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By Root 7028 0

the leader of the Chicago chapter of the Sons of Liberty, and a couple of sidekicks bothered to return to Hines’s rooms. He did not have five hundred men, or one hundred men, or even fifty men, although he thought he might be able to find twenty-five if given enough time. When the Confederates insisted this was not enough, Walsh suggested November 8—the day of the election—as the new date for the prison liberation. Hines agreed through gritted teeth, swearing he would hold them to that day no matter what the cost. Once the Sons of Liberty left, the Confederates passed the rest of the night pondering their options. The snippets of news that filtered along the corridors of the hotel indicated that Vallandigham had failed to derail McClellan’s bid for the Democratic Party’s nomination. Just about every expectation held by Hines, Grenfell, and the rest had turned out to be wrong. There was no seething undercurrent of revolution, no paramilitary organization of well-armed fighters, no willingness in any quarter to take risks.

It was too dangerous for the Confederates to remain in Chicago. Hines outlined their choices during a noisy meeting of the disappointed volunteers: they could use their tickets to return to Canada, attempt to sneak home, or stay with him and hide out in southern Illinois until November 8. Twenty chose Canada; another twenty-five said they would go south. The rest agreed to help Hines build a force from scratch among the Illinois members of the Sons of Liberty. Grenfell, as usual, made a fourth choice. He would maintain the hunting charade and shoot prairie chickens around Carlyle, Illinois, until called to duty.38 “Tell the girls I am alive and well, although engaged in rather dangerous speculations, which you will know more of, probably, bye and bye,” he wrote on August 31 to the Grenfell family business manager in London.

The North West states are ripe for revolt. If interfered with in their election they will rise. All this is in favour of the South.… We are on the eve of great events. Abe Lincoln will either have made peace, or made himself a military dictator, within the next two months. In the latter case the N. W. Provinces secede, and there comes a row. Either course aids the South.39

Jacob Thompson shared Grenfell’s delusion that the Northwest was smoldering with revolutionary aims. The Copperhead leaders were cowards, he claimed to Judah Benjamin, but “the feeling with the masses is as strong as ever. They are true, brave, and, I believe, willing and ready.”40 Indeed, Thompson was angry with Hines for giving up so quickly on the Chicago expedition. He refused to work with the Confederates who returned to Toronto, calling them “deserters.” Thompson blamed everyone for the mission’s failure, including Clay and Holcombe, whom he accused of weakening the Copperheads’ resolve by having dangled the prospect of a negotiated peace at the Niagara Falls conference in July.

Thompson had become a bitter and vengeful man since his arrival in Canada; during his absence from home, Federal soldiers had burned his Mississippi plantation and assaulted his wife. Isolated from friends and family and surrounded by like-minded fugitives, Thompson turned his personal grievances into an excuse to inflict the greatest possible suffering on the North, and in particular on Northern civilians. Nothing, he complained to Clay, should distract the Confederates from delivering the message of violence.

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31.1 Stanley had returned to the North from Wales in January 1863, having failed to reconcile with his family or to find satisfactory employment. But he had fared no better in America, and after working at various jobs he joined the U.S. Navy on July 19, 1864. He was assigned to USS Minnesota as a ship’s clerk, a light position that would expose him to danger only if the vessel received a direct hit. Otherwise, he anticipated a summer of little excitement other than the occasional chase of an unarmed blockade runner.8

31.2 On December 7, 1863, seventeen Confederate sympathizers—many of them British—had boarded