The Lake Erie raid might have been a real success had Cole not been betrayed by a Confederate turncoat at Windsor. The informer was an officer who operated a hotel where 60 Confederate refugees lived. His guests were unaware they were boarding with a Union detective who relayed every conversation to Colonel Bennett Hill, the provost marshal of Detroit. Hill, in turn, passed the information on to the Michigan’s commander, Captain Jack Carter. It may even have been Thompson himself, lodging in Windsor just before the raid, who let information slip and sealed Cole’s fate.

In any case, on September 17, two days before the raid, Hill had wired Captain Carter and warned him of the plot to capture the Michigan: ‘It is reported to me that some of the officers and men of your steamer have been tampered with, and that a party of rebel refugees leave Windsor tomorrow with the expectation of getting possession of your steamer.’

On the morning of the 19th, Hill furnished the specifics that led to Cole’s arrest. ‘It is said that the parties will embark today at Maldon on board the Philo Parsons and will seize either the steamer or another running from Kelley’s Island,’ Hill wrote. ‘Since last dispatch I am again assured that officers and men have been bought by a man named Cole, a few to be introduced on board under the guise of friends of officers.’

Cole’s rooms were searched, and among his papers were found some letters linking him to Thompson. Other documents indicated he had been paroled in Memphis that April, after taking an oath not to take up arms against the Union. Both documents were enough to have him charged as a spy. If convicted, he would be executed.

Alerted to Cole’s predicament by Annie Brown, Thompson wrote a letter to the commandant of Johnson’s Island, where he believed Cole was incarcerated. He urged that Cole be treated as a prisoner of war rather than a spy. That would not get him out of jail, but it would keep him alive. It turned out that Cole was not at Johnson’s Island, however. He had been taken to a Federal prison in Cincinnati, then moved to Columbus, and finally to Fort Lafayette in New York Harbor. He was found guilty of treason and sentenced to hang, but a full confession earned him amnesty. He would be released in the spring of 1865.

A month after the Lake Erie raid, in October 1864, Canadian-based Confederates were back on the offensive, raiding the Vermont town of St. Albans. This time, however, Thompson was not involved–a symptom of yet another problem in his organization. The raid was authorized by Thompson’s second in command, former senator Clay. Sickly and ill-tempered, Clay deeply disliked Thompson. He had no interest in his boss’s plots and raids, and separated from him soon after they arrived in Halifax. While Thompson used Toronto and Montreal as his bases, Clay worked out of St. Catharines, a town on Lake Ontario about 15 miles from Niagara Falls. It was he who was responsible for the peace talks at Niagara Falls in July 1864. And it was he who was now launching one of the most politically controversial raids of the Canadian mission.

On October 19, 1864, about two dozen Rebel raiders commanded by Lieutenant Bennett Young, a Kentucky cavalry officer, descended on St. Albans, about 40 miles south of Montreal. They robbed three banks of up to $200,000, killing one man and wounding three other people. As they retreated, they unsuccessfully attempted to set fire to the town. Most of the raiders were quickly captured or eventually turned themselves in to Canadian authorities. Young was arrested at a farmhouse on the Canadian side of the border, and was about to be lynched by an angry mob of Vermonters when the timely appearance of a British soldier saved his life.

Young and his fellow raiders were accused of violating Canada’s neutrality. But they claimed that they operated with the official sanction of the Confederate government, and were therefore carrying out legitimate acts of war against the United States on U.S. soil, and merely residing in Canada. Despite challenges, the defense worked. Clay, however, did not linger to hear the verdict. He denied any responsibility for the raid and fled Canada for the South.

Next to bungling, Union spies, and internal division, one of the greatest factors in the failure of Thompson’s Canadian operation was deliberate betrayal from within the organization. The most reviled of Thompson’s turncoat operatives was Godfrey Joseph Hyams, an Arkansan who had traveled to Toronto in late 1863, after being forced to move, as he later told a Toronto court, by Federal soldiers who seized his property and expelled him from the state.

Hyams was apparently poor and uneducated. By late 1864, his wife was six months pregnant, and he was eking out a living repairing shoes. He was so hard up that when Thompson paid him $50 for a mission, most of the money went straight to rent in arrears. On February 22, 1865, Mrs. Hyams gave birth to a boy, who was christened Stonewall Jackson Hyams. Tragically, the baby died a month later, on March 20, and was buried at the cost of $1 in a Toronto Catholic cemetery.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that Hyams first appears in dispatches as an informer just a few weeks after his son’s death. On one hand, he loved the Confederate cause enough to name the boy after a revered Southern hero. On the other, he had no job prospects, and he was unable to pay the rent and buy basic necessities. His errands for Thompson had been dwindling, and along with it, his meager income. Soon any information he had would not be worth anything to anyone. It was a good time to sell out.

Whatever had caused his change of heart, on April 5, 1865, Hyams walked into the office of David Thurston, the U.S. consul in Toronto, and offered to make a deal. It appears he had first discussed the matter with Robert Harrison, Toronto’s crown attorney (a position similar to district attorney). At the time, Harrison was prosecuting numerous Thompson operatives on assorted charges. The defendants included the St. Albans raiders and Burley. It is possible that Hyams was questioned as part of those investigations and perhaps indicated a willingness to make a deal.

Thurston described Hyams’s visit in a letter to U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward on April 7:

A few days since, a person named Hyams who has been an intimate associate of rebels here, called on me. He stated that he was in possession of important information. It related to the plans of those rebels and the steamer Georgian [a second plot to capture the Michigan and free prisoners at Johnson's Island, involving a civilian vessel named Georgian]. He told me he had been connected with the rebels for several years and all their schemes and plots were known to him. He was desirous of communicating them to me if I would remunerate him for so doing. I said that the information would be submitted to the government of the U.S. and if it was considered of value, a proper recompense would be made, but under no circumstances could I guarantee it. He replied he was willing to accept those terms.

Hyams delivered high-grade information about the Georgian plan. An earlier report from a low-level Canadian informant known only as ‘Fides’ stated that Thompson had hired James Bates, a former Mississippi steamboat captain, as a front man to buy the Georgian. ‘[Bates] is a determined old fellow, an old maniac,’ Fides wrote. ‘His Captain knows the lake well and is a man to succeed. It behooves people of Sandusky to keep a good lookout.’ Hyams added to this, describing a falling out between Thompson and Bates and how Colonel George Taylor Denison, a Canadian army officer with Southern sympathies, had taken title of the ship for Thompson.

The most startling revelation was related to a secret arms factory in a Toronto house, where Thompson was making torpedoes, hand grenades, and so-called Greek fire, a crude ancestor of napalm. Authorities searched the property for evidence. Thurston later reported:

The house [Hyams] described was empty, but his belief was that certain of these incendiaries were buried under the floor. Two policemen were detailed to examine the premises and in the extremity of the hall a portion of the floor was removed and under four inches of water and 18 inches of earth, several torpedoes were found buried.

These torpedoes are covered with a mixture of broken coal and pitch and resemble pieces of bituminous coal. They are made of cast iron of irregular shape, hollow and are filled with powder and covered. Hyams says they are to be thrown into coal bins in factories and steamboats etc., where they will, without being noticed, be shoveled into the fire and effect the purpose for which they are designed.

Thurston relayed all this information to Toronto police, the Canadian attorney general’s department, and to Crown Attorney Harrison. Harrison responded that he hoped ‘to arrest Col. Thompson as being concerned in a conspiracy to violate neutrality laws.’ He also suggested that perhaps Hyams could provide valuable assistance in the prosecution of the St. Albans raiders. It may have been at this point that Canadian and U.S. officials decided to put Hyams on the payroll.

On April 10, just three days after Thurston wrote to Seward, the Confederate cabal was shocked when Hyams appeared as a witness for the prosecution at the trial of raid leader Young. Hyams told the court of his meetings with Young and the plans for the St. Albans raid. He named names and pointed fingers in the courtroom.

After the war, Hyams would continue his association with Federal officials, appearing as a witness in the Lincoln assassination trials. Prosecutors initially believed that the plot to kill Lincoln involved the Canadian commissioners because a bank draft found on John Wilkes Booth’s body was drawn on a Canadian bank. Although Booth had been in Montreal in the fall of 1864, it was not proven that the assassination plot involved Confederates in Canada.

The Hyams case and similar situations had made it clear that bad luck and Thompson’s ineptitude as a spymaster were stifling the Confederacy’s mission in Canada. The chasm between Thompson and Clay had done its share of damage, too. In a series of articles in Southern Bivouac magazine in 1886, the two men’s military commander, Captain Thomas Henry Hines of Kentucky, identified their interpersonal tension as a destructive factor:

The Commissioners were not harmonious from the inception of their mission. This was a source of constant embarrassment and proved one of the most potent obstacles for success. [They] found it impossible to agree.

Col. Thompson was a man of sterling integrity, but he was inclined to believe too much that was told to him, to trust too many men, to doubt too little and suspect less. His subordinates were kept in continual apprehension, lest he compromise their efforts by indiscreet confidences.

One of Hines’s close associates, Captain John Castleman, also wrote of the friction between Thompson and Clay in his memoir Active Service. Castleman thought highly of Thompson, but not of Clay. The latter ‘was not practical,’ wrote Castleman. ‘He lacked judgment. He was peevish, irritable and suspicious. He distrusted Mr. Thompson and relied on those who were often untrustworthy.’

The mutual animosity essentially turned Confederate operations in Canada into two missions with two masters who did not talk to each other, who often worked at cross purposes, and who no doubt compromised themselves in more ways than one. Meanwhile, Canadian and U.S. authorities were working together closely by late 1864, passing information back and forth in an effort to foil the espionage efforts. Canadians did not want to be drawn into America’s Civil War and came to resent that Thompson’s harassing actions were conducted from bases in their country. In the case of the Georgian, the United States/Canadian cooperation was particularly close. For the good of the Union cause, Canadian authorities impounded the vessel at Collingwood on Lake Huron, even though when they searched the vessel, they found no arms, munitions, or torpedoes.

By the end of 1864, it was obvious to Confederate authorities in Richmond that the Canadian mission was finished. Clay returned South in November, and on December 30 Secretary of State Benjamin ordered Thompson home: ‘From reports which reach us from trustworthy sources, we are satisfied that so close an espionage is kept upon you that your services have been deprived of the value which is attached to your residence in Canada. The President thinks that it is better that you return to the Confederacy.’

Thompson did not leave Canada until mid-April when he sailed for England. His wife joined him there, and they spent the next two years in Europe before returning to Mississippi. Clay turned himself in to Federal authorities and remained in prison until 1866. Fides and Hyams disappeared without a trace. Cole drifted to Mexico after he was freed from jail and then returned to Texas, where he reportedly went into the railroad business.

They could have made history, those fledgling spies who made up the Confederacy’s Canadian mission. Cast into the arena of international espionage, these would-be heroes had the chance to help rescue their cause from the brink of its demise. Unfortunately for them, and for the cause that counted on them, they failed miserably.

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This article was written by Adam Mayers and originally published in the June 2001 issue of Civil War Times Magazine. For more great articles, be sure to subscribe to Civil War Times magazine today!

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