The first book-length study of one of the Civil War's most outlandish and mysterious characters, Devil's Game traces the amazing career of Charles A. Dunham, double agent. Dunham was a spy, forger, "reptile journalist," and master of dirty tricks. Writing under different names for different newspapers, including New York's Tribune, Herald, and World, he routinely faked stories to promote the North's war aims, sometimes writing contradictory stories for rival papers. Dunham also used his journalism to create new identities and sometimes stepped into them, playing (with the help of his wife, Ophelia) at least a half-dozen such roles.
Dunham achieved his greatest infamy at the war's end. Called to testify in Washington, he was the most notorious of the witnesses who swore that Lincoln's assassination had been plotted by conspirators in Montreal and Toronto, on orders from Richmond. That testimony (later discredited but never officially challenged) helped lead to the execution of several alleged associates of John Wilkes Booth.
Dunham's postwar intrigues were almost as complex, as he continued to collect fake "evidence" of Southern war crimes. Finally convicted of perjury in these schemes, he worked in prison to produce evidence implicating President Andrew Johnson in the assassination, then reversed himself and sold out his associates to the President.
Until now many parts of Dunham's wartime (and postwar) career have remained shadowy. Carman Cumming sheds new light on numerous escapades, including Dunham's effort to sell Lincoln on plans for a raid to capture Jefferson Davis and a complex effort in Canada to plan - and then betray - cross-border raids.
Exhaustively researched, Devil's Game is a portrait of a consummate chameleon. Drawing together previous Dunham scholarship, Cumming offers the first detailed tour of Dunham's convoluted, high-stakes, international deceits. A carefully crafted assessment of Dunham's motives, personality, and the complex effects of his schemes make Devil's Game an important and original work that will change some basic assumptions about the secret operations of the Civil War.
Devil's Game
The Civil War Intrigues of Charles A. DunhamBy CARMAN CUMMINGUNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2004 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-252-02890-8Contents
Preface.............................................xiAcknowledgments.....................................xv1. Chameleon........................................12. "Cheats and Forgeries"...........................203. Castle Thunder...................................354. Reptile Journalist...............................565. Southern Life....................................816. Fire in the Rear.................................957. A Message from Richmond..........................1238. "Private Business"...............................1459. School for Perjury...............................16010. Plots "Shrewd and Devilish".....................18111. Scorpions in a Bottle...........................19912. Impeachment.....................................21313. "Protean Maneuvers".............................23814. Letters from Albany.............................247Notes...............................................263Bibliography........................................291Index...............................................297
Chapter One
Chameleon
James Watson Wallace, Virginian officer recovering from war wounds, surfaced quietly in a remote corner of Canada East (Quebec) in the fall of 1864, at a time when the Civil War far to the south was coming to its bloody climax. At a time when Grant was squeezing in on Richmond, when Sheridan was scouring out the Shenandoah Valley, when Sherman was planning his savage march from Atlanta to the sea. At a time when Confederate leaders in Richmond were turning to desperate measures, among them a late effort to get at their enemies along the exposed northern frontier.
His entrance on stage could not have been more prosaic. Riding in a farmer's buggy, he showed up on November 1 in the border town of Lacolle and stepped down at the Ennis Hotel. Witnesses then and later would describe him closely, seeing him as impressively handsome, courteous, and educated, fitting the part of a convalescent Confederate officer. His clothes were well cut but worn, his bearing erect and military, his face clean-shaven and smooth. One witness spoke of an "open and frank countenance." A later profile would describe him as "tall, well-proportioned, with dark hair and dark eyes." He looked younger than his thirty-two years, and he sometimes took off a few when he had to give his age.
In the hotel saloon, Wallace struck up a conversation with a couple of pleasant Canadians and was soon spinning tales of how he had commanded the Fourth Florida Regiment under Jubal Early, in the army that had menaced Washington in midsummer. From there the talk turned to the recent fuss on the border, raised when a score of Confederates raided banks in the Vermont town of St. Albans, killing one man before escaping across the Canadian line with gold and greenbacks stuffed in their saddlebags. Wallace said he knew many of the fourteen raiders now in jail in Montreal. He was heading that way himself and was sure he could prove the men were legitimate Confederate soldiers acting under orders, who therefore should not be extradited to face a Union gallows.
At this point, his new friends told him apologetically that they were in fact plainclothes police, hunting for more raiders, and that he should consider himself under arrest. Was he carrying any weapons? He was, Wallace confirmed, taking a "six-barrel Colt's revolver" from under his coat and handing it over. The officers invited him to a private room for a more thorough search.
"He made no resistance," a short item in the Montreal Daily Witness reported, "but complimented his captors on the rather considerate and gentlemanly manner his arrest had been effected. He was brought into town by the latest train last evening, and this morning was brought up in Police Court. He now denies, we understand, what he is stated to have said to the policemen. The prisoner is a young and fine-looking man and the next step will be to see whether he can be identified."
The next step was never taken. At a court appearance next day before Judge Charles J. Coursol (whose name would soon be execrated on both sides of the border), no witnesses showed up to identify him, and he was released. But his arrest on the frontier, along with his revolver and his claim of a Confederate background, all worked in his favor. For an entrée into Montreal's Confederate community, nothing could have been more helpful than a whispered connection with St. Albans.
* * *
Montreal at this time had a curious relationship to the Civil War. In easy contact with both sides by train or ship (at least in the sailing season), the city watched the fighting in nervous detachment while sheltering a rare mix of spies, counterspies, refugees, detectives, arms buyers, and saboteurs. In the Confederate set, all who could afford it stayed at St. Lawrence Hall. In the sumptuous dining room, one could sometimes see the chief Confederate commissioner, Col. Jacob (Jake) Thompson, hard-faced Mississippi planter and former U.S. interior secretary, or his less intimidating co-commissioner, Clement C. Clay Jr., an ailing, indecisive aristocrat who had been a senator from Alabama in both the Union and Confederate Congresses. Thompson worked mainly from Toronto, while Clay preferred the Niagara border district of Canada West (Ontario), where he patronized the spas and vineyards, entertained Northern guests, and indiscreetly wrote passionate poetry for a certain Northern lady. In their absence, lesser figures vied for status. Among them was James Holcombe, a Virginia law professor who had preceded Thompson and Clay as Confederate commissioner and seemed loath to go home—perhaps because he, like Clay, had a local love interest. Much more noticeable was George N. Sanders, the bumptious and erratic political manipulator who had built, from Kentucky to New York to England, a reputation as a troublemaker. One of Sanders's sons, Lewis, was also active among Montreal Confederates. (Another had died recently in a Northern prison camp.)
While these people were among the more active rebels, they were not necessarily the top tier of Montreal's Southern elite. The more eminent men included retired general William Henry Carroll of Tennessee, former governor James D. Westcott of the Florida territory, Dr. Montrose Pallen of Mississippi, Judge Beverley Tucker of Virginia, and banker John Porterfield of Tennessee. Dr. Luke Blackburn, distinguished plague-fighting doctor from Kentucky and later the governor of that state, was an occasional visitor. At the time of Wallace's arrival, the local elite were discussing (not always with approval) the news that Blackburn was back from Cuba and the Bahamas, bringing clothing soaked with fluids from yellow-fever victims, and that he was shipping these to Union camps in hopes of infecting Northern soldiers. Judge Tucker meanwhile was said to be making high-level, and official, efforts to interest the enemy in massive trades of cotton for bacon. Pallen was also a subject of gossip: he had set up an office and a watching post across from the U.S. consulate (to the fury of the consular staff) and was said to be harboring a wounded St. Albans raider. General Carroll as well would soon be of interest. While sailing toward the South, he would be captured off North Carolina, imprisoned in Fortress Monroe, and quickly released for return to Montreal. These leading Southerners were often seen in the company of Northerners sympathetic to their cause or willing to do business with them. Even Col. Lafayette C. Baker, the well-hated head of secret police in the Union War Department, had visited at least once, promoting (or pretending to promote) Tucker's cotton-for-bacon deal. The well-known actor John Wilkes Booth had also been among recent visitors.
* * *
In that conspiratorial setting, all Southern newcomers to Montreal were vetted, their movements and background noted. In the case of James Watson Wallace, his arrest formed an image that helped in his first contacts with rebels at the local jail. But so did his looks, fitting the part he claimed, of a Southerner of good family. A Vermont lawyer who was keeping a watching brief on the St. Albans raiders, Henry George Edson, left on record a precise description of the man as he came into court: "He is about 5 ft 7 in higth [sic], fair smooth face, full eye, dark hair and eye, open and frank countenance, mouth large, lips full, his dress is dark. Overcoat rather worse for wear. Erect martial air and gentlemanly appearance." Edson also learned more about the prisoner's background but guarded the knowledge.
After his release by Judge Coursol, Wallace took modest lodgings at the Bull's Head Tavern and melted into the Confederate community. To new friends, he sketched a background of life in Richmond and in the rebel army, leading to the wound that had taken him out of the fighting. The injury, he told them, was in his groin. No gentleman, and certainly no lady, would think of asking for confirmation.
Within the brotherhood Wallace explained his mission in various ways. To some strangers he simply said he had come to settle the estate of a brother who had died in the Canadas. To others judged more reliable, he confided that he was collecting men for a fresh border raid, an attack that would make fortunes and wipe out some of the shame of earlier failures. That, too, was believable: rumors of new raids were constant in the wake of St. Albans and other more official operations coordinated by the Confederate commissioners.
To some rebels (but not to the top men), Wallace apparently went further, displaying secret credentials, very impressive ones, bearing the signature of Confederate Secretary of War James A. Seddon. One such document identified him as Col. James Watson Wallace, special agent of the Confederate War Department, and authorized him to draw from Toronto accounts $5,000 in gold in exchange for Confederate bonds. Another, even more detailed, identified him as Col. George W. Margrave and ordered him to proceed to Canada, to organize refugee Confederates into a military body, and to "employ them against the enemy in his own territory."
Any Confederate who saw this document would have been impressed, for George W. Margrave was a name to conjure with. A number of stories the year before in Horace Greeley's New York Tribune had traced the career of this Southern agent. They had painted him as a veteran and ruthless international adventurer who under various names (including Isaac E. Haynes) had traveled with impunity through the North and Canada, scheming and intriguing, operating almost as a rebel Pimpernel. One set of stories had Margrave plotting with "Copperhead" Peace Democrats to lure the North into fatal peace contacts. Another, more astonishing but backed by written evidence, named him as a key figure among those planning to kidnap or assassinate Abraham Lincoln and other Union leaders. At one point, the Tribune revealed that Margrave was actually a cover name for a scion of South Carolina's elite Rhett family—a family said to live in a world of "men, women and Rhetts."
These stories were written by a man who said he had escaped to the North after working in the Confederate War Department, and although backed by a captured report Margrave was supposed to have written, the stories were otherwise unconfirmed. No Confederate official, of course, would ever admit to knowing of Colonel Margrave, and denials would be pointless. In any event, few in Montreal's Confederate community got to see the Margrave papers. For most, "Wallace" would remain simply one more face among the mixed lot of refugees, invalids, escaped prisoners, and agents who made up their exile community. Undoubtedly, they would have noted that despite his worn clothes, he moved among the elites rather than the rougher skedaddlers. They would also have noticed that he was soon joined by a refined lady companion. Ophelia (Phele) had been known in Brooklyn as Mrs. Dunham and in Baltimore as Mrs. Redburn, but now she transformed herself easily into Mrs. Wallace. Always resourceful (with four children and an adventurous husband, she had to be), she would help to sustain the image of Southern gentry. At one point, the leading Confederate exiles, including General Carroll and Governor Westcott, would take up a collection for the family, of the kind often organized for genteel Southerners in "distressed circumstances."
Shortly after Wallace's arrival in Montreal, another series of exposés began to show up in the New York Tribune, describing the Confederate plots in Canada. The stories seemed well informed and detailed, although anyone who knew the community might have been puzzled by the way they ridiculed the rebels while at the same time grossly inflating the threat they posed. Canadians might also have noted that the writer missed no chance at hurting relations between them and the Americans, by harping on the haven Canadians were giving to rebel raiders, especially when Judge Coursol in mid-December shocked both countries (and infuriated Northerners) by releasing the St. Albans raiders on the thinnest of excuses. The anonymous reporter wrote of this and other issues, praising Union leaders who wanted to see Canada punished for aiding the rebels. The stories provoked a buzz of resentful talk among Montreal Confederates about who the scoundrel could be. Some efforts were made to identify him, but the Tribune's managing editor, Sydney H. Gay, was, like Edson, carefully discreet.
Gay, however, had some cause to be uneasy about his Montreal correspondent, known to him by yet another name. Their relationship went back at least a full year, to the time when a man calling himself Sandford Conover had turned up in Baltimore and Washington, claiming to be a former clerk in the Confederate War Department at Richmond and offering long columns about military affairs and living conditions in the Confederacy. Some of these tales Gay found hard to credit, but "Conover" offered documentary evidence. He had, for instance, while working in Richmond, actually copied out one long report filed by Colonel Margrave after his return from intrigues with the Copperhead Democrats. He had also brought from Richmond authentic-looking letters by prominent rebels, some revealing plots to trick the Union into peace talks.
In both South and North, too, Conover had managed to find out a good deal about another vicious Confederate agent, a renegade Northerner named Charles A. Dunham, a former Democrat from New York. By chance, Conover had actually witnessed "Colonel" Dunham's arrival at the rebel War Department and so was able to sneer at the fuss made over the traitor. He offered evidence that Dunham, like Margrave, had made mischief in the North and in Canada, under the name Henry E. Wolfenden, and had been part of a scheme in the fall of 1863 to free rebel prisoners from Johnson's Island in Lake Erie.
* * *
Wallace ... Margrave ... Rhett ... Haynes ... Wolfenden ... Conover ... Redburn ... Dunham ...
In reports, letters, and newspaper articles, the cast became ever more elaborate and interconnected. At times, in letters or dispatches, one of these men would expose the doings of one of the others. At times they would accuse each other of notorious crimes and misdemeanors, such as the planning of Lincoln's assassination. At one point, Conover named Dunham as the head of this conspiracy, and at another he told how Margrave had created the original plan. At still another, Wallace offered a reward for the capture of Conover, who had "personated" him in Washington. (He was shortly afterwards arrested by a Canadian policeman eager to collect the reward he himself had put up.)
Only very gradually, and long after the war, would it become clear that all these men and several others (such as Harvey Birch of the New York Herald and Franklin Foster of the New York World) were all one and the same, the creation of an astonishingly clever and prolific fraud. A fraud who wrote constantly, creating multiple personalities and weaving them into a framework of deception that crossed the boundaries of North and South, exploiting wartime paranoia. A chameleon who under different names wrote wonderfully connected lies for at least four or five newspapers and for an unknown number of agencies on both sides.
Curiously, even when it became certain that his birth name was Charles A. Dunham, journalists and politicians kept on calling him Sandford (or Sanford) Conover, the name he had created for his greatest fraud. (In North Carolina, the towns of Sanford and Conover are not far apart, and it is tempting to imagine Dunham scanning the map as he set out to choose yet another new name.) There is a certain justice in the fact that history remembers him mainly by a name that was his own creation. In effect, he created his own world, inhabited by characters who went where he sent them and performed according to his whims.
Some of the whims were dangerous, leading to wildly false stories about Confederate operations in Canada, for instance, or about plots against Lincoln, or about President Andrew Johnson's alleged part in the assassination. Some of the lies stood up long enough to cause great damage—to sharpen the danger of war with Britain or to harm the work of postwar reconciliation.
Some still stand.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Devil's Gameby CARMAN CUMMING Copyright © 2004 by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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