Reconsideration.

RULE 28-A question may be reconsidered at any time during the same meeting, or at the first meeting held thereafter. A motion for reconsideration being once made, and decided in the negative, shall not be re-moved before the next meeting.

RULE 29.-A motion to reconsider shall be made and seconded by members who voted in the majority.

RULE 30.-No question shall be reconsidered more than once, nor shall a vote to reconsider be reconsidered.

Committees.

RULE 31.—All committees shall be appointed by the president, unless otherwise specially directed by the society.

RULE 32.—All committees shall consist of three members each, unless some other number be specified, and the first person mentioned shall be chairman.

RULE 33.-On the acceptance of a final report from a committee, the said committee shall be considered discharged without a vote, unless otherwise or dered.

Reports of committees.

RULE 34-Committees to whom references are made shall, in all cases, report in writing the state of facts, with their opinions thereon.

RULE 35-All reports of committees shall be addressed to the president and members of the society of the Illini ;" shall briefly describe the matter referred and the conclusions to which the committee has arrived, which conclusions should be summed up in the form of an order, resolution, or recommendation.

The rules.

RULE 36.-No appropriation shall be made by the society unless there is money in the treasury sufficient to pay it.

RULE 37.-Three members of the executive committee shall be a quorum for the transaction of business.

RULE 38.-No warrant shall be legal unless it has been passed by order of the executive committee, and is countersigned by the president and secretary.

RULE 39.-These rules may be temporarily suspended by a majority of the members present, but shall not be repealed, altered, or amended unless by a concurrence of two-thirds of the members voting.

RULE 40.—The society shall have power to make such additional rules, from time to time, as may be considered necessary for the better regulation of the affairs of the society.

WAR DEPARTMENT, BUREAU OF MILITARY JUSTICE, December 27, 1864. Respectfully returned to Colonel Hardie, inspector general United States

army.

No records relating to the within named are found in this office.
By direction of the Judge Advocate General.

A. A. HOSMER, Major and Judge Advocate.

BUREAU OF MILITARY JUSTICE,
March 31, 1865.

DEAR SIR: I have the honor to state that the record of the trial of St. Leger Grenfel, which is supposed to have taken place recently, has not yet been received at this bureau. Unless it is desired that the papers accompanying your note of the 16th instant should be returned without further delay, they will be retained until the record arrives, with a view to their being considered therewith.

Very respectfully, your obedient servant,

To the President: The following report of the opinion of this bureau upon the proceedings at the trial by military commission of certain persons charged with conspiracy to liberate rebel prisoners of war confined in Chicago, and to destroy and sack that city, is respectfully submitted.

The commission began its session on the 11th of January, 1865. The pris oners arraigned before it were: Charles Walsh, Buckner S. Morris, Vincent Marmaduke, R. T. Semmes, Charles T. Daniel alias Charles Travis, G. St. Leger Grenfel, and Benjamin M. Anderson.

Walsh was convicted and sentenced to five years penitentiary confinement ; Morris and Marmaduke were acquitted by the commission; Semmes was convicted and sentenced to three years' imprisonment; Daniel escaped from confinement during the trial, but was, notwithstanding, convicted and sentenced to death; Anderson committed suicide in prison, and Grenfel was convicted and condemned to death.

General Hooker approves the proceedings in all the cases, and in those of Daniel and Grenfel refers the proceedings for the action of the President. He designates the penitentiary at Columbus, Ohio, as the place of confinement for the prisoners Walsh and Semmes.

In the case of Walsh a separate report has been rendered unnecessary. In the case of Semmes a special report upon his application for pardon was prepared in this bureau on the 6th of June, and has been submitted to the President.

The prisoners were arraigned upon the following charges:

First. Conspiring, in violation of the laws of war, to release the rebel prisoners of war confined by authority of the United States at Camp Douglas, near Chicago, Illinois.

The time laid in the specifications as that selected for the perpetration of these crimes was the 1st day of November, 1864, or thereabouts.

The action of the commission in proceeding to the conviction and sentence of the prisoner Daniel, after his voluntary flight, has the sanction of precedent, and has been held by this bureau to be justifiable in the similar case of Harrison H. Dodd, grand commander of the order of the Sons of Liberty, in the State of Indiana. The opinion expressed in the report upon that case in favor of the legality of such a course is still adhered to by this bureau.

Daniel is shown to have been a soldier in the so-called confederate service, and was arrested on the roof of the house occupied by Walsh, now under con

viction for participation in the conspiracy. There can be no doubt that he was one of a large number of rebel fugitives, sent from Canada to aid in the hideous projects of the conspirators, and the abandonment of his defence by voluntary flight is believed to have been properly accepted by the commission, apart from the evidence, as a confession of his guilt. It is respectfully recommended that the sentence in his case be approved.

In the case of G. St. Leger Grenfel, now under sentence of death for complicity in the conspiracy, a careful examination of the record brings this bureau to the conclusion that the commission are warranted by the evidence taken in the case, and by the rules of law as applicable to the impeachment of witnesses, in the findings to which, after a most patient, and doubtless absolutely impartial investigation of the case, they have ultimately arrived.

That a plot for the release of the prisoners at Camp Douglas, and the destruction of Chicago, was planned and nearly matured, is placed beyond a doubt by all the evidence in the case. That it was designed and matured by rebel agents of the confederate government in Canada, its cost defrayed from funds placed in the hands of those agents for such purposes, and a large number of those who were to have been its perpetrators sent thence to aid and lead in the assault, is also demonstrated. The proofs are further conclusive that many of the more prominent leaders of the order of the Sons of Liberty were cognizant of the design, lent it their hearty approval and support, and aimed to involve in it, through the machinery of their treasonable associations, the multitudes of deluded followers, whose faith in the government they had taken every measure to undermine, and whose obedience to their mandates they had, as they thought, secured by the most solemn and binding obligations. The evidence which tends to fasten upon Grenfel a knowledge of and participation in the plot is of such a nature as to satisfy this bureau of the correctness of the conclusions of the court. It is chiefly that of a witness named John T. Shanks, formerly in the rebel service, and lately a prisoner of war at Camp Douglas. He was employed in November last, by the commanding officer of the post, Brigadier General Sweet, to act as a detective in the discovery of evidence against persons supposed to be connected with the conspiracy for the release of the Camp Douglas prisoners and the destruction of the city of Chicago.

Grenfel, whom the witness knew to have been formerly in the rebel service, was then at the Richmond House, and had registered his name without concealment upon its books. With him the witness Shanks sought an interview, and he details on the stand a conversation which he states he himself had with Grenfel, in company with a man of the name of Fielding, from whom he also swears that he obtained, in a separate conversation, further corroborative proof of Grenfel's complicity in the alleged conspiracy. At his first interview with Grenfel the witness states that no one else was present, and that they separated after a few questions had been put him as to the readiness of the Camp Douglas prisoners to co-operate with assistance from without. The second meeting was at half past nine on the same evening, when Grenfel introduced him to a Mr. Fielding. This interview was also brief, in consequence of Grenfel's stating that he was ill, and Fielding at once went away with witness to another room, where much information was imparted to the latter on the subject of the plot. Shanks and Grenfel were arrested at the hotel the same night. The witness testifies that at each of these conversations the plans of the conspirators were exposed to him. If his statements are to be relied upon, they fasten upon Grenfel a complete knowledge of the plot, and are amply sufficient to warrant the enforcement of the sentence pronounced by the commission.

Shanks's first interview with Grenfel, as has already been stated, was but of few minutes' duration, which he states were employed by the latter in questions about the willingness of the prisoners to co-operate. They were wholly alone. They met again, by appointment, at half past nine the same evening, and wit

66

ness was introduced by Grenfel to one Fielding. Something was said at this interview about effecting the release of the Camp Douglas prisoners, and I was asked by Fielding how many men would be required to accomplish that." Witness volunteered, with two hundred men, to tear down one side of the square, and Greufel, Fielding, and Shanks went on to arrange the details of the plan. The conversation was with Fielding, but in the hearing of Grenfel, who was walking to and fro and occasionally making suggestions. After witness had, as he states, exhibited a plan of the camp, Grenfel professed to be unwell, and Shanks and Fielding went away to another room, where the details were again minutely gone over and the various parts assigned.

Witness states that he saw a great many others at the hotel that evening who were in the conspiracy, but is unable to give their names. Witness states, in answer to a question of the judge advocate, that at his first interview with Grenfel the latter said that the means for the project were to come from the confederate government, and influential citizens of the north were to co-operate. Colonel Grenfel was to lead the attack on the city. Fielding said there were about fifteen hundred men they could rely on. Grenfel informed witness he was in communication with Judge Morris and his wife in the project.

It was attempted to show, by oral testimony, in order to impeach and discredit this witness, that he had been convicted while a clerk in the land office in Texas, under an indictment for the forgery of land warrants, and to have spent many months in prison in expiation of his crime. This he denied, under oath, in the most positive manner, when cross-examined upon it by the counsel for the defence. It is a well-settled rule of law that the answer of a witness to a question put him on cross-examination upon a collateral matter, and with a view to injure his credibility, must be taken as final.

Evidence in rebuttal cannot be legally admitted afterwards to show the falsity of his answer. And though considerable testimony was subsequently introduced by the defence to show that Shanks had been convicted and punished for forgery, while in Texas, yet his denial of this accusation on cross-examination is legally decisive of the matter, and renders the admission of the rebutting testimony to the particular fact of his conviction for forgery wholly unjustified by all the longestablished rules of evidence in criminal trials. Though the evidence referred to was permitted by the court to be introduced, yet, being in fact inadmissible, the subsequent conviction of the accused is to be accepted by this bureau as a proof that the court, in obedience to the rules of evidence, ultimately and very properly disregarded it in their deliberations on the case.

Considerable testimony was further offered by the defence to the worthlessness of Shanks's general reputation in his native State of Texas. The witnesses to this point, however, were themselves Texans, sharers in the rebellion against the institutions of their country, and, therefore, deserving of little credit, when testifying in the interests of one who is known to have been in former years a leader in their armies, to have taken part in some of the most desperate of their projects, and to have entered heart and soul-himself a foreigner, and with no national stimulus to participation-into the vastest struggle for the overthrow of free institutions and the perpetuation of hopeless slavery which the world has ever known.

It has been repeatedly held by this bureau, and the opinion is still adhered to, that the testimony of men in sympathy with the confederate cause is to be regarded as nearly or wholly valueless when given in the interest of one who has shared in their sympathies, and whose punishment, for crimes common to him and to themselves, they are anxious to avert. It is believed, therefore, that the court was justified in the rejection of this testimony, when forming their conclusions upon the merits of the case; and when we further take into consideration the fact that the members of the commission had the advantage of a personal inspection of the witnesses, and could judge of their credibility by a multitude

of signs which wholly escape the observation of him whose duty it is simply to read the written record, it is believed that there can be no justification for a reversal by this bureau, of conclusions arrived at after a most protracted and toilsome investigation, by a tribunal composed of officers of the rank and high intelligence which the members of this commission are known to possess.

Grenfel, it was shown, had come to Chicago direct from a small town in southern Illinois, where he had spent some months in shooting game. He had been for a long time in the service of the confederacy, but had finally retired from it; had reported to the Secretary of War at Washington in June, 1864, and had been permitted to go at large by the latter after a careful investigation of his conduct and purposes.

The evidence of a witness named Langhorne, touching a previous visit of Grenfel's to Chicago, at the time of the meeting of the democratic convention in August, is entitled to a certain weight. Langhorne swears that it had been intended by the rebel agents in Canada, with the co-operation of the Sons of Liberty, to make an attack upon the city at that time; that a number of armed men and large sums of money were sent from Canada for the purpose, and that then, as at the November attempt, Grenfel was to take charge of the expedition.

Langhorne says, in reference to a plan to free the Camp Douglas prisoners in August: "I travelled in company with Colonel Anderson from Toronto to Chicago just before the Chicago convention of last August; we remained all day in the Grand Junction depot. The party I was with got on at Jackson, and when we arrived at Chicago Colonel Grenfel was on the train. I had never seen him before on that trip from Toronto, Canada West. The party I was with were Colonel Anderson, Bell, and Dr. Smith; Grenfel was with others, I suppose.

He then goes on to say that he went to General Walsh's house, and made cartridges, and had a conversation with Walsh, in which the latter said there were upwards of 1,200 men engaged in the enterprise. His next reference to Grenfel is, that the latter told him that Marmaduke was in Chicago, also; which, however, has no bearing on the case, inasmuch as the commission acquitted Mar maduke of the charges. He then states that his party became alarmed from some cause and departed. Grenfel came down into our room and said he could not find anybody, either Hines or Marmaduke, who could tell him what to do. He afterwards told me that all they had to do was to go to south Illinois and drill copperheads."

It is to be stated here that the evidence of the defence establishes conclusively that he did not do this, but spent the two following months in shooting, in no connection with politics whatever. This is freely admitted by the judge advo

cate.

and

The witness is subsequently asked if he had any conversation with Grenfel on the cars from Canada to Chicago, and he replied, "Yes;" that Grenfel came up to the end of the car where he and his party were, wearing a gray suit of clothes, and on being told by witness that in those clothes he "would not live five hours in Chicago," replied "No, this is an old uniform that was worn in an English battalion I once belonged to. I have my English papers, and my dog gun, and if they ask me what I am doing, I will say I am going a hunting." The remaining testimony affecting Grenfel is that of one George W. Hull, another rebel soldier. He details a conversation had by him in Kentucky, in October last, with Benjamin M. Anderson, one of the accused, and who committed suicide during the progress of the trial, in which he states Anderson told him of an intended attack on Camp Douglas, and that an Englishman had been found who was to lead the assault. On being pressed, the witness stated that he inquired of Anderson if the Englishman's name was Grenfel, and he thinks he answered that it was.

In the course of the testimony of this witness he describes several cases of cruelty practiced by the accused on Union men while in the rebel service.