The bearer Chaplain S.F. Cameron is employed with Mr. [Kensey Johns] Stewart on a secret service, according to an understanding with the President, and the Chaplain will want to pass through our lines on his way to Canada, accompanied by two friends.
Will you give him the necessary papers to enable him to pass with his two companions, & oblige. Yours truly, J.P. Benjamin Sec. State44
The fact that Stewart was a prominent figure in the Confederacy’s Canadian operation is also gleaned from a second letter that survived the Richmond fires written by Benjamin to Jacob Thompson. On November 29, 1864, Benjamin wrote to Thompson concerning a draft for $20,000 that was intended to finance Stewart’s clandestine activities:
I learn that an order on you for twenty thousand dollars, drawn by me on the 17th October, in favor of Mr. Stewart has not been received. ...
My present purpose is to explain to you that Dr. Stewart proposed to engage in the same business as that which you have controlled, and that as we supposed you would be returning home very soon, it was desirable that you should leave with him means sufficient to enable him to act with efficiency.45
Whatever Stewart’s secret activities were, they were well known to Richmond and important enough to warrant a large sum of money to finance their undertaking.46
Two weeks after Benjamin’s letter to Thompson, Stewart was in Toronto and wrote directly to Jefferson Davis. In his letter to Davis, Stewart complained about the “miserable failures” and “useless annoyances” that some of Davis’s other agents were engaged in. Stewart pointed out that these ineffectual activities did little more than engender a “thirst for revenge” on the part of the Confederacy’s enemies without having any real effect toward winning the war. In simpler words, Stewart felt Davis had a few loose cannons rolling around in Canada that should be spiked. Stewart bluntly wrote: “Your Excellency is aware that when a negro is slightly chastised, he hates you, but a just & thorough whipping humbles him.” Stewart had the audacity to tell Davis that the time for “slightly chastising” his ineffectual agents was past and it was time for stronger action. Thompson and his cohorts needed a thorough whipping. Stewart then made a startling revelation. He called Davis’s attention to one “inhumane & cruel” activity that he felt Davis should order stopped immediately:
I cannot regard you as capable of expecting the blessing of God upon, or being personally associated with instruments & plans such as I describe below. As our country has been and is entirely dependent upon God, we cannot afford to displease him. Therefore, it cannot be our policy to employ wicked men to destroy the persons & property of private citizens, by inhumane & cruel acts. I name only one. $100.00 of public money has been paid here to one “Hyams” [emphasis added] a shoemaker, for services rendered by conveying and causing to be sold in the city of Washington at auction, boxes of small-pox clothing. ... There can be no doubt of the causes of the failure of such plans. It is only a matter of surprise that, God does not forsake us and our cause when we are associated with such misguided friends.47
Stewart carefully avoided identifying Blackburn by name or of tying Thompson into the plot. But Stewart’s reference to “$100 of public money” paid to “‘Hyams’ a shoemaker” is clear confirmation of Hyams’s testimony given during the trial of the Lincoln conspirators. Stewart’s letter not only confirmed Blackburn’s plot, supporting Hyams’s claim that Thompson paid him, but placed the whole affair squarely on the desk of Jefferson Davis. If Davis had no knowledge of Blackburn’s activities before December 12, 1864, he certainly knew about them after receiving Stewart’s letter.48 Four months after Stewart’s letter to Davis the trunks were not destroyed and the plot was still going forward despite Stewart’s plea to Davis to order a halt to the project. More important, Hyams’s veracity is vindicated by a man who probably despised him, the Reverend Kensey Johns Stewart.
The accusations against Blackburn are compelling. The testimony of the witnesses in the Bermuda hearing, the deposition of William W. Cleary during the Canadian trial, and the testimony of the Washington auction agent W.E. Wall and his assistant A. Bennett during the Lincoln conspiracy trial, fully support the details of Godfrey Hyams’s claims. But most compelling in all of the evidence against Blackburn is the letter of Kensey Johns Stewart to Jefferson Davis, indicating Davis had fall knowledge of the plot. Stewart, who along with Jacob Thompson, ranked at the top of Jefferson Davis’s cadre of Canadian agents, knew of such a plot and attempted to convince Davis to order it stopped. This Confederate agent and close confidant of Davis clearly fingered Hyams as the hired disperser in a plan to unleash biological warfare by someone who was under Davis’s control. That someone was Luke P. Blackburn. Yet four months later, the trunks containing “infected clothing” were still in Edward Swan’s care awaiting the signal to ship them to New York.
Blackburn’s motives, and those of his superiors, seem clear. Their ignorance of infectious disease in no way mitigates their guilt in attempting to unleash biological warfare against civilian populations. Indeed, they believed that Blackburn’s trunks that had reached New Bern were responsible for the yellow fever epidemic that killed over two thousand people in that coastal town. Blackburn’s small valise of gift shirts designed to infect Lincoln with a deadly disease show that he was a target of the Confederate operation in Canada. Black flag warfare had come of age.
Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, viewed as a call for slave insurrection, together with the Dahlgren Raid, may well have influenced Davis and his advisors to rethink what constituted legitimate military action. By inciting slaves to insurrection and ordering military actions that would result in untold civilian casualties, Lincoln had forfeited any protection he might have had under the accepted laws of war. If it is true that Lincoln sanctioned the killing of Davis and other members of his cabinet, he may well have placed himself at the center of the bulls-eye. It is important to understand, however, that it mattered little that Lincoln may not have targeted Davis; it was enough that Davis and his advisers believed that Lincoln had targeted them. Perception, after all, was reality. Among the best evidence that Jefferson Davis’s view of black flag warfare had taken a dramatic turn came six months after Dahlgren’s failed raid and while Luke Blackburn was still collecting infected clothing in Bermuda. It involved a Confederate agent by the name of Thomas Nelson Conrad.
In September of 1864 Thomas Nelson Conrad safely slipped into Washington for the purpose of “reconnoitering the White House … to ascertain Mr. Lincoln’s customary movements.”49 Those were Conrad’s words written twenty-eight years later. Conrad was a member of the Confederate Secret Service and he was on a mission, with Lincoln as the target. The mission had a clear connection with the Confederate leaders in Richmond.
Born at Fairfax Court House in Virginia, Conrad attended Dickinson College in Pennsylvania where he studied for the ministry. Following graduation he moved to Georgetown in the District of Columbia where he taught at the Georgetown Institute until his arrest in June of 1861 as a Southern sympathizer. At graduation ceremonies that year, Conrad had purposefully insulted the Unionists in the audience by instructing the music director to play “Dixie” at the close of festivities. Conrad was immediately arrested and imprisoned in the Old Capitol Prison in Washington. While a prisoner he made several important connections with other Confederate prisoners including a man by the name of “Bull” Frizzell. After several months Conrad was paroled and made his way to Richmond where he enlisted in Jeb Stuart’s cavalry corps. A lay preacher, Conrad was appointed chaplain for the Third Virginia Cavalry (Wickham’s Brigade, Fitz Lee’s Division). He spent most of his time functioning as a “scout” before being tapped by Richmond to perform clandestine duty because of his intimate knowledge of Washington and his skill as a scout.
Conrad had lived in Washington for over five years and was familiar with the city and its environs.50 He described his duties as a scout in a postwar memoir titled, The Rebel Scout:
Stuart’s scouts performed du
ties of three kinds: observing the Federal Army in camp, so as to be able to anticipate a movement; hanging upon the flank of the army when in motion, reporting line of march and number of corps; and crossing the lines into Washington and beyond, bearing dispatches, interviewing certain parties and securing information. The same scouts often discharged the first and second mentioned duty, but few ever went into Washington City. A college mate, ... and myself were perhaps among the few who not only scouted within our line, but were frequently sent by President Davis and our general officers into Washington and sometimes into Canada.51
In 1864, Conrad was plucked from his position with Stuart and placed in the employ of the Confederate Secret Service. In September of that year he slipped into Washington on a plan to capture Lincoln and carry him to Richmond. As with other capture plots, Soldiers’ Home became the ideal venue for snatching up Lincoln. In his memoir, Conrad explained his mission: “We had to determine at what point it would be most expedient to capture the carriage and take possession of Mr. Lincoln; and then whether to move with him through Maryland to the lower Potomac [Charles County] and cross or to the upper Potomac [Montgomery County] and deliver the prisoner to Mosby’s Confederacy for transportation to Richmond …. [H]aving scouted the country pretty thoroughly … we finally concluded to take the lower Potomac.”52
Conrad was a credible person, well placed in the Confederate order of things, and fully capable of carrying out such an operation. Conrad’s mission, unlike those previously planned, appears to have been directed out of Judah Benjamin’s office. In his memoir Conrad tells of receiving two letters from Jefferson Davis to Secretary of War James A. Seddon and Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin. These letters directed the transfer of Conrad to the Secret Service department and provided him with the necessary funds to finance his operation in Washington.53
While in Richmond, Conrad received a second letter from Seddon on War Department letterhead, dated September 15, 1864, that directed Lieutenant Colonel John S. Mosby and Colonel Charles H. Cawood to “aid and facilitate the movements of Captain Conrad.”54 Mosby commanded the 43rd Battalion of Virginia Cavalry operating primarily throughout Loudoun County, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Montgomery County, Maryland. Cawood was in command of a signal corps camp in King George County, Virginia, situated across the Potomac River from Charles County, Maryland. These two areas represented the “upper Potomac” and “lower Potomac” referred to by Conrad in his memoir. The two Maryland counties were avenues into Washington that Confederate agents used with great success throughout the war. Both were potential escape routes for a capturing party carrying the president from his summer quarters at Soldiers’ Home to Virginia and Richmond. Seddon’s letter was just one more “dot” making up the overall picture that tied Davis and his subordinates to an effort to remove Lincoln from the presidency
Conrad was careful not to write anything in his memoirs that directly connected Davis or Benjamin to his plot to capture Lincoln. While the correspondence transferring Conrad to the Confederate Secret Service and authorizing funds to finance his clandestine activities in Washington also make no mention of a plan to capture Lincoln and bring him south, it is simply not creditable to believe that Conrad would undertake such a daring mission on his own responsibility without Davis’s full knowledge and approval.
To carry out his plan of capture, Conrad enlisted the help of three other individuals who were well known to him. Daniel Mountjoy Cloud had been a classmate at Dickinson College and good friend of Conrad.55 The two men had worked together previously and were confident of each other’s capabilities. The second man was John “Bull” Frizzell, who became friends with Conrad while both men were in the Old Capitol Prison in 1861. Conrad described Frizzell as a “broad-shouldered, rawboned, squareheaded sixfooter ... always ready to ‘cuss’ out the Yankees and knock down a guard or a blackguard.”56 He wore a silver plate that covered a skull fracture suffered in an earlier adventure. Rumor had it that Frizzell had traveled to Harpers Ferry in 1859 to help capture John Brown and later cut off one of Brown’s ears as a personal trophy.57 The third man was Conrad’s “halfbreed” servant named William. Conrad described him as “six feet in height, straight as an arrow, twenty-three years of age, ... and bold as a lion.”58
As with previous plots to capture Lincoln, this one also targeted Soldiers’ Home as the likely place to snatch up the president. Conrad’s scheme called for the four men to intercept Lincoln in his carriage as he arrived at the entrance to the Soldiers’ Home. William would climb next to the driver and force him to divert the carriage along an escape route while Frizzell would jump inside and subdue Lincoln. Conrad would lead the carriage while Cloud covered the rear. The entourage would make its way over the Eastern Branch of the Potomac and head into southern Maryland along the Confederate line used by agents of the Confederate Secret Service. While there were many similarities between Conrad’s plan and John Wilkes Booth’s later plan, including the route of escape into Virginia, Conrad’s operation appeared to be independent of Booth’s.59
Conrad and Cloud stationed themselves in Lafayette Square, across from the White House, where they could observe Lincoln as he traveled to and from the Soldiers’ Home as a part of his daily routine. With cold weather approaching, the president and his family would be moving back into the White House full time, leaving Soldiers’ Home until the following spring. If Conrad and his men were to act, they had to act soon. Suddenly, without warning, Conrad noticed that Lincoln’s carriage was accompanied by a troop of cavalry.60 Conrad was stunned at this sudden development. He later wrote, “What can it mean? How long will it last? Have our plans been betrayed and our movements suspected?”61
Conrad scouted the White House for the next several days trying to find out if the cavalry escort was permanent and why it had been assigned to accompany Lincoln at this time. He arrived at an interesting conclusion for the sudden change in procedure—there must have been “another set of Confederates seeking the same end, and some one of them had given it away by some indiscretion.”62
Indeed there were other plots afoot, but neither the War Department nor the National Police were aware them. At the time Conrad reconnoitered the White House, John Wilkes Booth was on his way to Canada and a rendezvous with Jefferson Davis’s agents in Montreal. The cavalry troop assigned to accompany Lincoln on his trips to and from the Soldiers’ Home was not new, however. It first began accompanying Lincoln in September of 1863, not in the fall of 1864 as Conrad had written. In any event, Conrad aborted the plan while musing that had Lincoln “fallen into the meshes of the silken net we had spread for him he would never have been the victim of the assassin’s heartless, bloody and atrocious crime.”63
Conrad’s own account of his mission to Washington to reconnoiter Lincoln’s movements for a capture operation seems authentic. The extant documents authorizing full support for his movements by Seddon and Benjamin suggest a direct link to Jefferson Davis for Conrad’s capture plan. It is doubtful that these two secretaries would be supporting Conrad without the knowledge and approval of Davis. Of importance, Conrad’s activities were financed with Secret Service funds. On January 10, two months after he had aborted his capture mission, Conrad wrote to Secretary of War Seddon stating that he had received four hundred dollars in gold from Secretary of State Benjamin to cover his expenses over the past four months.64 Conrad further states in his letter that the gold was converted into one thousand dollars in Northern funds. This gold clearly financed his activity in Washington at the time he planned to capture Lincoln. The authorization of gold payments from the Secret Service fund required the approval of Davis.65 That Lincoln was the target of a capture mission known by Davis seems certain.
The black flag efforts of Cipriano Ferrandini, Walker Taylor, Isaac Wistar, Ulric Dahlgren, Bradley Johnson, Luke Blackburn, and Thomas Conrad pale in comparison to the plot that was being devised in early 1865 by a man named Thomas Harney. Harney, an explosives expert in the Confederate
Torpedo Bureau, was planning a mission to blow up the White House, taking Abraham Lincoln and members of his cabinet along with it.66 The plot was set for April 1865 and, like Booth’s plot, hoped to reverse the Confederacy’s failing fortunes and gain her time to regroup. But the schemes of Harney and Booth were still in their formative stages in the fall of 1864 and would not reach fruition until April of the following year.
While Conrad was in Richmond organizing his capture scheme, John Wilkes Booth was in Baltimore meeting with two former friends, Samuel Bland Arnold and Michael O’Laughlen, and forming his own plot. Both Booth and Conrad looked to capturing Lincoln while he moved between his two residences and carrying him south to Richmond over the same southern Maryland route. Both would need the help of well-placed agents along the way. By the time Booth made his first visit to Charles County, Maryland, in November 1864, the Confederate command in Richmond must have been aware of his activities. Booth possessed certain attributes necessary for covert activity. Because of his profession and fame he could move about more freely and with less suspicion than most people. His fame and personality made him attractive to people such that he could get them to do things for him. He was intelligent, articulate, and above all, had a deep passion for the Confederacy and a hatred for Lincoln. While Booth was not a professional agent like Conrad, he proved better than Conrad in one important aspect: he did not abandon his mission. The year 1864 would mark a turning point in Booth’s short but illustrious life. His last paid appearance occurred on May 28 with a matinee performance in The Corsican Brothers at the Boston Museum. Although he would appear three more times in benefits, his career was over.67 He would turn away from the stage and toward the role he believed destiny had thrust upon him.
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