Colonel Grenfell's Wars: The Life of a Soldier of Fortune (review)

182CIVIL WAR HISTORY Colonel Grenfell's Wars: The Life of a Soldier of Fortune. By Stephen Z. Starr. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1971. Pp. vii, 352. $10.95.) In Civil War History, March, 1967, Richard O. Curry examined the historiography of the tradition that Northern Democratic opponents of the Lincoln administration—"Copperheads" in Republican parlanceorganized disloyal secret societies and went so far in 1864 as to join with Confederate agents in the revolutionary scheme known as the "Great Northwest Conspiracy." Curry took the position that revisionist historians like Frank L. Klement, who view the tales of subversion and attempted revolution as legend, have the better of the argument against traditionalists like Wood Gray and Stephen Z. Starr, who find beneath the smoke-clouds of wartime politics a considerable amount of traitorous fire. But the debate has not ended. In this biography of the British soldier of fortune George St. Léger Grcnfell, Starr revives traditionalist interpretations of Copperhead activities. As Starr tells the story, Grcnfell, after winning fame as a volunteer Confederate cavalryman under John Hunt Morgan, abandoned army service in order to participate in the Northwest Conspiracy. This revolutionary scheme called for armed Copperheads to "take over the state governments in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri; the new governments would then join to form a Northwestern Confederacy, withdraw from the war, and separate from the Union." Grcnfell and other Confederate agents, assembled in Canada under the leadership of Thomas Henry Hincs, were to further the uprising by freeing thousands of Confederate prisoners of war in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. The failure of the Copperhead revolutionists to materialize forced successive delays and curtailments of the Confederates' objectives, until in the end their chief aim was to free and arm the prisoners in Camp Douglas, near Chicago. Before they could strike, on November 8, Election Day, the authorities smashed the scheme by arresting Grcnfell and a number of the other conspirators. They were tried by military commission—a procedure that Starr considers unconstitutional in the light of Ex parte MMigan—and Grcnfell was sentenced to hang. Through the efforts of his lawyers and the British minister in Washington, the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. In recounting these events Starr relies upon traditional narratives that revisionist historians have rejected as fictitious—for example, the writings of John B. Castlcman—and thus arrives at conclusions opposite to those of the revisionists. Hc argues that the Sons of Liberty, the Democratic secret society accused of involvement in the Northwest Conspiracy, was "potentially a serious threat to the survival of the Union (p. 143)." Hc states that Clement L. Vallandigham, the "Supreme Grand Commander" of the Sons of Liberty, held "a full-fledged council of war" in Canada with Hines and promised him Copperhead support for his armed uprising (p. 155). Hc further states that Vallandigham's later BOOK REVIEWS183 court testimony as to the legitimate political nature of the Sons of Liberty was "a tissue of half-truths," and that under cross-examination Vallandigham "was forced to resort to more direct perjuries (p. 243)." With none of this docs Klement agree, either in his Copperheads in the Middle West, which Starr explicitly challenges, or in his Vallandigham biography, The Limits of Dissent, which evidently appeared too late for Starr to use. Starr's most convincing evidence of conspiracy is a letter that Grenfcll wrote to a friend in England on August 31, 1864. In it he says that he is "engaged in rather dangerous speculations" and that "The North West states are ripe for revolt. If interfered with in their election they will rise (p. 179)." More evidence of this nature would add needed weight to Starr's effort to revise the revisionists. It should be noted that Starr offers his readers more than the Northwest Conspiracy. So far as the rather scant sources on Grenfell allow, he examines this reckless man's pre-Civil War adventures, his exploits in the Confederate cavalry, and his last years as a prisoner in the Dry Tortugas, where he served his sentence. There he fought with the authorities , yet selflessly nursed the sick during an epidemic of yellow fever. Then in March, 1868, he escaped...