A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [375]
The governor-general of Canada, Viscount Monck, was in many ways as isolated as Lord Lyons. Though blessed with a genial manner and patrician ease at social gatherings, Monck’s determination to avoid showing favoritism toward any party forced him to maintain a degree of aloofness from the Canadians, who could sense that he looked askance at their internal quarrels. Monck thought his ministers were among the most small-minded men he had ever encountered. None of them, he wrote in a confidential letter to London, “is capable of rising above the level of a parish politician.”2 It had been clear to him since his arrival three years earlier that the endemic suspicion and jealousy between Canada’s provinces had been disastrous for the country’s development. To survive and flourish, Monck believed, these separate provinces had to be persuaded that their future prosperity depended upon confederation; and he had thrown himself into the project with energetic zeal.33.1 He hoped that at the very least, political unity would strengthen Canada’s relations with the United States, and that it might possibly even make the colonists more willing to pay for their own defense—an object dear to London.
Lord Monck had been concerned about Southern violations of British neutrality ever since the Confederate agents had appeared in the spring, petitioning—without success—to have five additional ships sent to patrol the Great Lakes. Personally, he was pro-Northern rather than neutral (or even pro-Southern like many Canadians), and was doing his best to discourage the Confederacy from sending its agents to Canada. In November 1863 he had foiled a Southern plot to attack the Federal prison camp on Johnson’s Island in Lake Erie off Sandusky, Ohio—successfully, though only temporarily, dampening the Confederates’ interest in launching raids from Canada against the North.3
During the summer, Commissioner Jacob Thompson had revived the plan to liberate the prisoners on Johnson’s Island. The days when almost any force could have taken the island were long past, but the prison was still an enticing prospect for the Confederates because its position in Sandusky Bay was close to the Canadian border. Sandusky itself was a minor town; Charles Dickens had paid a fleeting visit in 1842 and thought the place bleak and the population “morose, sullen, clownish and repulsive.”4 But to the fugitive slaves who escaped captivity via the “underground railroad” to Canada, Sandusky represented their last stop before freedom. The U.S. authorities had chosen Johnson’s Island for the opposite reason; without a boat, it was the last stop to nowhere.
The island’s prison was badly built and poorly maintained: its latrines lacked drainage and the barracks had no running water. But the suffering of the 2,500 Confederate prisoners had only really begun in the spring, when the War Department decreed that conditions should mirror those of Southern prisons; food parcels were confiscated, and prisoners were forbidden to supplement their rations except by capturing rats (which were, however, plentiful). These weak and diseased inmates were the men Jacob Thompson intended to use to bring terror to the United States’ northern border.
The iron-hulled gunboat USS Michigan had been patrolling Sandusky Bay since Monck’s exposure of the first Confederate plot against Johnson’s Island. Before then, it had been employed to make draft protesters in Detroit think twice before they rioted.5 The warship had never fired its guns and was too unseaworthy for deployment in battle, but since she was the only naval vessel on Lake Erie, whoever sailed her controlled the lake. In mid-July, Thompson believed he had found the right man to capture the vessel.
Twenty-seven-year-old Charles H. Cole was a mystery to everyone who knew him. He lied about his war record,