The Con Man Who Was Pardoned By Both Abe Lincoln and Jefferson Davis

On this episode of Our American Stories, our next story is about a con man who was so good that he got both the Union and the Confederate presidents to pardon him; yet, he was so bad that a NYC woman offered a $50k reward to find him—dead or alive. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue with our American stories.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Up next.

Speaker 1 (00:14):
The story that comes to us from Frank Garman, who
is a professor of American history at Christopher Newport University.
He's also a Jack Miller Center fellow. Let's take a listen.

Speaker 2 (00:30):
I asked my colleague Jonathan White, who is a Civil
War historian who just won the Lincoln Prize, if he
had any recommendations for collections that were accessible online, and
he mentioned that the pardon records sent to Abraham Lincoln
had all been digitized. So that semester I asked my

(00:51):
students to look through the pardon records in search of
interesting stories, and in October, one of my students told
me about a letter that he had found can earning
Charles Callum's pardon application. The letter is only two pages long,
and it begins by describing the merits of the case.

(01:11):
Callum was only nineteen years old when he was arrested
for stealing from the post office in Portsmouth, Virginia, and
this first offense landed him with a ten year sentence
in the penitentiary in Richmond. His application also contains several
letters from his older sister, who described the plight of

(01:32):
their four orphaned siblings now that their mother had died
while Charles was in prison, and he also had letters
of recommendation from a congressman, a former senator, and petitions
from prominent individuals from his hometown. But the pardon clerk
continued the letter, stating that there is a lion in

(01:54):
the path that leads to mercy in this case, as
he also had a letter from the super intendant of
the Virginia Penitentiary who explained that Callum was an old
defender who had just been released from the same prison
after serving a fifteen month sentence for breaking into houses
near Parkersburg in what's now West Virginia. And he added

(02:18):
that after Charles was captured, men from the Ohio Penitentiary
recognized him as having served there under an alias. If
any of this is true, the pardon clerk mused, young
Callum has run a wonderful career in crime for one
so young, and I am compelled to say that I

(02:39):
regard his application as one of the least meritorious on
file in the office. My students said there must be
a story here, and at first I thought we might
write a short article together summarizing the case with a
few references from the newspapers to fill in the details.
But as they began searching for Charles Callum, I found

(03:00):
dozens of articles that at first all seemed to point
to different people. But as I kept digging, I discovered
that nearly all of these references pointed to the same person.
I soon discovered that Callum had been pardoned by Abraham Lincoln,
but that the pardon arrived after Virginia had seceded from

(03:23):
the Union, and the governor refused to release him, failing
to recognize Lincoln's authority now that Virginia had left the Union,
and so Callum remained in prison for another two years
until the summer of eighteen sixty three, when he appealed
to Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederate States. But

(03:47):
in his application to Jefferson Davis, he changed his story.
Rather than presenting himself as a youthful offender, he claimed
that he wished to join his many gallant kins men
who had already died in the Confederate Service, and he
produced a letter claiming to come from his maternal aunt,

(04:09):
which described the deaths of four of her sons who
had already died in the Confederate service, and concluded by
wishing that she had a fifth of Charles Callum. Needless
to say, Charles Callum was from Michigan. He had no

(04:30):
relatives in the Confederacy. His parents had fairly recently emigrated
from England and Scotland, and they had closer ties to
Canada than anywhere in the American South. But Jefferson Davis
found his plea convincing, and he decided to pardon him
in the summer of eighteen sixty three on the condition

(04:52):
that he joined the Confederate Army. Now as Callum later
claimed that, he never reported for duty, but instead spent
the war speculating in Bacon, Brandy and Whiskey. He was
arrested again in the winter of eighteen sixty four outside
of Richmond, and there he was pretending to be a

(05:15):
Confederate captain and had apparently committed some theft, and so
he was arrested for stealing and impersonating a Confederate officer,
and he was locked away in the notorious Richmond prison,
Castle Thunder. He was only there for a few weeks,

(05:36):
in which point he convinced his captors that he would
eagerly join the Confederate Army if he could only be released,
at which point he deserted again, and this time deserted
by walking all the way from the outskirts of Richmond
to Norfolk, where he crossed the Union lines and made

(05:58):
his way back to his home state of Michigan. Almost
as soon as the war ended and Callum received word
of Lincoln's assassination, he rushed to Washington, d c. In
an effort to aid in the investigation. He showed up
in Washington and presented himself to the detectives investigating the

(06:22):
Lincoln assassination, claiming that he had been in Richmond the
whole time and that he had been able to infiltrate
the Confederate's secret service and had bore witness to the
various conspiracies and threats against the President's life. His story
was so compelling that the detectives on the case actually

(06:45):
hired him, and for a period of a couple of
weeks he participated in the investigation. Now, his contributions were inconsequential,
but after the war he was able to parlay this
detective experience into a real job as a detective for
the Internal Revenue Service. For about a year, and a half.

(07:09):
In the late eighteen sixties, he worked as a detective
for the Internal Revenue Service in a district that covered
Georgia and northern Florida, and during his time there he
developed a reputation for extortion in blackmail. One newspaper later
reported that had he remained in Savannah, he almost certainly

(07:32):
would have been lynched. He decided to leave Georgia and
travel abroad. He left in eighteen seventy and he decided
to travel in the United Kingdom, and during that time
he reconnected with the congressman who had written a letter

(07:55):
of recommendation on his behalf years before when he was
applying for for the pardon from Abraham Lincoln. And that
congressman happened to be traveling in Ireland when he witnessed
a riot in Phoenix Park, Dublin. And this riot was
related to some Irish nationalism going on in that time period,

(08:20):
and the British authorities were trying to investigate and try
to infiltrate some of these Irish nationalist networks. But the
young congressmen realized that the British detectives had a major impetitive.
Their accent gave them away and those in Ireland could
immediately tell that the British detectives were English. But the

(08:45):
Congressman had a solution. He proposed that if Charles Callum
were to pose as an American tourist, that he would
be able to infiltrate these networks.

Speaker 1 (08:57):
And you're listening to Frank Garman, who was a professor
of American history at Christopher Newport University, tell one heck
of a story about Charles Collum and what a con
artist this guy is or was, that is of the
first order and relentless, particularly conning Jefferson Davisonto granting him

(09:18):
a pardon in exchange for serving in the Confederate Army,
which of course he pretended to do while impersonating a
Confederate officer, was of course engaging in more theft and
bribery and all the usual things that Charles did straight
through his time in Savannah and then even in his
little European jaunt which landed him in Ireland. Once a

(09:42):
con artist, always a con artist. When we come back
more of this remarkable American story, Charles Collum's story here
on our American story, and we continue here with our

(10:11):
American stories and with Frank Garmon, who's a professor of
American history at Christopher Newport University, and let's pick up
where we last left off with his storytelling about one Charles.

Speaker 2 (10:23):
Colum So ultimately the British government hired him for about
six months, and during this period Charles traveled around Ireland
extensively and developed a habit of overbilling the British government
pretty egregiously because he convinced them to reimburse them for
all travel expenses, and he proceeded to travel to a

(10:46):
different town nearly every night in order to milk this
job for all he could. After a period of six months,
the authorities in London discovered that he had simply been
reading the newspaper in Ireland and reporting back what he
had read and was transmitting little in the way of

(11:10):
useful information, and so they ultimately fired him. When he
left the UK, he decided to go to northern Florida,
which was covered by the area where he had worked
in the Internal Revenue Service, and in this case he
decided to enter into local politics. He partnered with the

(11:31):
reconstruction governor, a Republican named Harrison Reid, who had lost
the support of his party had several times faced impeachment
proceedings against him, but had survived all removal efforts. And
this governor was looking for a way to remain relevant
in Florida politics. So he reached out to some rival

(11:54):
Democrats and negotiated a deal with them. He would use
his influence as governor to try to sway the election
in eighteen seventy two in favor of the Democrats, if
only the Democrats in the state legislature would send him
to the United States Senate. Now, in those days, state

(12:18):
legislatures elected US Senators, and he believed that by using
his influence as governor, he might be able to manipulate
the election results. One way that he did this was
by trying to remove some of the federal officials, some
loyal radical Republicans who were upholding the reconstruction efforts there.

(12:43):
And so he encouraged President Grant to remove some of
the officials in the Justice Department, the US Attorney and
the US Marshal for the Northern District of Florida, and
he proposed that Grant appoint Charles Callum as US Marshall there,
and Grant did so. He met personally with Charles Callum,

(13:07):
and as a result of this meeting, was persuaded to
issue the appointment, much to the dismay of every local politician,
every local Republican in Florida. One local politician wrote, Grant
must have been decidedly drunk when he issued the appointments,

(13:29):
and after about ten days, Grant rescinded these appointments, and
at this point Charles Callum decided to enter the race himself,
and he printed some deceptive looking ballots that had ulysses
s Grant and his running mate at the top, but

(13:50):
curiously all of the Democratic candidates for the state offices
with his name included for the US Congress, and when
the election scheme faltered and his patron in the governor's
mansion not re elected, he decided to leave Florida and

(14:13):
went to New York City. In New York, Callum pursued
two different schemes at the same time. He operated a
fake newspaper and a fake secret society that went with it.
Callum also engaged in a scheme that targeted wealthy widows.

(14:37):
He became a serial bigamist after he realized that New
York in those days did not require marriage licenses and
in a span of six months, he married half a
dozen women in Manhattan alone, in each case disappearing with
their money shortly after the marriage. One of these women

(15:04):
consulted a pugnacious New York attorney named Iris Schaeffer and
retained his services. In order to locate Charles Collum, she
took out advertisements that were syndicated in newspapers across the country.
Some of them stated that this woman has lost fifty

(15:24):
thousand dollars and is prepared to spend another fifty thousand
dollars getting even with him. The articles offered a reward
of thirty five hundred dollars for Charles's capture if alive,
or the presentation of his body if dead. With his

(15:48):
identity known, he changed his name. He faked his death,
and for the next twelve years he traveled all over
In eighteen eighty six, he resurfaced under an assumed name,

(16:09):
where he went by Colonel Livingston Graham. He claimed to
be a Union Army veteran, but he could not remember
where he had served or who he had fought with,
and he attempted to check into the Central Branch of
the National Soldier's Home in Dayton, Ohio. After a three

(16:31):
month investigation, the Pension Bureau was able to determine that
his real name was Charles Callum, not Colonel Livingston Graham
as he presumed, but that he had never served in
the Union Army and had no claim to the soldier's home.
His younger brother George, picked him up and there the

(16:52):
story goes cold. His life reveals the malleability of identity
during this period. In an earlier era, Americans would have
been skeptical of his transience. They would be reluctant to
trust someone who had just arrived in Florida and was

(17:14):
suddenly running for Congress. In a later age, it would
have been easier to verify someone's identity. It would be
difficult for someone to approach such prominent people as Abraham
Lincoln or Ulysses S. Grant. So this time period in

(17:36):
the Gilded Age is really a unique era of American
history in that someone like Charles Callum could reinvent themselves
again and again and again.

Speaker 1 (17:52):
And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Greg Hangler, and a special thanks to
Frank Garman, who was a professor of American history at
Christopher Newport University. He's also a Jack Miller Center Fellow,
and the Jack Miller Center is a nationwide network of
scholars and teachers dedicated to educating the next generation about

(18:12):
America's founding principles and history. To learn more, visit Jackmillercenter
dot org. And by the way, if you're a history
teacher you just love American history, send your stories to
ouramericanstories dot com. There's some of our favorites. And this
was just a delight. Here was a world class con
artist who got pardon not just by President Abraham Lincoln,

(18:35):
for President Jefferson Davis. That's pretty unusual. And what a
con artist. Bernie Madoff had nothing on this guy. In fact,
I don't think Bernie had half his energy or ingenuity.
Is this This gentleman, Charles Collum did it again and
again and again and in ingenious ways. I mean, ending
up in Ireland, in England, duping the British government into

(19:00):
covering his expenses, and ultimately landing in Florida to run
for office and hope to land in the Senate. The
audacity of this guy, and then to fake his own death.
Of course, let's not forget he staged his own death.
The story of Charles Collum, the story of a world
class con man. Here on our American stories.