven, I have no such aspiration. I will never accept the presidency. I would cheerfully take the dictatorship and agree to lay down my life when the country is saved....

I feel that God has placed a great work in my hands. I have not sought it-I know how weak I am. I know that I need to do right, and I believe that God will help me and give me the wisdom I do not possess. Pray for me, darling, that I may be able to accomplish my task, the greatest, perhaps, that any poor weak mortal ever had to do-God grant that I may bring this war to an end and be permitted to spend the rest of my days quietly with you.

It is significant that McClellan proposed to "end" the war, not "win" it. That would become the major difference between the Democrats and President Lincoln in 1864.

Galloping around Washington, astride his stallion named Dan Webster, McClellan looked the part of the Man on Horseback. William H. Russell, a British war correspondent, described him: "He is a very squarely built, thick-throated, broad-chested man under the middle height with slightly bowed legs, a tendency to embonpoint. His head, covered with a close cut crop of dark, auburn hair, is well set on his shoulders ... The brow small, contracted, and furrowed. A short, reddish mustache conceals his mouth."

In the general's dark blue eyes, the Englishman could see no trace of uneasiness. Noting that the commander liked fine cigars and sometimes a chew of tobacco, Russell, commented: "He looks like a stout little captain of dragoons."

McClellan labored night and day to weld his motley crew of raw volunteers into some semblance of a fighting force. By enforcing strict discipline, he cleared laggard soldiers and officers off the streets of Washington and out of the saloons, and inspired esprit de corps among thousands of recruits flooding into the city. He supervised the construction of a ring of forts to protect the capital from invasion, expected at any time. His soldiers hailed him as "Little Mac," "George," and "the Young Napoleon."

McClellan did not share the rigors of camp life with his men in their tents, however. His headquarters were in a mansion on Jackson Square. It was close to the White House-a fact observed by those who believed the ambitious warrior already had his eye on that residence. The gossip persisted although he was a year below the minimum legal age of thirty-five to be president. He would be old enough, his advocates noted, to qualify by 1864.

In early September, several Northern newspapers printed alarming stories indicating an imminent Confederate attack on Washington. The New York Tribune predicted that a gray-clad horde would cross the Potomac and converge on Frederick, Maryland, where pro-Confederate members of the legislature would vote to take Maryland out of the Union.

Under orders from President Lincoln, McClellan sent Federal troops to arrest the pro-secessionist legislators before they could convene at Frederick, September 17. Nineteen legislators were arrested, along with Baltimore mayor George Brown, two newspaper editors, and Congressman Henry May. Later the prisoners were sent to Fort Lafayette, New York, and to Fort Warren, in Boston harbor, where they languished for more than a year, until their release in November 1862. None ever had a trial. Their arrests and imprisonment were clearly violations of the Bill of Rights.

Maryland leaders insisted that there never had been any plot to take their state out of the Union. The legislature had already ruled that out in April 1861 when Lincoln had threatened to "bombard their cities."

The crackdown on the Maryland legislature typified the Lincoln administration's iron-fisted technique of dealing with dissent. Early in the war, a few brave-or foolhardy-souls dared to speak up and say it was wrong for Americans to be butchering each other over a political dispute. Their calls for conciliation were drowned out by the roar of cheers for victory.

After the Bull Run defeat, however, more antiwar protests could be heard, and the government began to deal harshly with newspapers and individuals daring to call for peace.

William Henry Seward, the secretary of state, who considered himself the "premier" of the Lincoln regime, became, in effect, the director of internal security. In a story that has made its way into the history books, Seward is quoted as boasting to the British ambassador: "My Lord, I can touch a bell on my right hand and arrest a citizen of Ohio. I can touch a bell again and order the imprisonment of a citizen of New York; and no power on earth, except the President, can release them. Can the Queen of England do as much?"

The New York Daily News printed so much antiwar copy that the government banned it from the mails. A crippled newsboy named George Hubbell was thrown into Fort Lafayette for selling the politically incorrect newspaper at a railroad station in Connecticut. His brother, a Republican Party worker in New York, protested to Lincoln: "George has been a cripple from his youth with a spinal deformity and is the sole help of his mother, who is in the deepest sorrow." It was difficult to explain how the imprisonment of this crippled newsboy promoted national security. Embarrassed by the blunder, Seward released the youth within a week.

James W. Wall, the leader of a passionate band of peace advocates at Burlington, New Jersey, wrote antiwar editorials for the New York Daily News. He charged: "The war has a four-fold object: first, power; the second, plunder; third, Negro equality; and fourth, southern subjugation." This was "treason" enough to land him in Fort Lafayette. After two weeks, Wall was freed. Upon his return to Burlington, he received a hero's welcome, complete with a torchlight procession to his home. Later, Democrats who controlled the New Jersey legislature elected him to the United States Senate, where his father, Garrett Wall, had served as an ally of President Andrew Jackson.

While Seward had the power of tinkling his little bell, he did not hesitate to arrest even men who had served with him in the Senate if they were suspected of favoring the South. One such former senator was Dr. William McKendree Gwin, a California Democrat and erstwhile physician who owned a plantation and slaves in Mississippi. With Calhoun B. Benham, California's district attorney, and a friend, Joseph L. Brent, Dr. Gwin sailed from San Francisco October 21, 1861, via Panama, for New York City. Upon arriving in New York, November 15, all three men were arrested under Seward's orders and lodged in Fort Lafayette.

"Gwin was known to be a sympathizer with the rebels and was believed to entertain the purpose of joining them in the insurrectionary states," the State Department claimed. Dr. Gwin denied charges that he sought to make California an independent state or to ally it with the Southern Confederacy. Eventually, President Lincoln intervened in the case and all three men were freed.

Former senator George Wallace Jones, an Iowa Democrat who had served as minister in Bogot, then capital of New Granada (now Colombia), from 1857 to 1861, returned to Washington in the fall of 1861, had a cordial visit with his old friend Seward and a chat with Lincoln, and proceeded to New York. At his hotel there, however, he found himself arrested on an order from Seward.

Dr. Gwin was in the same hotel, having just been freed from prison. Jones recalled: "Mrs. Gwin entered hurriedly and threw her arms around my neck and exclaimed, 'Oh, my dear General, you're going to Fort Lafayette, from which my husband has just been released!'"

Somehow, the administration had intercepted a letter Jones had sent from Bogot May 17 to Jefferson Davis, who had been his bosom friend for years. "May God Almighty avert civil war," Jones wrote to the president of the Confederacy, "but if unhappily it shall come you may (I think without doubt) count on me and mine, and hosts of other friends, standing shoulder to shoulder in the ranks with you and other Southern friends and relatives whose rights, like my own, have been disregarded by the Abolitionists."

Jones walked out of the Fort Lafayette prison February 22, 1862, after receiving his parole, promising "to give no aid or comfort to enemies of the United States." His two sons joined the Confederate army.

As the autumn days went by and McClellan's army showed no sign of going after the Rebels in Virginia, the Northern people began to complain. Correspondent Russell observed: "The people are beginning to think the youthful Napoleon is only a brummagem Bonaparte."

McClellan said he was handicapped by his obstinate superior, General Scott, with whom he feuded for months. Privately, Little Mac called Lincoln "an idiot" and wrote that Scott was "in his dotage." Sick and infirm at seventy-five, the once-mighty Scott retired, and on November 1, 1861, McClellan succeeded him as general in chief, while also keeping command of the Army of the Potomac, a dual load of responsibility.

"The supreme command of the Army will entail a vast labor upon you," the president told him.

McClellan replied, "I can do it all."

Chapter Two

Barlow Commands the Boom

McCLELLAN'S PROMOTION to supreme commander delighted a powerful New Yorker who intended to become his unofficial campaign manager and to catapult him into the White House. The mastermind of the McClellan-for-president boom was Samuel Latham Mitchill Barlow, a rich and influential Manhattan lawyer and a young man on the make. In 1861, Barlow was only thirty-five, just six months older than McClellan.

Born in Massachusetts in 1826, Barlow was the eldest son of Samuel Bancroft Barlow, a physician. His mother was the daughter of Jean Brillot-Savarin, an migr who had fled France to escape the perils of the revolution. At sixteen, Barlow began working in a New York law office for a dollar a week. At twenty-three, he was admitted to the bar and soon became one of the city's most successful corporation lawyers. With his wife and two children, Barlow resided in a brownstone mansion at the corner of Madison Avenue and Twenty-third Street, where he entertained lavishly. He also loved to display his large collection of paintings and well-stocked library.

Behind the scenes, Barlow played a major role in corporations that expanded the nation's rail network during the boom years of the 1850s when railway executives increasingly influenced party politics. In that era, the railroads became the first large industrial complex, and their executives wielded great power in the legislatures and in the halls of Congress and manipulated political conventions. For instance, the New York State Democratic chairman, Dean Richmond, bossed the New York Central Railroad, while the leaders of the Camden and Amboy Railroad dictated the politics of New Jersey, one of the few strongholds of Democrats in the North.

In 1860, Barlow persuaded McClellan to become superintendent of the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad, which ran 340 miles between St. Louis and Cincinnati. Through their association in the railroad business, the two men became lifelong friends. It was quite natural for Barlow to become McClellan's most enthusiastic advocate for the presidency, although the general himself modestly disclaimed any desire to do anything except end the war.

In the first great wave of patriotic fervor after Fort Sumter's fall in April 1861, most Democrats joined Republicans in supporting the war for the purpose of restoring the Union. But partisanship reemerged as the war dragged on without victory, and the Democrats began to rebuild their shattered party. The strategy seemed clear to Barlow: McClellan would crush the rebellion, the Southern states would rejoin the Union if assured of new guarantees for the slave system, and the grateful American people would reward McClellan with the presidency.

Early in the war, McClellan felt confident that his policy of bringing the Southern states back into the Union without interfering with slavery represented the majority opinion of the Northern people as well as the policy of the president. Lincoln's orders canceling the decrees of Gen. John Charles Frmont in Missouri and Gen. David Hunter in South Carolina freeing the slaves of "rebels" in their regions bolstered McClellan's perception. Lincoln feared that Frmont's order would so enrage pro-Union slaveholders in Kentucky that the crucial border state would tip over into the Confederacy. Without Kentucky, the president believed, he could not win the war.

A week after assuming command, McClellan confided in Barlow his plans for ending the war with one tremendous blow. He asked Barlow and other influential men to help him achieve the original aim set forth by Congress by a nearly unanimous vote in July 1861-to defeat the rebellion and to restore the Union but not to interfere with private property, particularly slaves.

"Help me to dodge the nigger-we want nothing to do with him," McClellan wrote to Barlow. "I am fighting to preserve the integrity of the Union and the power of the govt." McClellan believed that the slavery issue must remain secondary, and he believed that Lincoln agreed with him: "The Presdt is perfectly honest and is really sound on the nigger question."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The DARK Intrigueby Frank van der Linden Copyright © 2007 by Frank van der Linden. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Fulcrum Publishing
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1555916104
• ISBN 13: 9781555916107
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304