Two years after the Civil War’s guns went silent, the former Union General George H. Sharpe navigated London’s bone-biting cold and snowy rail lines to reach the U.S. diplomatic mission at 54 Portland Place. His orders from Washington were both secret and explosive: Capture the former secretary of state of the Confederacy, Judah Philip Benjamin, who’d found exile, and a lucrative law practice, in Victorian England.
The New York-born Sharpe had been chosen for the operation for good reason. He’d overseen military intelligence for Union Commander Ulysses S. Grant during the final stages of the war between the states and emerged as a special envoy for U.S. Secretary of State William Seward in its aftermath. Sharpe had run espionage operations into Richmond, the Confederate capital, and Benjamin’s base of operations.
But Sharpe’s trip to England that February was on a particularly grave matter, and unknown to the American public. Senior members of the U.S. government, including Secretary of State Seward, believed there was ample evidence that Benjamin had played a central role in developing the plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln two years earlier.
Benjamin’s network of Confederate spies and couriers ran from Virginia, up through the Northern states, and into Canada. And this secretive web directly tied the prominent Southern Jewish leader to members of the hit team that organized the attack on Lincoln and Seward in April 1865. This included John Wilkes Booth and his accomplice, John Surratt Jr., a Southern spy who had worked as Benjamin’s personal courier.
U.S. authorities were determined in the winter of 1867 to bring Benjamin to justice along with the former Confederate President Jefferson Davis, who was imprisoned at Fort Monroe, Virginia, with a pending trial for treason. If convicted, Davis would face the death penalty, as would Benjamin.
Once inside the U.S. mission in London, in a dusty basement piled with dispatches, Sharpe took into his confidence the No. 2 official in the American mission, the diplomat and political gadfly Benjamin Moran. Sharpe disclosed to the startled bureaucrat that he’d been ordered by Seward to hunt Confederate leaders who’d fled to England, France, and Italy after the war. This included John Surratt, who’d made a serpentine escape from the U.S. through Canada and Europe before finally being captured in Alexandria, Egypt. He was indicted for his alleged role in Lincoln’s murder and set to go on trial in Washington, D.C., just a few months later.
Moran took copious, handwritten notes of his conversations with his visitor from Washington. “Mr. George H. Sharpe, a detective, has been sent here to hunt up evidence against persons implicated in the assassination of Mr. Lincoln,” Moran wrote on Feb. 11, 1867. “[Sharpe] is a bullet-headed fellow and is determined to catch Benjamin if possible.”