merican Knights," "Order of the Star," "Sons of Liberty," and by other
equally high-sounding names, which they adopted and discarded in turn,
as one after the other was discovered and brought into undesired
prominence. The titles and grips and passwords of these secret military
organizations, the turgid eloquence of their meetings, and the
clandestine drill of their oath-bound members, doubtless exercised quite
as much fascination on such followers as their unlawful object of aiding
and abetting the Southern cause. The number of men thus enlisted in the
work of inducing desertion among Union soldiers, fomenting resistance to
the draft, furnishing the Confederates with arms, and conspiring to
establish a Northwestern Confederacy in full accord with the South,
which formed the ultimate dream of their leaders, is hard to determine.
Vallandigham, the real head of the movement, claimed five hundred
thousand, and Judge Holt, in an official report, adopted that as being
somewhere near the truth, though others counted them at a full million.

The government, cognizant of their existence, and able to produce
abundant evidence against the ring-leaders whenever it chose to do so,
wisely paid little heed to these dark-lantern proceedings, though, as
was perhaps natural, military officers commanding the departments in
which they were most numerous were inclined to look upon them more
seriously; and Governor Morton of Indiana was much disquieted by their
work in his State.

Mr. Lincoln's attitude toward them was one of good-humored contempt.
"Nothing can make me believe that one hundred thousand Indiana Democrats
are disloyal," he said; and maintained that there was more folly than
crime in their acts. Indeed, though prolific enough of oaths and
treasonable utterances, these organizations were singularly lacking in
energy and initiative. Most of the attempts made against the public
peace in the free States and along the northern border came, not from
resident conspirators, but from Southern emissaries and their Canadian
sympathizers; and even these rarely rose above the level of ordinary
arson and highway robbery.

Jacob Thompson, who had been Secretary of the Interior under President
Buchanan, was the principal agent of the Confederate government in
Canada, where he carried on operations as remarkable for their
impracticability as for their malignity. One plan during the summer of
1864 contemplated nothing less than seizing and ho