It Happened Here -- A Close  Thing (Twice)

At Sacket's Harbor   Part I

Barely a month had passed since the Congress of the United States in a far from unanimous vote, had voted to declare war on Great Britain.  Sacket's Harbor¹ residents must have steeled themselves for the future with feelings of both ambivalence and trepidation.  Since 1801 the sleepy little port town owed it existence mainly to trade across the lake, including a profitable trade in potash, destined for the nearly tree-less  Britain²  But now the British and Canadians were their enemies. For some time changes had been in the wind. Congress had enacted embargo acts in 1807 and in 1809 that made trade with Britain and France illegal and in 1809 the U.S. government had bought the brig Oneida from private owners on Lake Ontario to attempt to interdict this trade. In July of 1812 the Oneida had captured the Lord Nelson, a  Canadian merchant sloop carrying on trade between New York and Upper Canadian ports. Meanwhile, the British had built up a sizable little fleet based in Kingston, only a short distance away, across the lake. While the Lord Nelson and the eighteen gun Oneida rested at anchor in the harbor, on shore a blockhouse and gun emplacements were being hastily constructed. But the residents undoubtedly observed their were no guns for the new battery, and in fact the only ordinance in town was a huge old 32 pounder, obtained for the Oneida but rejected because the 6500 lb, 10 foot long cannon was simply too big and too heavy for the little brig

"Old Sow" Replica on the Sacket's Harbor Battlefield

On the Canadian side, the British war office was urging restraint in dealing with the Americans. Locked in a death struggle with Napoleon, they simply didn't need another war with another enemy on another front, no matter how weak and unprepared it was. On the other hand, they knew a few short miles away at anchor in a defenseless harbor, sat their ship that had been "pirated" from them with the brig that was the cause of their irritation.

On September 19, 1812 a British fleet comprised of the Royal George (24guns), the Seneca (18guns), the Prince Regent (20 guns), the Earl of Moira (20 guns) and the Simcoe  set sail for Sacket's Harbor.

The British attack force was first spotted from the masthead of the Oneida.  The American ship attempted to make for open water, but was cut off and returned to the harbor. There she
anchored and prepared to fight as a floating, stationary battery. Her eight shore-facing guns were removed and placed in the shore emplacements. Only the day before, the large 32 lb. gun had been mounted in a pivoting emplacement  at the head of the new battery. Captain Chauncey
placed sailing master William Vaughn in charge of this gun.

As the Americans began their final preparations they discovered a catastrophic oversight.  There was no ammunition large enough for the 32 pounder in town! When Vaughn attempted to use the 24 lb cannon balls in the larger cannon  much of the explosive force of the burning gunpowder simply roared past the smaller ball and the shot fell far short of its target.  From on board the attacking ships the artillery crews on shore could hear peals of derisive laughter.  Then Vaughn had an inspiration. The professional navy man knew
                                                            

Site of Ft. Tompkins Blockhouse; Gun Emplacements near the hedge

that riflemen achieved greater range and accuracy by wrapping their rifle balls in a patch of oiled cloth or buckskin, partly to contain the force of the gunpowder blast behind the ball, propelling it to its target. He ordered a bewildered subordinate to run to his house and rip up the parlor rug in his sitting room and bring it to him. When the man returned, he cut it into large patches which he wrapped around each shot before forcing them down the barrel of his "old sow" cannon.

By now the British ships were firing broadsides at the gun batteries and the American batteries were returning fire, but having limited effect because the Oneida's armaments were carronades--a shorter cannon, with shorter range, and the ships of the British fleet were careful to stay beyond their reach.

A Carronade at Sackets Harbor

A 24 lb. Canon at Sackets Harbor

For about two hours American and British artillery dueled.  But while the British shot were slamming into the rocks below the battery or plowing up the muddy earth beyond the American emplacements, cannon fire, mainly from Vaughn's gun was crashing into spars and bringing down rigging. Then as the Royal George tacked once again to bring its lake-facing guns around so they could fire at the shore battery, a lucky shot from the 32-pounder plowed into the rear cabin of the fleet's flagship, crashing through the whole length of the ship and exiting out of the bow. The destruction and carnage was terrific. From one end of the ship to the other, gun carriages were splintered  and cannon upended; sailors were crushed and dismembered; eight crewmen died immediately. Following this blow, the Royal George gave the signal to retreat and  the British fleet bore off to Kingston.

The next two plus years saw major changes at Sacket's Harbor as army, navy, marines and civilian shipbuilders flooded into this town of a few hundred souls, turning it briefly into the third largest city in New York State, becoming one of the nation's busiest shipbuilding ports.   Sacket's Harbor had escaped its first trial but it would face a more severe trial in a little over eight months.  (Next week Part II)

1Since its first settlement, Sacket's Harbor has been spelled a variety of ways. Some early documents refer to it as “Sackett's Harbor” For much of its history it has been “Sacket's Harbor.” Modern postal regulations do not allow for th use of apostrohes so today it is “Sackets Harbor.”
2Check out “It Happened Here - Pioneers and Potash” in NYSHMs: It Happened Here posted on 8-23-13.

It Happened Here -- Zim's Bandstand

One of the most endearing features of many small towns in upstate New York are their small parks and the well maintained bandstands that date from an era when most entertainments were homemade.

Eugene Zimmerman was born in Basel Switzerland in 1862. After his mother died, his father, a baker, and older brother emigrated to America and he was sent to live with relatives in French Alsace-Lorraine. When the Franco-Prussian War broke out Eugene joined them in America.  Zimmerman loved to doodle and draw caricatures. He later claimed his first drawings were made in frosting on the cakes his father baked, in his Patterson, New Jersey bakery. The young man tried his hand at a wide variety of jobs.  A stint as a sign painter's apprentice was an important bridge to his future profession, bringing him to Elmira, New York. Meanwhile,  he continued to teach himself to become a cartoonist by copying the cartoons of others and by constantly drawing.    (A cartoon he would draw as a successful cartoonist is perhaps autobiographical.  It shows a young boy having been caught drawing a caricature on a horse stall in his barn by his father. It is grotesque and funny. His somewhat annoyed father asks him who is its subject. The boy stutters "B-ben H-harrison"(president).  It is obviously a caricature of his father.)

In 1883 Zimmerman put together a portfolio of his cartoons and went looking for a job in New York City.  He found one at Punch, a Democratic political magazine.  Since at least the early Enlightenment political cartoons had been an element in political discourse. A generation before, Thomas Nast had made the political cartoon a force in American politics. His cartoons of New York's Tammany Hall organization and its leader "Boss" Tweed were instrumental in bringing down the Democratic Party boss. Tweed was once quoted as saying "I don't care a straw for your newspaper articles, my constituents don't know how to read, but they can't help seeing them damned pictures."

Zimmerman, who began to sign his cartoons "Zim," worked for Punch for two and a half years until he heard of a new magazine in the works.  Judge would be both a magazine of political commentary and satire and of general social satire. It would have a Republican orientation, more in line with Zimmerman's personal political leanings; and with fewer cartoonists on staff and with a broader societal focus it would give "Zim" greater opportunities for expression.  It was a good fit and Zimmerman would work for Judge for twenty-five years, until he retired. Over his lifetime an incredible 40,000 of his drawings would be published.

In 1886 Zimmerman married Mabel Alice Beard of Horseheads¹, New York,  a town adjacent to Elmira.  Two years later he arranged with his editor to go to New York on alternate weeks, and to work from home on the other weeks.  The couple moved to a home next to Teal Park in 

Horseheads²

^{Though his work focused his attention on national politics and on the melting pot that was New York City in the last quarter of the 19th} century^{3,"Zim" threw himself into the life of the local community, serving as a village trustee, joining the Rotary Club and the local volunteer fire department and organizing a community brass band. From retirement he would write and illustrate several books about his region and his community:  Zimm's Foolish History of Elmira and its Tributaries,  Zim's Foolish History of Horseheads and two later editions of the Foolish History of Horseheads,} 

Teal Park. Horseheads

^{In 1910 "Zim" designed a band stand for his band.  Neither a Victorian wedding cake nor a neoclassical temple--designs favored in many community bandstands, Zim's bandstand has the feel of a spinning carousel; and to complete its whimsical feel, it sports a trio of grasshopper and frog musicians. The bandstand was dedicated in 1914.}

1Horseheads got its name when early settlers came upon a pile of horse skulls. At the end of the Clinton-Sullivan Campaign against the Iroquois, in 1778, before Continental army troops boarded their boats for the return trip down the Chemung River their worn out, surviving pack horses were butchered for their meat. It was the skeletal remains of these animals that the first settlers found.

2“Zim” was attracted to the quiet life and simple amenities of the small town of Horseheads but no doubt the name “Horseheads” appealed to his sense of whimsy as well.

3Today “Zim's” cartoons are sometimes criticized for their racial and ethnic stereotyping but as a leading caricaturist of what became known as the “grotesque” style cartooning all ethnic groups came under the attack of his pen. Favorite subjects also included “crackers.” smug rural white people, gathered around their public forum, the county-store cracker barrel, and “Jays,” rural whites lost and confused in the big city or blissfully unaware of its traffic patterns-the origin of the term “Jay-walkers.”

It Happened Here -- A Man in the Shadows

By the end of November 1860 the votes had been counted, and the issue decided. Abraham Lincoln, a lawyer from Illinois would be the nation's next President.  But in the South this news was greeted with outrage, anguish and alarm. The South's worst fears were realized.  A "black Republican" -- a man on record for opposing the spread of slavery into the territories and widely suspected of being a closet abolitionist would be their next President unless the southern states did something about it. In several of these states that something was secession.  States across the South held conventions to debate secession and as the inauguration drew near, several states, beginning with South Carolina voted to secede from the Union.  In Maryland, the southern state that surrounded Washington on three sides that something would be obstruction, and probably -- murder.

Despite the unsubstantiated  rumors of groups forming to prevent the President from being inaugurated,  Republican party leaders organizing Lincoln's trip from his home in Springfield Illinois to the Capitol paid scant attention to the President-elect's personal security. The trip was designed to be something of victory processional with multiple opportunities for party faithful as well as the general public to meet and greet their new President along a route that led from Illinois, across Indiana and Ohio, across the breadth of New York State, to Albany, down to New York City, to Philadelphia, thence to Harrisburg, into Wilmington, Delaware, then Baltimore and finally Washington.  Metropolitan police along the route were contacted to provide security and crowd control through cities in which Lincoln's entourage would stop. Their effectiveness varied.  In Buffalo a joyous mob overcame the police, pressed in upon the President's party, nearly crushing the President and dislocating the shoulder of one of his aides. At Albany masses of police and the State's 25th Regiment prevented a similar incident. And in Baltimore the police marshal, George P. Kane (an ardent secessionist) declared the police would not be providing an escort for the President-elect, lamely maintaining that one would not be needed.

  Lincoln in Albany

President-elect Abraham Lincoln was greeted

by a large, boisterous crowd on

February 18, 1861, as he stopped in Albany

on his way to his inauguration in

Washington, D.C.

--tablet/fiberglass marker on the east lawn of the

State Capitol (apparently removed for the winter)

Throughout the trip, no body guard accompanied the President-elect, though several of the military men in the entourage, at the last minute, decided to arm themselves, offering a revolver to Lincoln, who declined it.

The first efforts to ferret out information about possible plots came not from the government, or from Lincoln's party at all, but from a railroad executive. Samuel Morse Felton of the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad had begun hearing rumors of plots by secessionists to destroy rail lines into Washington in a bid to take over the Capital. He contacted Allan Pinkerton of Chicago, whose detective agency had previously done work for the railroads helping them catch thieves and embezzlers. Pinkerton immediately dispatched several operatives to Baltimore, setting himself up, posing as a southern securities broker in the city, while his men tried to get close to a group of  plotters who called themselves the "National Volunteers".

About the same time a small group of young Republicans in Washington concerned about the rumors of plots swirling around the city organized themselves into an informal "committee of safety".  One of them,  Lucius Chittenden was secretly contacted by a group of Baltimore Republicans. They revealed to him details they had discovered of a plot to surround Lincoln's train car and kill him when it was in the process of being switched from one rail line to another in Baltimore.  (Thru lines and central rail stations were not common at this time. Several times in his trip Lincoln had had to change trains, taking a carriage from one line's station to board another line's train in another part of town.  In Baltimore a track connected the PW&B line to the railroad servicing Washington, but because of the fire hazard the wood burning engines posed to the downtown area, cars switching lines had to be pulled through the downtown area by teams of horses. It was here the plotters were planning to strike.)

A third group of investigators were set in motion by General Winfield Scott, who had been ordered to Washington from New York to oversee the security of the capital city. Scott asked New York Police Superintendent John A. Kennedy if he would send a couple detectives to Baltimore to see what they could find out about the troubling rumors emanating from there. A pair of New York city detectives,

Cortland Co. Rte. 41, Homer, New York(2)

Tom Sampson and Eli DeVoe were assigned and attempted to infiltrate a group hostile to Lincoln, using the aliases Thompson and Davis.  Posing as two outgoing, outspoken southern businessmen from Augusta, Georgia and Mobile, Alabama(1)  they worked to ingratiate themselves with Baltimore secessionists getting themselves accepted into a paramilitary group calling itself the "Southern Volunteers". As new members of the group they listening to fiery secessionist speeches, drilled with the organization and even took oaths to kill Lincoln, if the opportunity should present itself.

 It was while they were first hanging around  attempting to identify radical secessionist that they were spotted by Timothy Webster, one of Pinkerton's operatives. He recognized Tom Sampson from when he worked as a New York detective. Never fully accepted into the group, their "cover" was compromised when DeVoe's wife sent him a letter postmarked from New York. Though they were able to explain away the New York postmark they came under constant surveillance and began to fear for their lives. Abruptly they left their hotel, abandoning their bags and catching a train for Washington.

In Washington they checked into the famous Willard Hotel(3). Foolishly, perhaps from habit, they registered under the aliases they had used in Baltimore.  After they settled into their room Sampson returned to the lobby only to be surprised by the sight of two men he recognized from the "Southern Volunteers" perusing the hotel registry. About the same time a third man sidled up to Sampson, whispering hoarsely to him "For God's sake, Tom, come out of this." They slipped outside by a side door and Sampson recognized the man as Timothy Webster.  Webster explained he had been sent by a "most desperate Secession party" with twenty other men to kill DeVoe and Sampson on sight. He counseled him to leave immediately, taking a train at a station fifteen miles out of Washington, because the Washington train stations were all being watched.(4) Reaching the outlying station Samson and DeVoe boarded a train to Baltimore, only to discover to their horror three men they recognized from the "Volunteers" were sitting in the front of the car. They were joined by three more, and while the train sped along one of the men grinned at the others, pointing with his thumb over his shoulder at DeVoe and Thompson. They had clearly been spotted. With few options open to them the two detectives chose a desperate move. They casually walked to the rear of the car then jumped from the moving train. Both survived with many cuts and bruises. DeVoe sprained his ankle, badly. Hailing a horse drawn street car, then a hack they caught a train heading north. Once safely north of the Mason/Dixon line they made their report.

It is not certain if DeVoe and Sampson's report  figured into Lincoln's decision to change his travel plans. When Samuel Felton received Pinkerton's information he immediately dispatched the Chicago detective to warn the President-elect. General Scott also acted on information from several sources-- Chittenden's, the report of another New York detective David Bookstaver, who was working undercover as a music agent to Washington and Baltimore society and perhaps Thompson and DeVoe's. Scott sent an urgent warning to the President using Frederick Seward,  William H. Seward's son as a courier. When Lincoln got these dispatches, following Pinkerton's information, he determined these threats were probably real and directed his staff to devise an alternate plan.

The following day Lincoln returned to Philadelphia, was placed on an overnight coach to Washington and whisked through Baltimore to the Federal City, a full day before the conspirators expected him.

Did Thompson and DeVoe's efforts help frustrate a plot to kill Lincoln? Perhaps. At any rate, their discovery and the plotters efforts to kill them did provide an important distraction for the conspirators and allowed Pinkerton's men to get closer to the plotters, allowing them to get the information to present to President.

After the "Baltimore Plot" the name Eli DeVoe disappears from the historical record, except for one other incident.  Following the second attempt on Lincoln's life, this one successful, DeVoe is named as one of the detectives involved in the arrest in 1865 of Mary Surrat, the boarding house owner convicted in John Wilkes Booth plot.  Allan Pinkerton went on to create the Intelligence Service for the Army of the Potomac, soon to be known as the Union Intelligence Service.  Did DeVoe join this agency? Did he continue on as a New York City detective? It certainly appears Police Superintendendent Kennedy had no compunctions about sending agents wherever he thought they were needed.  In 1874 DeVoe died and was buried in Summit, New Jersey.  For most of his life Eli DeVoe remained "a man in the shadows".

1DeVoe had lived in Mobile for several years.

2DeVoe was actually a member of the N.Y. Metropolitan Police. The U.S. Secret Service was not formed until July1865 and for many years dealt only with counterfeiting investigations. It was not until after McKinley's assassination in 1901 that Congress gave it the task of protecting the President. 

3The Willard was the premier hotel in Washington (and also one of the few decent places to stay.)
Unbeknownst to the conspirators, Lincoln would stay there as well, until after the inauguration when he could move into the White House.

4Perhaps the conspirators decided to wait until DeVoe and Sampson left Baltimore for Washington because they would be more anonymous there, and less likely to be recognized by anyone.