John Yates Beall

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
John Yates Beall

John Yates Beall (born January 1, 1835 in Jefferson County , Virginia , † February 24, 1865 in Fort Columbus, Governors Island , New York City ) was a volunteer in the Confederation Army who was executed as a spy and guerrilla fighter towards the end of the American Civil War has been.

Life

Beall came from a distinguished family in Jefferson County, what is now West Virginia . He was the son of a wealthy farmer and studied law at the University of Virginia , which he gave up after the death of his father to take over the farm in 1855. At the beginning of the Civil War, he volunteered for the 2nd Virginia Infantry, but retired from active service after being shot in the lung in the First Battle of the Bull Run . He planned to make shipping traffic with a privateer unsafe for the Confederates on the Great Lakes , but this was officially rejected in order not to endanger relations with Great Britain . But he received the rank of Captain ( Acting Master ) of the Confederate Navy without command. Thereupon he raised a crew himself and began with the ships The Raven and The Swan for sea raids on the Potomac River and in the Chesapeake Bay , conquered smaller ships of the northern states , interrupted an undersea telegraph cable and partially destroyed the lighthouse of Cape Charles . He was captured in November 1863 and imprisoned at Fort McHenry , Baltimore , until he was exchanged in May 1864.

His next plan was to free Confederate prisoners on Johnson's Island in Lake Erie . He moved to Canada again on his own with a group of volunteers and in September 1864 he succeeded in capturing two ships, the steamships Philo Parsons and Island Queen on Lake Erie near Kelley's Island, which transported passengers and cargo. The crew opposed his plan to hijack a Northern gunboat. The group returned to the Canadian shore and disbanded.

Beall now intended to derail a railroad transport with Confederate captured officers. To do this, he made several unsuccessful attempts near Buffalo . The trains carried the prisoners from Johnson's Island to Fort Warren in Boston Harbor . He was captured on December 16, 1864, on the third attempt near the Suspension Bridge railway station in Niagara , and imprisoned at Fort Lafayette (his accomplices escaped). General John Adams Dix presented him to a military court closed to the public (but with the prominent New York criminal defense attorney James T. Brady as a defender) and he was on 8 February on charges of espionage and violation of the laws of war (he was wearing civilian clothes when he was arrested) to Sentenced to death . Beall was then transferred for execution to Fort Columbus on Governors Island, opposite the city of New York in the Hudson . Only now did the case become known in the newspapers. Friends in high positions, which Beall still had from his student days or who felt connected to the family, rushed to his aid and formulated petitions. Six US senators , many congressmen and other celebrities turned to President Abraham Lincoln for a pardon, but the latter declined. Beall was hanged .

Allegedly, actor John Wilkes Booth also turned to Lincoln, which led to speculation that this was a motive for his assassination attempt on Lincoln. According to this legend, Lincoln initially wanted to pardon Beall, which he also promised Booth at a meeting, but was changed by his Secretary of State William H. Seward , who came from New York and feared for the safety there. The story of Booth's pardon was launched as early as the 1870s by journalists (Mark Pomeroy, editor of the La Crosse Democrat he founded in Wisconsin in 1860 , who agitated against Lincoln, and later editor of Pomeroy's Democrat ) and by Senate Secretary John Weiss Forney , who, according to legend, should have supported Booth in his petition for clemency, publicly rejected it as an invention in 1876. There is also no evidence whatsoever that Booth knew Beall or even, as legend has it, was a personal friend or fellow student. The name Booth does not appear anywhere among the many requests for mercy for Beall.

In reality, Lincoln was tough from the start. He did not want to endanger the authority of Dix, the military commander in New York, and closed himself off to all petitions days before the execution. Dix had ended the Draft Riots in New York in 1863 and suspected Beall of being involved in Confederate arson attempts in New York in November 1864, although Beall denied it. The guilty were caught and executed a month after Beall.

Beall left a diary. He is buried in Charles Town , Jefferson County.

literature

  • John Yates Beall, Daniel B. Lucas: Memoir of John Yates Beall: His Life; Trial; Correspondence; Diary; and Private Manuscript Found Among His Papers, Including His Own Account of the Raid on Lake Erie , J. Lovell, 1865
  • John W. Headley Confederate Operations in Canada and New York , Neale Publishing, 1906, reprinted by Time-Life 1981.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Lloyd Lewis Myths After Lincoln , New York: Grosset & Dunlap 1929, 1957
  2. ↑ Biography in wisconsin history by Marcus Mills Pomeroy (1833-1896)
  3. ↑ The story of Pomeroy is reprinted in the Mariposa Gazette, May 13, 1876
  4. ↑ Michael W. Kauffman , author of the Booth biography American Brutus , at Abraham Lincoln Online. Booth didn't graduate from the University of Virginia
personal data
SURNAME Beall, John Yates
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American guerrillas of the southern states
DATE OF BIRTH January 1, 1835
PLACE OF BIRTH Jefferson County , Virginia
DATE OF DEATH February 24, 1865
Place of death Governors Island , New York