A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [435]
On March 6, 1868, Grenfell tried to escape from the Dry Tortugas along with three other prisoners. They were caught in a storm and the little boat disappeared. Afterward there was the occasional “sighting” of Grenfell, but there is little doubt that he drowned somewhere in the Gulf.
Bennet Burley had better luck. He had been incarcerated in Port Clinton, the capital of Ottawa County, Ohio, and was awaiting his second trial (the first having resulted in a hung jury) when, in September 1865, a well-wisher brought him an apple pie to celebrate the start of apple-picking season. Hidden beneath the crust was a sharpened iron file. Burley escaped to Detroit, where he was able to cross the river to Canada and to freedom. He became a journalist and in 1881 settled down to a long career as the foreign correspondent for the London Daily Telegraph. Burleigh (he changed the spelling) was joined at the Telegraph by George Augustus Sala (Belle Boyd’s sometime protector) and Francis Lawley, who had returned to England shortly after Appomattox. Dropped by Sala, Belle took advantage of the general amnesty declared by President Johnson in 1866 to go back to the United States, where she earned a living as an actress until her marriage in 1869 to Lieutenant John Swainston Hammond, a former British volunteer in the Federal army.14 Lawley’s return to England had a less happy outcome: his creditors continued to pursue him, and the salary he earned from writing about the turf (a subject he knew well) was not enough to stave off bankruptcy. There were still outstanding debts against his estate when he died in 1901. His fellow pro-Southern journalist Frank Vizetelly continued as a war artist and reporter until he was killed in 1883 while covering the fighting in the Sudan between the Anglo-Egyptian army under William Hicks (known as Hicks Pasha) and the Mahdi rebels.
Canada was a popular hiding place for many Southern fugitives. Jefferson Davis resided there for a time after his release from prison in 1867. At first it had seemed likely that the former Confederate president would be tried and executed for masterminding Lincoln’s assassination. But when no evidence could be produced against him, the grounds for prosecution became more complicated. The question was still unresolved when Davis was given bail on May 13, 1867. It was a further two years before the threat of legal action against him and thirty-seven other Confederate leaders, including Robert E. Lee, was dropped by the U.S. government. Davis lived on for another twenty years, beset by financial misfortune and family tragedies, but a defiant relic of the Confederate States to the last. Lee, in contrast, was a firm advocate of reconciliation with the North. He became president of Washington College in Lexington, Virginia (later Washington and Lee University), a post he held until his death in 1870.
The last Confederate war secretary, John Breckinridge, and the commissioners James Mason, Clement C. Clay, and Jacob Thompson also returned to the United States from Canada once they were confident of receiving amnesty. Despite his leading role in the Confederates’ terror operations in Canada, Thompson was never prosecuted for his crimes. He chose Memphis, Tennessee, as his new home, his wealth mysteriously untouched despite the war—there was always speculation that some of his fortune came from the $1 million entrusted to him by the Confederacy in 1864.
Thompson was extremely fortunate, especially in light of the terror and destruction he had tried to inflict upon the North. His colleagues in Europe never dared return to the United States, since they were not included in any of the official pardons. Ambrose Dudley Mann, the commissioner in Brussels, and John Slidell, the commissioner in Paris, stayed in France; the Confederate financial agent Colin McRae emigrated to Belize, and the chief of Confederate operations abroad, James Bulloch,