On March 7, two days after the Dahlgren papers appeared in print, an editor of the Richmond Sentinel expressed an opinion on the question of guilt that was widely applauded across the South. ‘Dahlgren’s infamy did not begin or die with him…,’ the editor wrote, ‘he was but the willing instrument for executing an atrocity which his superiors had carefully approved and sanctioned. Truly there is no depth of dishonor and villainy to which Lincoln and his agents are not capable of descending.’³²

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in America's Civil War magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

It is indeed quite impossible to imagine Ulric Dahlgren dreaming up this murderous scheme on his own. At age twenty-one, a newly appointed colonel acting in his first command role, Dahlgren lacked everything from motive to inspiration to initiate a program of assassination and wholesale destruction in the enemy’s capital. A willing instrument he certainly was but nothing more than that. The notes and instructions in his papers, especially those in his notebook, refer to plans of other commands beside his own and include notations about what are clearly orders and directions given him by his superior–who was, of course, Judson Kilpatrick. Indeed, in admitting to General Meade that he had read and approved Dahlgren’s address to his men, Kilpatrick was implicating himself in the villainy.

General Meade obviously recognized this, for he made sure that Judson Kilpatrick never again served in the Army of the Potomac. Kill-Cavalry next surfaced under Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman’s command. ‘I know that Kilpatrick is a hell of a damned fool,’ said Sherman as he prepared for his march from Atlanta to the sea, ‘but I want just that sort of a man to command my cavalry on this expedition.’³³

If young Dahlgren did not conceive the crime, the perpetrator of his deadly orders can only have been Judson Kilpatrick, conceiver and commander of the expedition. Assigning Kilpatrick to investigate the Dahlgren papers after their story broke in the Richmond papers was akin to assigning the fox to investigate casualties in the hen house. He smugly reported seeing a harmless address written by Colonel Dahlgren before the raid, thereby immediately marking the investigation closed. No matter how the case turned out, no matter what the perfidious Rebels might claim (or forge) concerning the papers, no one would be implicated but the late, lamented colonel. Adding that he had marked the address approved in red ink was simply a red herring.

Everything we know about Judson Kilpatrick indicates he would have had no scruples about plotting and executing a scheme of murder and destruction as outlined in the Dahlgren papers. But everything we know about him further suggests that he would never have dared to carry out this plot without at least tacit approval from some higher authority. Kilpatrick was ignoble enough to execute the mission’s secret agenda, but he was hardly brave enough to return with the corpse of Jefferson Davis unless he knew he would find a welcome in Washington.

Therefore, from Kilpatrick’s doorstep the trail of responsibility appears to lead straight to the office of Secretary of War Stanton. From first to last, there had been no intervening stops anywhere in the chain of command. Army commander Meade, whatever his views afterward, originally knew nothing beyond the stated objectives of the raid. General Pleasonton, commander of the Cavalry Corps and Kilpatrick’s immediate superior, distanced himself from the mission from its inception.

The plan for the Richmond raid and its stated objectives emerged from Kilpatrick’s private meeting with Stanton at the War Department on February 12. The idea for the raid’s secret agenda almost surely also came from that meeting. Stanton was never one to demonstrate respect for the niceties of civilized warfare. He had been, for example, the behind-the-scenes author of the set of draconian measures inflicted on Southern civilians in 1862. He was also exceedingly devious. An image comes easily to mind: Secretary Stanton describing for his visitor the perfidies of Jefferson Davis, rather in the manner of King Henry II speaking of Thomas à Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, before an audience of his eager courtiers, saying, ‘Will no one rid me of this man!’ To Judson Kilpatrick, ambitious and ruthless, his duty would have seemed clear enough. To his new patron, the thought of liberating the suffering prisoners from Belle Isle and Libby Prison to wreak vengeance on their captors would have seemed a pleasing rationalization for the scheme.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to