George Proctor Kane - Kane in The Civil War

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.