by a grant from the Ohio Humanities Council, a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

HOST: In September 1864, a pirate from Virginia sailed onto Lake Erie.

His goal was to liberate the Confederate officers imprisoned on Johnson's Island near Sandusky, Ohio.

Follow us through this story of conspiracy, intrigue and adventure, a story of the Civil War.

♪ MAN: It is well remembered along the lake shore; Buffalo, Detroit and Cleveland were filled with excitement; the citizens patrolled the streets by night, and visions of piratical craft sailing boldly in and firing upon the defenseless houses filled all eyes.

-- Harper's New Monthly Magazine ♪ MAN: John Y. Beall was a most extraordinary man.

He was well-educated, manly, brave and had the faculty of at once commanding the respect and the confidence of all of any age who came in contact with him."

--Major John Breckinridge Castleman, Confederate spy ♪ MAN: "It was the severity of the winters that tolled so heavily on us.

Many were from the extreme South, and some had never seen a fall of snow.

The first day of January 1864 was a revelation.

On that day, the thermometer marked 25 degrees below zero."

-- Lt. Horace Carpenter, 9th Louisiana.

HOST: This is what remains of the Civil War Depot at Johnson's Island, on Lake Erie.

Today, it's an archaeological dig surrounded by upscale homes.

But during the Civil War, more than 10,000 Confederate officers languished on Johnson's Island, hoping -- praying -- to return to their families, their friends, their homes.

It was also the focus of a bizarre 1864 plot to capture the one Union warship on the Great Lakes, to liberate the Rebel officers on Johnson's Island, to terrorize the cities along Lake Erie, and to force the war back onto Northern soil.

The conspiracy failed and the participants faced disparate futures... One died on the gallows, one became a famous war correspondent, and another simply vanished into the post-war Texas landscape.

Welcome to "Rebels on Lake Erie."

♪ I've left my old mother to weep and to mourn ♪ ♪ I am a Rebel soldier and far from my home ♪ ♪ MAN: "The Island Queen is now passing, crowded with both sexes vying with each other in displaying their contempt for prisoners, whose fault has been opposition to tyranny and despotism; for which so-called offense, we are brought here to be gazed at by a vulgar rabble, as if we were caged hyenas."

-- Captain Joe Barbiere, Gayoso Guards, 42nd Tennessee.

DAVID: The Johnson's Island prison compound is probably one of the most unique sites from the Civil War related to the prison use because it was the only one that the Union actually built solely as a prison facility.

On many of the other prisons that they were using -- these were civilian prisons or penal prisons that were being converted to military prisons -- or they added a prison component to a military installation already in existence.

So Johnson's Island was one that they actually designed to hold all the prisoners, both the officers and the enlisted.

And they built this in early 1862, thinking that it would accommodate all the prisoners that would be captured by the war.

And, of course, it didn't, so it ended up being converted just to an officers' prison for Confederate captured.

In 1861, the orders came down from Washington... Find a suitable location for a depot for prisoners of war on one of the islands of Lake Erie.

Lt. Col. William Hoffman, Commissary-General of Prisons, was assigned the task.

North and Middle Bass Island were quickly rejected -- too close to Canada.

South Bass Island, too expensive.

Kelley's Island had too many residents -- and too many temptations for the guards with so many vineyards nearby.

That left Johnson's Island, a lonely outpost in Sandusky Bay.

Once know as Bull's Island, it had been a favorite haunt for Indians to fish.

But by 1861, the Indian threat was gone and Johnson's Island had become the ideal location for a prisoner of war camp.

It was only three miles from Sandusky, Ohio, -- making the prison easy to build, supply, and fortify.

It was accessible only by ferry, enhancing the security of the camp.

And it was cheap.

The government could lease the land for just $500 a year.

And so it was decided... Johnson's Island would be the site of the new depot for Confederate prisoners of war.

Local contractors quickly built 12 large, Spartan barracks and another to serve as a hospital.

DAVID: The buildings that they had constructed for the prisoners were made out of wood.

They were a single layer of wood that was typically green.

So there was lots of knots in the wood and there was cracks.

So the prisoners really had to try to fill in those areas with paper and whatever they could in order to make them at least somewhat tolerable through the winter months.

The prison compound was surrounded by a 15 foot stockade.

Armed guards -- the Hoffman Battalion, most from Ohio communities -- peered down at the Rebel prisoners, ever-ready to shoot anyone who stepped over the forbidden deadline.

MAN: "30 feet from the wall around the entire prison is an imaginary line called the deadline... To step across the line is death, a heavy penalty for a slight offense."

-- Captain Joe Barbiere, Gayoso Guards.

Johnson's Island was also protected by the mighty U.S.S.

Michigan , the only Union ship patrolling Lake Erie.

The iron-hulled Michigan was a formidable opponent with its cannons and full crew of experienced sailors.

The first prisoners arrived in April 1862.

The Sandusky Register reported that some had the bearing of gentlemen; others had a "don't care a dime" swagger of bloods; a few were sullen in appearance and one lad just seemed lost, looking into the water with sadness on his face.

By June of 1862, Secretary of War Stanton decided to declare Johnson's Island, that he would make it only for officers, Confederate officers.

So that made it unique.

It seems that Stanton believed -- and this was a common thought also on the Confederate side -- that you separated officers from their men because it lessened the chance of escape and trouble; that if the enlisted men didn't have their leaders, that they would be easier to control and would just be a more docile, if you will, prison population.

There also seems to be a kind of understanding that officers -- almost an elitism, that perhaps they should be treated differently and separate from their men.

The officers in the South were typically the more privileged of the South.

They had education, they typically had wealth.

So, these were individuals who were accustomed to a lifestyle that included servants.

It's a much different population than your typical military population would be.

MAN: "The prisoners were a unique set of men...

There was one brigadier general and the rest represented all grades, from colonel down to brevet-second lieutenant.

There were representatives of all the armies of the Confederacy east of the Mississippi."

-- 2nd Lt. Luther R. Mills, of the 26th Virginia.

One of the interesting aspects of this site is the differences between the economic status of the guards and of the prisoners.

The guards may have been being paid 13 or 15 dollars a month in order to be guards here.

And the prisoners could easily receive $25, $50, $100 a month from their family or friends through Northern Banks.

So it created, in some sense, this tension between the two groups because the guards, being the ones theoretically in power, were less empowered when it came to the financial aspects of things they could purchase.

MAN: "The battalion, comprised as graceless, impudent, and insulting, a set of ruffians as was ever gotten together.

The sentinels availed themselves with few exceptions, of every occasion to insult us and shoot us.

They had never seen service and were very valiant toward unarmed men."

-- Captain Decimus et Ultimus Barziza, 4th Texas Infantry.

♪ Some of the prisoners at Johnson's Island had been captured in some of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War -- Fort Donelson in Tennessee, Gettysburg in Pennsylvania, and Shiloh in Tennessee.

Some had been wounded, tended to at primitive hospitals and had not yet fully recovered when shipped to Johnson's Island.

Others were simply stunned that they had been separated from their units and captured by Union troops.

More had been defeated in the battlefield.

All were loaded onto trains -- one prisoner called them cattle cars -- and they headed north.

When the Confederate officers arrived at Sandusky, Ohio, curiosity seekers met the trains and heckled the prisoners as they made their way to the pier and the ferry that would take them to their final destination -- Johnson's Island.

MAN: "We were divested of our money, and our names and rank and date of capture being taken down carefully in a book.

We bade adieu to the outer world; the gates of the prisonyard swung open, we entered... And beheld some thousand or 1500 brother Rebels formed in line on either side of the walk...many of them bawling out lustily, "fresh fish!"

It was a strange, sad sign, that crowd of badly dressed, yellow looking gentlemen, shouting out the slant salutation of convicts and felons to their unfortunate comrades, fresh from those fields of glory and noble daring on which most of them had played at one time no mean part.

But I am of no humor tonight for moralizing."

-- Col. D.R.

Hundley, 31st Alabama.

After the initial shock of that greeting, the new arrivals -- stripped of their rank and titles by the guards -- made their way to their quarters in the large barracks.

Those wooden buildings had no insulation.

They were pleasant enough in the spring and fall, but they were brutally cold in the winter.

The heart of the room was the cast-iron stove, where the prisoners cooked and did laundry.

The rules of the prison -- Pierson's Ten Commandments -- were tacked to an inside wall.

The men slept three high -- two to a bunk.

The new arrivals always complained about the smells of Johnson's Island -- from the often overflowing latrines -- sinks behind their quarters -- to the unappetizing odor that often emanated from the kitchen.

But the prisoners quickly got used to the smells and the regimen of Johnson's Island.

Day started at 6:00 a.m. with breakfast.

No one was allowed to leave the quarters until the Garrison Flag was hoisted, a little after sunrise.

(bugle call) Roll call followed.

Rain or shine, blizzard or sweltering heat.

The sutler, he arrived in the morning.

A sutler would be kind of like a general store operator these days.

The sutler, in this case, was Mr. Johnson, the guy who owned the land.

So, he had a real sweet deal here.

He was the only sutler.

So his prices weren't, he didn't have to compete with anybody.

So he could charge the prisoners pretty much what the market A high point of the day was the delivery of the newspapers.

Prisoners raced to buy Harper's Weekly , the New York Herald , or the Sandusky "Lying" Register -- as the Confederate inmates called the local paper.

The best "outloud readers" would perch on a stairway to share the news with those gathered around.

Confederate victories brought hooting, hollering and huzzahs.

Union advances, blank stares.

Newspapers were always reused -- stuck in the holes and crevices to cut down on the drafts during the bone-chilling Lake Erie winters, or hung on the walls as insulation, or used to start cook fires, or taken to the latrines to be used there.

Mail came about noon.

Prisoners who were lucky received a precious letter from home, a parcel of clothing or delicacies to eat, or money -- exchanged for scrip -- so they could buy supplies from the sutler.

MAN: "It may be stated frankly that the Southern people never forgot their soldiers in prison, and however reduced in circumstances, never missed an opportunity to send much in the same way."

-- Col. Henry Kyd Douglas, 13th and 49th Virginia Regiments.

Some prisoners weren't so fortunate and went months without a word from home.

MAN: "My Dear Mother, it will be four months since I was captured and during that period, not one word have I heard from home.

Sincerely do I trust you have been more fortunate in hearing from me.

Have written a number of times."

-- Lt. T.C.

Hearn.

Prisoners at Johnson's Island filled their days as they wished.

Some concentrated on making money as tailors, barbers, or bakers.

Some even became moonshiners.

Most of the prisoners spent their days in intellectual, artistic, or sporting pursuits.

The YMCA donated a library of 600 volumes.

Prisoners with artistic talents made jewelry, which were sent to a dear one at home or traded to guards for needed supplies.

Robert Smith of Tennessee filled his spare hours with photography.

Captured with a lens, he constructed a camera from a wooden tobacco box.

He transformed part of this block into a darkroom and used discarded oyster cans to print tin types.

DAVID: They had different types of schools that they could actually attend.

For instance, they had a law school here, they had a medical school here.

They had a large library that they could get books from.

They put on plays, they put on minstrel shows, they wrote poetry.

Many of them played music, so they had lots of music going on.

So, they had access to a lot of the finer aspects of the culture that they were used to down in the South.

And they brought that with them, and they tried to reconstruct it here so that it became more familiar to them.

MAN: "If a stranger were to look in on us this morning, he would hardly think we were prisoners.

While I am scribbling down a few thoughts, just to pass off the time, Mosely is sitting at my side, studying away at his French as though life depended on it.

Just opposite sits my worthy friend Ballantine engaged in a novel, while at my left sit Dennis and Clark trying their skill at chess...

Thus, we employ the time."

-- Edmund DeWitt Patterson, 9th Alabama.

But nothing could compare to sports on Johnson's Island.

During the spring and summer, there was baseball.

The Southern 9 -- officers below the rank of captain -- played the Confederate 9 -- those with higher rank.

One championship game drew 3000 fans -- prisoners, guards, and citizens all screamed for their favorites.

The prisoners had this large parade ground in the middle between the two rows of blocks.

And that's where they staged all the baseball games that they played in the summer, and they staged large snowball battles in the winter.

I can't imagine 500 or 1,000 guys engaged in a snowball fight, but that's what occurred during the winter.

When you think about the weather that the prisoners had to cope with, they came from the South, so they weren't used to the severe weather that we have up here at Johnson's Island and associated with Lake Erie.

MAN: "The fuel given us was frequently insufficient, and in our desperation, we burned every available chair or box, and even parts of our bunks found their way into the stove.

During this time of horrors, some of us maintained life by forming a circle and dancing with the energy of despair."

-- Lt. Henry E. Shepherd, 43rd North Carolina.

People oftentimes sort of homogenize the experience of being a prisoner of war, and it really depended on when you were imprisoned here.

And in 1862, when it opened up in April, a lot of the letters and diaries that we have are pretty positive toward the facility, toward the food, toward the rations, toward the guard.

If you, however, were here during a winter, then that was a totally different experience.

If you were here after probably May or June of 1864, then it became much more intolerable.

The Union cut rations with the prisoners, so by the late fall of 1864, the prisoners were actually losing weight from having their rations cut so severely; they weren't allowed to receive packages from home, which would include food.

So they were truly suffering.

MAN: "We now have a rough soldier's ration and scant at that.

The fare is so rough that the Vicksburg and Port Gibson officers eat rats, which they say are equal to frogs and chicken."

-- Major Gen. Isaac G. Trimble, Army of Northern Virginia.

MAN: "Men became depressed and listless...the parade ground was dotted with gaunt, cavernous men with a far-away look in their eye and with hunger and prevalence showing in every line of their emaciated bodies."

-- Lt. Horace Carpenter, 9th Louisiana.

It was at this time -- when hunger and want was the greatest at Johnson's Island -- that a small group of Rebels in Canada plotted a daring conspiracy.

♪ LESLEY: By the summer of 1864, the war had reached a military stalemate.

Grant, who had become the commander of all field armies for the United States, had devised a plan, it was supposed to be a coordinated plan to hit the Confederate armies in several locations, including Virginia, which would mean Lee's army in Richmond, outside of Richmond.

Also, Sherman was going to go after forces in Georgia and target northwest Georgia.

There were other contingencies to this plan.

But things became bogged down, they became very bogged down in the summer of 1864.

Particularly in Virginia, there was incredible bloodletting, resulting from Grant's strategy of fighting Lee.

Lee was such a tenacious and aggressive foe.

In just three days in May 1864, the Battle of the Wilderness brought 18,000 Union dead, injured, or missing.

The next month, almost 12,000 Union soldiers fell dead or wounded at the Battle of Cold Harbor.

The high Union casualties, the savagery on the battlefield, the burning, the destruction.

There's increasing evidence in the North of war weariness.

And there's always been war weariness, but just open despair on the part of the Northern people.

What is the point of this war?

Why all this death and suffering?

So you get to the Fall of 1864 and you have the election on the horizon, the presidential election, and things were looking bleak for Lincoln's re-election.

Within his own party, there's dissension.

He's facing it from the radicals who believe he's not going far enough; politically, he's not going far enough with his Emancipation Proclamation.

And they want to pull away.

There's a convention in Cleveland and there's the creation of a new party -- the Radical Democracy.

♪ And there's also dissension coming from the opposition party, of course, the Democrats.

And within the Democratic party, you have peace democrats or copperheads, that want the war to stop and there's discussions of allowing the Confederates to have their separate nation.

There are also Democrats, you might call them moderate Democrats, who believe there should be peace, but also reunion.

So there's just a lot of political angst.

And things are not looking very good for Lincoln.

So this is a very dark time for the North.

None of this is lost on the Confederacy...

They see the high Union losses on the battlefield.

They see the growing war weariness in the North.

They see the dissension in the Republican and Democratic parties.

Perhaps this is a time for a new strategy -- one quite apart from the battlefield.

LESLEY: Some of the Confederate military leaders and political leaders think they see an opening to stir up that dissension and take advantage of it.

And they think that if Lincoln loses the election, that it would mean peace for them and a winning of the war.

In spring 1864, the Confederacy sent three Commissioners to Canada.

Their mission was simple -- to undermine the Union war effort through conspiracy, subterfuge, covert operations.

And the commissioners had the money to finance the job.

The best known of these plans was the Northwest Conspiracy.

The overall plan -- and I think probably it was pretty grandiose -- was to try to get some of the Northwestern states -- Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan -- to break away from the Union.

Another aspect was to try to release prisoners from a number of Northern prison camps.

There was a prison in Chicago, there was a prison in Indianapolis, and one in Columbus, and, of course, Johnson's Island, which were in the same general geographical area.

And the prison conditions were becoming very bad.

It was believed by the Confederate government that if they could break these prisoners out, that they could maraud down through Ohio or Indiana and kind of bring the war home to northerners.

♪ Throughout the Civil War, rumors swarmed about the prisoner of war depot on Johnson's Island.

In 1863, rumor had it that well-armed Confederates would swoop down from Canada, destroy Buffalo, take possession of steamboats on Lake Erie, free the prisoners on Johnson's Island, and ferry the officers away to freedom.

In early 1864, Rebels were said to be gathering on Canadian Pelee Island; only a winter storm prevented the raid.

The September 1864 plot, however, was different.

It was part of the broader Confederate conspiracy, bankrolled by Confederate gold and supervised by the Confederate commissioners in Canada.

The Johnson's Island plot was under Confederate Commissioner Jacob Thompson, a wealthy Mississippi politico and plantation owner.

His military aide observed, Thompson drank too much, talked too much, and trusted too freely.

Thompson picked Major Charles Cole as the point person for the Johnson's Island mission.

JAMES: Cole was not a person that many people knew very well.

He said that he had served at one point in the Confederate Navy; although, no records were ever produced to prove that.

He said that he served with Nathan Bedford Forest, and we've not seen records of that.

There is some evidence that he may have been a lieutenant with the Fifth Tennessee, and one of the officers in that corps said that he was dismissed because of some sort of mysterious misconduct.

He claims that he was a prisoner and that he escaped and got to Canada.

But he's so untrustworthy in anything that he says that it's really hard to know what his background really was or where he ever came from.

Cole was responsible for gathering intelligence on the defenses of cities along Lake Erie, locating Confederate sympathizers in Sandusky, Ohio, communicating with prisoners at Johnson's Island, and disabling the crew of the U.S.S.

Michigan.

Cole posed as a wealthy oil businessman from Pennsylvania when he resided at the West Hotel in Sandusky.

He and his "wife" -- a prostitute and Confederate courier named Emma Bison -- gave grand parties, all bankrolled by Confederate money.

They got to know many of the officers at Johnson's Island and on the Michigan .

The plot to take the Michigan and liberate Johnson's Island was fairly advanced when young John Yates Beall came to call on Jacob Thompson at the Queens Hotel in Toronto, in August 1864.

♪ John Yates Beall was born on New Year's Day 1835, on a plantation in Walnut Grove in the Shenandoah Valley, Virginia.

He was one of seven children in a slave-holding household that stressed duty to God and country.

Beall went to the University of Virginia to study law.

After his father's death in 1855, Beall returned home to run the family's plantation.

John Beall was first introduced to the military, really, in a local militia group.

In a response to John Brown's attack on Harper's Ferry, a fellow by the name of Lawson Botts organized a group called the Botts Greys.

It was a local militia group to protect the countryside in case there was another uprising among slaves promoted by Northern abolitionists.

After Virginia seceded from the Union in April 1861, that unit became part of a brigade led by the legendary Confederate General Stonewall Jackson.

His service in the unit, however, was brief.

In 1862, in a skirmish outside Harper's Ferry, Beall -- just 27 -- was shot in the lung.

Doctors never expected him to survive.

Beall's family sent him to Florida to convalesce.

Months later, Beall returned to Virginia -- but never strong enough to rejoin Jackson's troops.

BEALL: "I am old, prematurely old; exposure, hardship, suffering, the drain of an unhealed wound, anxiety, hope deferred, have done the work of time on the body -- they have not quenched my spirit, nor impaired by tenacity of my will."

-- John Yates Beall, November 1862.

By February 1863, Beall was sufficiently recovered to hatch a new scheme to advance Confederate fortunes.

Beall and his pal Edwin Gray Lee -- second cousin of the great Confederate General Robert E. Lee -- wanted to break Confederate prisoners out of Union prisons in the Midwest.

The two met with Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and Secretary of Navy, Stephen Mallory, in early 1863 to explain their plans.

JAMES: The problem was that they intended to go to Canada and work from Toronto.

Jefferson Davis and Mallory worried that this might put a hoped-for alliance between the Confederacy and England in jeopardy.

Instead, Mallory offered Beall and Lee an opportunity to operate as privateers on the Chesapeake Bay.

JAMES: The idea was that they would capture Union cargoships and take whatever they captured back to Richmond to help the Confederate war effort.

And so Beall, who had no naval experience, took up the challenge.

With two small boats -- the Raven and the Swan , Beall and his crew of about 20, sailed to the Chesapeake to terrorize Union shipping in the spring and summer of 1863.

Beall and his crew were very successful.

They cut a telegraph wire that cut off Union communication.

They destroyed a lighthouse.

They confiscated whale oil and sent it back to Richmond, which was badly needed.

But somewhere along the way, General Dix, who was in charge of the Department of the East, became so frustrated, he sent a regiment of soldiers down to find Beall and his crew.

It took months to find Beall.

Finally on November 14, 1863, Beall was captured and taken -- in irons -- to Fort McHenry in Baltimore.

Beall and his men were charged as pirates and faced certain execution.

But then the Confederacy heard of his arrest.

JAMES: So the Confederate government got in touch with the Union government and said, if you're going to treat our soldiers as pirates, then we're going to take a like number of your people that we have and we'll treat them the same way.

If you hang them, we'll hang yours.

So from that point on, they were treated as prisoners of war.

After some months, Beall and his crew were exchanged and he made his way back to Richmond, where he was looking for another assignment.

When he got to Richmond, Beall learned of the new plot to liberate the prisoners on Johnson's Island.

If Beall wanted to get involved, Confederate officials said he'd need to meet with Thompson in Toronto.

In August 1864, Thompson welcomed Beall into the plot.

MAN: "He was an earnest, not to say fanatical young man, with strong religious convictions, one of a type that is peculiarly dangerous in times of strife, because in such men all ordinary scruples are subjected to a stern sense of duty that knows not fear and rejects even reasonable precautions."

-- Frederick J. Shepard, Buffalo, New York.

Beall met with the mysterious Charles Cole in Sandusky, Ohio, and then headed to Windsor, Ontario, to recruit a new crew.

While there, Beall found an ally -- Bennett Burley, a young Scotsman, a crewmate from his privateering days on the Chesapeake.

Beall and Burley, together again, ready to face their greatest challenge -- capturing the U.S.S.

Michigan , liberating Johnson's Island, and terrorizing the towns along Lake Erie...

Doing the impossible, just as they had on the Chesapeake Bay.

The prisoners on Johnson's Island had a part to play in this mission.

At the signal -- a flare in the sky -- the prisoners were to rise up and overpower their guards.

How the prisoners learned of the conspiracy is a source of debate.

One account had Cole slipping instructions to prisoners on the inside of cigar bands -- on cigars he distributed to prisoners when he visited Johnson's Island.

MAN: "The object and time of the expedition were known in the prison; it was not generally known, however, beforehand, because the Yankees had always kept spies in the prison who passed themselves off for Confederates, and thus, they generally found out any contemplated movement that was publicly canvassed amongst us."

-- Captain Decimus et Ultimus Barziza, 4th Texas Infantry.

MAN: "We were organized into companies and regiments and had armed ourselves with clubs, which were made of stove wood and other material at hand.

And we were in constant expectation of orders, which never came, to make the fight.

It surely would have been a pitiable affair, for the undertaking was wholly impracticable."

-- Capt.

Archibald S. McKennon, 16th Arkansas Infantry.

♪ Sunday, September 18, 1864... Young Bennett Burley goes to Detroit to arrange passage on the Philo Parsons , a commercial side-wheel steamer, for himself and several friends.

Burley asks, "Could the Parsons make an unscheduled stop at Sandwich," a Canadian town below Detroit.

"Certainly," responds Parsons' clerk Walter O. Ashley.

The Parsons would touch the dock and the passengers could board.

Monday, September 19, 1864... A clear, beautiful, autumn day.

First stop -- The unscheduled stop at Sandwich.

The Parsons touches the dock and three well-dressed men jump aboard.

One of them was later identified as John Yates Beall.

Next stop -- Malden, another Canadian town, where 20-some men come aboard, bringing a big black trunk tied up with ropes.

The Parsons' clerk thinks the roughly dressed men were "skedaddlers," draft evaders returning to Ohio.

The Philo Parsons cruises down the Detroit River and then out onto the Lake.

Beall and his crew are all on board.

They wait, biding their time.

Burley and his pals socialize with the other passengers -- especially the ladies.

The "skedaddlers" keep to themselves.

The Parsons makes its regular stop at North Bass Island.

Passengers get on, others get off.

At Middle Bass Island, the captain leaves the Parsons to spend the night with his family.

Next stop -- Kelley's Island.

The Parsons leaves Kelley's Island at 4:00 p.m. About 30 minutes later, Beall and his men make their move.

BEALL: "I am a Confederate officer.

There are 30 of us, well armed.

I seize this boat and take you as prisoner.

You must pilot the boat as I direct."

-- John Yates Beall, September 19, 1864.

JAMES: They raised a Confederate flag on the Philo Parsons.

At gunpoint, they put all the passengers in one of the parlors and kept them under lock and key.

When they got down in the vicinity of Sandusky Bay, the engineer informed John Beall that they didn't have enough wood to make the return trip.

So he asked, "Well, where can we get wood?"

They said, "Well, you're going to have to go back to Middle Bass Island."

The foray back to Middle Bass Island would be disastrous for Beall and his mission.

The unscheduled stop caused unwanted attention.

Another steamboat -- the Island Queen -- with its passengers, Union soldiers on furlough, came alongside.

Beall and his men have no choice but to board the Island Queen and take control of the ship.

They took all the passengers from both the Island Queen and the Philo Parsons and they put them ashore on Middle Bass Island, with the idea that they wouldn't report what had happened for 24 hours.

With that, the Parsons left -- with the Island Queen in tow.

Beall's men scuttled the Island Queen in the shallow Lake Erie waters.

As dusk turned to dark, the Parsons voyaged on.

At the Marblehead lighthouse, Beall searched the sky for a signal from Cole.

Cole was to incapacitate some of the Michigan's officers and crew at a party with liquor and loose women.

After the sailors were drugged -- or drunk -- Cole was to send the signal and Beall would proceed.

The signal never came.

Cole was already under arrest on board the Michigan .

The plot to take the Michigan and liberate Johnson's Island had been uncovered -- before the Philo Parsons started its fateful voyage.

A young Rebel, who had been recruited for the mission, revealed the plan to a military officer in Detroit, who warned the Michigan .

Soon after, Cole was arrested.

That afternoon, Charles Cole had been arrested and he had been taken to the Michigan , where he confessed pretty readily.

John Beall and the Philo Parsons were sailing into a trap.

The Michigan was waiting for them.

JAMES: By the time they get to the mouth of the Sandusky Bay, it is dark, in fact, it's very dark.

Nobody on shore, nobody on the Michigan can see the Philo Parsons because they're running without lights.

The problem arises for the Confederates aboard the Philo Parsons when they get to the mouth of the Sandusky Bay, because the pilot says, "I don't if I'm going to be able to get through the channel.

It's fairly shallow, except for one area -- and if you don't hit that channel just right, we could run aground."

Well, when Beall's crew found out that they had a potential to run aground and that they were within range of the Michigan's cannons, they were afraid that they could be blown out of the water.

Beall and Burley were willing to take their chances, but their crew -- the skedaddlers -- weren't.

The crew mutinied in a strange, signed letter, acknowledging Beall's "gentlemanly bearing" but refused to go any further.

Beall bemoaned the action.

BEALL: "When 17 of my 20 men mutinied and refused to go on, this necessitated my turning back, thus abandoning Cole to be hung, a most cowardly and dishonorable affair."

JAMES: Once the Confederates piloted the boat up the Detroit River, they dock at Sandwich and they tried to sink the Philo Parsons .

BEALL: "Before these men are condemned, judge if they have broken your laws.

No murder was committed, indeed, not a life was lost.

There was no searching of prisoners, no robbing.

It is true the boats were abused, but sir, they were captured by Confederates, enemies of the United States, and however questionable the taste, the right is clear.

These men were not burglars or pirates, enemies of mankind, unless hatred and hostility to Yankees be taken as a sin against humanity or a crime against civilization."

-- John Yates Beall.

♪ Beall may not have been liberated Johnson's Island, but he had been successful in frightening the population of every city and town that bordered Lake Erie.

WOMAN: "The air was filled with flying and exaggerated rumors, the suspense was painful, women grew nervous with apprehension and no thought of sleep was entertained."

-- Theresa Thorndale, Sandusky, Ohio.

LESLEY: It was certainly an anxious time.

People's emotions were pretty high pitched.

And so you put something like this into the mix of this kind of plot -- and you know, Morgan's Raid had also similarly really set off Ohio.

So I think it's not surprising that people were so scared and that word spread like wildfire, long before we had modern technology, word did get around.

MAN: "Yankees terribly frightened at the discovery of a plot to capture the Michigan and release the prisoners confined here.

The Rebs and their sympathizers captured two steamboats up near the Canada shore, but, unfortunately for us, the plot was exposed and the authorities put on their guard.

It was a well-laid plan and would have succeeded had they kept it secret.

I hope they will try again."

-- Edmund DeWitt Patterson, 9th Alabama.

What John Beall did was he went up to a lake north of Toronto, Balsam Lake, and spent about a week just kind of laying low and seeing what was going to happen.

And Bennett Burley went to Guelph, which is the home of his cousin, Adam Robertson.

And it was there that Burley was eventually arrested.

The authorities thought that Burley was John Beall.

He was all ready to give himself up in exchange for Burley's freedom.

But Beall didn't give himself up...

While Burley languished in a Canadian jail, Beall planned new exploits.

On December 16, 1864, Beall was on a new mission -- to free Confederate generals bound for Boston by train.

In rented sleighs, Beall and his men set out for the New York Central Railway between Dunkirk and Buffalo, to search for the best place to waylay the train.

His men tried to pry up the tracks.

As the train speeded toward them, Beall and his men took off.

Beall paired with the young George Anderson.

The two planned to escape to Canada by train.

They waited separately at the Niagara Falls station.

Anderson, exhausted, fell asleep.

B So he left the safety of the train and returned to the station to find the boy.

Just then, two Niagara Falls detectives arrested them both.

JAMES: And the police then interrogated Beall and they said, who are you?

He said, I'll admit that I'm a runaway Confederate prisoner.

And then they questioned Anderson, and they told Anderson, you know, you're caught, you're out of uniform, you're probably going to be accused of spying, and you're going to be executed.

And, of course, that really frightened Anderson, he was only 18 years old, and so he confessed.

Not only did he confess what the Confederates were up to on the railroad, but he identified John Beall as what his real identity was.

John Yates Beall celebrated his 30th birthday in a New York City jail.

That day he reflected on his life.

BEALL: "Thus far on life's way, I have lived an honest life, defrauding no man.

Those blows that I have struck have been against the society of a hostile nation, not against the society of which I am a member by right or verses mankind generally."

-- John Yates Beall, January 1, 1865.

♪ ♪ Beall was taken to Ft. Lafayette, where he was indicted as a guerilla and a spy.

He was to be tried in a military court, and faced the death sentence, if convicted.

Beall pleaded not guilty to each charge, saying he was a Confederate officer, following orders.

I think we need to look at the Beall charges and trial in context of the questions of rules of war and what exactly he was charged with.

He was charged for being a spy, for spying.

He was charged with being a guerilla.

In other words, he was charged with unconventional warfare, and also his defense was that he had been authorized by Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy.

The military tribunal was under the purview of General John Dix.

Beall was allowed an attorney.

He wanted his old friend, Confederate Dan Lucas, to represent him.

Dix refused.

Another Confederate prisoner, General Roger Pryor, volunteered to represent Beall.

Dix refused again.

Major John Bolles, who served as the prosecuting attorney, suggested a well-known criminal attorney from New York City, James Brady.

Brady agreed but said he needed to finish another case first.

Dix agreed to delay the trial for one week.

In the meantime, John Beall was supposed to send letters to the Confederate government, trying to get some kind of authorization that he, in fact, was a Confederate officer and that this was a legitimate Confederate mission, which they could then use in court.

When it came time for the trial, the letters were introduced as part of the evidence, but Beall was shocked to find out they had never been sent to the Confederacy.

In fact, at the time of the trial, the Confederate government wasn't even aware that Beall was being tried.

Beall's trial began February 5, 1865.

Brady argued Beall's case aggressively.

But Beall had no witnesses and no evidence to support his claim that he was a Confederate officer on authorized military missions, when he took the Philo Parsons on Lake Erie and when he was attempting to free the Confederate generals from the train in New York.

The eight-man military court found Beall guilty of being a spy and a guerilla.

Beall was sentenced to death by hanging.

Beall was ferried in irons across New York Harbor to Ft. Columbus to await his execution.

As Beall lingered in his dark, dank cell, Beall's friends hoped to convince President Lincoln to commute the sentence.

JAMES: There were extraordinary efforts to try to save his life.

He has friends that went personally to President Lincoln and plead his case, and Lincoln was feeling a lot of pressure.

Many people were coming to him and talking to him about giving some sort of clemency to Beall.

People were saying even if you don't want to grant him a pardon, at least stay the execution, at least hold off on the execution until more of this can be discussed.

There was a petition that was circulated in the United States Congress; over 90 members of Congress signed it asking for at least a stay of execution.

But Lincoln would not intervene.

On the days before his execution, Beall languished in his cell, pondering his fate.

He met with a minister.

MAN: "He did not use one angry or bitter expression toward his enemies, but calmly declared his conviction that he was to be executed contrary to the rules of civilized warfare.

He accepted his doom as the will of God."

-- The Rev.

Henry J.

Van Dyke.

To Jacob Thompson, Beall entrusted the task of vindicating his name to the people of the South and his beloved Virginia.

BEALL: "I do expect you to vindicate my character.

I have been styled a pirate, a robber.

When the United States authorities, after such a trial, shall execute such a sentence, I do earnestly call on you to officially vindicate me at least to my countrymen.

With unabated loyalty to our cause of self government and my country and an earnest prayer for our success as a nation and kindest feelings for yourself, I remain truly your friend, John Yates Beall."

On February 24, 1865, just before 1:00 p.m., a pale, careworn John Yates Beall was brought out of his cell into the bright sunlight.

BEALL: "How beautiful the sunlight is.

I never knew what its splendor was 'til now, when I look upon it for the last time."

A crowd gathered outside Ft. Columbus to witness the execution of the first spy since the American Revolution.

Rowboats and steamboats crammed with passengers, dotted the water around Governors Island.

♪ A cortege accompanied Beall to the gallows on the southside of Ft. Columbus.

As the adjutant read the charges, Beall looked to the South, oblivious to all around him.

When the adjutant finished, Beall was asked if he had anything to say.

He responded... BEALL: "I protest against this execution.

It is absolute murder -- brutal murder.

I die in the service and defense of my country."

With that, John Yates Beall was hanged.

With a slight muscular contraction of his legs, followed by a convulsive shrugging of his shoulders, it was over.

The New York Times saw the execution as a clear message to the South.

MAN: "In the rigid enforcement of the sentence imposed by a military commission upon this man, his Confederates will see the determination of our Government to protect its citizens from plundering raids, its commerce from treacherous piratical attacks, and its ports and dockyards from prowling spies."

-- The New York Times .

I think he was used as an example, but that the Union was trying to say to the Confederates and to the world, there are rules of war.

It's one thing to fight on the battlefield, but when you start to do things like this and you essentially turn on civilians, you take off your uniform, you put on a civilian uniform, that's not allowed and we can't allow that.

It's understandable to me why he was executed.

JAMES: I think it's unfortunate that John Beall was executed.

He was a man who had a lot of character, a lot of dignity, a lot of honor, a lot of respect for his fellow man.

In a sense, he was a victim of his own integrity because he wouldn't sacrifice his country, he wouldn't sacrifice his men, his crew, his associates to save himself.

During the time that he was incarcerated, he had opportunities to give up the plans, to name names and he refused to do it because he didn't think it was the right thing to do.

♪ Scarcely three months after Beall was executed, the war ended.

On April 2, 1865, Richmond was captured.

On April 9, General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Grant at Appomattox Court House.

Less than a week later, John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre.

At Johnson's Island, the end of the war brought much confusion and uncertainty.

To be released, prisoners had to pledge an oath of allegiance to the Union, an oath that most had refused to sign earlier.

But the war was over, the officers wanted to go home.

Most relented and took the oath.

Being released meant that they were allowed to take what they had with them.

But they were not given a free pass on the rail; they weren't given money in order to buy tickets.

They were basically taken over to Sandusky and left to their own devices on how they would find their way back to the South, if they, in fact, went back to the South.

So many of the prisoners ended up having to work their way back if they didn't have money, walking part of the way back, so some of them, it took them several months before they actually ended up back in the South.

In February, 1865, Bennett Burley was extradited to the United States.

In June, after the Civil War was over, Burley was indicted on robbery charges by a grand jury in Port Clinton, a town just 12 miles west of Sandusky.

The next month he was tried in a civilian court.

The jury could not agree.

In September, before he could be retried, Burley escaped from jail.

It's kind of a funny thing, but Burley was a very likable person.

On many occasions, the sheriff had released him from his cell and they walked around town together.

He got to know a lot of the townspeople.

They would come to his window and they'd just chat with him in his jail cell and so what they believe is some of the local townspeople helped him escape when the sheriff was away.

Burley returned to Scotland, then moved to London, where he became a war correspondent for the London Telegraph.

He seldom spoke of his adventures in the American Civil War.

In 1866, the mysterious Charles Cole was released from prison.

One account has him settling in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and selling land warrants for Weatherford, Texas.

Others say he settled in Texas.

No one knows the whole story of what happened to the mysterious Captain Cole.

Jacob Thompson, the Confederate commissioner who coordinated the Johnson's Island conspiracy, sailed for France after the war, taking with him an unspecified amount of Confederate gold.

He did little to salvage Beall's reputation to anyone.

After his execution, John Yates Beall's body was buried at the Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.

Following his last wishes, Beall's body was returned home after the war.

He is buried in the Zion Episcopal Church Cemetery in Charleston -- now West Virginia.

After the war, the government saw no further use for Johnson's Island.

Everything was auctioned off.

The land reverted to Leonard Johnson and farming.

Corn was planted where the prisonyard had been.

The blockhouse became a shelter for pigs.

Johnson's Island has changed over the years.

Quarry mining ripped a hole in the center of the island.

A causeway now connects with the mainland.

But others things haven't changed... Take, for example, this cemetery... More than 200 Confederate officers remain here.

Many of these headstones are etched with their names, while others simply say unknown.

A statue of a Confederate officer looks forlornly, as many of these men must have done during the Civil War.

Today, tourists from the North and the South visit this cemetery and remember a terrible time in American history, a time when our nation was torn apart, a time when Confederate officers languished in a prisoner of war camp on Johnson's Island, and a time when a star-crossed pirate faced execution for doing what he thought was the honorable thing.

♪ My home is on a secret isle Far far away from thee ♪ ♪ Where thy dear formed thy blissful smile ♪ ♪ I never never see ♪ ♪ I rest beneath a northern sky ♪ ♪ A sky to me so dreary ♪ ♪ I think of thee, dear one and sigh...alone upon Lake Erie ♪ ♪ Alone...alone... Alone upon Lake Erie ♪