Review Essay: Law and Order in Lincoln’s America

Review Essay: Law and Order in Lincoln’s America

Mark S. Schantz

Writing in The American Historical Review in October 1972, historian Philip Shaw Paludan reflected on the forces that propelled the United States into civil war. It was easy enough, he thought, to understand why the South seceded in the days after Abraham Lincoln’s election: without the electoral votes of a single southern state, a new Republican president had been swept into office. Despite Lincoln’s promises to leave the institution of slavery intact where it already existed, limiting only its extension into the West, southern planters saw the writing on the wall. They knew slavery to be an organic institution, always in need of new territory to endure. Talk of limiting slavery’s expansion pushed the white South toward what historian James M. McPherson calls a “counter revolution”—a move to leave the Union before their human property was threatened by “Black Republicans.”

What engaged Paludan, however, was a deeper concern: Why didn’t the North simply let the South leave the Union? What would have been the cost of leaving the economic and cultural relations of the North and the South intact, albeit living as two separate nations, cheek by jowl? After all, some radical abolitionists—William Lloyd Garrison comes to mind—might have been happy to have seen the sinful part of the Union excised like a tumor in order to keep the saving remnant of the North free from the spread of corruption.

As Paludan rolled this question over in his mind, he discovered the motives for the Republican Party’s willingness to wage war, not in the North’s inherent love of racial egalitarianism or even the free labor ideology espoused most clearly by Abraham Lincoln. Rather, he argued, the reality of secession jeopardized the social relations that bound society together—particularly at the level of local and state governments. Northerners and Midwesterners, for Paludan, carried with them a profound respect for law and order, demonstrated especially in their reverence for and dedication to the lawful functioning of local authority. The political act of secession, then, threatened all of this. If secession were allowed to stand, then any law could be set aside, and any authority challenged. What would happen to the smooth functioning of local and state government, to binding economic contracts and arrangements, to the institution of marriage—to the entire web of covenants and agreements that held together the people of the United States? The answer that secession offered was that none of this would matter going forward. If the South could leave the Union unchecked, then all bets were off. Or, as Abraham Lincoln put the matter in his first inaugural address: “Plainly, the central idea of secession, is the essence of anarchy.” Respect for the law in all its dimensions demanded that the errant southern states (or, rather, the deviant individuals who had prompted secession) must be brought back into their proper alignment with the Union. Failure to do so would plunge the United States into the abyss of chaos.

The three books before us offer a fascinating counterpoint to Paludan’s notion that legal order occupied center stage in America’s unfolding drama. The volumes by Frank W. Garmon Jr., A Wonderful Career in Crime: Charles Cowlam’s Masquerades in the Civil War Era and Gilded Age, Jonathan W. White’s treatment of Appleton Oaksmith in Shipwrecked: A True Civil War Story of Mutinies, Jailbreaks, Blockade-Running, and the Slave Trade, and, finally, William C. Harris’s consideration in Confederate Privateer: The Life of John Yates Beall,  present us with historical figures who were nothing if not counter-cultural forces in derailing respect for law and order. In different dimensions, Charles Cowlam (a born Michigander), Appleton Oaksmith (originally from Maine) and John Beall (whose father owned twenty-nine slaves in Virginia), complicate in fascinating ways the image of the United States as a law-abiding nation.

All three books showcase the talent of their authors as master sleuths and detectives par excellence. Frank Garmon’s book somehow traces the fabulist and “chameleon” Charles Cowlam throughout his life of crime, from his pilfering of mails in Virginia, to his stint as a convict in the Virginia State Penitentiary (he received a pardon from Lincoln in May 1861 but the governor of Virginia refused to recognize it), to his rehabilitation as a spy claiming information about the Lincoln assassination, to his work as a detective—where, amazingly enough, he attempted to ingratiate himself with the Canadian prime minister in an effort to round up Fenian rebels in Michigan and Ohio—to his stint as an Internal Revenue agent (you can guess how this ended), and then, his self-promoted run for Congress in Florida in 1872. Cowlam’s scheme to serve as U.S. marshal for the Northern District of Florida is exactly the kind of disrespect for governance that concerned Paludan in his essay. Eventually Cowlam reinvented himself as a Union colonel and wound up for a time at the soldiers’ home in Dayton, Ohio. Along the way, he swindled everyone in his path, committed bigamy, and concocted, in the words of one contemporary, “as many aliases as there are letters in the alphabet.” Tracking down Cowlam’s movements, and his numerous name changes, addresses, occupations, spouses, relationships, is a heroic feat and reveals Garmon’s indefatigable research.

Garmon’s treatment of Cowlam also expertly invokes excerpts from Herman Melville’s 1857 novel, The Confidence Man: His Masquerade. Garmon situates Cowlam’s various schemes at a moment in American culture in which individual identities were porous and negotiated, where social mobility precluded authentic knowledge of someone’s past life, and where the dislocations of war made it even more possible for grifters and con artists to ply their trade. Cowlam may have been an exceptional rogue, but he was a rogue born of the particular historical circumstances of his time.

Jonathan White’s efforts in tracking down Appleton Oaksmith’s adventures are perhaps even more extensive, as they follow his protagonist around the globe. He was born into a prominent literary family—Appleton’s mother Elizabeth Oakes Smith was a widely-read poet (and a major character in White’s telling) featured in national publications, and his father, Seba Smith, invented the character of Jack Downing, a literary figure whom Abraham Lincoln enjoyed immensely. Throughout his life, Appleton punctuated his exploits and scrapes with the law in poetic verse, and White does an amazing job of joining together his literary productions with specific events in his life. His lively and compelling narrative casts Oaksmith as a swashbuckling troubadour. Appleton Oaksmith was, by turns, an adventurer to California, a brave captain fending off a mutinous crew, an agent for freebooter William Walker’s invasion of Nicaragua, and a possible slave trader on the African coast where his crew engaged in a pitched battle with indigenous African peoples at the mouth of the Congo River. It was his alleged relationship with the international slave trade that could have sent Oaksmith to the gallows. Accused of outfitting ships for the slave trade, Oaksmith endured arrest, a trial (in which no fewer than fourteen women sat around him at the defense table), conviction, and imprisonment, before engineering a miracle escape from Boston’s Charles Street Jail (now the luxury Liberty Hotel). In so escaping, Oaksmith elided the fate of the era’s most well-known slaver, Nathaniel Gordon.

White’s chapter on the Gordon trial and execution is a wonderful counterpoint to Oaksmith’s tale—the implication, perhaps, is that Oaksmith could have been another Gordon, the only American hanged for engaging in the international slave trade. The Gordon case grabbed national headlines and brought enormous pressure on Abraham Lincoln to save the slaver from his death. In the historical record, Lincoln’s refusal to grant Gordon a reprieve from his death sentence is often taken as an emblem of the president’s hard stand against slavers more generally. In the critical month of February 1862, it served as a warning that Lincoln would mete out harsh punishment to those who broke the laws, especially when it came to the international slave trade. But there is more to the story. White is a clear-eyed and nuanced guide in exploring some of the other lesser-known cases of slavers in which Lincoln did indeed pardon the culprits. Lincoln’s handling of the Gordon case, while decisive, does not sum up all his dealings with those convicted of violating U.S. law. Thus, even the “law and order” president seemed reluctant to hold some slave-traders accountable for their actions.

After escaping from jail, Oaksmith fled for a time to Cuba, where he served as a Confederate blockade-runner. The Lincoln administration unsuccessfully sought his extradition, even to the point of attempting an illegal kidnapping scheme shortly before the presidential election of 1864. By 1865, he had landed in England, where he became a naturalized British subject and wrote commentary on the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871. Oaksmith eventually returned to the United States, received a pardon from President Ulysses S. Grant—after more than a decade in exile—and then moved to North Carolina. There, he became a railroad promoter and then won election to the state house of representatives, where he served alongside seventeen African American men. The former convicted slaver who had spent a career skirting the laws now joined with Black men in the pursuit of local and lawful governance—exactly the sort of outcome that Paludan’s Unionists would have cheered.

John Yates Beall, the subject of William C. Harris’s volume, was a lawbreaker twice over. He was a pirate in a rebel navy. Ironically, as a young man he had pursued the study of law at the University of Virginia but lost interest in things academic. Already a Confederate soldier before being discharged due to wounds incurred early in the conflict, he also became a notorious privateer, commando, and guerrilla warrior engaged in the Confederacy’s cause. Like Oaksmith, Beall had an appetite for adventure and did not let his early wounds sideline him. By 1863, the erudite young man parlayed his connections with Robert E. Lee’s second cousin into a plan to serve as a privateer on the Chesapeake Bay. Beall’s official connection to missions approved by the Confederate government would become an integral part of his legal defense when he was eventually captured by Union forces. For a short time, “Master” Beall and his commando comrades terrorized a handful of Union vessels on the Chesapeake before being captured. While he did no real damage to the Union cause, his activities were troublesome enough to engage the attention of Union forces. And then, as fate would have it, Beall was lucky enough to have the piracy charges pending against him dropped and was then exchanged for a Union officer.

Beall took his exchange as license to continue his marauding activities. This time, he appealed to Confederate Secretary of the Navy Stephen R. Mallory to approve an audacious plan to rescue a large contingent of Confederate officers being held as prisoners of war on Johnson’s Island, in Lake Erie. As it developed, this rather fantastical plan revolved around Beall and his commandos getting hold of the Union gunship Michigan—the most imposing warship on Lake Erie—and using it to sail to Johnson’s Island, rescuing Confederate prisoners of war, getting them to Canada, and then secreting them by boat to Wilmington, North Carolina, where they would replenish Gen. Robert E. Lee’s officer corps. It was a plan born of both despair and delusion, reflecting the desperation of the Confederacy as the war ground into yet another year.

Harris is deft in revealing that by 1864, “guerrilla or clandestine activities on the Great Lakes and in the West thus became a part of the Confederate strategy.” Historians have largely overlooked this northern theatre of the Civil War, and Harris contributes to our understanding of the conflict by bringing it into focus. And indeed, Harris shows how the raid on St. Alban’s, Vermont, and the attempted arson of New York City in 1864 figured into a larger Confederate strategy of embarrassing the Lincoln administration in an election year, and possibly fomenting a military conflict between the United States and Great Britain that could work to the favor of the Confederacy. Despite these lofty aims, the plan to capture the Michigan and to free the captive rebel prisoners on Johnson’s Island failed and sent Beall back to Canada. It is a matter of some irony that Canada—the refuge for antebellum enslaved people running from their masters—simultaneously became a base of operations for Confederate operatives seeking to attack the Union.

Beall’s next big operation kept him on solid ground. This would be an attempt to capture a Lake Shore train about fifteen miles from Buffalo, New York, overpower the guards, and then free seven Confederate generals who a fiasco. Beall and his group of ten commandos bought tickets on the Lake Shore Railroad, then planned to exit the train and deploy themselves to capture their target. They rode out to the point of attack on sleighs—which Harris notes wryly, “might have been the only time sleighs were used in a train robbery.” But it was cold in Buffalo in the winter (a surprise?), and, indeed, the track was frozen so hard that one of the raiders could barely budge it. The train stopped anyway, but it contained no Confederate generals. The mission disintegrated. While he fell asleep in a railroad station trying to get to Canada, Union men captured and arrested Beall. Throughout Beall’s exploits there is an element of tragicomedy, such earnest intention combined with an almost cartoonish lack of planning and execution.

John Yates Beall was convicted by a military commission of spying and pursuing irregular warfare, which Judge Advocate John A. Bolles contended “are offenses against the laws of God and the laws of man.” Captain Beall was now a rebel three times over. He was sentenced to death. And, as in the case of Nathaniel Gordon, Abraham Lincoln withstood significant appeals to save Beall’s life from many quarters, including entreaties from Rep. Thaddeus Stevens—a Radical Republican and a most unusual ally for Beall. Indeed, Harris indicates that the Gordon case was much on Lincoln’s mind when he supported Union general John A. Dix in carrying out the death penalty. By all accounts, Beall met his fate with composure and calm, without regret, and lambasting the legal proceedings against him by saying, “I protest against the execution of this sentence. It is absolute murder; brutal murder. I die in the defense and service of my country. I have nothing more to say.” Thus did the commando and guerrilla meet his end, protesting the legal process and the outcome of the military commission that sent him to his death.

Rebels and rogues though they were, Cowlam, Oaksmith, and Beall all nevertheless yearned for some measure of political respectability. As they skirted the edges of legality, all three men, in different ways, wanted recognition, acknowledgement from the public, and even government office. Charles Cowlam, in Garmon’s estimation, claimed a Union colonel’s office toward the end of his life to present himself as a true patriot and stalwart supporter of his country. Cowlam’s interest in serving as a spy to uncover the assassination of Lincoln, his stint as an Internal Revenue officer, even his trumped-up campaign for Congress in 1872, might all be taken as backdoor efforts to claim a place of political legitimacy. The offices he sought would have marked him as a success had he not tried to swindle his way to them. Garmon’s interpretation of Charles Cowlam’s life is that he invested much effort in trying to be someone else—more specifically his brother, George. As Garmon writes, “Charles’ brother, George, offers a counterpoint to his life and allows us to speculate on what type of life he might have led had he not gone to prison.” Respectability by proxy, then, might be one avenue to understanding Charles Cowlam’s life.

Appleton Oaksmith, to a lesser degree than Cowlam, ventured into the realm of the political. White’s treatment of Oaksmith during the secession crisis of 1860–1861, places him in New York as an “active member” of the Democratic Tammany Hall machine. In this role, he took it upon himself to lecture Sen. William H. Seward on the virtues of maintaining the Union and what it would take to avoid all-out war. Seward never replied. Oaksmith continued to hound President Buchanan on the need to enforce the laws of the land, declaring secession to be unlawful and calling on Congress to come up with a compromise to avoid war. He wrote resolutions. He made speeches. He proposed that three commissioners from the city of New York be appointed to meet with representatives of the seceding states, hoping to avert war. And of course, he wrote a poem titled the “The Union Marseillaise” calling for the nation to endure. A man who would soon spend time in jail for violating the congressional prohibition against slave trading nevertheless lectured a New York senator and future secretary of state and the sitting president of the United States on the illegality of secession and the coming of the Civil War. And on the other side of the conflict, Oaksmith served in the North Carolina state legislature, where he “was ardently anti-Klan and in favor of protecting the rights of ex-slaves.” A strange outcome indeed for a man convicted of having outfitted ships for the international slave trade and who then broke out of jail and fled the country.

The case of John Yates Beall presents us with a different path toward asserting legitimate political authority. To the date of his execution, Beall and his legal defenders maintained that he was not a pirate or a brigand or a spy, but a duly constituted legal actor, operating under direct orders from the Confederate government. During his military commission trial, Beall’s attorney, James T. Brady, drove home this point again and again. “Captain Beall was acting as an officer of the Confederate Government, either in command himself of Confederate soldiers, or under the command of some Confederate officer,” Brady claimed. And what difference was there, Brady asked, between William T. Sherman, who despoiled a peaceful people in their homes and property with perfect legality, and a commander such as Beall who, arguably, did very little damage to the Union cause. Ironically, Beall rested the defense of his case on the very principles of orderly government that secession called into question.

Thus did Cowlam, Oaksmith, and Beall occupy a kind of liminal terrain between legality and illegality—at once challenging the structures of legitimate social authority and then by turns relying on them. The arc of their lives suggests that the boundary between law and chaos was everywhere up for grabs in the Civil War era. Paludan’s “law and order” argument may indeed still hold water, particularly as a broad framing of the secession crisis itself. But the three characters we are considering here present some important caveats, at least, in accepting his contention across the board. Law and disorder may have walked hand in hand at this moment in American history.

Reading about the lives of Cowlam, Oaksmith, and Beall recalled to mind a 1988 volume by David S. Reynolds (a recent Lincoln Prize winner), Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville. Reynolds probed antebellum literature that he termed subversive, “which was bizarre, nightmarish, and often politically radical.” These extra-canonical writers testified to a robust and pervasive American literary culture outside of Melville, Hawthorne, Dickinson, and Poe, but simultaneously showed how popular and subversive writers deeply influenced more conventional literary figures. Reynolds’ argument may also suggest to us that Cowlam, Oaksmith, and Beall, may not have been as singular as we might at first suspect. Perhaps we have read our own histories in ways that hew toward conventional narratives at the expense of more disreputable and unsavory characters. Cowlam, Oaksmith, and Beall may have embodied their own version of “the subversive imagination” in an age of law and order—but one in which many Americans participated.

Our characters also call on us to reflect on questions of personal identity in the Civil War era. For example, the use of aliases, alternative spellings of names, and outright name changing was not uncommon in nineteenth-century America. Historians who have mined the archives in search of particular individuals and genealogists tracking down their ancestors know this to be true. In addition to making research vexing, however, name changes can serve to mask crime. Charles Cowlam was the master of aliases, but Oaksmith and Beall also switched their identities over time. In 1849, Appleton Oaksmith self-consciously changed his name from Appleton Smith to Appleton Oaksmith. He served as a Confederate blockade-runner under the name Captain John McDonald. In 1862, when John Yates Beall was hiding out from Union forces in Iowa, he concealed his identity as a Confederate soldier and called himself simply John Yates. At the time of his capture by Union authorities, Beall claimed to be a man named W. W. Baker. One of the most striking quotes in Shipwrecked comes from 1871, in which Oaksmith ruminates, “I look upon myself sometimes with a sort of doubt as to my own identity—when I reflect upon this case and all I have seen in the papers. Am I myself?” While Oaksmith was likely referring to the gap between the perception of his actions in the press and his own view of himself, the query invites us to consider the nature of personhood in the Civil War era.

It is an article of faith among historians of the Civil War era that the Republican Party birthed the image of the “self-made man” in American political culture. The archetype for this vision of a society based on “free soil, free labor, free men” was Abraham Lincoln himself. He began his life in grinding poverty and obscurity, and then lifted himself to the presidency of the United States. It was Lincoln’s trajectory of upward mobility, a story rich with individual achievement and determined striving, that captivated the North and especially the Republican Party. Yet, how different was Abraham Lincoln’s narrative of “self-making” from the self-making in which Charles Cowlam, Appleton Oaksmith, and John Yates Beall engaged? To be sure, Abraham Lincoln, former Whig politician and soon-to-be law and order Republican president, was made of different stuff than Cowlam, Oaksmith, and Beall. Still, all of them engaged in the process of making and re-making themselves, taking on and casting off different personas over time, recasting their identities in intentional ways. Perhaps it was in sharing this dedication to identities in flux that Cowlam, Oaksmith, and Beall—outsiders in many registers—embodied the spirit of their age more fully than we realize.

A telling detail from the last moments of John Yates Beall’s life offers a coda to the project of self-making and to the thin line between the legal and the extralegal. On the day of his execution at Fort Columbus in New York harbor, Beall requested to have his photograph made. He wanted control of his last moments, his last image, and of the memory that future generations would possess. The resulting portrait perpetrated a masquerade every bit as deceptive as the character in Melville’s The Confidence Man and perhaps worthy of a Charles Cowlam misdirection. Dressed in gentlemanly civilian garb, with a bow tie neatly finished, Beall looks out at us as an entirely bourgeois man. Not a rogue, not a pirate, not a spy, Beall made his oeuvre the very image of respectability, embodying in one simple shot the shadowy boundary between legality and illegality in the era of the Civil War.

Mark S. Schantz is professor of history emeritus at Birmingham-Southern College and the author of Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America’s Culture of Death (2008).