UNION AND CONFEDERATE RAIDS AND RAIDERS.
BY GEORGE L. KILMER.
BEALL, THE LAKE RAIDER—ANDREWS AND HIS DISGUISED RAIDERS—LIEUTENANT CUSHING'S BOAT RAIDS—KILPATRICK'S RAID BY RICHMOND—MORGAN'S KENTUCKY RAID—RAIDING A CITY.
The secret enterprise which placed Lieutenant Davis in a dungeon cell and nearly cost him his life had a deeply tragic ending for John Y. Beall, the young Virginian, executed at Fort Columbus, New York Harbor, the 24th of February, 1865. Beall was the chief promoter and the leader of the Lake Erie raid in the fall of 1864, but technically the offence for which he suffered was that of a spy. The judge advocate of the court which condemned him spoke of the prisoner as one "whom violent passions had shorn of his nature's elements of manliness, and led him to commit deeds which to have even suspected him of at an earlier stage in his career would have been a calumny and a crime."
Beall had been wounded in the Confederate service early in the conflict. As master in the navy, he had led for a time the daring, reckless life of a "swamp angel" in the lower Potomac, destroying the Union commerce in Chesapeake Bay and its adjacent waters.
While thus engaged, he planned a lake raid, but failed to get his government to sanction the project until 1864, when the Northwestern Confederacy movement made it necessary for Jacob Thompson and his co-conspirators in Canada to have a foothold upon Union soil along the border.
One of Thompson's cherished plans was an uprising of the notorious Sons of Liberty at Chicago, during the Democratic national convention in August, 1864. About this time Beall arrived at Sandusky, O., with authority to proceed on his raiding enterprise. Thompson had prepared the way for him by a careful investigation of the lake defences, through an emissary located at Sandusky—Capt. Charles H. Cole, formerly of Morgan's raiders. Cole was supplied with means to entertain and bribe such Union officials as might be of service to the Confederacy; and he finally concluded that the control of the lakes could be secured by the capture of the gunboat Michigan, the sole defender of the waters, and the liberation of the Confederate prisoners at Camp Douglas, Chicago, and at Johnson's Island in Sandusky Bay.
Thompson gave Cole authority to capture the Michigan, and appointed Beall to aid him. It was arranged between Cole and Beall that the former would remain in Sandusky and coöperate by bribing some of the men on the Michigan, and by preparing the prisoners on Johnson's Island for an outbreak. The Michigan lay off the island. The date was fixed for the night of September 19th, and Beall went to Canada to organize a force, hazarding everything, as will be seen, on the success of his confederate, who, at the decisive moment, when Beall's attacking party should arrive off Sandusky, was to make rocket signals from Johnson's Island that the expected aid was a certainty.
Beall secured the services of nineteen Confederate refugees, chiefly escaped prisoners of war harbored in Canada, and the party disguised in civilian dress took passage on a steamer plying between Sandusky and Detroit, carrying in their baggage a supply of revolvers and hatchets. At the proper time, the captain in his office, and the mate at the wheel, were told to vacate their stations, revolvers were suddenly brandished right and left to intimidate the officers and men, and Beall as spokesman declared, "I take possession of this boat in the name of the Confederate States."