• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 6808 0

but she was living in the most primitive conditions, without winter shoes or proper undergarments. It was nevertheless easier for her to obtain flour and wood than it was for the inhabitants of Richmond. “We have famine, owing to the incapacity of the government, and the rapacity of speculators,” complained John Jones on January 19. The city was swirling with rumors. He had heard that Secretary of War James A. Seddon had resigned—which was true—and that Jefferson Davis was going to be replaced by General Lee—which was not, although the Confederate Congress voted to make Lee “Commander-in-Chief” of all Southern forces. Four days later, on the twenty-third, Jones wrote, “It is rumored that a commissioner (a Louisianan) sailed to-day for England, to make overtures to that government.”36

Kenner was not sailing for Europe; he had decided to make the three-hundred-mile journey to New York, and from there attempt to sneak onto one of the fast steamships. He set off on January 18 with two guides, who had been told that “Mr. Kinglake” was going to Canada to assist with the defenses of the Confederate prisoners. Their orders were to make haste but also to take extra care to avoid capture. Neither knew that their charge’s identity was as fake as his brown wig, nor were they aware that the last messenger to attempt to reach Canada from the South had been captured in Ohio, tried by court-martial, and sentenced to death.37

—

In Canada, Lord Monck was fighting a rearguard action against pro-Southern prejudice and bureaucratic incompetence in order to preserve British neutrality in the region. Five of the St. Albans raiders, including Bennett Young, had been rearrested;35.6 the Montreal chief of police had been forced to resign; the original judge in the St. Albans case, Charles Coursol, suspended; the St. Albans banks indemnified for the money stolen; the law changed to allow for the expulsion of aliens; and hundreds of troops deployed along the border. On January 11, the judge in Montreal had granted the St. Albans raiders a thirty-day recess on the grounds that they needed more time to prepare their defense. But Monck hoped this setback would be viewed against the success of the Bennet Burley trial in Upper Canada, where Burley’s extradition had been ordered on January 20. Lord Monck signed the extradition papers, and on February 2, Burley was taken by special night train to Suspension Bridge station at Niagara Falls. Twenty armed guards rode the train, maintaining a vigil until the Union agents came on board to collect the prisoner.38

The secretary of the legation, Joseph Burnley, dismissed Burley as an undeserving case, just as he had done with the Chicago conspirator Colonel Grenfell. “If my cousin Charles would use his influence with Lord Lyons it might be of use to me,” Grenfell had written in December to the chief clerk of the family firm, Pascoe Grenfell and Co., in London, unaware that Lyons was about to return to England. “I cannot say more at present. I know not a soul here nor have I a friend.” He ended the note pathetically: “I leave it to you to inform my girls of my situation or not, just as you like.”39 Grenfell’s cousin, Charles Grenfell, MP, did ask for help from the Foreign Office, which in turn ordered Burnley to raise the case with Seward. The legation secretary doubted they could do anything for Grenfell, whose guilt was so obvious that “everything seems to militate against him,” but he asked the British consul in St. Louis, Mr. Wilkins, to make discreet inquiries.40 “You seem to be on such good terms with the Authorities,” he explained, “that I dare say you may be able to effect something privately when I should most likely fail officially.”41

Grenfell’s former commanding officer, General Joseph Wheeler, later claimed that the Englishman was innocent of the charges. Of the more than one hundred Confederate conspirators who had been arrested in November, only eight were put on trial in January, and Grenfell was one of them. “The trial of your grandfather, you must recall,” Wheeler wrote to Grenfell’s family,