“Set a Price on Every Rebel Head and Hang Them”
IN THE SPRING OF 1861, to complement his cover story of being an English gentleman seeking business opportunities in Jackson, Pryce Lewis had cultivated a splendid set of “Dundrearies,” luxuriant sideburns as worn by the dim-witted Lord Dundreary in Our American Cousin. This play had been a success on both sides of the Atlantic two years earlier, and a good many Americans were under the impression that an extravagant pair of Dundrearies were de rigueur for the more well-bred Englishman.
Unfortunately for Lewis, his whiskers were the only things developing well in Jackson. He had won the confidence of Pinkerton’s prime suspect in the case, the “leading citizen,” but the friendship had so far proved fruitless. Lewis reported to Chicago, “After the closest observation during many conversations carefully planned to lead up to subjects which might cause the betrayal of symptoms similar to those which marked the conduct of Eugene Aram, I failed to detect the slightest trace of remorse or mental trouble of any unusual kind.” In short, either the man was a killer without a conscious, or he “was entirely innocent of the murder.”
As the days lengthened and the trees blossomed Lewis and his new companion conversed about little else other than the rapidly deteriorating relations between the Confederate and Federal governments. Lincoln may have told the Southern states in his inaugural address that “we must not be enemies,” but in Jackson the plea had fallen on deaf ears. Lewis noted that with every day that passed the town was “in a fever of preparation for war … troops were being enrolled and camps of instruction established in the vicinity of the town. Marching, drilling, drum beating and band playing were features of every day life.” Lewis regularly cabled Chicago for advice, but each time he was told to carry on as best he could.
Six hundred miles to the east, in Fort Sumter at the entrance to Charleston Bay, Major Robert Anderson found himself in a similar predicament. Anderson and eighty-five men had been stranded in South Carolina since the previous December, hunkered down behind the pentagonal fort’s twelve-foot-thick brick walls. Encircling Anderson’s garrison were hundreds of Southern militiamen and a disconcerting number of coastal guns. On his election as president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis made it clear that his government prized the fort, but upon his inauguration as president of the Federal government, Lincoln was equally adamant that he wouldn’t be bullied into capitulation.
Yet Lincoln had to act quickly for the men inside the fort were running out of food. For six weeks the new president agonized over his course of action; if he sent a supply convoy into Charleston Bay, it would precipitate a war for which he would get the Southern blame, but if he yielded to Davis’s demand the North would pillory him as a poltroon. He received little help from his cabinet, particularly the Machiavellian secretary of state William Seward, who saw Sumter as his chance to fatally undermine Lincoln and seize the presidency for himself. Cede the fort, he advised Lincoln, as a gesture of goodwill. But Seward had underestimated Lincoln’s strength of character, and the more he meddled the more the president stiffened. On April 5 he dispatched a fleet of supply ships to Fort Sumter, but with a proviso that was relayed to Jefferson Davis. The vessels would be unarmed, their only cargo was “food for hungry men.” If, therefore, Confederate forces chose to open fire on defenseless ships, it would be construed by the Federal government as an act of war.
Now it was Davis perched on the horns of a dilemma: did he allow the fort to be resupplied and lose face in the South, or did he open fire and provoke war with the North? On Tuesday, April 9, he held a cabinet meeting, and the outcome was unequivocal: war. Three days later, a few hours before the fleet of supply ships was scheduled to arrive in Charleston Bay, the Southern forces unleashed a storm of fire on Fort Sumter. Major Anderson and his men endured for a day and a half before they lowered the Stars and Stripes. The rebel flag was hoisted, and the Charleston bells began to peal.
As the South reverberated to the sweet sound of bells, the noises in the North were of a far more martial tone. “Set a price on every rebel head and hang them as fast as caught,” thundered the Philadelphia Inquirer, while the New York Times warned the South that what it had started the North would finish. The rebellion, it said in its editorial of April 13, “must be trampled under foot and extinguished forever [and] the president will be false to his oath, as well as to his nature, if he hesitates an instant as to the course which he must pursue.”
Two days later Lincoln authorized the mobilization of seventy-five thousand troops, and men were soon marching to the strains of “Yankee Doodle,” but only in those states above the Mason-Dixon Line. In the South the rebellion appeared to be infectious. Kentucky refused to comply with Lincoln’s order, as did Tennessee.
In Virginia the sentiments were just as strong, or at least they were in the eastern and southern sections of the state, and in the capital, Richmond, where Sarah Jones, the English governess, recorded how a “convulsion seized the public mind, and ‘To arms! To arms!’ was now the sudden cry.” A one-hundred-gun salute blasted out in honor of the Sumter victory, and the Stars and Bars flew from above the capitol building. Inside delegates voted on whether to secede, the more pusillanimous being swayed by the chest-thumping rhetoric of ex-governor Henry Wise—the man who had hanged John Brown—who told a hushed chamber that he had ordered armed men to seize the Federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry and they were doing so as he spoke, and that anyone present who failed to support these “patriotic volunteer revolutionists” was not fit to call himself a Virginian. On April 17 the secessionists carried the day, 88–55, much to the chagrin of Virginians to the west of the Shenandoah Valley. They resented being ruled from Richmond, a city they saw as effete and unrepresentative of the state. In western Virginia few people owned slaves, and even fewer wished to leave the Union.
Having arrogated the Federal arsenal, Virginian forces then seized the country’s predominant naval base near Norfolk. To consolidate its reputation as the heart of the Confederacy, Virginia invited President Davis to move his government to Richmond, an altogether more salubrious location than Montgomery. Davis accepted, and there was more reason to celebrate in early May when the Virginian-born Robert E. Lee, the most outstanding officer in the American army, turned his back on the Union and joined the Confederacy. It had been a torturous decision for Lee, and he accepted command of the Virginian army with little glee. While callow young men marched through the state to the tune of “Dixie’s Land,” cheered on their way by Southern belles, Lee feared “that the country will have to pass through a terrible ordeal, a necessary expiation perhaps for our national sins.”
On the day Lee foresaw an impending catastrophe, Sunday, May 5, Allan Pinkerton was in Washington waiting for an interview with Abraham Lincoln. Pinkerton had written to the president on April 21 to tell him that he had in his agency “sixteen to eighteen persons on whose courage, skill and devotion to their country” he could rely. Pinkerton was also anxious Lincoln should know that if his detective agency could “be of any service in the way of obtaining information of the movements of the Traitors or safely conveying your letters or dispatches or that class of Secret Service which is the most dangerous, I am at your service.” The letter was hand-delivered to Lincoln by Pinkerton’s most trusted operative, Timothy Webster, who returned to Chicago with a presidential message secreted in his walking cane. The note invited Pinkerton to Washington to discuss his proposal, and the Scot arrived on May 2. He found the capital greatly changed since his last visit, a bewildering juxtaposition between those who were loyal to the Union and those who weren’t. He passed down streets “filled with soldiers, armed and eager for the fray; officers and orderlies were seen galloping from place to place … [but] here too lurked the secret enemy, who was conveying beyond the lines the coveted information of every movement made or contemplated.” He didn’t comment on the proliferation of groggeries and bawdy houses, the destination for thousands of Lincoln’s volunteers, but Pinkerton would have visited neither; he disapproved of liquor, and he was devoted to his darling Joan and their four children.
The next day, Friday, May 3, Pinkerton arrived at the White House, in the early throes of a twenty-thousand-dollar refurbishment under the stern direction of Mrs. Lincoln, and was escorted inside, where after a short wait he was granted an audience with the president and his cabinet. Pinkerton was informed that the administration “had for some time entertained the idea of organizing a secret-service department of the government, with the view of ascertaining the social, political and patriotic status of the numerous suspected persons in and around the city.” However, Pinkerton was told, nothing further had yet been done about the matter, and thus his suggestions were eagerly awaited. He furnished the cabinet with his ideas “as fully and concisely as I was able to do … and, after I had concluded, I took my departure, with the understanding that I would receive further communications from them.”
But he didn’t, so in a sulk he left Washington, muttering dark oaths about the government’s “confusion and excitement.” But Pinkerton’s spirits were soon lifted by a letter he found waiting for him at the post office in Philadelphia, where he’d briefly stopped en route to Chicago. The letter had been written nearly two weeks earlier in Columbus by General George McClellan, who signed himself “Major General, commanding Ohio Volunteers.”
McClellan was a West Point graduate and former railroad president whose privileged life had left his character flabby and unformed. He had no experience of adversity or hardship, only of success, which had nourished his ego but not his resolve. McClellan was thirty-four when war broke out, and though a Democrat and apathetic to slavery, he accepted a military command in the Union army. McClellan and Pinkerton had known each other for several years, having met through the Illinois Central Railroad, of which McClellan was vice president at the time. It was a curious friendship for McClellan was as extravagant as Pinkerton was austere, but the common thread that ran through both men was their gargantuan conceit.
When McClellan called, Pinkerton came running, and the pair sat down in Cincinnati, the former’s headquarters, in the second week of May. In between sending Pinkerton the letter and receiving him at his headquarters, McClellan had been promoted to commander of the Department of the Ohio, which comprised the forces of Ohio, Illinois and Indiana. Now he asked Pinkerton to establish a secret service within the department. By the end of May Pinkerton had transferred the seat of his detective agency from Chicago to Cincinnati, and most of his agents were out in the field on assignment. Timothy Webster brought back important information concerning rebel troop activity in Memphis and Clarksville, and Pinkerton—operating under his nom de guerre of Major E. J. Allen—reported from behind the enemy lines in Kentucky.
In Virginia, meanwhile, the growing tension between those in the south and those to the west of the Allegheny Mountains was coming to a head. On May 23 a referendum was held on whether the state should secede; 128,884 people agreed with their political masters and voted to leave the Union. Thirty-two thousand Virginians elected to remain loyal to the Union, and most of them lived in the western part of the state. As rebel militia began to take up positions in the recalcitrant region, the loyalists appealed to Lincoln’s government for help. But Washington had no troops to spare; they were all needed to guard against the expected rebel assault on the capital. Fortunately for the Virginian Unionists, help was at hand from another source, just across the Ohio River. Governor William Dennison of Ohio instructed McClellan to take an army across the river and drive back the Confederate troops.
Toward the end of June McClellan had twenty thousand men in Virginia, but there now emerged a trait that was to bedevil the young general during the coming months: hesitancy. He lacked the killer instinct of the great commanders, and instead of striking out to destroy the small ragtag army of General Robert Garnett, McClellan asked Pinkerton to find out the strength and condition of the rebel forces in Charleston. As Pinkerton pondered who to send on the dangerous mission, Pryce Lewis arrived in Cincinnati, carrying some valuable information concerning the Confederate army in Tennessee, as well as his report of the Jackson murder.
In fact the murderer of the bank cashier was the horse thief Lewis had interviewed in jail. The man subsequently confessed and was hanged. But neither this revelation, nor that of the rebel troop strength, held Pinkerton’s attention in quite the way Lewis’s whiskers did, and they gave him an idea.