The Trial
While Pryce Lewis’s memoirs are a fascinating and concise account of his work as a Civil War spy, there is one aspect in which they are inadequate: the trial of Timothy Webster, and who exactly said what. In Lewis’s defense, one must remember that at the time of the trial he was not only physically exhausted, having spent several weeks in a small, damp prison cell, but also mentally shattered. Just days before he appeared as a defense witness for Webster, Lewis had been scheduled to die. In addition, Lewis only appeared briefly at the trial and therefore was able to describe just the events relating to his testimony. Unfortunately, the notes of Webster’s trial, along with those pertaining to Lewis and Scully, were lost at the end of the war. Thus the best surviving contemporary account is the article published by the Richmond Dispatch on April 30, which was later reproduced by several Northern newspapers. The Dispatch reported that Webster faced two charges or specifications: that on April 1, 1862, “being an enemy alien and in the service of the United States, he lurked about the armies and fortifications of the Confederate States in and near Richmond” and that on July 1, 1861, “[he] did lurk in and about the armies and fortifications of the Confederate States at Memphis, in the State of Tennessee.”
The first charge was clearly spurious as on that date Webster was confined to his bed in the home of William Campbell, while the second charge would have been hard to prove nine months down the line (and indeed he was acquitted on this count).
In reality, both charges were manufactured to put Webster in the dock, probably why the documents were later destroyed. The Confederates had enough circumstantial evidence from inquiries made in Baltimore to convince themselves that Webster was a double agent. And they also had the word of John Scully.
Again, the precise nature of Scully’s confession was never made clear, not by the Confederate newspapers, nor Pryce Lewis, nor Allan Pinkerton. The Richmond Dispatch said he “let the cat out of the bag,” while Pinkerton in The Spy of the Rebellion wrote that Scully, “yielding to the influences which he could not control, had told his story, and had given a truthful account of all his movements.” Yet in his memoirs Lewis described receiving a note from Scully in which the Irishman said, “I have made a full statement and confessed everything.” But later, after Lewis’s interview with Judge Crump, he “concluded that Scully had not made a full statement.”
In fact Scully appeared to have remained loyal to Lewis throughout his interrogation, refusing to reveal the latter’s journey through the Kanawha Valley in July 1861, as well as the trip to Chattanooga that Lewis had planned to take once they had wrapped up business in Richmond.
Nor did Scully seem to tell Winder’s men much about Webster, if the best the court could come up with were two specifications, one of which was risible. Did Scully also tell the Confederates about Webster’s journey to Memphis in July 1861? More likely the rebels had eyewitnesses willing to testify that Webster had been in Tennessee during this time, such as the pompous army doctor named Burton, and the court-martial preferred to concentrate on one additional charge other than the one of spying in and around Richmond. To list all the Southern cities and towns that Webster had visited in the past twelve months would have been a considerable embarrassment to the Confederate authorities, and revealed the extent of the damage caused by Webster’s espionage.
In all probability, Scully confessed two things: first, that he was still in the employ of the Federal secret service, and second, that he came to Richmond to deliver a letter from Allan Pinkerton to Timothy Webster. This confession, while not direct proof that Webster was a Northern spy, was enough for the rebels to hang him.
Lewis maintained in his memoirs that he said nothing to incriminate Webster, merely acknowledging to the prosecution that he came South to deliver a letter to Webster. Bizarrely, however, Lewis didn’t mention if the prosecution asked who wrote the letter and what, therefore, was his response. It’s inconceivable that Lewis was not asked this question, and peculiar that Lewis did not address this issue in his memoirs.
In 1945 Harriet Shoen, a friend of Mary Lewis, Pryce’s daughter, sent the memoirs to Colonel Louis A. Sigaud, who, during the First World War, had commanded the Corps of Intelligence Police of the American Expeditionary Force to France, and later wrote several books and articles about Civil War espionage. Sigaud scrutinized the memoirs, describing them as “very interesting” but highlighting inconsistencies with regard to Webster’s trial. Specifically, Sigaud found it “exceedingly difficult to believe that Lewis was not questioned at all as to his call upon Webster with Scully, their delivery of the letter to him, their employment by the Federal Government and the fact that the alleged Scott letter was a fake.” This gave Sigaud “the impression that much is being left unsaid and perhaps deliberately.” Did Lewis admit during Webster’s trial that the letter came from Pinkerton? Sigaud thought he might have, though his suspicions were based on inference rather than hard evidence. Ultimately, however, Sigaud concluded that neither Scully nor Lewis was to blame for Webster’s fate but that “primarily Pinkerton was responsible for he slipped up by sending men to Webster who ran the risk of identification in Richmond by Southerners who had met them in Washington.”