Kane in The Civil War
As the Civil War was beginning, Kane was moved from Fort McHenry to Fort Lafayette, and then to Fort Columbus, New York. From there he wrote to Secretary of State William H. Seward in October 1861 asking for a speedy trial and complaining that the conditions at Lafayette had been so bad that he required medical care for "an affection of the heart which I attribute to the nature of my confinement at Lafayette." This heart condition may have precluded his service later on the field of battle for the Confederacy. Eventually Kane was released and went to Canada.
According to the New York Times obituary of him on June 23, 1878, Kane received a commission on General Robert E. Lee’s staff, and was with Lee at Gettysburg. This seems unlikely; a letter he wrote to Jefferson Davis on July 17, 1863, just two weeks after Gettysburg, is from Canada, where Kane offers his services in organizing an expedition against Chicago, Milwaukee, and Detroit. His plan was to destroy all shipping, thus "paralyzing the lake commerce." By November, he writes Davis again from Montreal to report on the failure of a plan to rescue Confederate prisoners at Sandusky Bay. In Canada in 1864, Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth presented to Confederate officials - including Kane- his plan to kidnap President Lincoln.
In February 1864 Kane ran the Federal blockade and was soon in Richmond. In 1864 he published a broadside in which he exhorted Marylanders in the Confederate army to form their own Maryland militias, rather than serve under the flags of other states. On July 20, 1864, he is reported by the Charleston Mercury to be “about to cooperate with our forces then near Baltimore, with 15,000 Maryland recruits." On October 8, 1864 he writes again to Davis, offering to recruit Marylanders to form a corps of heavy artillery, a suggestion that was politely declined. In March 1865, he is reported to have been instrumental in acquiring fresh uniforms for Marylanders in the Confederate Army. In the closing days of the war, he is still writing to Jefferson Davis to report on the movement of troops around Danville, Virginia.
Read more about this topic: George Proctor Kane
Famous quotes containing the words civil war, kane, civil and/or war:
“Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage’s earthquake.”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
“Where is the “unexplored land” but in our own untried enterprises? To an adventurous spirit any place—London, New York, Worcester, or his own yard—is “unexplored land,” to seek which Frémont and Kane travel so far. To a sluggish and defeated spirit even the Great Basin and the Polaris are trivial places.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... though mathematics may teach a man how to build a bridge, it is what the Scotch Universities call the humanities, that teach him to be civil and sweet-tempered.”
—Amelia E. Barr (1831–1919)
“The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime. It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)