Rebel at Large

Two days after Abraham Lincoln's assassination, a customer in a Detroit sa loon pointed at a slender, mustached young stranger and shouted: "That's John Wilkes Booth!" The stranger promptly drew a revolver, clouted the first man at hand and drove his boot into the belly of another. Then he backed out the door and dashed to the ferry. By putting his revolver to the ferry captain's head, he persuaded him to get started at once. Once on the Canadian side, he apologized for the "inconvenience," gave the captain $5 and walked off.

The revolver-toting stranger was not John Wilkes Booth, but a look-alike named Thomas Mines. Like Booth, he had a price on his head, but the resemblance ended there. Hines was a former Confederate cavalryman from Kentucky who had made a reputation with Morgan's Raiders. Cool, intelligent and apparently without fear, he had been assigned to espionage work by the Confederacy's Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin. In Confederate Agent, Author Horan tries to prove that Captain Hines was the mastermind of a gigantic plot to defeat the North from within. Hines's chief weapon: a vast, fifth-column army of Copperheads whose leaders Hines was to inspire and direct. That the plot did not work, says Horan, was no fault of Hines.

Fire & Rebellion. Author Horan is ,a somewhat heavy-handed writer whose researches almost always lead him to fascinating material. Previous books (on Jesse James, the Pinkerton detective agency) dealt with surefire subjects; but Tom Hines remains a shadowy figure right to the end of Confederate Agent. Nonetheless, it becomes apparent that he must have been a devil of a fellow, always hunted, sometimes caught, never held for keeps. He was only 23 when the Confederate government sent him to Canada with apparently unlimited funds. There he met with the top U.S. Copperheads, formed a "squadron" of Confederate saboteurs, and went to work. If he was really responsible for what happened after that, as Author Horan suggests, he may be one of the most neglected men of Civil War history.

From across the Canadian border a Confederate band rode into St. Albans, Vt., robbed the bank and made its president swear "loyalty" to the Confederacy. In St. Louis, Federal boats were burned at the levee. In New York City, 15 hotels and Barnum's Museum were set afire in a vain effort to burn the whole city to the ground. In Louisville there was an unsuccessful attempt to kidnap Vice Presidentelect Andrew Johnson, and in Chicago, Hines himself arrived to direct "an armed rebellion of thousands of Copperheads." What happened there was to happen many times to Hines in his efforts to start rebellions in Illinois. Ohio and Indiana: the news leaked out. Federal troops arrived, and the leaders got cold feet.

Law & Justice. During that year, Hines seemed to be everywhere at once, even stepped back to his native Kentucky to marry his childhood sweetheart, Nancy. But with Grant and Sherman battering the rebels in the field. Hines's cause was lost. At war's end he sent for his wife, began to study law in Canada while he waited until it was safe to go home. Later, in Bowling Green, he hung out his shingle and did so well that in 1875 he became chief justice of Kentucky's Court of Appeals. Hines died in 1898, Author Horan says, of a broken heart. His Nancy had died three weeks before.

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