A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [387]
Lord Monck was throwing the meager resources at his disposal into surveillance operations against the Confederates, but his system was grossly inferior to the Federals’. Alerted by the U.S. consul in Halifax, Seward was able to telegraph General Dix on November 2: “This department has received information from the British Provinces to the effect that there is a conspiracy on foot to set fire to the principal cities in the Northern States on the day of the Presidential election.” The warning was followed by the dispatch of General Butler and five thousand troops, who marched into New York on November 7. The New York Copperheads met Thompson’s guerrillas that day and told them to go back to Canada, as no subversive would dare show his face while Butler was in town. But Martin and Headley would not be put off that easily, and they extracted from the Copperheads a new date for the uprising: Evacuation Day, November 25, so called because it was the day the British Army had been evacuated from Manhattan during the Revolutionary War.
Although the New York plotters had postponed their plan, the Chicago conspiracy was still in play, despite the arrest of John Castleman, Captain Thomas Hines’s deputy, on October 2. Castleman’s place was taken by the English volunteer Colonel Grenfell. “We have all got to live a certain time,” Grenfell wrote to his daughter on October 11, “and when the end comes what difference will it make whether I lived in London or Illinois?”4 The new plan relied on the help of twelve hundred Copperheads—a much smaller number than before—to launch a four-pronged attack on Camp Douglas. Once armed and liberated, the Confederate prisoners were supposed to break open the other prison camps in the state while the Copperheads, led by Grenfell, created a diversion throughout Chicago with fires and incendiary bombs. Hines expected to raise an army of 25,000 Confederate prisoners of war to capture Illinois.
The commandant of Camp Douglas, Colonel Benjamin Sweet, had informants inside the prison who were keeping him abreast of the conspiracy, but he did not know the full details of the plot until a Confederate turncoat named Maurice Langhorne called at his office on November 5 and offered to go undercover for him. Langhorne had briefly served under Confederate general Morgan and knew he would have no difficulty reconnecting with his former comrades. Grenfell was particularly incautious, freely discussing the plot not only with Langhorne but also with a second informant who was sent by Colonel Sweet to verify the information.
Shortly after midnight on November 7, Union troops arrested the leader of the Copperheads; another detachment went after Thomas Hines, although he managed to hide. A third went to the Richmond House hotel in search of Grenfell. A fellow conspirator had managed to get a note to him first, which read: “Colonel—you must leave tonight. Go to Briggs House,” but Grenfell ignored the warning. The arresting officers found the note when they entered his room. He was sitting by the fire, fully dressed, though he could have run from the hotel at any time during the previous three hours.5 Whether he was feeling ill (he was still recovering from influenza) or was simply overconfident, his inaction led to his becoming an inmate of Camp Douglas rather than its liberator. He was put in a special cell reserved for spies and irregular combatants—next to the latrines.
The legation read about the arrests on the morning of the election, but Lord Lyons himself was unaware of the failed plot. He had collapsed on November 6. “Two days after you left,” George Sheffield wrote to Edward Malet, “Lord Lyons gave