A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [364]
Thompson did not care whether Vallandigham wanted reunion or Southern independence so long as he was committed to fomenting a revolution in the North. He agreed to fund a joint venture between his Confederate raiders and Vallandigham’s Sons of Liberty to make a coordinated attack on the three prisoner-of-war camps in Illinois and Indiana. The prisoners would provide a ready army to help the conspirators stage a coup d’état in the Northwest, and as soon as this was accomplished, they would return to the South to help finish the war. Thompson hoped that the prison break would bring an additional fifty thousand fighters to the Confederacy.
Captain Hines, Colonel Grenfell, and some sixty former members of Morgan’s brigade were to attack the prisons; the Sons of Liberty would have the responsibility for rounding up the chiefs of the local legislatures and disposing of them. “All they need now is an ‘occasion,’ as they style it, to rise and assert their rights,” Thompson had reported to Benjamin on July 7.32 There was no attempt at any strategic planning, no discussion as to which camps would be liberated first or how the army of liberated prisoners would be fed, transported, and clothed; but this did not stop Thompson from writing hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of checks. Confederate sympathizers and corrupt middlemen shipped cartloads of revolvers hidden in boxes marked “Sunday school books” to Ohio and Indiana. New York proved to be especially fertile ground for obtaining illicit guns and ammunition.
All the Confederates had assigned themselves aliases, which fooled no one and only served to give the conspirators a false sense of security. “Dear Hunter [the alias used by Thomas Hines],” wrote Grenfell on July 31 from Collingwood on the Canadian side of Lake Huron, “there is fair fishing round the place but better further North … if any news write immediately.”33 Grenfell was waiting for Hines to give him the signal to go south to Toronto, which was the agreed rendezvous point for the plotters. However, the date for the uprising was proving difficult to pin down with the Sons of Liberty, and the “occasion” had been pushed back several times. Vallandigham had returned to Ohio, hoping to be arrested by the authorities in the belief that this would provoke a public backlash violent enough to spark a revolt. But to his dismay, Lincoln gave orders for the troublemaker to be ignored, which deprived Vallandigham of the intoxicating power of indignation. Ironically, Grant’s military failures in Virginia had also weakened the Sons of Liberty’s resolve, since public weariness with the war made it seem likely that democracy rather than conspiracy would soon bring peace. Representatives for the Sons of Liberty tried to cancel the mission, telling Hines and Thompson on August 8: “The more we think of it the more thoroughly are we convinced that it will be unsuccessful.”34
The organization had been successfully infiltrated and arrests were already beginning to take place, including those of fifty leading men from the Sons of Liberty in Kentucky on July 30. Two days later the state’s grand commander, Judge Joshua Bullitt, was seized as he stepped off the ferryboat on his return from a conference with Thompson and Hines in Canada. A search of his belongings revealed a satchel full of gold, a check for $10,000 signed by Jacob Thompson, and many incriminating papers.35 The leaders of the Indiana chapter, including Harrison Dodd, were arrested three weeks later. The Confederates were equally guilty of jeopardizing the mission. They knew U.S. detectives were tailing them but failed to alter their behavior. The same basic ciphers were used, the same routines followed, and there was much careless talk in public places. By now the Federal authorities had a clear idea that some sort of attack on Camp Douglas was being planned