The
Volume XXI
Green
Bag
April, 1909
Number 4
The Lake Erie Piracy Case By Hon. IT. B. Brown Former Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States THE Civil War, which for four years was waged so fiercely through the states of the South, left but little impress upon the ordinary domestic life of those bordering upon the Great Lakes. Their inhabitants pursued their usual avoca tions, with no apprehension of danger, feeling safe in the remoteness of the con flict, and in the overpowering strength of the North to resist an invasion. The farmers plowed their fields and reaped their crops without fear of interruption. The manufactories increased rather than diminished their outputs, and the com merce of the Lakes was stimulated by one of its periodical seasons of high freights and abundant passenger traffic. Except for the presence of a prisoners' camp at Chicago, and another for officers at Johnson's Island in Lake Erie, and the frequency of blue uniforms upon the streets, there was little to remind one of the tremendous struggle that was going on within less than a day's journey to the southward. But on the 20th of September, 1864, the Lake cities were suddenly aroused from their imagined security by the news that a passenger steamer upon Lake Erie had been seized by a squad of Confederates, her crew overpowered, the steamer captured and her course
directed to Johnson's Island, with the avowed purpose of rescuing the prisoners confined there and taking them to the Ohio shore, whence it was hoped they might make their way South through the state of Ohio. The plot was carefully planned, and perhaps might have been carried to a successful conclusion had it not been for the abundant precautions taken by the Fed eral forces. The steamer, the Philo Parsons, left Detroit at her usual hour in the morning, and at the request of one Bennett G. Burleigh, who had come on board the night before, stopped at Sandwich in Canada, nearly opposite Detroit, to take on board three friends of Burleigh, one of whom he said was lame and unable to cross the ferry. Proceeding down the river, the steamer stopped at Amherstberg, where sixteen roughish-looking men came aboard with an old trunk tied with a rope. They did not seem to be connected with Burleigh, but were supposed to be refugees from the draft returning home; and little attention was paid to them. Nothing occurred to excite sus picion until the boat was well within American waters, when one Beall, the leader of the gang, while engaged in conversation with the mate in the pilot
