By the third year of the war the United States of America was caught in the thick web of a martial law dictatorship. Trouble was, most citizens didn’t know it. It was a time when thousands of Northerners had been jailed on suspicion without cause, unable to seek legal advice. Only a favored few had rights, depending on who they were and who they supported politically. Military courts had replaced civil courts. All transportation had been nationalized, and it was rumored that all telegraph communication might be forced into the same fate. The two men behind this terrifying consolidation of power were about to meet for one of their regular gab sessions in a corner of a Washington hotel dining room.
Edwin Stanton finished his afternoon meal and ordered the wine once he saw Colonel Lafayette Baker arrive in the lobby. Stanton peered over his small, wire-rimmed spectacles at his younger associate moving towards the table.
“You’re late,” he frowned, as Baker neared the table.
“I was busy at the office.”
“Is that so,” Stanton remarked.
The two bearded men waited for a servant to clear the table. Stanton poured the newly-arrived wine for both him and Baker. Stanton was an ill-tempered, chubby, fidgety man, a lawyer by trade. A former director of the Atlantic and Ohio Telegraph Company, he entered federal politics in 1860 as attorney general to then-president James Buchanan. Although a Democrat and a fierce rival of the current President Lincoln, Stanton was appointed by Lincoln as secretary of war two years later in a move that stunned political circles. Washington quickly saw Stanton as an opportunist, preoccupied with his own growing power, someone who took advantage of every situation dumped in his lap. In one short year, Stanton had taken the backroom reins of the country with the help of Baker, a man of questionable reputation, and never let go.
And Stanton still wasn’t finished.
Colonel Baker had risen to his position almost as rapidly, but by other routes. A roughneck from a low-to-middle-class background, he had been a founding member of the infamous 1856 Vigilante Committee of San Francisco that had policed the city during the wild California Gold Rush. The talk was that the group had cleaned up the town. But insiders said they had crossed the line. The Committee ran the city their way, making up the rules as they went along, looting and confiscating where and when they saw fit, all in the name of the law.
Later, Baker moved east and established connections in Washington. When the war started, Baker was made a special agent in the War Department and was sent to the Rebel capital of Richmond to gather information about the enemy. The Rebels sent him back, believing he was spying for them. At the Second Bull Run battle he rode a hundred miles through enemy lines to deliver a dispatch from Stanton to Union General Nathaniel Banks. When the Internal Revenue Act of 1862 was passed as a war measure, Stanton hired Baker, who in turn hired detectives to collect from defaulting taxpayers and imprison them if they failed to pay. The jails were soon filled to capacity. Baker’s position was merely a front for his own federal secret service, the National Detective Police. Baker now had a force of two thousand NDP detectives and spies under his iron-fisted control. Next to Stanton, Baker was the most feared man in Washington.
“Anything new from your agent at the front?” Stanton inquired, glaring at Baker.
“Haven’t heard from him in days. But I do know that both Hooker and Lee have moved out from their winter headquarters.”
“So what?” Stanton said. His eyes held Baker’s without blinking, as he measured the detective’s words. “The newspapers have already reported that! Your man is supposed to be there for the inside information, Baker.”
“I know it, sir. But the spring campaign has just started. He won’t let me down.”
“I should hope not.”
Baker said nothing. He knew Stanton hated spies. He considered them sneaks and bloodsuckers. But Lincoln insisted on them. Spies were good for the North only as long as they were of use. Spies could also turn against their masters and become double agents, like he did to the Rebs.
“Lee has to be defeated,” Stanton continued. “The sooner, the better. For all of us, the South included. Put them out of their misery. Lincoln wants to let the Reb states back in the Union after the war. He told me that under his plan as long as only ten percent of a state’s population agrees to an oath to the United States, then they’re in.”
“What kind of oath?”
“They must promise to support the Constitution of the United States and obey all federal laws concerning slavery. He’s even thinking of pardoning all Reb military and political leaders. Can you imagine, Baker?” His eyes grew larger. “Let Lee, Jackson, Longstreet, Davis off dirt free?”
“What can we do about it?”
“Plenty.” Stanton’s face twisted. “A few choice Republicans are concocting postwar reconstruction plans to divide the South into five conquered military districts controlled by a military governor for each district. These are our kind of people, Baker. They won’t allow any Southerner to vote unless he takes the oath to the Union. We’ll make the Rebs pay.”
Baker knew that Stanton stood to gain the most. The governors would answer to a Washington controlled by Stanton. It would make the secretary more powerful than ever. “Who are these so-called choice Republicans?” Baker asked.
“Senators Chandler in Michigan, Wade of Ohio, Conness from California, and Representative Davis of Maryland, to name three.”
Baker wondered what lay beneath the surface of the Republicans’ proposals. The NDP chief saw the proposals as a plan for the Republicans to stay in power and create a Southern branch of their party by relying on Negro votes. They wanted to keep their Congress gains of 1860 — free homesteads, high tariffs, subsidies to railroads, a banking system favorable to the big business empires in New York. If the Southern-based Democrats returned to power, they would oppose the Republican reconstruction plans.
“Does Lincoln know what these men are up to?”
“Yes, unfortunately,” Stanton said. “And he’ll veto any such bill. That I know. He can’t win the next election. He’ll destroy everything we’re putting together. Right now, he doesn’t have much support anywhere. And he had to bring the emancipation thing into the picture. The troops are now fighting to free the slaves. And they don’t like it. Neither does our Republican round table in Washington. However,” Stanton grunted, “if we win the war by next year, or at least manage some great victories on the battlefield, it’s likely that Mr. Lincoln could win again.”
“So, we’re stuck.”
Stanton nodded. “Yes, Baker. Stuck.”
* * * *
Forty minutes later, deep in the basement of the Treasury Department, not far from the White House, Colonel Baker was preparing a coded dispatch for his agent in Wilmington, North Carolina. This machine was not for military purposes, but for Baker’s personal business. By using it, Baker had an excellent control of the clandestine flow of shipments — cotton, meat, guns, and medical supplies — between Washington and Richmond. His connections on both sides in the conflict were of great advantage to him. He was also becoming very wealthy, very quickly.
Baker walked up to a subordinate in the busy office, a young man unfamiliar with the message’s true contents. “Barkley?”
The man turned around. “Yes, sir.”
“Drop what you’re doing and send this through our channel in Richmond.”
The man looked at the sheet for a moment. “It’s in code?”
“Of course it’s in code. Get to it.”
“Yes, sir.”
* * * *
Eli Jacoby slowly opened his hotel room door.
“Yes, what is it, boy?”
“Mr. Jacoby,” said the young telegraph messenger. “Message for you, sir. From Richmond.”
Jacoby gave the young man a gold sovereign and took the sealed envelope. He locked the door, then spent the next few minutes deciphering the message by using his cipher-code book and his own notes. He soon discovered that all secret shipments expected to cross the Potomac bound for Wilmington were still to be grounded. Jacoby frowned, wondering when it would pick up again. He was losing money.
Born a Southerner, Jacoby was no respecter of Southern ways and customs. He had high-level contacts in New York, Washington, Boston, and Philadelphia, a network of Northern commodity speculators in the Union war effort. This group had been making a killing selling to Rebel interests on the side, and at the same time they were all making money on the transfer of cotton north. It was made to look perfectly legal by the sinister misuse of cotton and border passes issued by both the Lincoln and Davis governments.
Jacoby appraised his image in the mirror, which reflected an influential citizen of the South. He was not the most handsome of men, with his slight paunch, square face, and cold gray eyes. Balding on top, he had long hair on the sides and back, and a patchy beard speckled with gray around a thin mouth. But he was the best-dressed man in town. He liked that distinction.
Today, he needed a hair trim and was impatient to be doing something. The barber shop was just around the corner, a good place to pick up useful war gossip.