Devil's Game
About the Book
The first book-length study of one of the Civil War's most outlandish and mysterious characters, Devil's Game traces the amazing career of Charles A. Dunham, double agent.Dunham was a spy, forger, journalist, and master of dirty tricks. Writing for a variety of papers (including New York's Tribune, Herald, and World) under alternate names, he routinely faked stories, even writing contradictory accounts for different papers. Dunham also used his journalism to create new identities and then boldly cast himself to play the roles. With the help of his wife, Ophelia, he passed in and out of at least a half-dozen personae.
His characters included the vicious "Colonel" Charles Dunham, under the command of General Early; Colonel James Watson Wallace, a wounded Virginian convalescing in Montreal; and Colonel George Margrave, "one of the most cool and reckless villains in the Confederacy." In the South, he was known as Isaac Haynes, with still more aliases for his Canadian travels. Dunham would reinforce his house of cards by going so far as to have the invented characters in his ersatz stories accuse each other of heinous crimes.
Dunham achieved his greatest infamy at the war's end. Called to testify in Washington, he was the most notorious of the witnesses to swear that Lincoln's assassination had been plotted by conspirators in Montreal and Toronto, on orders from Richmond. These intrigues continued even from behind bars, as he worked tirelessly to build a network of evidence implicating President Andrew Johnson in the assassination.
Although this testimony was later discredited, until now many parts of Dunham's wartime (and postwar) career have remained shadowy. Carman Cumming sheds new light on numerous escapades, including Dunham's effort to sell Lincoln on plans for a raid to capture Jefferson Davis and a complex effort in Canada to plan--and then betray--cross-border raids.
Exhaustively researched and unprecedented in its depth, Devil's Game is a shocking portrait of a consummate chameleon. Drawing together all previous Dunham scholarship, Cumming offers the first detailed tour of Dunham's convoluted, high-stakes, international deceits. A carefully crafted assessment of Dunham's motives, personality, and the complex effects of his schemes make Devil's Game an important and original work that will change some basic assumptions about the secret operations of the Civil War.
About the Author
Carman Cumming worked as a reporter and editor in Canada and the United States before becoming a journalism professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. His publications include Secret Craft: The Journalism of Edward Farrer and Sketches from a Young Country: The Images of Grip Magazine.Reviews
"The first extensive treatment of [Dunham's] mendacious career. . . . Well worth reading for a glimpse at the termites that are eternally at work in the foundations of historical truth."--Civil War Book Review"Cumming has done a great service in so fully and carefully bringing [Dunham's] activities to the attention of scholars and anyone interested in the more bizarre and Byzantine aspects of the Civil War."--Louisiana History
Blurbs
"During the Civil War, Charles A. Dunham successfully and profitably enacted the role of agent provocateur for both the Confederacy and the United States. His intricate hoaxes, eagerly accepted by credulous editors and officials, were important in establishing the fear of catastrophe that periodically infected both sides. So convincing were his lies and so anxious were his patrons to believe the worst of the enemy, that even after his exposure as an unscrupulous fraud he continued to be well-paid for his stories. Readers of this superlative book will likely come away with a new view of the Civil War."--William Hanchett, author of Lincoln Murder Conspiracies
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