Book Review: The Plot to Perpetuate Slavery: How George McClellan, Southern Spies and a Confidence Man Nearly Derailed Emancipation

The Plot to Perpetuate Slavery: How George McClellan, Southern Spies and a Confidence Man Nearly Derailed Emancipation. By Phil Roycraft. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., Inc., Publishers, 2024. Paperback, 227 pp. $39.95.

Reviewed by Zachery A. Fry

The plot of Phil Roycraft’s book reads a bit like a John le Carré novel. Major General George McClellan, frustrated by the announcement of President Abraham Lincoln’s preliminary emancipation proclamation in the days after Antietam, greenlights a clandestine mission to Richmond to broach the topic of peace with Confederate politicians and diplomats. Undercover networks spring to life.

In response, Confederate agents acting at the behest of President Jefferson Davis send an emissary to the White House to announce the secession government’s conditions for an armistice: amnesty for Rebels, the return of fugitive slaves, and immediate disavowal of emancipation. Lincoln and his cabinet listen, even seeming to entertain the overtures, while McClellan, with the main army of the republic, waits north of the Potomac River to see the fruits of his nefarious labor bloom. But the peace proposal is not all it seems. The Rebel messenger is a con man, and the armistice talk is a clever Confederate ruse to coax Lincoln into renouncing emancipation. When the details hit the press, it produces a flurry of accusations, recriminations, and embarrassing exposés.

The plot unfolds in much more detail, of course—sometimes frustratingly so. Roycraft, an environmental engineer in Michigan with numerous articles in state historical journals to his name, does his best to balance the story. An initial dramatis personae would help the reader navigate the many names and aliases that fill the volume. The sprawling web of connections and associations Roycraft finds at work in the story are forged everywhere from church congregations and college classrooms to battlefields and prison cells, and they are sometimes interrupted by digressions that don’t seem altogether connected to the story at hand. The convoluted course of the schemes leaves the reader wondering who is really pulling the strings—McClellan, Davis, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (always good for some nefarious involvement), or the operational figures such as Confederate agent Thomas Nelson Conrad and undercover Unionist envoy William Chase Barney.

Despite this cacophony of characters, the main figure emerging from the pages is John Wesley Greene, a grotesquely fascinating scoundrel with an unlikely early stint as a Union regimental chaplain. Before the war, Greene had swindled numerous New York businesses and, according to Roycraft, even inspired Herman Melville’s novel The Confidence Man. Dismissed from the service for pilfering his flock’s letters from home, Chaplain Greene reemerges in the autumn of 1862 to deliver Davis’s peace proposal to Washington. Exactly how and why the Confederates entrusted Greene with this task is explored in some detail through Roycraft’s use of Greene’s published affidavit and some circumstantial evidence. Herein lies a key issue with the book, one that also tinges many other works on Civil War intelligence operations. Based on the extant source base—which includes personal memoirs, newspaper articles, and a handful of government files—connecting the dots among various figures requires conjecture and innuendo. The altogether frequent use of words such as “likely” and “undoubtedly” in the book illustrates the dilemma.

The other aspect some readers may find unsettling in The Plot to Perpetuate Slavery is its verdict on George McClellan. Like William Styple’s work McClellan’s Other Story, Roycraft’s volume finds the young general guilty of malicious, even treasonous, political intrigue after Antietam. The author discusses in detail a supposed message from McClellan to Robert E. Lee after the battle calling for a political compromise to end hostilities immediately. This story, or some variation of it, has reappeared frequently over the years among McClellan’s legion of detractors. It echoes certain allegations from the 1864 campaign trail—almost immediately disproved—that Little Mac schemed with the enemy to halt Lincoln’s policy in its tracks by presenting an armistice to the president as a fait accompli. According to Roycraft’s version of events, McClellan’s inactivity for the duration of September and October can best be explained by his desire to see the course of the peace talks the general had subversively instigated between Davis and Lincoln. Readers should judge for themselves the case Roycraft presents on this matter.

The Plot to Perpetuate Slavery is an intriguing book, and Roycraft’s passion for pursuing this tantalizing story is evident on every page. He has uncovered some fascinating figures. John Wesley Greene’s career, above all else in the work, reminds us just how common fraud and embezzlement were in the Civil War era. But it’s also a tangled yarn that Roycraft spins, and his reliance on conjecture to pull everything together overburdens the story.

These views are the reviewer’s alone and do not represent the position of the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or the federal government.

Zachery A. Fry is assistant professor of military history at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. He is author of A Republic in the Ranks: Loyalty and Dissent in the Army of the Potomac, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2020.