It is safe to surmise that several elderly Americans have watched the news from Manchuria during the past winter with a half expectation of reading of some wild adventure on the part of Bennet Burleigh, correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph. Among these were Mr. Justice Brown of the United States Supreme Court, who just forty years ago secured his extradition from Canada on a nominal charge of robbery, but really on account of his participation in the Johnson’s Island conspiracy. Among them also was James Lattimore, once sheriff of Ottawa County, O., from whose custody he escaped, but who seems to have very pleasant recollections of his whilom prisoner, in spite of the fact that his private purse was somewhat depleted in efforts to recover the fugitive whose society he had found so agreeable that he had been in the habit of taking him about the village of Port Clinton with him. There may be living in Texas some of Burleigh’s journalistic associates prepared for almost any deed of daring on his part. The sketch of his career in “Who’s Who” reads as follows:
“Burleigh, Bennet, war correspondent, on the staff of the Daily Telegraph since 1882; b. Glasgow; married. Fought in American war (twice sentenced to death); Central News correspondent throughout first Egyptian war (present at Tel-el-Kebir); correspondent French campaign Madagascar; as Daily Telegraph correspondent accompanied desert column from Korti to Metammah, 1884 (present at Abu Klea, despatches); Ashanti expedition; Atbara expedition; Egyptian war (present at Omdurman); South African war, 1899–1902. Address: 95 North Side, Clapham Common, S. W.”
“Who’s Who” omits mention of several books of which he is the author—“Desert Warfare,” “Two Campaigns: Madagascar and Ashantee.” “Khartoum Campaign, 1898; or the Reconquest of the Soudan,” “Sirdar and Khalifa,” and “Natal Campaign.” In Harper’s Magazine for July, 1900, Fred A. McKenzie says that for Burleigh to spend a day in battle and then ride sixty miles, afterwards write a long and brilliant dispatch and get it first through, is a trifle. He also says Burleigh is an ardent Socialist and has several times been a labor candidate for Parliament in Glasgow, that his favorite drink is soda-water, and that he abjures tobacco. He adds: “When every outlet from the Transvaal was closed, he boarded the train of the Boer General Joubert and traveled with him, securing a long interview with him and full details of the Boer intentions. He so won Joubert that the old general lent him a conveyance to go over into British territory.” But, as the country editor said of another brilliant newspaper correspondent, “Alas, not for him the glittering hatchet, not for him the fruitful cherry tree.” It is not true that Burleigh, or as he was then called, Bennet G. Burley, was twice sentenced to death during the American Civil War, though it might be said that twice he stood in some danger of being hanged by the Federals, into whose hands he had fallen and against whom he had waged irregular warfare. And both times he succeeded in escaping from custody.
Judge Daniel B. Lucas of Charlestown, W. Va., in his anonymously published “Memoir of John Yates Beall,” says Burley was the son of a Glasgow master mechanic and that when he first appeared in Richmond he had in his pocket the plan of a submarine battery invented by his father. He had also a plan for a torpedo that could be attached to the side of a vessel by screws and then ignited with a fuse. Judge Lucas asserts that Burley actually assisted one John Maxwell to fasten such a torpedo to a Union war vessel, but the fuse refused to ignite, no damage was done, and the torpedo found its way to New York, where it was exhibited at the corner of Fulton and Nassau streets. At a later date a Northern newspaper printed a story that before coming to America Burley had fought in Italy both with the Garibaldians and against them: but whether this be true or not, there is no question that he was engaged with Beall in certain small privateering enterprises in the waters of Eastern Virginia, or that he took part in a raid across Chesapeake Bay under Capt. Thad Fitzhugh in March, 1864, when the raiders captured the steam tug Titan and destroyed another vessel. May 12, Burley was himself wounded and captured near the mouth of the Rappahannock River by a skirmish guard of the 36th United States Colored Infantry, and he had to surrender to black men, for no officers came up until the fighting was over. On his person were found papers authorizing him to go beyond the Confederate lines, and it was suspected that he had on foot some adventure as a spy. He was taken to Fort Delaware, forty miles below Philadelphia, whence he and five others attempted their escape through a sewer, the water in which came up to the log sleepers supporting the plank cover. The fugitives had to make their way for a distance of about twenty-five yards along this sewer, diving under each sleeper as they came to it, and upon reaching its mouth to swim the Delaware River for a distance of a mile and a half, with a tide running that more than doubled the effort necessary to cover the distance. Two of them were captured at the mouth of the sewer, and two were drowned in the river, but Burley and a companion, thanks to the Scotchman’s extraordinary physical powers, got away safely, being picked up in mid river by a vessel whose master professed to accept their story that they had been upset while on a fishing excursion, and took them to Philadelphia. Burley thence made his way to Canada, and in Toronto he fell in with his old associate in Eastern Virginia, John Y. Beall. Judge Lucas, who narrates these adventures, probably got his account of them from Burley himself.
Unlike the other Great Lake cities, Sandusky, O., lies not on a narrow creek, but upon the shore of a broad bay which encloses Johnson’s Island, about 300 acres in extent. The island and the surrounding waters present a very pleasing aspect, and the Sandusky people are grievously disappointed that this site was not selected for the Great Lake naval training station by the board which recently decided upon a point on Lake Michigan. It is worth noting that the convincing objection to any site on Lake Erie, its ease of access from a foreign and possibly hostile country, was the very cause of much official anxiety at the only time Johnson’s Island was used for a national purpose. For in October, 1861, the Government established here a dépôt for captured Confederate officers, whose numbers after the surrender of Vicksburg and Port Hudson ran up to between two and three thousand. They were confined within a stockade enclosing an area of fifteen acres, being housed in thirteen two-story barracks and guarded by two blockhouses, one at a corner of the palisade and one at the gate, so situated that it looked down the street between the two rows of barracks. One of these blockhouses, with the prison cemetery and the ruins of two earth forts, now forms the only relic of the island’s occupation by the Confederates. The cemetery contains 206 uniform marble slabs erected after the war by the Southern people. The whole number of Confederates buried here was about 230, five at least of whom were executed by the Federal authorities for atrocious treatment of Southern Unionists, enlisting troops within the Federal lines, and similar offenses. The graves on the island have for years been regularly decorated with flowers by the Sandusky Grand Army men when they were paying the same tribute to the memory of their comrades buried on the mainland, and they have even been subjected to some criticism for this display of magnanimity. One sometimes sees statements that none of the prisoners ever succeeded in escaping from Johnson’s Island, but in the Burley extradition proceedings Capt. Robert C. Kennedy, who was afterwards hanged for his part in the plot to burn New York, swore that he had effected such an escape.
Almost from the establishment of this dépôt for prisoners of war there were rumors of threatened attacks upon it by Confederates from Canada, though the first actual plan for a Rebel raid on the Great Lakes of which we have any official evidence, seems to have been directed primarily against the Michigan, the only Union war vessel in these waters, while she still lay at Erie. In February, 1863, Lieut. William Murdaugh, of the Confederate navy, laid before his superiors a plan for capturing the Michigan and destroying the lake cities. He proposed, with a small steamer and fifty men armed with cutlasses, revolvers, and small iron buoys to be used as torpedoes, to surprise and capture the Union vessel by boarding and then, before news of the affair had reached the Canadians, to send the smaller vessel back through the Welland Canal, to work destruction along the New York shore of Lake Ontario, and especially to the Erie Canal aqueduct at Rochester, while he himself proceeded, in the Michigan, to treat in a similar fashion the locks and shipping at Buffalo, Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee, and the Sault Ste. Marie, finally running the Michigan ashore in Georgian Bay and destroying her. The Confederate Cabinet approved of the scheme and set aside $100,000 for its consummation, but Murdaugh says that when everything was ready for a start Jefferson Davis, while deeming the enterprise practicable, caused it to be laid aside for a time, lest such a storm should be aroused over the violation of the British neutrality laws as to put a stop to the building of Confederate ironclads then on the stocks in England. Just six months later Secretaries Seddon and Mallory suggested to Lieut. R. D. Minor, also of the Confederate navy, a similar undertaking having for its main purpose the release of the Confederates confined at Sandusky. The proposition was eagerly embraced, and a party of twenty-two naval officers, who undertook to carry it out, reached Montreal about October 21 and announced to the Johnson’s Island prisoners, through the personal column of the New York Herald, that “a carriage would be at the door a few nights after the fourth of November.” The original plan contemplated taking passage on a lake steamer at Windsor, opposite Detroit, and seizing her when fairly out on Lake Erie. The prisoners were expected to overcome their rather scanty guard, and their rescuers were simply to receive them on board for transportation to Canada. But on learning that the lake steamers seldom and at irregular intervals stopped at any Canadian port, and possibly because the conspirators had ascertained that the Michigan now lay in front of the prison, a different method was adopted. Passage was to be taken at St. Catherines on one of a line of steamers running from Ogdensburg to Chicago, for the party, as mechanics and laborers who were to be employed on the waterworks of the latter city. With numbers increased to fifty-four from escaped prisoners found in Canada, the conspirators assembled at St. Catherines armed with revolvers, butcher knives, and two small nine-pounders, a store of dumb-bells having been laid in to serve as cannon balls. A private named Conelly went to Ogdensburg and paid the passage money for twenty-five men, with an agreement that as many more laborers should be taken as he could secure. The weapons were to be boxed up and marked “Machinery,” and the plan was, after seizing the vessel, to arrive at Sandusky about daylight, come into collision with the Michigan as if by accident, board and carry her, turn her guns on the prison headquarters, and demand the surrender of the island, the reputation for humanity of the commander, Col. William S. Pierson, being one of the factors relied on for the success of the plot. The Confederate prisoners were to be taken to Canada by some of the steamers lying at Sandusky, while the Michigan, her crew reinforced by some fifty rebel officers from the island, was to lay waste the shore of Lake Erie, paying especial attention to Buffalo. But on November 11, Lord Monck, Governor-General of Canada, warned the Washington authorities of the plot, at the same time taking precautions to prevent its execution. Two days before, the military officials at Detroit had sent word that an attack was to be made on the prison, and the guard had been considerably strengthened; but Lord Monck’s message caused general alarm among the lake cities. While Gen. Jacob D. Cox was fortifying Cedar Point, at the entrance of Sandusky Bay, Gen. Dix was recommending the removal of the prisoners from Johnson’s Island, so greatly was he disturbed over the undefended condition of Buffalo, whither he had hurried. A month later Gen. Halleck expressed the belief that there was “no real foundation for the pretended raid,” but the foregoing story of the preparations is taken from a letter to Admiral Buchanan from Lieut. Minor, who attributes the failure of the enterprise wholly to its betrayal to Lord Monck, which he charges to one McCuaig, a Canadian sympathizer with the South.
The connection is not clear between the inchoate Murdaugh-Minor plot of 1863, and the actual Beall-Burley-Cole attempt of 1864. But the advent in Canada, as a Confederate emissary, of Jacob Thompson, President Buchanan’s Secretary of the Navy, probably explains the revival of the scheme. At any rate Thompson reports to Secretary Benjamin that he sent Capt. Charles H. Cole around the lakes as a lower deck passenger to study the various harbors and to learn all he could about the Michigan, in order to devise some plan for her capture. Cole had belonged to Forrest’s command, had been taken prisoner, and had been released on taking an oath of allegiance to the United States. Maj. Robert Stiles, of Richmond, who had the misfortune to be confined in the same casemate with Cole at Fort Lafayette at a later date, regards him as an unmitigated villain and says it was believed that he had belonged to both the Union and Confederate armies and had deserted from both, and Judge Lucas, whom he once visited, entertains an almost equally unfavorable opinion of the man who now established himself in Sandusky and, professing to be engaged in the oil business, proceeded to cultivate acquaintance with military and naval officers, his tactics being based chiefly on the hypothesis that they suffered from a perennial and unconquerable thirst. He was accompanied by a woman whom he sometimes introduced as his wife, but who was regarded by some of the Michigan’s officers as a person of doubtful character. Cole did succeed in establishing terms of intimacy with some army and navy officers, and in a newspaper article of 1882, purporting to be based on his revelations, it was asserted that he got two Confederates enlisted on board the Michigan and ten in the troops guarding the prison; but the article contains such absurdities as an account of a visit to the Michigan by Jacob Thompson disguised in petticoats, and is otherwise so palpably fictitious as to render it practically worthless. There are Sandusky traditions that he won over some of the vessel’s engineering force, with the result of disabling her temporarily, but these stories are scouted by the one surviving officer of the ship, Capt. James Hunter, of Erie, then an acting ensign, and they do not find the slightest support in the official documents of the time. The naval officer with whom Cole was most intimate was transferred to the Atlantic coast before anything happened, on account of his habits, and Capt. Hunter, whom Cole had tried to induce to leave the service, remembers his indignation with the conspirator because the latter criticised this transfer and otherwise presumed upon his acquaintance. Hunter suspected him of being a counterfeiter.
The real leader of the enterprise, John Yates Beall, was the opposite of Cole in every respect, being a young man of strong religious convictions and of serious character throughout. He was a graduate of the University of Virginia, belonged to an old family in the Shenandoah Valley, and owned one of the best farms there. Having been wounded in October, 1861, while serving as a private under Stonewall Jackson, he had spent some time with a brother in Dubuque County, Ia., and on the discovery that he was a Confederate had fled to Canada, thence returning South, and, under a commission as an acting master in the Confederate navy, embarking in those Chesapeake Bay privateering enterprises to which reference has been made and in which Burley was associated with him. His biographer claims for him the original suggestion of the Lake Erie undertaking, but he is here without support from the official records. Beall’s operations in Eastern Virginia caused the Federal authorities so much annoyance that a considerable effort was made to end them, with the result that he was captured on board a schooner he had just taken in November, 1863. He and his companions were detained at Fort McHenry in irons for over a month, with the idea that they should be regarded as pirates, but Gen. Butler finally ordered them to be placed on the footing of prisoners of war, and in May, Beall was exchanged. Returning to Richmond, he participated in the fighting around Mechanicsville as a volunteer, but a little later left the army, discouraged, his biographer says, both by the neglect of his superiors and by the condition of his health. He proceeded by way of Baltimore and New York to Canada, where on applying to Jacob Thompson for the command of a privateer on Lake Huron, he was told of a plan to capture the Michigan and release the Johnson’s Island prisoners, and at once volunteered his services. His diary says that he also went to Sandusky and had a consultation there with Cole, returning thence to Windsor, opposite Detroit, where Thompson made his headquarters, to collect his men.
Sunday evening, September 18, 1864, Burley stepped on board, at her wharf in Detroit, the small steamer Philo Parsons, which ran between Detroit and Sandusky. He asked the clerk, Walter O. Ashley, to stop the next morning at Sandwich, on the Canadian side of the river, to take on three friends of his, one of whom was lame and could not well cross the ferry. Ashley consented on condition that Burley should himself come aboard at Detroit. On Monday morning, accordingly, Burley was one of the passengers who started with the boat, and at Sandwich three men, one of whom was Beall, jumped aboard. Later at Amherstburgh, or Malden, also on the Canadian side, sixteen roughly dressed men, with an old trunk tied with a rope, took passage. They appeared to have no relations with the Beall and Burley party, and were supposed to be returning Americans who had run away from the draft. At Middle Bass Island, which was the home of Capt. Atwood, commanding the steamer, he went ashore, leaving her in charge of the mate and Ashley, who was a part owner. After leaving Kelly’s Island, which is about six miles from the Ohio shore, Beall, who had been talking with the mate at the wheel, drew a pistol and declared that as a Confederate officer he took possession of the steamer. At the same time three others leveled revolvers at Ashley, and Burley ordered him into the cabin, whither the passengers, some fifty in number, were also driven, a guard being placed at the door. The old trunk was opened, and proved to contain hatchets and revolvers, with which the captors of the boat armed themselves. Burley proceeded to smash a trotting sulky that stood on deck and throw overboard the pieces, together with the rest of the deck load, consisting of iron, household goods, and tobacco. He and Beall then took the clerk to his office and compelled him to give up the steamer’s papers, later in the day taking also what money he had, amounting to some $90. These events occurred between four and five o’clock in the afternoon, and the boat had run down the lake to a point from which, as the mate, Dewitt C. Nicholls, afterwards testified, the Michigan was plainly visible in Sandusky Bay. He was asked many questions about her, and when it was learned from him that the Parsons had not enough fuel to take her much farther, he was ordered to turn her about and head for Middle Bass Island, where wood could be taken on board. While she was still lying at the wharf there, the Island Queen, a smaller boat which plied between this group of islands and Sandusky, came up, having on board about twenty-five unarmed Union soldiers, who were on their way to Toledo to be mustered out. As she unsuspiciously moored alongside, some of Beall’s men jumped on board and took possession. A dozen pistols were fired, and the engineer of the Queen was shot in the face, but not seriously injured. Gen. Dix, who made an official report on the whole affair, says that several persons were knocked down and that some injuries were suffered from blows with hatchets, one of which caused a profuse loss of blood, but this was the limit of personal suffering inflicted by the raiders. The passengers of both boats, after some detention in the cabin and hold of the Parsons, were put ashore on the island, as were most of the two crews, a few men being retained on the Parsons to handle her. The soldiers were paroled not to bear arms against the Confederacy until regularly exchanged, and the civilians were required to promise that they would say nothing of what had happened for twenty-four hours. Then the two steamers, lashed abreast, got under way, but after going about five miles, the Queen was scuttled and set adrift, after wards sinking on Chickanolee Reef. The Parsons continued on her way toward Sandusky for a time, but owing to a failure to receive at Kelly’s Island a messenger from Cole, all the party except Beall, Burley, and two others, weakened at the prospect of attacking the Michigan with hatchets and revolvers. Beall regarded their prudence as mutiny, and required from them a written statement, which was drawn up on the back of a bill of lading and can be found with the names of the signers in Capt. T. T. Hines’s account of the affair in vol. 2 of the Southern Bivouac. With great reluctance on the part of Beall, the boat’s head was turned toward the Detroit River, and the residents of Middle Bass, who were out burying their valuables, saw her steaming by in the darkness, “like a scared pickerel.” On the way a Confederate flag was hoisted, the mate, Nicholls, being required to assist in the unpleasant task of getting it up, and there was some talk of attacking a vessel or two that were passed and of robbing the island home of a Detroit banker named Ives. A boat load of plunder was landed near Malden, and at Sandwich the Parsons was abandoned, some of her furniture being put ashore and her injection pipes being cut, so that she would fill and sink. The raiders then disappeared, a couple of them who were later arrested by the Canadian authorities being discharged by a justice of the peace after a detention of two hours.
Beall’s plan of attack on the Michigan is not intelligible. Cole intended to have some of her officers ashore that evening participating in a revel, and perhaps there was some basis for the later talk of drugged wine to be sent aboard. Captain Hunter remembers two occasions when Cole did send wine to the officers. The prisoners knew some scheme for their release was on foot, for Archibald S. McKennon, of South McAlester, I. T., the present counsel for the Seminole Nation, who was then on the island, tells the writer: “We were organized into companies and regiments and had armed ourselves with clubs, which were made of stovewood and other material at hand, with which to make the fight. I think I was a captain of the organization. Anyhow, I occupied some position by which I had information of the contemplated movement, for I remember I had several conferences with the colonel of the organization as to my duties, and we were in constant expectation of orders to make the fight, which never came. It surely would have been a pitiable affair, for the undertaking was wholly impracticable.” Capt. Hunter has an ingenious theory that Beall intended that just as the Parsons entered the Bay, she should burst into flames, and when the Michigan sent her boats to rescue the passengers, the conspirators could get possession of these and with them gain the deck of the warship without arousing suspicion. Gen. Dix did find on the Parsons some combustible material, but he was probably right in supposing that it had been prepared for the purpose of burning Banker Ives’s house or the Parsons when she was abandoned. It looks as if Beall was trusting largely to luck, which, as the case turned out, was overwhelmingly against him. For on Saturday, two days before he boarded the Parsons, a man professing to be a Confederate refugee in Canada called at the military headquarters in Detroit and gave such information that the following telegram was sent to the Michigan’s commander: