To be sure, there is no certain evidence tying Edwin Stanton to the Kilpatrick-Dahlgren plot. Only the fact of their February 12 meeting can be documented. Yet no other reasonable explanation meets the case. It cannot be imagined that Kilpatrick had the courage to carry this out on his own without sanction, and only Stanton could have filled such an approving role. It certainly cannot be imagined that the president countenanced political assassination and black flag warfare against civilians. Lincoln approved the capture of Davis, perhaps as a hostage for the release of Union prisoners, but nothing we know about the man suggests he would have gone beyond that.

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What is especially significant in regard to Edwin Stanton’s possible role in this affair is his determination to get rid of the evidence. In late November 1865 Stanton ordered Francis Lieber, the keeper of captured Confederate records, to furnish him with everything relating to the Kilpatrick-Dahlgren raid. On December 1 of that year Lieber complied, handing over to Stanton a packet of papers and correspondence from the Confederate archives that included material found on Dahlgren’s body, including his instructions, the address to his men, and his pocket notebook. These papers–the Dahlgren papers–have not been seen since. Historian James O. Hall, who tracked down the Lieber-Stanton transaction and who has searched widely for the missing papers, writes with considerable authority that the’suspicion lingers that Stanton consigned them to the fireplace in his office.’³⁴

Consequently, the present-day historical record of the Dahlgren papers consists of a badly faded set of the photographs taken by the Confederates, held in the National Archives; copies of Dahlgren’s address and instructions made by the London lithographer in 1864; and the transcriptions of these papers and of the pocket notebook printed in the Richmond newspapers on March 5 and April 1, 1864. Whatever Stanton’s motives were in laying his hands on the papers, historical research confirms both their existence and authenticity.

One irony of the Dahlgren case is that its wartime impact never depended upon this matter of authenticity. The Confederates never had the slightest doubt on that score. The papers were in their hands, and they could document where they had been found. In the South their implications were seen with stark clarity. ‘If the Confederate capital has been in the closest danger of massacre and conflagration,’ wrote the Richmond Sentinel’s editor, ‘if the President and Cabinet have run a serious risk of being hanged at their own door, do we not owe it chiefly to the milk-and-water spirit in which this war has hitherto been conducted?’³⁵

Some historians claim the heinous proposals contained in the Dahlgren papers were the motivation for the equally heinous shooting of Lincoln in Ford’s Theatre. This theory is well documented in Come Retribution: The Confederate Secret Service and the Assassination of Lincoln, by William A. Tidwell with James O. Hall and David W. Gaddy. Whatever linkage may be suggested between the assassin John Wilkes Booth and the plan of the would-be assassin Ulric Dahlgren, there is no doubt that the ‘milk-and-water spirit’ of warfare the Sentinel’s editor complained of underwent a dramatic change, so far as the Confederacy was concerned, following publication of the Dahlgren papers. To Richmond’s leaders, the message seemed obvious: The North had taken off the gloves, and now the South felt free–indeed obliged as a matter of self-defense–to do the same. Subsequently there was a greatly enhanced sense of motive and a rationalization for the growing commitment to covert activity.

The ultimate irony in this sordid tale of villainy and retribution is that it was all so senseless and unnecessary. The Kilpatrick-Dahlgren raid was a fiasco, its fate sealed from the beginning with the choice of co-leaders. Its bloody secret agenda need never have emerged, at least during the war, but for hot-blooded young Dahlgren’s failure to destroy the incriminating papers he was carrying. Judson Kilpatrick, Ulric Dahlgren, and their probable patron Edwin Stanton set out to engineer the death of the Confederacy’s president; the legacy spawned out of the utter failure of their effort may have included the death of their own president.

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