Dahlgren affair

The Dahlgren affair was an incident during the American Civil War which stemmed from a failed Union raid on the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia in March 1864. Brigadier General Hugh Judson Kilpatrick and Colonel Ulric Dahlgren led an attack on Richmond to free Union prisoners from Belle Isle and damage Confederate infrastructure.

The attack failed and Dahlgren was killed while in retreat during the Battle of Walkerton. Papers discovered on his body purportedly revealed orders to free Union prisoners from Belle Isle, arm them with flammable material, torch the city of Richmond while also carrying out a decapitation strike of the Confederate government by assassinating President Jefferson Davis and his entire cabinet.

The papers were published in the Richmond newspapers and sparked outrage in the South with speculation that President Abraham Lincoln had given the orders himself. An angry mob disinterred Dahlgren's remains and disrespectfully placed them on display in Richmond. Reports of the mistreatment of Dahlgren's corpse inflamed public opinion in the North. Union newspapers and Dahlgren's father, Union Navy Rear Admiral John A. Dahlgren claimed the papers were a forgery. Union Major General George Meade had to personally assure Confederate General Robert E. Lee that the orders were not authorized by the Union Army. The controversy is known to have caused Davis and his cabinet to authorize Thomas Hines to unleash the total war of the Northwest Conspiracy behind Union lines and may also have contributed to John Wilkes Booth's assassination of President Lincoln.

It has never been determined if the papers were forged or if not, who they were written by, although historian Stephen W. Sears points to the "unscrupulous" Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton as the authority behind the plan to have the freed Richmond prisoners commit arson and assassination. Captain John McEntee of the Bureau of Military Intelligence, who accompanied Dahlgren on the raid, told General Marsena Patrick that the published documents were accurate, as they corresponded with what Dalhgren told him. This was confirmed by another B.M.I. agent, John Babcock.^{[citation needed]}

After the war, Stanton requested the documents from Francis Lieber, who had been tasked with accumulating and preserving captured Confederate documents. Lieber was ordered to give them to the Secretary of War, and they were never seen again.