George St. Leger Grenfell (May 30, 1808 – March 1868?) was a British soldier of fortune, of the Cornish family, who claimed to have fought in Algeria, in Morocco against the Barbary pirates, under Garibaldi in South America, in the Crimean War, and in the Sepoy Mutiny. Immigrating to the United States, he fought for the Confederacy during the American Civil War, and was a leader of a notorious plot to seize control of parts of the Northern U.S.
Biography
Grenfell was born in London, England. He came to America in 1862 and became an officer in the Confederate States Army, serving with cavalryman John Hunt Morgan, General Braxton Bragg, and General J.E.B. Stuart. He resigned from the Confederate Army in 1864 to join a plot to take over the governments of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois and establish a Northwestern Confederacy. When the plan to take over Chicago was discovered, Grenfell and some 150 others were arrested. In what became known as the "Chicago Conspiracy", Grenfell was tried, convicted, and sentenced to hang. Through the efforts of the British Minister in Washington, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by President Andrew Johnson at the isolated Fort Jefferson military prison located about 70 miles west of Key West, Florida, in the Dry Tortugas islands of the Gulf of Mexico. He arrived at Fort Jefferson on October 8, 1865.
The great majority of the 527 prisoners at Fort Jefferson when Grenfell arrived were Union Army privates whose most common transgression was desertion. A number of civilians were also being held, most for robbery. Grenfell was in a special category called "state prisoner."
There were only four other state prisoners at Fort Jefferson: Dr. Samuel A. Mudd, Edmund Spangler, Samuel Arnold, and Michael O'Laughlen, all of whom had arrived at Fort Jefferson just two and a half months earlier after being convicted at the Lincoln assassination conspiracy trial.
Unfortunately for Grenfell, Dr. Mudd had attempted to escape a few days before Grenfell arrived. Fearing a larger escape attempt of the state prisoners, the five men were confined together for the next three months in a ground level cell known as the "dungeon." In a letter Dr. Mudd wrote at the time to his brother-in-law Jere Dyer, he said:
We are all at this moment in chains. Neither Colonel Grenfel nor myself has been taken out to work the past two or three days, but suffered to remain passively in our quarters. He is quite an intelligent man, tall, straight, and about sixty-one or two years of age. He speaks fluently several languages, and often adds mirth by his witty sarcasm and jest. He has been badly wounded and is now suffering with dropsy, and is allowed no medical treatment whatever, but loaded down with chains, and fed upon the most loathsome food, which treatment in a short time must bring him to an untimely grave. You will confer an act of kindness and mercy by acquainting the English Minister at Washington, Sir F.A. Bruce, of these facts.
In an April 16, 1867, letter to Tom Dyer, his wife's brother in New Orleans, Dr. Mudd again wrote of Grenfell:
Colonel St. Ledger Grenfel is kept in close confinement under guard. A few days ago, being sick, he applied to the doctor of the Post for medical attention, which he was refused, and he was ordered to work. Feeling himself unable to move about, he refused. He was then ordered to carry a ball until further orders, which he likewise refused. He was then tied up for half a day, and still refusing, he was taken to one of the wharves, thrown overboard with a rope attached, and ducked; being able to keep himself above water, a fifty pound weight was attached to his feet. Grenfel is an old man, about sixty. He has never refused to do work which he was able to perform, but they demanded more than he felt able, and he wisely refused. They could not conquer him, and he is doing now that which he never objected doing.
In a 1926 Saturday Evening Post article, author George Allan England provided a description of Colonel Grenfell, as told to him by a former Fort Jefferson lighthouse keeper: