A publication of the Central Intelligence Agency

For additional copies or information on CIA,

write to:

Public Affairs

Central Intelligence Agency

Washington, DC 20505

(703) 482-0623

ISBN No. 1-929667-12-4

or visit our website at

www.cia.gov

2
The Office of Public Affairs (OPA) wishes to thank Thomas Allen for

his work in drafting and preparing this publication. OPA also

expresses its gratitude to those who gave of their time and expertise

in reviewing Mr. Allen’s draft. Most of the photographs came from

the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and the National

Archives and Record Administration in College Park, Maryland. The

Harper’s Weekly drawings of “The Scout,” “The CSS Alabama,” “Life

of a Spy,” “Arson Gossip Article,” “Arson Story,” “Guardhouse at

Langley,” and “Ft. Sumter article” were courtesy of Harpweek, LLC.

The pictures of the “Cipher for Telegraphic Correspondence Code

Book,” the “Cipher Cylinder,” and the “Star Wig-Wag Flag” are

courtesy of the National Security Agency. The photo of 

Elizabeth Van Lew is from the Virginia Historical Society. The

Confederate flags are from the Museum of the Confederacy. 

3
i

Introduction

Though much has been written about the Civil War itself, little has been written about the spy war that

went on within.

The chronicling of Civil War intelligence activities challenges historians because of the lack of records, the

lack of access to records, and the questionable truth of other records. Judah P. Benjamin, the Confederacy’s

Secretary of State, burned all the intelligence records he could find as federal troops entered Richmond.

Union intelligence records were kept sealed in the National Archives until 1953. A few individuals involved

in intelligence gathering burned their personal papers while others chose to publish their memoirs, though

greatly embellishing their exploits. Even today, the identities of many spies remain secret. 

Henry Thomas Harrison, for example, was a Confederate spy whose intelligence set in motion the events

that produced the battle of Gettysburg. But neither his first name nor details of his long career as a spy were

known until 1986, when historian James O. Hall published an article about him. 

Though the idea of centralized intelligence gathering was decades away, the age-old resistance to the idea

was present even then. Neither side saw the need to create such intelligence organizations, but each side

approached the idea of effectively acquiring intelligence in their own way. The Confederacy’s Signal Corps,

devoted primarily to communications and intercepts, included a covert agency, the Secret Service Bureau.

This unit ran espionage and counter-espionage operations in the North. Late in the war, the bureau set up a

secret headquarters in Canada and sent out operatives on covert missions in Northern states. The Union’s

Bureau of Military Information, unlike the Confederacy’s Secret Service Bureau, operated for specific generals rather than for the Union Army itself. But here was born the idea of what would eventually become a

centralized military intelligence division. 

Each side still used age-old intelligence techniques, such as code-breaking, deception, and covert surveillance. However, into this modern war came two innovations that would endure as tools of espionage: wiretapping and overhead reconnaissance. 

What follows is a look at some of the highlights of how the North and the South gathered and used their

information, the important missions, and the personalities. From this special view, the focus is not on the

battlefield, but on a battle of wits. 

4
The Civil War 

Introduction 4 

Saving Mr. Lincoln 6 

Intelligence Collection -- The South 10 

Intelligence Collection -- The North 16 

The Bureau of Military Information 21 

Black Dispatches 25 

Intelligence’s New Tools 30 

Intelligence Overseas 36 

Conspiracy in Canada 42 

Epilogue 47 

Postscript: Then and Now, the Guard Posts at Langley 49 

Suggested Readings 50
6
2

On February 11, 1861, Abraham Lincoln said his

farewell to the people of his hometown of Springfield,

Illinois, and boarded a train that would take him to

Washington for his inauguration on March 4. As he

started out, rumors of assassination plots circulated in

several cities along the planned route. In Washington,

stories spread that assassins would strike down

Lincoln before or during his inauguration.

The South Carolina legislature had responded to

Lincoln’s election by unanimously voting to secede from

the Union, leading the march of Southern states toward

secession. “Civil war,” said an Ohio newspaper, “is as

certain to follow secession as darkness to follow the

going down of the sun.” The Union was tearing apart—

and so, it seemed, was the nation’s capital itself.

Rumors of plots swirled around the city. Secessionist

congressmen were said to be planning to kidnap lameduck President James Buchanan so that Vice President

(and future Confederate general) John C. Breckinridge,

who had run against Lincoln as a pro-slavery candidate,

could seize power. “Minutemen” from Virginia and

Maryland were reportedly ready to invade the city.

Charles Pomeroy Stone, a West Point graduate who had

served in the Mexican War, was in Washington when the

secessions began. Concerned about the rumors, he called

upon his old commander, now Lieutenant General

Winfield Scott, commander-in-chief of the U.S. Army.

Scott made Stone a colonel and named him inspectorgeneral of the District of Columbia militia. 

Most of the U.S. Army was in Indian country, far

beyond the reach of railroads. Washington’s potential

defenders included volunteer units of dubious loyalty.

These included the National Rifles, whose captain said

his men stood ready to “guard the frontier of Maryland

and help to keep the Yankees from coming down to

coerce the South.”

Like many other Army officers of the time, Stone had to

grope for military intelligence, using whatever resources

he managed to find. There was no formal military intelligence organization, and counterintelligence was an unknown art. Stone

realized that he needed help from

civilians with special skills: detectives.

The U.S. government, lacking any federal investigative

agency, often used private detectives to track down

counterfeiters and mail thieves. Suspecting that the

National Rifles harbored secessionists, Stone planted a

detective in the ranks and told him to keep the unit’s

captain under surveillance.

Stone’s detective told him that the men of the National

Rifles were planning to storm the Treasury building as

part of a plot to take over Washington. Stone also

learned that more than 300 other men, known as

“National Volunteers,” were drilling in a hall above a

large livery stable. Stone gave the task of penetrating that

group to a “skillful New York detective” who had been

loaned to the Army.

Through the detective’s undercover work, Stone was able

to learn enough to force the disbanding of the National

Volunteers. Their captain, Dr. Cornelius Boyle, a prominent Washington physician, left the capital and later

became a Confederate intelligence officer. Stone’s counterintelligence efforts also

purged the National Rifles of

secessionists. The unit became

one of 30 companies formed by

Washingtonians loyal to the

Union and ready to defend both

the capital and Lincoln.

Soon after Lincoln’s train left

Springfield, Stone began receiving reports of assassination

plots. “So many clear indications pointed to Baltimore

that three good detectives of

the New York police force

were constantly employed

there,” Stone recalled. In a classic example of intelligence

analysis, he compared the detectives’ reports to “the

information received from independent sources.” Stone

did not mention another detective—Allan Pinkerton,

founder of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. 

Major Allan Pinkerton, 

President Abraham Lincoln, and

Gen. John A. McClernand at

Antietam, MD, October 1862

7
3

Samuel Morse Felton, president of the Philadelphia,

Wilmington, and Baltimore Railroad, had hired

Pinkerton after hearing reports that rabid secessionists in

Baltimore were planning to cut Baltimore off from

Washington by burning bridges and sinking the

Susquehanna River train ferry. Pinkerton went to

Baltimore with five operatives, including a trusted assistant, Kate Warne, described by Pinkerton as America’s

first woman detective. Pinkerton set up an office and

posed as a stockbroker named John H. Hutchinson. 

While investigating the sabotage rumors, Pinkerton

heard of a plot to kill Lincoln in Baltimore when his

train arrived from Harrisburg on February 23. Lincoln

was to be taken by carriage to a private home for lunch

and then returned to the train. While secessionists—the

National Volunteers were mentioned—whipped up a

riot, a barber who called himself Captain Ferrandini

would kill Lincoln, vanish into the mob, and slip away

to the South. Baltimore police would have only a small

force at the scene, under orders from the mayor and

chief of police, both Southern sympathizers.

Pinkerton hoped to foil the plot by getting Lincoln to

change his schedule. On February 21, he met with

Lincoln in a Chicago hotel room. Lincoln said he 

could not believe there was a conspiracy to kill him.

Hours later, Frederick Seward, son of Senator

William Henry Seward, arrived at Lincoln’s room and

warned him of the plot, which had been discovered 

independently by detectives working for Colonel Stone

and General Scott. They had sent young Seward to

Lincoln, who now was convinced.

Next morning, Lincoln left by train for Harrisburg, as

scheduled, then boarded a special train, accompanied by

his bodyguard Ward H. Lamon, a burly former law partner. When the train pulled into West Philadelphia,

Pinkerton was waiting in a carriage. The telegraph to

Baltimore was cut off. Agents were placed in telegraph

offices in Harrisburg, Philadelphia, and New York City,

where there was a special watch to hold up any messages

about Lincoln’s travels. The carriage took Lincoln and

Lamon to the yard of the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and

Baltimore Railroad. There, Kate Warne met the carriage

with four tickets for sleeping berths. She and Pinkerton,

like Lamon, were armed.

The train pulled out shortly before 11 p.m. and arrived

in Baltimore about 3:30 a.m. on February 23. Warne

remained in Baltimore as the sleeping cars with 

Lincoln on board were shifted to another train, which

arrived in Washington around 6 a.m. Later, Lincoln

would say he regretted slipping into the capital “like a

thief in the night.”

On March 4, the morning of the inauguration, Stone

stationed riflemen in windows overlooking the broad

steps where Lincoln would take the oath of office.

Sharpshooters stood on roofs along the inaugural route

to the Capitol as Lincoln rode past in an open carriage.

Soldiers lined the streets. Under the platform where

Lincoln stood, other soldiers huddled, guarding against

bomb planters. Other troops formed a cordon at the foot

of the steps. After Lincoln’s inauguration, Stone continued to protect the capital, taking control of telegraph

offices and the railroad station, and seizing boats on the

Potomac to keep Confederate agents

from using them.

On April 12, Confederate cannons in

Charleston began firing on Fort

Sumter. The Civil War had begun.

Nine days later, Pinkerton wrote to

President Lincoln, offering to start “obtaining information on the movements of the traitors, or safely conveying your letters or dispatches.” Before Lincoln responded, Major General George B. McClellan asked Pinkerton

to set up a military intelligence service for McClellan’s

command, the Army’s Division of the Ohio. A former

railroad executive, McClellan

was Pinkerton’s friend and former client. Pinkerton agreed

and, with several operatives,

headed for McClellan’s headquarters in Cincinnati. Like the

detectives who had worked for

Colonel Stone, Pinkerton would

be a civilian, but he assumed a

military cover name,

Major E. J. Allen.

Fort Sumter

Gen. George McClellan

8
4

Allan Pinkerton, born in 1819 in Glasgow, Scotland, was

the son of a police sergeant. At the age of 23, he

emigrated to the United States. After working for a 

time as a cooper, he became first a deputy sheriff in

Illinois and then a member of Chicago’s newly organized

police force.

In 1850, he left the force as a detective and founded the

Pinkerton National Detective Agency. Pinkerton’s code

called for his agents to have no “addiction to drink,

smoking, card playing, low dives or ... slang.” On the

front of his Chicago headquarters, he placed a sign with

a huge eye bearing the company slogan—“We Never

Sleep.” That Pinkerton logo was probably the origin of

the term “private eye.” 

Pinkerton’s detectives specialized in tracking and capturing gangs that robbed railroads. Through his work,

Pinkerton met George B. McClellan, president of the

Rock Island and Illinois Central Railroad, and its attorney, Abraham Lincoln. Those connections led to his

work during the Civil War. 

After the war, Pinkerton returned to Chicago and basked

in the publicity earned by Pinkerton detectives as they

pursued such notorious bandits as the James brothers

and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. “Pinkertons,”

as they were called, also worked as strikebreakers for the

executives of companies battling unions that were organizing rail workers and coal miners.

Pinkerton died in 1884 and was buried in a family plot

whose graves included that of Timothy Webster, one of

his best agents who was hanged by the Confederates.

Pinkerton had recovered Webster’s remains after the war. 

The Pinkerton National Detective Agency continued as a

family enterprise through four generations. Outsiders

bought it and kept the Pinkerton name. In 1999,

Securitas, an international security firm, acquired the

Pinkerton company. 

The Eye That Never Sleeps

Major Allan Pinkerton (right, seated) with his officers

9
10
8

For Confederates planning espionage against the North,

Washington looked like an ideal site: a city 60 miles

south of the Mason-Dixon Line, adjacent to slave-holding states, and full of Southern sympathizers. Many of

them were in Congress or in the federal bureaucracy, 

and had access to valuable intelligence. All recruiters 

had to do was find among them the men and women

who would have the courage and the skill to act as 

reliable agents. 

The earliest known recruiter was Governor John Letcher

of Virginia, who laid the foundation for Confederate

espionage work in Washington. Virginia seceded from

the Union on April 17, 1861, but did not join the

Confederacy until May. During the interval, Letcher saw

his state as an independent foe of the Union and began

his own defense by forming an army and setting up a spy

net in his foe’s capital. He knew Washington well: as a

member of Congress from 1853 to 1859 and he had

been active in the city’s social life.

One of the best-known members of that society was

Rose O’Neal Greenhow, a vivacious 44-year-old widow,

who partied and dined with Washington’s elite. Openly

pro-South, she had wept in the Senate Gallery on

January 21, 1861, when Jefferson Davis, one of her

many influential friends, said farewell to the Senate and

went off to lead the Confederacy. 

Letcher got his spy nest started by telling 

Thomas Jordan, a Virginia-born West Point graduate,

to recruit Greenhow. Jordan, who had served in the

Seminole Indian War and the Mexican War, was 

stationed in Washington. Sometime in the spring of

1861, while still a U.S. Army officer, he called on

Greenhow and asked her to be an agent. (He soon left

Washington and became a lieutenant colonel in the

Virginia Provisional Army.) 

Greenhow accepted the mission enthusiastically, using

her knowledge of Washington’s ways to get intelligence

useful for the South. Major William E. Doster, the

provost marshal who provided security for Washington,

later called her “formidable,” an agent with “masterly

skill,” who bestowed on the

Confederacy “her knowledge of all the

forces which reigned at the Capitol.” 

Greenhow’s support of secessionists did not turn away

her anti-slavery admirers, who included Senator 

Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, chairman of the

Committee on Military Affairs (and future vice president

to President Ulysses S. Grant). Wilson was identified as

the author of love letters signed H; one letter said that

“spies are put upon me but I will try to elude them

tonight and once more have a happy hour in spite of

fate.” Another gentleman caller was a member of

Wilson’s committee, Senator Joseph Lane of Oregon,

who signed his importuning letters to her. Another

friend, Colonel Erasmus D. Keyes, General Winfield

Scott’s military secretary, later said that she had “tried to

persuade me not to take part in the war.” 

Jordan instructed Greenhow in a simple, 26-symbol

cipher and told her to use his cover name,

Thomas John Rayford, for sending him reports. In her

memoir about her espionage, she said that she sometimes

used a word code. As an example, she told of a letter that

said, “Tell Aunt Sally that I have some old shoes for the

children, and I wish her to send one down town to take

them, and to let me know whether she has found any 

charitable person to help her take care of them.” What

the letter actually meant was: “I have some important

information to send across the river, and wish a 

messenger immediately. Have you any means of getting

reliable information?” 

The delivery of the ciphered reports to Jordan involved

an ever-changing “Secret Line,” the name for the system

used to get letters, intelligence reports, and other documents across the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers and

into the hands of Confederate officers and officials. For

Greenhow, the Secret Line began with a courier to whom

she would entrust her reports. He or she would then

hand these off to the next link in the chain of men and

women who slipped in and out of taverns, farms, and

waterfront docks along routes that connected Baltimore

and Washington to the Confederacy.

One of Greenhow’s reports, she later said, had helped the

South win the first major battle of the war at Bull Run

Creek on the road to Manassas, Virginia, on July 21, 1861. 11
9

Modern historians discount her role, attributing the

Confederate victory to tactics and errors that produced a

Union rout. But P.G.T. Beauregard, the victorious general, gallantly gave her credit for alerting him to the size of

the federal force advancing toward Manassas. He said

that an enciphered report from her had been delivered to

a Confederate picket outpost and quickly passed on to

him and on to Jefferson Davis—with an added request

for reinforcements.

The carrier of the report was Betty Duvall, a young

friend of Greenhow. Duvall, dressed in a farm woman’s

clothes and driving a cart, passed through the Union sentinels on the Chain Bridge across the Potomac in

Washington, and stopped at a Virginia safe house, where

she mounted a horse and rode to the outpost, near

Fairfax County Courthouse. She told the officer in

charge that she had an urgent message for Beauregard.

“Upon my announcing that I would have it faithfully

forwarded at once,” the officer later said, “she took out

her tucking comb and let fall the longest and most beautiful roll of hair I have ever seen. She took then from the

back of her head, where it had been safely tied, a small

package, not larger than a silver dollar, sewed up in silk.”

Within was the message for Beauregard.

On the advance toward Manassas, the Union troops had

overrun the Fairfax outpost and found papers and maps

that incriminated Greenhow. Her grand home, not far

from the White House, was put under surveillance by

Allan Pinkerton, who had been placed in command of

the Union Army’s Division of the Potomac after the

debacle at Bull Run. “I secured a house in Washington,”

Pinkerton later wrote, “and gathered around me a number of resolute, trustworthy men and discreet women.” 

Pinkerton’s first major assignment was the capture of

Rose Greenhow. One rainy night, wanting to peek into

her parlor, he went to a high window, removed his boots,

and stood on the shoulders of two operatives, “prepared

to take notes of what transpired.” A man had entered—

and Pinkerton recognized him as an officer assigned to

the provost marshal’s office.

“Just at that moment I again received a warning from my

supporters, and hastily jumping to the ground, we hid

ourselves until the pedestrians had passed out of sight

and hearing.” He climbed back on the men’s shoulders

and saw the officer show Greenhow a map. The two left

the room for more than an hour, returned “arm in arm,”

and, with “a whispered good-night and something that

sounded very much like a kiss,” the officer left. 

Pinkerton followed the officer to a building he did not

recognize. Suddenly, four soldiers with fixed bayonets

grabbed Pinkerton—and arrested him on the officer’s

order. Pinkerton was soon released and the captain

arrested. The captain,

his career ruined,

died sometime later,

reportedly a suicide.

A week later,

Pinkerton arrested

Greenhow at her

home and seized documents and personal

letters that linked her

to Senators Wilson

and Lane, along 

with many other

well-known

Washingtonians. She

The Confederate “Secret Line.”

Rose O’Neal Greenhow and her

daughter during her time at the 

Old Capitol Prison. 12
10

was charged with “being a spy in the interest of the

rebels and furnishing the insurgent generals with important information relative to the movements of the Union

forces.” For ten months, she and several female friends

were held in her home. Because she kept attempting to

smuggle out messages, she was put in the Old Capitol

Prison (now the site of the United States Supreme Court

Building). She was released in June 1862 and sent

through federal and Confederate lines to Richmond.

After Greenhow’s capture, the cipher that Jordan had

devised apparently was used for deceptive messages sent

by Union officers. Writing about the cipher to

Confederate Secretary of War Judah P. Benjamin, Jordan

said, “Being my first attempt, and hastily devised, it may

be deciphered by any expert, as I found after use of it for

a time.” 

The Confederates operated at least two other intelligence

networks in Washington, both run by cavalrymen and

probably set up by the Secret Service Bureau, a clandestine unit within the Confederacy’s Signal Corps. The

bureau, a part of the Confederate War Department in

Richmond, was commanded by Major William Norris, a

former Baltimore lawyer. The Signal Corps ran the

army’s semaphore service while the Secret Service Bureau

oversaw a communications network whose missions

included the running of agents to and from Union territory and the forwarding of messages from Confederate

officials in Richmond to contacts in Canada and Europe. 

One of the bureau’s most important tasks was the

obtaining of open-source material, especially newspapers,

from the North, primarily through sympathizers in

Maryland, including postmasters. The newspapers 

provided information—and, occasionally, agents’ 

messages hidden in personal columns.

The delivery system—sometimes called “our

Government route”—boldly relied on the U.S. mail

along part of the way. One “mail agent,” a Marylander

who lived near Washington, regularly drove his cart

there, collected South-bound documents from network

members, then hid the mail in manure that he picked up

for his garden. Typically, an agent in Union territory

wrote a letter, probably in cipher, addressed it to a specific person, such as “Secretary of War, Richmond, Va.,”

and placed it in an envelope, which was then sealed and

placed inside a second envelope. A U.S. stamp was put

on that envelope, which was addressed to a collaborator,

usually in Maryland. He or she would then continue the

letter on its way by handing it to the first of a relay of

mail agents for delivery to “signal camps” in Virginia.

Confederate mail supervisors established several accommodation addresses (as they would be called today) so

that a suspiciously large amount of mail did not get

delivered to one recipient. The system depended mostly

on volunteers, some of whom made the enterprise profitable by adding smuggling to their espionage.

There were also riverside farms where Southern sympathizers maintained simple signal systems. One of the signalers was 24-year-old Mary Watson, who hung a black

dress or shawl from a dormer window to warn boatmen

across the river that Union troops were near.

Union officers assigned to investigating the rebel specialdelivery operation occasionally made arrests of mail

agents, but the mail kept going through. Major General

William T. Sherman was particularly incensed by the regular delivery of northern newspapers. Newspaper correspondents, he fumed, “should be treated as spies...and

are worth a hundred thousand men to the enemy.” Yet,

like other commanders on both sides, he planted false

information in newspapers, well knowing that the enemy

would read and perhaps believe the deception.

Although the focus of Confederate espionage was initially on Washington, as

the war went on, intelligence gathering

became more tactical.

Distinctions blurred

between “spies” and

“scouts.” But an 

age-old custom 

prevailed: if you were

caught in your army’s

uniform, you were a

prisoner of war; if you

were in disguise, you

were a spy and could be

hanged. Men who rode

with the “Gray Ghost,”

John S. Mosby, and

other such military John S. Mosby 13
units were usually considered soldiers. Many other riders,

particularly a Confederate espionage group known as

Coleman’s Scouts, were treated as spies.

When Yankee troops captured a group of riders behind

Union lines in Tennessee, they singled out one young

man who had documents concealed under his saddle and

in his clothing. Besides information about federal defenses in Nashville, the man, Sam Davis, had a piece of paper

signed E. Coleman.

Union interrogators, seeking information on the notorious Coleman’s Scouts, focused their attention on Davis.

He knew that “Coleman” was the cover name of Captain

H. B. Shaw, who had also been captured and was being

held in a nearby cell. But when Brigadier General

Grenville M. Dodge, a Union intelligence officer,

demanded to know who and where Coleman was, Davis

refused to talk. He remained silent even when Dodge

threatened to hang him.

Davis, a 21-year-old infantryman, was a courier for Shaw.

When he was hanged on November 27, 1863, he went

into Confederate legend not as a courier, but as a spy.

The legend has him say, “I would sooner die a thousand

deaths than betray a friend or be false to duty.” He

became “the South’s Nathan Hale,” one of many captives

executed as spies by both sides. The number of suspected

spies executed by both sides is not known because of 

the lack of records and the secrecy that surrounded 

most executions.

Because “spies” and “scouts” were used interchangeably, it

is difficult to sort out “espionage,” which is the work of

spies, from “reconnaissance,” which is the work of

trained observers, such as cavalry scouts. Confederate

General Robert E. Lee, for example, received a steady

stream of intelligence from what would be called agents

or spies today. In a report to Confederacy President

Jefferson Davis, Lee said that “our scouts on the

Potomac” had learned that a Union army was about to

march because “three days’ rations had been cooked and

placed in the haversacks of the men.” Another so-called

Southern scout seemed more likely to be a spy because he

“was able to converse with” Union troops to get an accurate estimate of the size of a deployment.

Lee’s greatest scout, Major General Jeb Stuart, won public fame as a dashing cavalryman leading audacious raids

behind Union lines. But when he was killed in action in

1864, Lee gave him an epitaph worthy of a great spy: “He

never brought me a piece of false information.”

11

14
12

James Ewell Brown Stuart, better known as Jeb Stuart,

was the grandson of a Revolutionary War hero and son

of an Army officer who served in the War of 1812. 

Jeb Stuart was born in the family homestead in Patrick

County, Virginia, on February 6, 1833. After attending

Emory and Henry College, he entered the U.S. Military

Academy, graduating in 1854. Three years later, as a 

cavalry officer in the West, he was wounded in an 

Indian battle.

While on duty in the Kansas Territory, Stuart pursued an

abolitionist known as Ossawatomie Brown, who was

accused of illegally freeing slaves. On October 17, 1859,

Stuart and Brown would cross paths again. Stuart accompanied Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee, who led a

U.S. Marine force to Harpers Ferry to fight

raiders who had seized the federal arsenal and

rifle factory there. John Brown, who called

himself Isaac Smith, had barricaded himself

and his followers in the armory fire engine

house. Lee sent Stuart to the door with a

white flag. The man known as Smith

“opened the door about four inches, and

placed his body against the crack, with a

carbine in his hand,” Stuart later wrote.

“Hence his remark after his capture that he

could have wiped me out like a mosquito.

When Smith first came to the door, I

recognized old Ossawatomie Brown

who had given us so much trouble

in Kansas.” Later, Stuart searched

Brown’s lodgings and found documents that disclosed details of

Brown’s plans for leading a

slave revolt. This was Stuart’s

first venture into the gathering of intelligence.

When the Civil

War began,

Stuart

resigned his U.S. Army commission and joined the

Confederacy. He rose rapidly, becoming a brigadier general in 1861 and in 1862, as a major general, chief of

cavalry of the Army of Northern Virginia. He seemed

too flamboyant to be a spy. “He could wear, without

exciting a suspicion of unfitness, all the warlike adornments of an old-time cavalier,” a biographer wrote of

Stuart. “His black plume, and hat caught up with a 

golden star, seemed the proper frame for a knightly

face....”At a time when scout and spy were often used

interchangeably, Stuart’s military exploits eclipsed his

espionage at least in public. But Stuart’s espionage was

well-known by General Robert E. Lee, who took a personal interest in the covert work of Stuart’s scouts. One

of them, Lee wrote, “sometimes acted under my special

direction.”

One of Stuart’s scouts, Benjamin Franklin Stringfellow,

became an extraordinarily competent agent. For a

time, Stringfellow posed as a dentist’s assistant in

Union-occupied Alexandria, Virginia, while regularly sending reports of Union troop movements. Later, he used the same cover while an

agent in Washington, where he even got a

dental license.

Stuart, who had trained Stringfellow, said of

him, “In determining the enemy’s real

design, I rely upon you, as well as

the quick transmission of the

information.” Stringfellow’s

information, Stuart said,

“may be worth all the

Yankee trains” that 

Stuart attacked. 

Stuart’s colorful career

ended on May 11,

1864, when he was

fatally wounded

while defending

Richmond. When

Lee learned of

Stuart’s death, he

said, “I can scarcely

think of him without weeping.”

The Flamboyant Spy

15
16
16

While the Confederacy focused on

getting intelligence to Richmond

via the couriers of the Secret Line,

the Union did not have any similar

system. Union generals handled

intelligence gathering as a task for

their own commands. Early in the

war, for example, when Major

General George B. McClellan

became commander of the 

Union’s Army of the Potomac, 

Allan Pinkerton moved to

Washington to gather intelligence for McClellan.

Pinkerton worked for McClellan, not the entire Union

Army. Even so, Pinkerton later called himself “Chief of

the United States Secret Service.” A similar claim came

after the war from Lafayette C. Baker, who performed

counterintelligence and oversaw security for 

Lieutenant General Winfield Scott, commander-in-chief

of the U.S. Army. 

There was no centrally directed intelligence agency in

Washington. Pinkerton and Baker worked only for their

superiors. They ran their organizations so independently

and so competitively that, in at least two cases, the operatives of one “secret service” arrested or kept under surveillance the operatives of the other.

The Union never developed a need for a national intelligence agency. The gathering of intelligence was, in fact,

so decentralized that President Lincoln himself even

hired an agent on his own, paid him, and personally

received the agent’s reports.

William A. Lloyd, a publisher of railroad and steamer

guides for railroads and steamers in the South,

approached Lincoln early in the war, looking for a pass

through Confederate lines so that he could continue his

business. Lincoln had a better idea: “Use the pass to go

to the South and spy for me”—at $200 a month plus

expenses. (This would have the equivalent purchasing

power of about $4,000 today.)

Lloyd signed a contract in which he agreed to provide

Lincoln personally with such intelligence as the number

and location of Confederate troops and the

layouts of their forts and fortifications.

Lloyd headed into the Confederacy with

his wife and maid, along with a publishing

company employee, Thomas H. S. Boyd.

Because Lloyd had contracted to send his information

directly to Lincoln, he did not use Union Army communications. Instead, he mailed the intelligence in letters to

Boyd’s family. Then a member of the family would take

the letters to the White House with instructions to have

them delivered directly to Lincoln, who presumably used

the information to weigh against what he was getting

from his generals.

Lloyd’s arrangement with Lincoln resembled Pinkerton’s

with McClellan and Baker’s with Scott: each agent was

serving a man, not an agency. Pinkerton added to his

services by doing some political spying for McClellan

while contributing little useful intelligence.

In July 1861, with some 35,000 Union troops in

Washington and Northern patriots clamoring for an “On

to Richmond” campaign, Scott desperately needed whatever information he could get about Confederate

strength around Manassas Junction, Virginia. In that

hamlet, 25 miles from Washington, near a creek called

Bull Run, Scott would launch the war’s first major battle.

Scott sent Baker to Manassas Junction.

According to Baker’s memoir, he set forth to Manassas 

under the cover of a traveling photographer named

Samuel Munson of Knoxville, Tennessee. Arrested in

Manassas by the Confederates, he was questioned and sent

on to Richmond, where, he claimed, Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, questioned him, but could not

break Baker’s cover. Although he spent time in a Richmond

jail and was under guard before being released, he said he

had somehow managed to get enough information about

Confederate forces to please Scott.

The information did not prevent a Union rout at Bull

Run. The debacle ended Scott’s career and began Baker’s,

for he became chief of what he sometimes called the

National Detective Police. With about 30 employees and

an appointment as “special provost marshal for the War

Department,” Baker worked not only on spy cases but

also tracked down deserters and subversives, an all-inclusive label for Southerners suspected of treasonable acts,

Lafayette Baker

17
17

and for “Copperheads,” Northerners with Southern sympathies. His most famous case involved the capture of

Belle Boyd.

Belle, in her colorful biography, said that she had killed 

a Union soldier who demanded that

she fly a U.S. flag over her home. 

By her account, she became a

Confederate spy, and one day—as

“the rifle-balls flew thick and fast

about me”—she dashed through 

federal lines and gave vital

information to Major General

Thomas (Stonewall) Jackson. She

was later arrested and brought before

Baker, whom she portrayed as an

arrogant rube she easily outwitted.

Baker supposedly threatened her

with life imprisonment (neither side ever executed a

woman as a spy), but she was released without having

been charged and sent to Richmond, where she was hailed

as a heroine.

Pinkerton, meanwhile, was developing a different view of

espionage, pursuing what today would be called actionable intelligence. He realized that when the war began,

the Confederacy had agents-in-place in Washington,

while Northerners had few assets in Richmond.

Pinkerton knew he had to establish a counterintelligence

presence in Washington—and that he had to get agents

into Richmond.

Pinkerton started a Richmond connection by sending

one of his best agents, Timothy Webster, to the

Confederate capital. British-born Timothy Webster was a

former New York City police officer skilled at making

acquaintances with people who became willing, unwitting sources. As Pinkerton later wrote, everyone who met

Webster “yielded to the magic of his blandishments and

was disposed to serve him whenever possible.”

Webster got himself into Richmond under the cover of 

a secessionist acting as a courier from Baltimore using

the Secret Line, the Confederate communications 

system. He ingratiated himself with Brigadier General 

John Henry Winder, who, as Richmond provost marshal,

ran counterintelligence there. Winder was also in charge

of prisoners of war east of the Mississippi and in that

role picked up kernels of intelligence. Webster put

Winder in his debt by carrying letters to and from

Winder’s son, William, who was a Union Army officer in

Washington. Winder showed his gratitude by giving

Webster a pass that allowed him to travel throughout the

Confederacy.

On one of his trips across the Potomac River, Webster

learned that Vincent Camalier, a Maryland secessionist, had

been jailed as he attempted to cross into Virginia. Webster

intervened, convincing the Union officer holding Camalier

to release him. The act won Webster more friends among

Southern sympathizers on both sides of the river. Webster

probably did not know that Camalier was himself an agent

for the Confederacy’s Secret Service Bureau. 

Webster also impressed Secretary

of War Judah P. Benjamin, who

accepted him as a courier and

gave him documents to deliver

to secessionists in Baltimore.

Webster, transformed into a 

double agent by Benjamin, 

could thus deliver to Pinkerton

not only reports based on

Webster’s own observations, but

also Confederate documents.

Pinkerton said that Webster’s

reports were so long and richly detailed that Pinkerton and

two operatives had to stay up all night to read and assess

them. He gave precise descriptions of the fortifications protecting Richmond, reported on soldier morale, and noted

food prices.

Suddenly, in February 1862, Webster’s reports stopped.

Pinkerton sent operatives Pryce Lewis and John Scully 

to Richmond to see what had happened. They learned

that Webster lay ill with inflammatory rheumatism in 

a Richmond hotel. He was being cared for by 

Hattie Lawton, posing as Webster’s wife, and her black

servant, John Scobell. Both were Pinkerton operatives. 

A Richmond civilian who had lived in Washington recognized Scully and Lewis as Pinkerton men. Captured

and jailed, they were threatened with hanging if they 

did not tell what they knew about Webster.

Both were released, presumably because they talked.

Pinkerton, however, believed that only Lewis had

betrayed Webster. (Lewis later went to New York and started

Timothy Webster

Belle Boyd

18
18

a detective agency.) Webster was arrested, tried, and sentenced to death. Lawton was also arrested as a spy, but officials, believing that no slave could be a spy, let Scobell go.

After learning about Webster’s death sentence, Pinkerton

went to Lincoln, who sent Confederacy President

Jefferson Davis a message threatening to hang

Confederates then held as spies if Webster were

executed. Despite Lincoln’s message, he was hanged on 

April 29, 1862. There is no record of an immediate

Union reprisal, but records of executions by the Union

and the Confederacy are sketchy and, as the war went

on, retaliatory executions of spies did occur.

Lawton maintained her cover as Webster’s widow until

she was sent to the North in a prison exchange about a

year after the hanging. While she was in prison,

Elizabeth Van Lew, a Richmond woman who provided

food and clothing to Union prisoners, asked in vain for

Lawton’s release. Neither woman seems to have known

that the other was a spy for the Union.

Van Lew sometimes showed touches of eccentricity—causing her to be known as “Crazy Bet.” But, in her role as selfmade spy, she was cunning, outwitting Confederate detectives, enciphering messages, and managing a clandestine

operation that was both an underground, which helped

Union prisoners to escape, and a spy network, which provided Union generals with valuable intelligence.

Through couriers she recruited, she sent intelligence dispatches containing specific information, such as, “eight

guns have been sent to Chaffin’s farm to be put in position.” Once she used a Confederate deserter to carry out

of Richmond a message warning that “the enemy are

planting torpedoes [mines] on all roads leading to the

city.”

In the spring of 1862, when Elizabeth Van Lew heard

that McClellan was launching a campaign to take

Richmond, she prepared a room for him—“a charming

chamber” with “pretty curtains”—in her imposing

Church Hill mansion. McClellan never made it to her

home, or to Richmond. Pinkerton, who accompanied

McClellan on the campaign, provided the general with

extraordinarily overestimated reports on the number of

Confederate troops between McClellan and Richmond.

McClellan, who himself was naturally inclined to embellish

troop strength estimates, believed Pinkerton’s numbers. At

one point, when 80,000 Confederates faced McClellan’s

100,000 troops, Pinkerton estimated that McClellan was

outnumbered nearly two-to-one. This gave McClellan the

right to claim, in a dispatch to Washington, that he was

opposed by “greatly superior numbers.”

Not Pinkerton, but a corporal named Barton W. Mitchell

gave McClellan one of the most important pieces of

intelligence ever presented to a general in battle. On

September 13, 1862, Corporal Mitchell had been resting

with a sergeant in a campground near Frederick,

Maryland, when he noticed an envelope in the grass.

Inside were three cigars wrapped in a copy of General

Robert E. Lee’s Special Orders No. 191, perhaps dropped

by a galloping Confederate courier.

The two soldiers took the envelope to their company captain

who started it on a swift upward path to McClellan. The

envelope contained the most important intelligence discovery of the war. As McClellan wrote Lincoln, “I have all the

plans of the rebels.” Incredibly, the discovery of the document was leaked and appeared in the New York Herald, but

apparently the story was not seen by Confederate officers

monitoring Northern newspapers.

The order revealed to McClellan that Lee planned to

divide his army into four parts, three to head for Harpers

Ferry and the fourth to Hagerstown, Maryland. The

order was four days old when it fell into McClellan’s

hands. But, instead of reacting speedily, he characteristically reacted slowly. The incredible intelligence coup had

done him no good. Lee’s forces were not attacked when

the cigar-wrapping document revealed his plan. The

result was the bloody battle of Antietam, fought at terrible cost for both sides. And when Lee headed back to

Virginia, McClellan did not pursue.

On November 7, 1862, Lincoln relieved McClellan of

command. Pinkerton resigned in sympathy, taking with

him the information he and his operatives had gathered

on the Confederacy. 

19
19

Elizabeth Van Lew, whose wealthy family was wellknown in Richmond society, was educated in

Philadelphia and returned home an ardent abolitionist

who convinced her mother to free the family slaves.

When the Civil War started, she became an outspoken

supporter of the Union. At first, braving the contempt of

her social peers, she cared for hospitalized

Union prisoners. Then she began helping

them to escape, sometimes hiding them in the

attic of her mansion.

Late in 1863, escapees told Major General

Benjamin Butler about Elizabeth Van Lew.

Butler, then in charge of Union-occupied eastern Virginia, sent one of the escapees back to

Richmond with orders to contact her and ask

her to spy for the Union. She agreed. Butler

gave her a simple cipher system for her

reports. She kept the cipher key in the case of

her watch and often wrote her reports in

invisible ink.

Butler soon passed on to Secretary of War

Edwin M. Stanton a sample of the quality of

the information he had been getting “from a

lady in Richmond.” She told where new artillery batteries were being set up, reported that three cavalry regiments had been “disbanded by General Lee for want of

horses,” and revealed that the Confederacy “intended to

remove to Georgia very soon all the Federal prisoners.”

(They were sent to the notorious Andersonville prison.)

Once, at Butler’s request, Van Lew carried out a risky

mission. She walked into the office of Brigadier General

John H. Winder, who, as provost marshal, sought out

subversives in Richmond. There, she handed to Winder’s

chief detective a note that recruited him as a Union

agent. Although she certainly was in peril as she stood in

Winder’s headquarters, it was, according to her diary, the

detective who “turned deadly pale.”

By June 1864, the Richmond underground had five

“depots,” where couriers could deliver their reports for

pickup by Union operatives slipping through

Confederate lines.

One depot was the Van Lew family farm just outside

Richmond. She was running more than a dozen agents

and couriers, including her own African-American servants. Sometimes they carried messages in scraped-out

eggs hidden among real eggs or among the paper patterns carried by a seamstress. Another agent was a baker

who used his delivery wagon as a cover for

picking up and passing on reports.

Van Lew left a journal that contained cautious references to her work for the Union.

But after the war, she asked the War

Department for all her dispatches, which she

destroyed to protect her network from postwar retribution. In her journal, which survived destruction, she noted that she was

called a traitor in the South and a spy in the

North; she said she preferred “the honored

name of ‘Faithful’ because of my loyalty to

my country.” 

She was appointed postmistress of

Richmond by President Ulysses S. Grant,

bestowing upon her one of the highest federal posts then available to a woman. The Richmond

Enquirer and Examiner condemned the appointment “of

a Federal spy” as a “deliberate insult to our people.”

President Rutherford B. Hayes did not reappoint her.

In 1883, she passed a civil service examination “with the

highest rating” and moved to Washington, D.C., where

she became a U.S. Post Office clerk. She resigned in

1887, after being demoted by a vindictive supervisor. She

returned to Richmond, where she became a recluse,

“shunned like the plague.”

She died in 1900. A plaque attached to her gravestone

reads in part: “She risked everything that is dear to

man—friends—fortune—comfort—health—life itself—

all for the one absorbing desire of her heart—that slavery

might be abolished and the Union preserved.” 

The Union’s “Lady in Richmond”

Elizabeth Van Lew,

courtesy of

The Virginia Historical Society, 

Richmond, Virginia

20
Courtesy of Harpweek LLC

21
22

When Ulysses S. Grant was a new brigadier general in

Missouri, his commander was Major General 

John C. Frémont, popularly known as “The Pathfinder”

for his mapmaking expeditions in the West. Frémont’s

intelligence unit was headed by Edward M. Kern, a former expedition artist and mapmaker on the Pathfinder’s

expedition of 1845. Frémont ordered Grant to start his

own intelligence organization by finding himself some

“reliable spies.” Fremont’s order put Grant on the path

toward a better appreciation of intelligence. He would

find reliable spies, and eventually he would find himself

the beneficiary of the Union’s first reliable intelligence

agency, the Bureau of Military Information.

Frémont had organized a daring band of mounted spies

called the Jessie Scouts, named after his wife and emulated by other commanders. The scouts wore Confederate

uniforms and prowled behind the enemy’s lines, risking

death as spies if they were caught. To distinguish each

other from real Confederates, some units wore white

scarves tied in a special way or used a “conversation

code,” in which a conventional phrase, such as “Good

morning,” would elicit from a Jessie an expected

response that would not sound strange if overheard by a

real Confederate. Jessies sometimes spent days behind

the lines, picking up bits of intelligence from casual

encounters with Confederates and from keen observations. One way

they carried

reports was

wrapped in tinfoil and tucked

in the cheek

like chewing

tobacco.

Grant’s bloodiest lesson about

the need for

“reliable spies”

came early on

the morning of April 6, 1862, in Tennessee, near a log

meetinghouse called Shiloh Church. Union soldiers were

beginning to wake up and make breakfast when a

Confederate force stormed the

Federals’ outer lines, bolted through

the camps, and snatched up uneaten

breakfasts as stunned Union troops

retreated. Grant, with an assist from gunboats on the

Tennessee River, drove the Confederates back and won the

two-day battle of Shiloh, but at the cost of more than 10,000

Union soldiers killed or wounded.

Grant had relied mostly on unreliable reports from

dispirited Confederate deserters, and he had not dispatched scouts or spies for two weeks prior to the battle.

He believed that the Confederates were massed 20-odd miles

away and was confident that he knew “the facts of the case.”

“The art of war is simple enough,”

Grant would later write. “Find out

where your enemy is. Get at him as

soon as you can. Strike him as hard

as you can and as often as you can,

and keep moving on.” The need to

“find out where” called for good

intelligence, and months after

Shiloh, Grant began showing an

appreciation of that aspect of the art

of war. “You have a much more

important command than that of a

division in the field,” he told Brigadier General

Grenville M. Dodge at his headquarters in Corinth, a rail

junction in northeastern Mississippi.

Dodge was a former railroad builder who did not look

like a soldier, according to people who knew him. They

said he was a “sickly-looking fellow” and “not a man of

very dignified personal presence.” But “we could very

easily see that he was a man. . . that, when he went into

anything, went in with his whole soul.” And that is the

way Dodge went into intelligence.

He had a broad view of intelligence, gathering information from runaway slaves, from secret Unionists in

Confederate territory, from women agents, and from a

well-trained “Corps of Scouts.” He taught the scouts

how to estimate the enemy’s numbers by measuring the

length of road encompassed by a column of soldiers. He

relied on a cavalry unit made up of Southerners who

were pro-Union, knowing that they could ferret out

information better than Yankees could.

General Ulysses S. Grant 

The Scout, courtesy of Harpweek, LLC

22
23

Well aware that telegraph wires could be tapped, he 

enciphered his dispatches and sent them by messenger.

At times, he had as many as 100 men and women 

working for him from Mississippi to Georgia. His 

security precautions were so thorough that little still is

known about his operations or the names of most of his

agents. When Dodge’s commander, Major General

Stephen A. Hurlbut, demanded those names, Dodge

refused. Hurlbut then threatened to cut off Dodge’s spy

funds. Grant backed Dodge.

In the eastern theater of the war, Major General 

Joseph Hooker, who had been given command of the

Army of the Potomac in January 1863, ordered his

deputy provost marshal, Colonel George H. Sharpe, to

create a unit to gather intelligence. Sharpe was aided by

John C. Babcock, who had worked for Pinkerton and

had made maps for McClellan. Babcock, who had been

an architect in Chicago before the war, was a civilian but

was unofficially called “Captain Babcock.” He became a

skilled interrogator of Confederate prisoners and deserters. He

was also an expert on Confederate order-of-battle; in one of 

his reports, his estimate of enemy forces was off by less than

one percent.

Sharpe, a New York lawyer in civilian life, set up what he

called the Bureau of Military Information, which 

foreshadowed the U.S. Army’s Military Intelligence

Division. Sharpe’s bureau produced reports based on

information collected from agents, prisoners of war,

refugees, Southern newspapers, documents retrieved

from battlefield corpses, and other sources. Sharpe

assembled about 70 agents who were carried on the rolls

as “guides.” Major General Philip H. Sheridan, operating

in the Shenandoah Valley, said the guides “cheerfully go

wherever ordered, to obtain that great essential of 

success, information.” Of the 30 or 40 guides roaming

the valley, 10 were killed in action. 

An example of Sharpe’s thoroughness can be seen in a

nine-part report produced in May 1863 as General

Robert E. Lee began moving troops in a march that 

ultimately ended at Gettysburg. The report begins with 

a detailed order-of-battle and later notes, “The

Confederate army is under marching orders, and an

order from General Lee was very lately read to the

troops, announcing a campaign of long marches and

hard fighting, in a part of the country where they would

have no railroad transportation.” 

By the time Grant began his siege of Petersburg in June

1864, Sharpe was Grant’s intelligence chief, stationed in

Grant’s headquarters at City Point, Virginia. So much

intelligence was flowing out of Richmond and into

Sharpe’s Bureau of Military Information that a clerk in

the Confederate War Department wrote in his diary,

“The enemy are kept fully informed of everything 

transpiring here.” The clerk appealed directly to

President Jefferson Davis, warning that “there was no

ground for hope unless communication with the 

enemy’s country were checked....” 

Sharpe’s reports are full of detailed references to the

whereabouts and numbers of troops, based on counting

tents; the length of an artillery train (for determining 

the number of cannons); the number of guards at

fortifications and ammunition dumps. “One of my lines

is running very well now,” Sharpe said in one report,

offering to provide “any specific information” wanted 

by Grant.

Grant was also getting help from Samuel Ruth, 

superintendent of the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and

Potomac Railroad—and a secret Unionist. Ruth 

provided information about Confederate Army movements and, as a railroad executive, managed to slow

down the repairing of bridges and the shipping of 

supplies to embattled Richmond. Under instructions

from Sharpe, Elizabeth Van Lew, the most important

Union agent in the Richmond underground, had 

recruited Ruth. He apparently formed an interlocking

spy ring, using railroad workers and others as his 

sub-agents.

Ruth was arrested in a sudden Confederate sweep on suspected agents, but he was soon released because, as The

Richmond Whig reported, “There was not the slightest

shadow of evidence against him.” After the court released

him, The Whig indignantly said, “The charge against

Ruth was trumped up.” For the rest of the war, Ruth

remained a respected Richmond citizen—and a Yankee

spy serving the Bureau of Military Information. 

23
George H. Sharpe, descendant of an old American family, came from Kingston, New York. At the age of 19, he

graduated from Rutgers—giving the salutatory address in

Latin—and went on to Yale Law School. He passed the

New York bar in 1849, but did not begin practicing for

several years because he wanted to travel in Europe.

While there, Sharpe studied European languages and

served at times in U.S. diplomatic posts in Vienna

and Rome.

When the war began, he was in a New York

militia as a captain. In 1862, he organized 

a regiment which was assigned to the defense

of Washington. Early in 1863, Colonel Sharpe

was made a deputy provost marshal general—

essentially, an intelligence officer—

assigned to run the Bureau of

Military Information. The

bureau had been set up by

Major General Joseph

Hooker, then commander

of the Army of the

Potomac.

General Ulysses S. Grant,

after creating the Armies

Operating Against

Richmond in July 1864,

put Sharpe’s Bureau of

Military Information

directly into Grant’s

headquarters at City

Point, Virginia. Grant

said Sharpe’s work

enabled him to “keep

track of every change

the enemy makes.” 

In February 1864, Sharpe was promoted to brigadier

general. His last task was at Appomattox, where he oversaw the granting of parole certificates to the soldiers of

the Army of Virginia after the surrender of General

Robert E. Lee. Out of respect for Lee, Sharpe gallantly

declined to issue him a parole. But Lee said he, too, was

a member of that defeated army, and Sharpe issued him

a parole.

Sharpe returned to Kingston and took up his law

practice again. In 1867, Secretary of State 

William H. Seward asked him to go to Europe to

locate and investigate Americans who might have

been involved in the assassination of President

Lincoln. Seward was particularly interested in 

finding John Surratt, whose mother, Mary Surratt,

had been hanged as one of the assassination 

conspirators.

Surratt was brought back to the United

States and put on trial in a civilian court.

The trial ended with a hung jury, and

Surratt was soon set free, never

to be tried again.

President Grant appointed

Sharpe U.S. marshal for the

Southern District of New

York State. His investigation of political corruption in New York City

helped to smash the

Tweed Ring run by 

Boss (William Marcy)

Tweed. Sharpe later

was elected to the New

York State Assembly.

He died in 1900. 

Giving Grant All He Wanted

24

24
25
28

Union officers got so many valuable pieces of intelligence

from slaves that the reports were put in a special category: “Black Dispatches.” Runaway slaves, many of them

conscripted to work on Confederate fortifications, gave

the Union Army a continually flowing stream of 

intelligence. So did slaves who volunteered to be 

stay-in-place agents. 

Tens of thousands of ex-slaves fought and died for the

Union in military units. Less known is the work of other

African-Americans who risked their lives in secret, gathering intelligence or while entering enemy territory as

scouts. Brigadier General Grenville M. Dodge 

mentioned how he used black scouts during a search for

Confederate troops in Tennessee: “Two negroes led our

cavalry to them, guiding them around their pickets. No

white man had the pluck to do it.”

Throughout the official records of the war, there are frequent references to bits of intelligence coming from

“contrabands.” The term tracks back to a demand for

runaway slaves from a Virginia slaveowner who cited the

Fugitive Slave Law when he learned that his slaves had

fled to Union territory. Responding, Major General

Benjamin Butler said that since secession, Virginia had

not been under federal law. Butler referred to the slaves

as “contraband of war,” and the term caught on. 

In a typical report: “Three contrabands came in from

Fort Johnson yesterday. They were officers’ servants, and

report, from conversation of the officers there, that north

and northwest faces of Fort Sumter are nearly as badly

breached as the gorge wall, and that many of our projectiles passed through both walls, and that the fort contains no serviceable guns.” 

George Scott escaped from a plantation near Yorktown

and headed for Fort Monroe, at the mouth of the James

River on the tip of the Virginia peninsula. On the way,

he noted two large fortifications. To gather more intelligence, Scott joined a Union officer on scouting missions.

On one such mission, Scott was the target of a

Confederate picket, whose bullet missed Scott’s body,

but put a hole in his jacket. Another slave worked on the

defenses of Leesburg. He escaped,

bringing with him his detailed observations about the deployment of

5,000 Confederate troops. Many other

slaves provided similar information about Confederate

plans and maneuvers. 

While Allan Pinkerton was serving as Major General

George D. McClellan’s intelligence chief, the private

detective ordered a careful debriefing of runaway slaves,

some of whom he personally recruited to go back as

agents. One of Pinkerton’s black agents was John Scobell

of Mississippi, who had been educated and freed by his

owner. Scobell used the cover of servant to two other

Pinkerton agents, Timothy Webster and Carrie Lawton,

when they operated in Richmond. Scobell also posed as a

cook and a laborer on his trips south, where he often

signed up black couriers for the Union at secret meetings

of the Legal League, an underground slave organization.

Another black spy for Pinkerton was W. H. Ringgold, a

free man who had been forced to work on a Virginia

riverboat that was moving Confederate troops and 

supplies. After about six months, he and the other crewmen were allowed to return to the North. Debriefed by

Pinkerton, Ringgold told all he knew about Confederate

fortifications on the Virginia peninsula. When

McClellan began his peninsula campaign in March

1862, the best intelligence he had was from Ringgold.

The Union Navy also profited from Black Dispatches.

Robert Smalls, a free African-American who was a harbor

pilot knowledgeable about Fernandina, Florida, noticed

that Confederates were preparing to destroy the harbor

as they withdrew. He realized that Fernandina would

provide the Union with a good port for blockade ships

patrolling Charleston.

In March 1862, Smalls rowed out to a Union warship

and reported what he had seen. The fleet, waiting to

attack Fernandina, moved swiftly before the damage was

done and captured the port. In another instance, Smalls

loaded his family and other African-American sailors

aboard a Confederate patrol ship in Charleston, calmly

gave the correct countersigns to Confederate signals as he

sailed her out of the harbor, and surrendered her to a

Union blockade ship. He and the crew were rewarded

with half the value of the captured ship. 26
29

Mary Touvestre, a freed slave, worked as a housekeeper

for one of the Confederate engineers who were repairing

the U.S. Navy’s Merrimac. The steam-powered frigate

had been partially burned on April 21, 1861, when

Federal forces abandoned the Gosport Navy Yard.

Rebuilt as an ironclad, she was renamed the C.S.S.

Virginia. Touvestre overheard the engineers talking

about the ship and realized its significance as a weapon

against the Northern blockade. Traveling at great risk

with a stolen set of plans, she made her way to

Washington and got an audience with officials in the

Department of the Navy.

Surprised by the momentum of the Confederate project,

the officials speeded up the building of the Union ironclad, the Monitor. Some historians believe that if the former slave had not carried her warning to Washington,

the Virginia might have had several unchallenged weeks

for a rampage against vulnerable Union ships, thwarting

the blockade long enough for the arrival of desperately

needed supplies from Europe.

Harriet Tubman, one of the nation’s most famous

African-Americans, was also one of the war’s most daring

and effective spies. She is renowned as a conductor of the

Underground Railroad. Her espionage work, like that of

many black spies, is far less known. But her exploits,

centered along the South Carolina coast, are well documented, mostly because they were military operations. 

Early in 1863, after she had spent nearly a year caring for

refugee slaves, Union officers in South Carolina decided

that she would be more valuable as a covert operative.

She was asked to assemble a small reconnaissance unit of

ex-slaves who knew the region and could gather timely

intelligence. She found nine men, some of them riverboat pilots who knew every inch of the waterways

threading through the coastal lowlands. One of her tasks

was the finding of “torpedoes,” as remotely-detonated

mines were called then, placed along the waterways

patrolled by Union river craft.

Her spying and scouting evolved into a kind of special

forces operation under Colonel James Montgomery. A

fervent believer in guerrilla warfare, Montgomery was a

veteran of antislavery border fighting in Kansas. Like

Tubman, he had met and admired firebrand abolitionist

John Brown. 

In July 1863, Tubman became Montgomery’s second-incommand during a night raid up the Combahee River,

near Beaufort, South Carolina. The Union gunboats, carrying some 300 black troops, slipped up the river, eluding torpedoes that Tubman’s men had spotted. 

Undetected, the raiders swarmed ashore, destroyed a

Confederate supply depot, torched homes and warehouses, and rounded up more than 750 rice plantation slaves.

“The enemy,” said a Confederate report on the raid,

“seems to have been well posted as to the character and

capacity of our troops ... and to have been well guided

by persons thoroughly acquainted with the river and

country.” Unwittingly, the report was praising the work

of slaves working for Tubman.

Reporting on the raid to Secretary of War Stanton,

Brigadier General Rufus Saxton said, “This is the only

military command in American history wherein a

woman, black or white, led the raid, and under whose

inspiration. it was originated and conducted.” 

Tubman’s spies added to the heroic chronicles of the

Black Dispatches. “This source of information,” said one

historian, “represented the single most prolific and 

productive category of intelligence obtained and acted 

on by Union forces throughout the Civil War.” 

One of the boldest—and least known—Northern spies

of the war was a free African-American who went under

cover as a slave in what appears to have been a plan to

place her in the official residence of Confederate 

President Jefferson Davis.

The residence, called the Richmond White House,

served as the Davis home and the President’s executive

office. While he conducted Confederacy business there,

he would not have seen his slaves as a threat to security.

Official papers did not have to be given special protection when slaves were around because, by law, slaves had

to be illiterate.

Elizabeth Van Lew well knew this law, and, while running her spy ring in Richmond, realized the espionage

value of a slave who was secretly able to read and write.

Van Lew had a perfect candidate for such an agent-inplace role: Mary Elizabeth Bowser.

27
30

The wealthy Van Lew family, which had 21 slaves in

1850, had only two by 1860—both of them elderly

women. Yet, Virginia and Richmond archives show that

the Van Lews had not gone through the legal procedures

for the freeing of slaves. Freedom meant exile. Under

Virginia law, freed slaves had to leave Virginia within a

year after winning their freedom. Only by ignoring that

law could Van Lew carry out the audacious placement of

an agent in the Richmond White House.

Elizabeth Van Lew and her widowed mother Eliza 

raised the eyebrows of their social acquaintances in

Richmond in 1846 by having a slave baptized as 

Mary Jane Richards in St. John’s Episcopal Church,

revered as the site where Patrick Henry said, “Give me

liberty or give me death.” Later, Elizabeth sent 

Mary Jane off to Philadelphia for an education. In 

1855, Mary Jane sailed to Liberia, the African nation 

founded by Americans as a colony for ex-slaves.

On March 5, 1860, a ship bearing Mary Jane Richards

arrived in Baltimore. She went on to Richmond—an 

illegal act for a freed slave. Five months later, she was

arrested for “perambulating the streets and claiming to

be a free person of color....” She was briefly jailed and

released after Elizabeth Van Lew paid a $10 fine and

claimed that Mary Jane was still a slave. This 

declaration would give her perfect cover as an agent.

Mary Jane Richards married and became 

Mary Elizabeth Bowser. It is under that name that she

enters Civil War espionage history.

Information about her is scanty. One good source is

Thomas McNiven, who posed as a baker while making

daily rounds as a Van Lew agent in Richmond. From

him, down the years, came the report that she “had a

photographic mind” and “Everything she saw on the

Rebel President’s Desk, she could repeat word for word.” 

Jefferson Davis’ widow, Varina, responding to an inquiry

in 1905, denied that the Richmond White House had

harbored a spy. “I had no ‘educated negro’ in my 

household,” she wrote. She did not mention that her

coachman, William A. Jackson, had crossed into Union

lines, bringing with him military conversations that he

had overheard. In a letter from Major General 

Irvin McDowell to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton,

“Jeff Davis’ coachman” is cited as the source of information about Confederate deployments. A butler who

served Jefferson Davis also made his way to Union lines.

Although McDowell and other Union generals could

attest to the value of the Black Dispatches, the best

endorsement came from General Robert E. Lee. “The

chief source of information to the enemy,” he wrote, “is

through our negroes.” 

28
31

Harriet Ross was born into slavery in Maryland

in 1819 or 1820. She was whipped when she

was a small child, and, when she was 15 years

old, was struck on the head by a scale weight hurled at a

slave she was helping escape. The injury produced a lifelong suffering from headaches and seizures. When she

was 25 years old, she married John Tubman, a free

African-American. About four years later, when her master

died, she feared that she and her kin would be sold and

scattered. So she began to think about escaping. Her husband declined to go with her, as did her brothers. 

The courage and skill she used in her escape she would

later use again as a spy for the Union. 

Harriet Tubman fled to the North on the Underground

Railroad, the network of abolitionists who helped slaves

make their way to freedom. After freeing herself, she

returned to Maryland, became a conductor on the railroad, and brought out members of her family. She made

a score of dangerous trips, helping some 300 slaves reach

the North. With each trip, she taught herself the ways of

covert work behind enemy lines. 

In 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Dred Scott,

a black man who had moved from a free state to a slave

state, had no right to sue for his freedom because

African-Americans could not be citizens; the court also

ruled that Congress did not have the power to prohibit

slavery in the territories. The decision emboldened slaveholders and put Tubman in even more jeopardy. But, in

that same year, she slipped into Maryland and conducted

her elderly parents to freedom. 

Because of fugitive slave laws, escapees could find ultimate freedom only in Canada. Tubman went frequently

to the main underground terminal in Canada, 

St. Catherines, Ontario. There she met John Brown, who

told her of his plans for an armed raid on Harpers Ferry.

She later said that if she had not been ill at the time, she

would have joined in the raid.

Tubman went to war in May 1861, joining a Union force dispatched to her native Maryland, which was a hotbed of

Southern sympathizers. There, she knew, her knowledge of the

land would be helpful to Union troops. Later, she served in

the Union’s Fort Monroe in Virginia. But it would be at her

The Conductor Becomes a Spy

next duty post, in South Carolina, that she would become a

full-fledged undercover operative.

In the spring of 1862, Tubman sailed from New York

City to Beaufort, South Carolina, the operations center

for Union forces that held the southeastern coast of

South Carolina. She was sent to the region at the suggestion of Massachusetts Governor John Andrew, who believed

that “she would be a valuable person to operate within the

enemy’s lines in procuring information & scouts.” 

The Union-held area was a magnet for slaves fleeing to freedom. Tubman helped to clothe and feed them while also setting up agent networks and conferring with Union officers,

including Colonel James Montgomery. He made her his second-in-command for the night raid up the Combahee River

that freed more than 750 plantation slaves.

After the war, Harriet Tubman lived on a small farm in

Auburn, New York. Years before, William A. Seward,

then an anti-slavery senator from New York—later to be

Lincoln’s Secretary of State—had sold her the property

and arranged for a mortgage. She continued to help exslaves and black veterans and supported the crusade for

women’s suffrage. In 1869, two years after the death of

John Tubman, she married Nelson Davis, an ex-slave

whom she had met when he was a Union soldier. 

Citing her work for the Union Army, especially the

Combahee River raid, she petitioned for a pension. 

A member of Congress who had been a Union general

backed her claim, noting “her services in the various

capacities of nurse, scout, and spy.” But not until 1890,

two years after the death of Davis, did she receive a 

pension of eight dollars a month. By then, she was in

poverty, and neighbors were providing her with food.

Nine years later, her monthly pension was raised to

twenty dollars. 

In 1903, she donated the farm to a church group on the

condition that the home be maintained as a refuge for

“aged and indigent colored people” and that she be

allowed to live in the house for the rest of her life. In

1913, the woman known in the Union Army as “the

General” died and was buried with military honors. 29

34

Thaddeus S. Lowe, a 29-year-old balloon enthusiast, went up about 500

feet on June 18, 1861, looked down

upon Washington, and, via a cable

linking his balloon gondola to the

War Department, telegraphed a message to President Lincoln: “The city,

with its girdle of encampments, 

presents a superb scene....” It was 

the first wartime air-to-ground 

communication ever recorded in

America. By linking the balloon to

the telegraph, Lowe transformed

what had been a novel contraption at country fairs into 

a tool for a new kind of intelligence gathering: real-time

aerial reconnaissance. 

The demonstration had been arranged, not by military

officers, but by Joseph Henry, first Secretary of the

Smithsonian Institution, and an enthusiastic 

supporter of the use of balloons in war. With a note 

introducing Lowe, Lincoln nudged Lieutenant 

General Winfield Scott, commander-in-chief of the U.S.

Army. The army soon accepted the new tool, forming

the U.S. Army Balloon Corps. In March 1862, when

Major General George B. McClellan began his campaign

up the Virginia peninsula, Thaddeus Lowe, bearing the

title Chief Aeronaut, went along. He had three balloons

and what he described as an “aeronautic train, consisting

of four army wagons and two gas generators.”

At 3 o’clock one morning, Lowe went up and stayed

aloft until daybreak, “observing the camp-fires and noting the movements of the enemy” around Yorktown.

Brigadier General Fitz John Porter went up next, getting,

from 1,000 feet, an unprecedented view of an American

battlefield. As soon as he landed, Porter rounded up generals and mapmakers and drew up maps showing the

Confederates’ fortifications, based on what he and Lowe

had seen while aloft.

Lowe made frequent flights to obtain tactical intelligence. On June 14, 1862, for instance, he went aloft

near Richmond carrying a map on which he noted, in

red, “some of the most important

earth works seen this morning.” 

The map had been prepared 

by John C. Babcock and 

“E.J. Allen S.S.U.S”—the cover name of

Allan Pinkerton. The initials stand for “Secret Service,

United States,” Pinkerton’s name for the organization

he formed while working for McClellan.

As the Union began to make routine use of the new surveillance system, the Confederates reacted. They shot

cannons at the balloons, but artillery, aimed by formulas

involving trajectory from cannon to land target, could

not easily become antiaircraft guns. Confederate artillery

officers soon learned that when they shot their guns,

they became targets of fire directed by Union artillery

spotters in the balloons. 

Then, in the age-old rhythm of intelligence, an espionage innovation produced a counter-innovation: The

Confederates started camouflaging encampments and

blacking out their camps after learning that Union balloonists counted campfires for estimates of troop

strength. To fool daytime observers, Confederates painted logs black and arranged them to look like cannons

jutting from defenses. They were dubbed “Quaker guns”

and “wooden ordnance.” 

The Confederates raised

balloons a few times.

But the South did not

have adequate equipment for producing

large amounts of hydrogen gas or rubber. The

first Confederate balloon was made of varnish-covered cotton and

was filled with hot air.

An observer drew a map

of Union positions near

Yorktown, but had trouble

controlling the balloon.

The next Confederate balloon was made of colorful swaths of silk (inspiring the

legend that the balloon’s fabric consisted of ball gowns

donated by patriotic Southern belles). Filled at

Richmond’s municipal gas works, the balloon was tethThaddeus S. Lowe

Lowe replenishing the balloon

“Intrepid” from the balloon

“Constitution” at Fair Oaks, Virginia

31
35

Richmond map used by Lowe on June 14, 1862, prepared by John C. Babcock and “E.J. Allen” (Allan Pinkerton). Lowe’s note at the bottom states

“The red lines represent some of the most important earth works seen this morning and are located as near as possible, as is also the camps in black

ink. As soon as I can get an observation from the Mechanicsville balloon, I can make many additions to this map.”

32
36

ered to a locomotive, which took it to an observation

site. The balloon later was moved by a tugboat and taken

down the James River. The tug ran aground, and Union

troops captured the balloon. 

Both sides soon gave up the use of balloons: the South

because of the lack of resources, and the North primarily

because Lowe and his balloons could not find a bureaucratic niche in the U.S. Army. Lowe resigned in May 1863, and

the U.S. Army Balloon Corps was disbanded soon after.

The telegraph, however, went to war and stayed in the

war. The Union particularly saw the value of the telegraph and used it as the key component in what would

be the first modern military communication system.

Field telegraph units linked commands and were connected to hilltop signalers who sent messages by flags in

daylight and by torches at night. 

For most of the war, Union Army telegraphic messages were handled by the

civilian-staffed U.S. Military Telegraph

(USMT), which connected battlefields

with far-flung generals and with the

War Department in Washington. On a

typical day, the USMT operators handled 4,500 telegrams, some more than

1,000 words long. During operations

at Fort Monroe, on the Virginia peninsula, the terrestrial network even had

an underwater branch that carried

messages across Chesapeake Bay to a

land connection at Wilmington,

Delaware. The underwater link was a recycled, 25-milelong segment of the original Atlantic Cable, which had

briefly connected America and Britain in 1858.

The Confederacy also used the telegraph for tactical

communications in the field and for messages between

Richmond and military commands. Like the Union

telegraphers, Southerner operators usually encrypted

messages. The Confederates’ preferred encryption system

was known as the Vigenere substitution cipher, named

after Blaise de Vigenere, the 16th-century French diplomat who developed it. The encipherment depended

upon the use of a keyword used to set up a matrix in

which a letter acquired a different equivalent each time it

was used in a message. Union codebreakers cracked the

code because Confederates usually employed only a few

keywords and encrypted only important words. 

For example, in a warning message sent to a general by

President Jefferson Davis, the text read: “By this you may

effect O—TPGGEXVK above that part—HJOPGKWMCT—patrolled...” The Union cryptanalyst, beginning with guesses, deciphered the first jumble of word as

a crossing and the second as the river (words were often

encrypted without spaces between them). Knowing the

basic Vigenere system, he then worked out the keyword

as CompleteVictory, and with this, he could break subsequent messages until the keyword was changed. Keyword

changes, however, did not guarantee message security;

for by knowing that a keyword had to be 15 letters long,

Union cryptanalysts had a solid clue when they tried to

break a message. (Union cryptanalysts also helped to

break up a Confederate counterfeiting ring based in New

York City.)

The cipher system, which

gave Confederate telegraph

operators strings of letters

combined with plaintext,

impaired message transmission. The operators, who

had no idea what they were

sending, often made mistakes. They sometimes garbled messages so thoroughly that only fragments reached decrypting officers. 

Both sides learned to tap telegraph lines. Federal operators tapped General Albert Sidney Johnston’s headquarters in Bowling Green, Kentucky and were undetected

for a month when they tapped the Confederate line

between Chattanooga and Knoxville. Most message

intercepts, however, came not through taps, but via the

capture of enemy telegraph stations. Once in control of a

station, the captors could not only intercept messages,

but also send false ones. Robert E. Lee found telegraphing so untrustworthy that he ordered his officers to “send

no dispatches by telegraph relative to ... movements, or

they will become known.” Federal telegraphers scrambled words in prearranged patterns, making Union messages relatively secure. (The technique was known as a

“routing code.”)

A signal tower at Elk

Mountain

Union code book

33
3

Much battlefield signaling

involved flags and torches

rather than telegraph operators. T he wig-wag system, as

it was known, was developed

by a U.S. Army officer,

Major Albert James Myer.

While he was a medical officer in the 1850s, Myer used

his knowledge of sign language to develop the wigwag•s two-part numerical code. A motion of a flag or

torch to the left indicated 1, to the right, 2. Each letter

of the alphabet was represented by a combination of lefts

and rights. As Myer pointed out in his manual, once a

"signalist" learned the system, he could use "a handkerchief or hat held in the hand above the head...or any

white or light cloth tied to a gun."

One of the young officers who had worked with Myer

was Lieutenant Edward Porter Alexander. When the war

began, Myer was still in the U.S. Army, and Alexander

was about to become a captain in the Confederate Army.

At Manassas in July 1861, Myer, attached to a balloon

unit, did not have a chance to put his system in operation. But Alexander did, setting up a wig-wag station on

a height still called Signal H ill. Alexander, who spotted

the glint of an artillery piece and signaled a crucial

Union maneuver, helped the Confederates win the 

battle -- thanks to Myer.

Because both North and South used essentially the same

wig-wag system, the signal principles were mutually

understood. By training powerful telescopes on rival signal stations, each side could intercept the other's messages and then try to decrypt them. Once, Confederate

signal operators intercepted a message that read, "Send

me a copy of Rebel Code immediately, if you have one

in your possession." T he Confederates quickly changed

their codes. Intercepting and decrypting went on continually. During a campaign around Charleston, the

Confederates had 76 signalists at work, twelve of them

assigned to reading enemy traffic.

Myer developed a cipher disk, as did the Confederates.

T he disks were used for important messages. T he transmitting station initiated the message by wig-wagging the

cipher combination that he would use.

T he receiving operator received the

enciphered message, then deciphered it

with the cipher device, which typically

consisted of two concentric disks.

Numbers on the outer disk indicated

flag wags (2122, say, for right, left,

right, right). T hese numbers aligned

with letters on the inner ring.

T he idea of signaling with flags inspired the sending of

other visual messages. Reports of "clothesline" and 

"window-shade" codes made Confederate and Union

officers suspicious of ordinary objects for their possible

covert meanings. One documented clothesline code

showed whether Confederate forces had withdrawn

(empty clothesline) or were being reinforced (three

pieces hung out).

In terms of espionage, the signal units of the two sides

differed considerably. For the Union, signal intelligence

was kept separate from the running of agents and other

espionage activities. T he Confederacy's Signal Corps 

had a clandestine unit, the Secret Service Bureau, whose

missions included infiltration of agents into the North.

Major William Norris, chief of the Signal Corps, ran 

the Secret Line, the underground link used by

Confederate couriers and agents traveling between the

North and South.

T he dual nature of the Confederate Signal Bureau was

demonstrated at least twice during the war. A Secret Line

operative set up a window-shade signal station in a

Washington building for communicating with an intelligence officer across the Potomac. T he operative was 

captured, but insisted he was an officer in the

Confederate Signal Corps. H eld for a time on suspicion

of spying, he was later released and returned to the

South. In another incident, a Confederate Signal Corps

officer was captured while attempting to set up a signal

station behind Union lines. T he officer "was taken in 

citizen's dress," a Union report noted, although "the

rebels have a uniform for their signal corps." Records

show that he was sent back to the Confederacy in an

exchange of prisoners of war. So, as a signal officer, he

did not meet the fate of a spy.

U.S. Army signal flag

Confederate cipher cylinder

34
38

Albert J. Myer’s lifelong devotion to communications

dated back to his youth when he was a telegraph operator in New York state. He graduated from Buffalo

Medical College in 1851. His doctoral dissertation was

entitled “A New Sign Language for Deaf Mutes,” reflecting his interest in silent signaling.

In 1854, he became an assistant surgeon in the Army

and was sent west where federal troops were fighting

Indians. Inspired by the sight of Indian smoke signals

and hand communications, he developed a “wig-wag”

communications system that used flags by day and torches by night. He was campaigning for the Army to adapt

his system when the Civil War began.

Myer shifted from surgeon to signal officer, with the

rank of major, and was promoted to colonel when the

Signal Corps was created in 1863. He clashed with superiors over the administration of military telegraphy,

which was not under his control. After eight months in

the fledgling Signal Corps, he was assigned to the

Military Division of the West Mississippi, where he

served for the rest of the war.

When Congress reorganized the Signal Corps in 1866,

Myer once more became chief signal officer. He was head

of the Signal Corps from 1867 until his death in 1880.

During his tenure as chief, he helped to create the U.S.

Weather Bureau, which was placed within the Signal

Corps. Under Myer as its first director, the Weather

Bureau started issuing reports that used the word

“forecast” for the first time. Myer became a permanent

brigadier general just before his death. Fort Myer, 

across the Potomac from Washington, D.C., is named 

in his honor.

From Signalman to Weatherman

35
36
42

At the beginning of the war, when the Union announced

a blockade of Southern ports, leaders of the Confederacy

believed that the blockade could be broken by pressure

from Britain and France. The plan was to withhold cotton from the textile mills of those nations, forcing them

to aid the Confederacy by convincing the Union to lift

the blockade. But the French and British textile mills

had huge stockpiles of cotton and did not face an immediate shortage from the Southern embargo.

North and South turned to diplomacy to advance their

interests. Slavery was abhorred in both France and

Britain. Neither nation could openly support the

Confederacy. But, strategically, both nations liked the

idea of a United States weakened by a crack-up of the

Union. And Britain especially did not side with the

North because of the hostile policy of Secretary of State

William H. Seward, who threatened to declare war on

the British if they intervened. 

The South wanted Britain and France to recognize the

sovereignty of the Confederate States of America. Union

diplomats hoped to keep Britain from recognizing or

intervening in any way. More than diplomacy was

involved. Confederate and Union agents in Britain and

France were fighting a secret war over the South’s clandestine operations aimed at buying arms and building

warships.

The North’s blockade of Southern ports had inspired the

Confederacy’s diplomatic efforts in London and Paris.

Southern strategists realized that the Confederacy could

not survive on whatever just happened to trickle into the

South from swift ships whose bold captains slipped

through the blockade. The South decided that to break

the blockade, the Confederacy needed to build a navy

that could attack the Union warships, sink Northern

merchantmen, and protect friendly commercial ships

running guns and other supplies to the South. 

Lacking adequate shipyards, Confederate officials sent

agents to Britain and France to arrange for the shipbuilding and the arms purchases. Covert operations were

needed because British law prohibited the arming of private ships in British yards. 

In the fall of 1861, the Confederacy’s

Department of State launched the

plan on a diplomatic level by naming

two representatives: former U.S. Senator James M.

Mason of Virginia was to go to Britain and former

Senator John Slidell of Louisiana to France. Officially,

the two envoys were empowered to negotiate treaties

with their respective countries. Their clandestine mission

was the obtaining of warships and arms. 

Mason and Slidell were put on a ship that got through

the blockade at Charleston and sailed via Nassau to

Havana. The two new diplomats had no notion of security. A Cuban newspaper published their itinerary. This

bit of open-source intelligence was read in another

Cuban port by Captain Charles Wilkes, the commanding officer of the U.S.S. San Jacinto. 

Mason and Slidell sailed from Havana on board the

Trent, a British mail packet. The San Jacinto lay in wait

and stopped the Trent with a shot across her bow. After a

tense standoff, Wilkes snatched Mason and Slidell off the

Trent, put them aboard the San Jacinto, and triumphantly sailed to Boston, where the two envoys were imprisoned. Britain reacted violently, ordering 10,000 troops to

Canada, ostensibly for its protection against the United

States. The crisis ended when the Lincoln administration

convinced the British that Wilkes had acted on his own.

Mason and Slidell were soon on their way across the

Atlantic again. 

Mason, though aware of covert Confederate activity in

England, restricted himself to diplomacy. Slidell, however, became involved in setting up illicit arms deals and

hiring propaganda agents for a campaign to counteract

European sentiments against slavery and the

Confederacy. One agent found seven “writers on the

daily London press” who were willing to accept what was

discreetly called “partial employment.” Besides the payoffs, the journalists got Havana cigars and American

whiskey. An agent in France had a $25,000 “secret service fund” to be used to sponsor newspaper articles that

“may be useful in enlightening public opinion.”

The propaganda fund paid for the publishing of 125,000

copies of a pro-slavery tract by “the Clergy of the

Confederate States of America.” Some copies were 37
43

stitched into religious publications, one of which was

strongly against slavery. Propaganda agents also produced

placards showing the Confederate and British flags intertwined and placed them in “every available space in the

streets of London.” Henry Hotze, a former U.S. Foreign

Service officer, was an undercover Confederate operative

who wrote pro-South articles for British newspapers and

founded Index, A Weekly Journal of Politics, Literature,

and News, which appeared to be a British publication.

Hotze hired British journalists and syndicated their 

pro-Confederate articles to dozens of British and

European publications—and to Northern newspapers.

Hotze’s journal kept publishing until five months after

the war ended. 

Hotze mingled with key British politicians, including

William Gladstone, Chancellor of the Exchequer, who

made pro-Confederacy speeches. Hotze also worked with

other Confederate agents to stage a peace rally calling for

the ending of the war on Southern terms. 

The Confederate secret service, which ran the Secret

Line courier service between Union territory and

Richmond, extended the service to reach England and

France. The courier service was set up by 

George N. Sanders, a former journalist and political

operator with connections in the North, the South, and

Europe. Union agents, aware of Sanders’ sympathies,

kept eliminate him under surveillance. A surveillance

report notes his landing in Liverpool “in a great hurry”

and describes him as “a man of small stature with black

whiskers under his chin” who “no doubt is a bearer of

dispatches from the insurgents.” 

Records of the Secret Service Fund refer to the extended

Secret Line as the “Postal Route to Richmond.” The

route ran from England to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and

then to coastal pickup points on Chesapeake Bay, where

Secret Line couriers were given the dispatches and got

them to the Confederate capital. Agents in Europe used

a special cipher for such correspondence.

The South had to invent a European intelligence presence. The North possessed a ready-made, though amateur, intelligence network in the form of U.S. ambassadors and consuls. Thomas Haines Dudley, the U.S. consul in Liverpool, ran the network in Britain. He had a

natural talent for espionage. A Quaker, Dudley once disguised himself as a slave trader in a scheme to purchase

back fugitive slaves kidnapped in the North.

Working with Dudley were

Henry Shelton Sanford, minister

to Belgium, and Freeman

Harlow Morse, U. S. consul in

London. Sanford believed in

sabotage and rigorous intelligence gathering. Sanford paid

more attention to Confederates

in Britain than to matters in

Belgium. Like Dudley, Sanford

engaged British detectives as

agents and saw no reason not to

gather information “through a

pretty mistress or a spying landlord.” Sanford bribed factory clerks

to tell him what Confederate purchasing agents were

paying for ordered supplies. “I go on the doctrine that in

war as in love everything is fair that will lead to success,”

Sanford wrote. 

Fearing that Sanford’s rash approach would produce

another U.S.-British crisis, the Lincoln administration

reined him in. In a message that praised him for his

“active and intelligence services for detecting traitorous

proceedings,” he was ordered to turn over those duties to

Morse and go back to being just a minister to Belgium.

Morse hired a former detective of the London police,

who set up surveillance posts in London and Liverpool

and got daily reports from his detectives. Among other

actions, they bribed postal workers to obtain the addresses on letters sent and received by Confederate agents.

The Union detectives also managed to intercept

Confederate telegrams.

The chief target of surveillance was 

James Dunwody Bulloch, a former U.S. Navy officer

(and three-year-old Theodore Roosevelt’s uncle). Bulloch

had launched the Confederate shipbuilding operation in

June 1861 when he found a Liverpool shipyard whose

owner agreed to build a ship to Bulloch’s specifications.

As he later explained, “The contract was made with me

as a private person, nothing whatever being said about

the ultimate destination of the ship....” Bulloch named

her the Oreto and sent her off to Nassau with a

Confederate captain and crew. 

Henry Shelton Sanford

38
44

The U.S. consul in Nassau, apparently tipped off by

American agents in England, went into court to charge

that the ship was a Confederate warship, in violation of

British law. The court ruled that no law was broken

because the Oreto was unarmed. 

She then sailed to a coral isle some 75 miles south of

Nassau. There she rendezvoused with an arms-filled ship

dispatched by Bulloch. Quickly armed and renamed the

Florida, she set sail. After a delay caused by an outbreak

of yellow fever aboard, she headed for Mobile, Alabama.

Because of a bungled installation, her guns could not fire

when she initially encountered Union warships. She got

away, though badly damaged. Once repaired, the Florida

survived to ravage Union shipping. In the two years

before she was captured, she seized or destroyed more

than 30 American ships.

Dudley was determined to keep Bulloch’s next ship from

going to sea. The ship, known in the yard simply as

“290,” was nearly ready to sail in July 1862 when

Bulloch’s agents realized that Dudley had gathered

enough intelligence to go to court with a legal claim

against the shipyard for violating British neutrality laws.

Bulloch hastily arranged what appeared to be a leisurely

sail down the River Mersey, complete with several

women and men seemingly out for the day. Suddenly, a

tugboat appeared alongside the ship, the passengers were

disembarked, and the 290 became the cruiser Alabama,

bound for the Azores, where she would take on guns,

ammunition, and supplies. 

Bulloch appeared to have outwitted Dudley. But

Bulloch did not know that Dudley had planted an agent

on the Alabama. The agent, paymaster Clarence Yonge,

left the ship in Jamaica, returned to England, and added

his knowledge to Dudley’s legal case against the clandestine Confederate operations. In an affidavit, Yonge noted

that the shipyard had equipped the supposedly commercial ship with sockets in her decks and other fixtures for

guns, along with powder tins, and accommodations for a

100-man crew.

The Alabama was the Confederate’s most successful

raider. She captured or destroyed more than 60 ships

with a total value of nearly $6 million before a Union

warship ended her career. While she was destroying the

U.S. commercial fleet, Dudley was using his evidence to

deprive the Confederacy of two additional warships

ordered by Bulloch. Dudley argued that the ships—two

ironclads with metal underwater rams jutting from their

hulls to rip holes in a foe’s wooden hull—were obviously

warships. And he warned that if British officials allowed

them to go to sea, the decision would be considered an

act of war against the United States. 

Dudley was awaiting the British decision when he

received a report from the U.S. consul in Cardiff, Wales:

a French ship had arrived in Cardiff carrying men who

carelessly talked about being crewmen for the rams, as

the warships were called. The consul noted that the men

boarded a train for Liverpool. Surveillance of the

Liverpool shipyard showed that one of the ironclads was

almost completed; a Frenchman, not Bulloch, claimed

ownership. In October 1863, as a ram was about to sail,

the British government seized both rams; the British government later bought them.

The State Department’s intelligence work in Europe produced another coup in June 1864 when the U.S. minister to France learned that the Alabama was in Cherbourg

for repairs. The minister passed the information in a

telegram to the captain of the U.S.S. Kearsarge, which

was in a Dutch port. The Kearsarge sailed to Cherbourg,

stood off outside the territorial limit, and waited for the

Alabama. In a two-hour battle watched by 15,000 spectators ashore and at sea, the guns of the Kearsarge sank

the Alabama.

By then, there was little hope that either France or

Britain would recognize the Confederacy. In February

1864, reporting to the Confederate Secretary of the

Navy, Bulloch had written, “The spies of the United

States are numerous, active, and unscrupulous. They

invade the privacy of families, tamper with the confidential clerks of merchants, and have succeeded in converting a portion of the police of this Kingdom into secret

agents of the United States....” There was, he said, “no

hope of getting the ships out.” 

39
45

Georgia-born James Dunwody Bulloch was the eldest

brother of Mittie Bulloch,Theodore Roosevelt’s mother.

Bulloch, who joined the U.S. Navy as a midshipman in

1839, rose only to the rank of lieutenant and quit after

14 years because no further promotion seemed likely. He

became master of a coastal steamer carrying mail and

passengers between New Orleans and New York. 

When the Civil War began, Bulloch volunteered for service in the Confederacy and was sent to Liverpool to

secretly arrange the building of blockade runners. He

arrived in England on June 4, 1861. His first British

contact was a Liverpool cotton merchant whose firm had

a branch in Charleston, South Carolina. Within three

days after his arrival, Bulloch negotiated a contract for

building the first Confederate blockade cruiser. On

paper, the ship was named the Oreto and was owned by

a Liverpool agent of an Italian company. 

Another ship built during Bulloch’s

covert operation was the Alabama. His

younger brother, Irving Bulloch, later

served on the ship. Legend makes him

the sailor who fired the last shot when

the Alabama was sinking after her duel

with the Union’s Kearsarge. Irving later

joined the crew of the raider

Shenandoah, which circumnavigated the

globe in search of Yankee prey. 

After the war, Bulloch remained in

Liverpool, where he lived with his

daughter and son-in-law. He remained

connected with maritime activities and

became director of the Liverpool

Nautical College. In 1883, he published

his memoirs, “The Secret Service of the

Confederate States in Europe” or “How

the Confederate Cruisers Were

Equipped.” He lived to see his nephew

become Vice President, but died in

Liverpool in January 1901, eight months

before Theodore Roosevelt became

President following the assassination of

President McKinley.

Shipbuilder of the Confederacy

40
46

In August 1862, the Alabama left Liverpool, bound

for war and fame under the command of

Captain Raphael Semmes. She captured and burned U.S.

ships in the North Atlantic and the West Indies, then

sailed for the Texas coast, where she continued her voyage of destruction. Her most famous feat was the sinking

Pride of the Confederate Navy

of the U.S.S. Hatteras, a steel-hulled, side-wheeled warship. After a stop in Cape Town, South Africa, the

Alabama spent six months in the East Indies chasing and

sinking U.S. ships. She destroyed seven more ships

before going around the Cape again on a voyage to

Cherbourg, France, for overhaul.

In her final duel, on June 19, 1864, the

U.S.S. Kearsarge sank the Alabama. A

British yachtsman picked up Semmes

and 41 others and took them to

England. Semmes soon returned to

Virginia, where he commanded the

James River Squadron and, after the fall

of Richmond, rallied his sailors as

infantrymen and fought on.

41
Courtesy of Harpweek, LLC 42
50

In secret sessions during February 1864, the Confederate

Congress passed a bill that authorized a campaign of sabotage against “the enemy’s property, by land or sea.” The

bill established a Secret Service fund—$5 million in U.S.

dollars—to finance the sabotage. As an incentive, saboteurs would get rewards proportional to the destruction

they wreaked. One million dollars of that fund was

specifically earmarked for use by agents in Canada. For

some time, agents there had been plotting far more than

across-the-border sabotage. They believed that their plans

for large-scale covert actions could win the war.

Canada, then officially known as British North America,

was against slavery, but not fully supportive of the

North. As a British possession, Canada reflected Britain’s

brand of neutrality, which tipped toward the South and

King Cotton. Many Canadians worried about the possibility that the breakup of the Union might tempt the

United States to add territory by attempting to annex

Canada. As the war wore on and Canadians’ sympathy

for the South grew, so did toleration for harboring

Confederate agents. 

The Canadian operations station was in Toronto under

the military command of Captain Thomas Henry Hines,

who had ridden with Morgan’s Raiders in guerrilla sorties

into Kentucky and Tennessee. On the raids, Hines had

made contact with leaders of pro-South underground

networks in what was then called the “Northwest”—part

of today’s Midwest. 

Hines’s orders from the

Confederate War

Department said he was

“detailed for special service” in Canada and was

empowered to carry out

“any hostile operation”

that did not violate

Canadian neutrality. As

Hines saw his mission,

which became known to

foes as the Northwest

Conspiracy, he was “creating a

Revolution.” By raising an insurrection

in the Northwest states, he believed that

he would turn them against the Union

and bring an end to the war on Southern terms. 

The conspirators especially recruited sympathizers from

Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, where an estimated 40 percent of the population was Southern-born. Many

belonged to secret societies, such as the Knights of the

Golden Circle or the Order of the Sons of Liberty, which

were anti-Union and anti-abolition. Members wore on

their lapels the head of Liberty, cut from copper pennies.

Their enemies called them Copperheads for the poisonous snake that struck without warning.

Among the conspirators were military officers in civilian

clothes and politicians, such as Jacob Thompson who

had been Secretary of the Interior under 

President James Buchanan and Clement Clay, former

U.S. Senator from Alabama. They were ostensibly 

“commissioners” sent to Canada with vaguely defined

public roles as their cover. Other politicians involved in

plots were George N. Sanders, who had taken part in

Confederate operations in Europe, and 

Clement L. Vallandigham, who had been a powerful

member of Congress from Ohio. He claimed he had

300,000 Sons of Liberty ready to follow him in an insurrection that would produce a Northwest Confederacy. 

Hines reported to the civilians, especially Thompson.

But there was a shadowy connection between Hines 

and the Secret Service Bureau of the Confederate 

Signal Corps. One clue to this connection is a Signal

Corps order that Hines be instructed in the use of

Confederate ciphers. 

Much of the Canada-Richmond communication system

relied on couriers, and one of them was a double agent.

Richard Montgomery, as a Confederate agent, carried

dispatches from Confederate President Jefferson Davis to

the Canadian station. As a Union agent, he stopped off

in Washington, where the dispatches, which were usually

in cipher, were copied and decrypted. To strengthen

Davis’ faith in Montgomery, Assistant Secretary of War

Charles Dana even had him captured and imprisoned. In

his staged escape, Montgomery claimed he shot himself

in the arm so he could have proof of his desperate flight. 

Confederate operations against the

Union from Canada 43
51

Not far from the Canadian border were two large Union

prisoner of war camps—on Johnson’s Island, near

Sandusky, Ohio in Lake Erie, and at Fort Douglas in

Chicago. To enlist soldiers for the insurrection, the conspirators came up with an elaborate plan: agents would

slip out of Canada, take over Lake Erie river steamers,

and use them as impromptu warships for the boarding

and seizure of the U.S.S. Michigan, which guarded the

lake for the Union. The Confederates would then attack

Johnson’s Island, free the thousands of prisoners there,

and arm them. In coordinated raids, prisoners at Fort

Douglas would also be freed and armed. The

Confederate soldiers, allied with the Sons of Liberty,

would then take over the region, forcing the North to

sue for peace.

On September 19, 1864, 

John Yates Beall, a veteran blockade

runner, and about 20 men boarded

the Philo Parsons, a small DetroitSandusky steamer, in Detroit as ordinary passengers. At Beall’s request, the

captain made an unscheduled stop at

Amherstburg on the Canadian side of

the Detroit River, and several more of

Beall’s men boarded, toting a large

trunk filled with grappling hooks for

seizing the Michigan. 

As the Philo Parsons neared Johnson’s Island, Beall put a

pistol to the helmsman’s head and took over the ship.

The Confederate flag was hoisted, and the real passengers and most of the crew were put ashore on another

island. Then Beall sailed the steamer to a point off

Johnson’s Island and awaited a signal from the Michigan.

A genial Philadelphia banker–and a new friend of the

captain of the Michigan–was supposed to signal Beall

that all was clear for the attack. However, the supposed

banker, who was really Captain Charles H. Cole of the

Confederate Army, had been arrested by Union soldiers.

Cole, Confederates later said, had been betrayed. Union

records show that Cole, captured on a tip from a

Confederate captive and held aboard the Michigan, “disclosed the whole plot” in time for the Union warship to

prepare for battle. 

Seeing no signal and fearing that the Michigan had been

alerted, Beall’s crew, murmuring mutiny, demanded that

he abort the attack. He set course for Canada, landed

everyone ashore, and then burned the Philo Parsons.

A month after the Michigan fiasco, about 20

Confederate agents in civilian clothes entered St. Albans,

Vermont, 15 miles south of the Canadian border. The

plan was to burn down the village in a “retribution” raid,

retaliating for Union rampages in the South. The raiders

robbed three banks of about $200,000, but managed to

set fire only to a woodshed. They recrossed the border on

stolen horses, killing a pursuer. 

Montgomery, the double agent, had passed to

Washington a dispatch that mentioned a military operation in Vermont without naming St. Albans. Canadian

authorities tracked down and arrested 14 of the raiders,

but did not turn them over to U.S. authorities. They

were eventually freed through the efforts of 

George Sanders. 

Another mission, twice postponed, was soon to begin.

Colonel Benjamin J. Sweet, commander of the POW

camp at Fort Douglas, knew it was coming. In a 

dispatch to his commanding officer, he reported that

Chicago “is filling up with suspicious characters, some 

of whom we know to be escaped prisoners, and others

who were here from Canada....” Sweet sent the dispatch

by messenger because he feared the conspirators might

intercept telegrams. 

Sweet had only 800 men to guard about 9,000 prisoners.

They were restless because they, like Sweet, had heard the

wild rumors of insurrection, prison-camp breakouts, and

an invasion of Chicago. Sweet tracked the rumors and,

from a planted agent, learned the identities and plans of

the Confederate officers who had slipped into Chicago.

As he described the plot, the infiltrators planned to strike

on November 8. They “intended to make a night attack

on and surprise this camp, release and arm the prisoners

of war, cut the telegraph wires, burn the railroad depots,

seize the banks and stores containing arms and ammunition, take possession of the city, and commence a campaign for the release of other prisoners of war in the

States of Illinois and Indiana, thus organizing an army to

effect and give success to the general uprising so long

contemplated by the Sons of Liberty.” 

John Yates Beall

44
52

Sweet struck first on the night of November 7. With the

aid of Union Army agents, Sweet arrested the raid’s leaders and Sons of Liberty officers, along with “106 bushwhackers, guerrillas, and rebel soldiers.” Cached in a collaborator’s home near the camp were 142 shotguns and

349 revolvers, along with thousands of rounds of ammunition. Sweet reinforced the military guard in the city by

mobilizing a force of 250 militiamen—and arming them

with the raiders’ confiscated guns.

Undeterred by the failure in Chicago, Commissioners

Thompson and Clay authorized the boldest operation

yet: the torching of New York City by eight agents. The

agents were to set the fires with containers of “Greek

fire,” the general name, dating to antiquity, for incendiary substances. The 1864 version of Greek fire was developed for the Confederacy by a Cincinnati chemist who

mixed phosphorous with carbon bisulphide. Exposed to

air, the mixture bursts into flames.

In New York, the leader of the saboteurs went to a certain basement where an old man with a beard handed

him a valise containing twelve dozen sealed, four-ounce

bottles. Each man checked into a series of hotels, then

went back to each one, opened a bottle in the room, 

left, and locked the door. They set fires in 19 hotels, a

theater, and P.T. Barnum’s American Museum. The fires

did not amount to much. There was no panic. There was

no uprising. 

The last known Canadian sabotage operation came in

December 1864. John Beall, who had failed to seize the

Michigan, vainly tried three times to derail Union trains

as they passed near Buffalo. Some of these trains carried

Confederate prisoners. As he was heading back to

Canada after the third attempt, he was arrested. Tried

and convicted as a spy and a guerrilla, Beall was hanged

on February 24, 1865. 

A month later, Robert Cobb Kennedy met the same fate.

He had been caught trying to get from Canada to

Richmond. He blurted out a confession that doomed

him as one of the New York terrorists. “I know that I am

to be hung for setting fire to Barnum’s Museum,” he

said, “but that was only a joke.” 

The next arrest of a Canadian conspirator came in May

1865. Luke Pryor Blackburn, a Kentucky doctor

attached to the Confederate sabotage group, was arrested

in Canada on charges of conspiracy to murder in a foreign country. The charge had originated with an alert

U.S. consul in Bermuda. Blackburn had been in

Bermuda caring for victims of a yellow-fever epidemic.

The consul learned that Blackburn had secretly collected

victims’ sweat-soaked clothing and blankets and shipped

them to Canada.

At Blackburn’s Canadian trial, an accomplice-turnedinformant testified that Blackburn believed that yellow

fever could be transmitted by the victims’clothing. (It

was not yet known that the disease was spread by the

bites of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes.) On Blackburn’s

instructions, the accomplice picked up trunks in Halifax

and shipped them to Northern cities in a plot to start a

yellow-fever epidemic. A special valise was to be presented to President Lincoln. Secreted among the gift of dress

shirts were rags of fever victims’ clothing. 

Blackburn was soon acquitted for lack of evidence, but

few noticed. The war was over, and Lincoln was already

dead—assassinated by a man who had met with the

Canadian conspirators, John Wilkes Booth. 

Booth had been in Canada in October 1864, but little is

known about his visit with conspirators there. Richard

Montgomery, the double agent in Canada, claimed that

Booth and others had met to plot the kidnapping of

President Lincoln. (The ransom was to be the freeing of

Confederate prisoners of war, who could then fight again

and perhaps win the war.) The kidnappers were to strike

in March 1865, but an unexpected change in Lincoln’s

schedule thwarted them. When General Lee surrendered

to General Grant on April 9, 1865, the plot dissolved.

But five days later, Booth transformed himself from kidnapper to assassin and killed Lincoln.

Lafayette Baker, head of the National Detective Police,

responded to a summons from Secretary of War 

Edwin M. Stanton: “Come here immediately and see if

you can find the murderer of the President.” On April

26, Baker found Booth, but failed to take him alive. The

assassin was fatally shot when he refused to come out of

a barn that his pursuers had set afire. 

45
53

John Yates Beall, born in Jefferson County, Virginia, in

1835, attended the University of Virginia and studied 

to become a lawyer. When the war began, he

enlisted in the Stonewall Brigade, led by Colonel

Thomas J. (“Stonewall”) Jackson. He was severely

wounded during a skirmish during the Shenandoah 

campaign of 1862. He returned to

battle for a short time, but he was

still too weak for battle and was

given a medical discharge. 

Beall made his way to Canada,

where he briefly discussed covert

plans with Confederate agents there.

He next appeared in the Chesapeake

Bay, leading two small vessels on

raids against Union supply ships.

He and his guerrilla band also cut a

Union telegraph cable, blew up a

lighthouse, and captured several

ships. One of them was a ship 

carrying supplies to a Union force 

at Port Royal, South Carolina. Beall

put a prize crew aboard and had the

ship sail to Richmond. “I do not

know that we ever accomplished

any great things,” he later wrote,

“but we deviled the life out of the

Gun boats of the Chesapeake trying

to catch us.”

In November 1863, he and his comrades were arrested

for piracy and imprisoned for several months. In May

1864, he was sent to Richmond in a prisoner exchange.

He slipped into Canada again and worked on his plan to

capture the U.S.S. Michigan and free Confederate 

prisoners of war. 

After his capture at Niagara Falls, he was taken to a New

York City police station. While in the station, he tried to

bribe a police officer with $3,000 in gold to help him

escape. He was unsuccessful. Beall was transferred to Fort

Lafayette, a prison on a bleak rocky island at the mouth

of upper New York Bay. (Today, the island supports

the east tower of the

Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.) On

February 10, 1865, a court

martial convened to try Beall

on two charges: violating the

law of war by capturing a civilian ship and acting as a spy. He

insisted that he had honorably

worked under the orders of

President Jefferson Davis and

authorized agents of the

Confederate government. The

court ignored his defense,

found him guilty, and sentenced him to death.

On February 21, Beall wrote a

desperate letter to the

Confederate commissioner in

charge of prisoner exchange. “I

acted under orders.” he wrote,

insisting that he was not a spy

and deserved to be treated as a

prisoner of war. 

The commissioner received the letter on February 27.

Three days before, Beall had been hanged. On the 

gallows, he said, “I protest against the execution of 

the sentence. It is absolute murder, brutal murder. I die

in the defense and service of my country.” 

Death of a Raider

46
54

The Bureau of Military Information, the U.S. Army’s

first modern military intelligence organization, was disbanded at the end of the war. In the 1880s, the first permanent U.S. intelligence organizations were formed: the

Office of Naval Intelligence and the Army’s Military

Intelligence Division. Both services posted attachés in

several major European cities, primarily for the 

gathering of open-source material. But when the

Spanish-American War began in 1898, some attachés 

ran espionage operations.

When the Army was fighting insurgents in the

Philippines after the Spanish-American War, Captain

Ralph Henry Van Deman took charge of the Bureau of

Insurgent Records and started running undercover

agents. Counterintelligence had returned to the U.S.

Army. Van Deman, an advocate of intelligence and counterintelligence, lobbied for his specialties throughout his

career, which ended with his retirement in 1929.

In 1903, when the U.S. Army created a general staff

modeled on those of European armies, the Military

Information Division (MID) was, for the first time, put

on the same staff level as operations and logistics. In

World War I, the MID became an important component

of the American Expeditionary Force. MID officers

recruited 50 French-speaking sergeants who had police

training. This corps of intelligence police eventually

evolved into the Counter Intelligence Corps. 

By the end of the war, the Military Intelligence Division

had 282 officers and 1,159 civilians, including the secret

MI-8 section, devoted to cryptology under 

Herbert O. Yardley. This time, when a war ended, military intelligence did not end with it. The MID lived on

through the interwar years, expanded during World War

II, and evolved into the Army’s Intelligence and Security

Command (INSCOM). 

As for what happened to some of the people who had

been involved in intelligence during the Civil War: 

Lafayette Baker, who had led the search for 

John Wilkes Booth and his conspirators, was fired by

President Andrew Johnson. Baker had assigned agents to

spy on Johnson, supposedly under orders from Johnson’s

foe, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. 

Luke Pryor Blackburn, the Confederate doctor who

conceived of the yellow-fever plot, returned to Kentucky,

where he worked tirelessly during a yellow-fever 

epidemic in 1878. His good deeds helped to get him

elected governor of Kentucky. On his tombstone is 

“Luke Pryor Blackburn—the Good Samaritan.” 

Details of the spy career of Elizabeth Van Lew’s maid,

Mary Elizabeth Bowser, are still debated. But there was

enough faith in stories of her spying in Jefferson Davis’s

residence to have her inducted into the U.S. Army

Intelligence Hall of Fame at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, 

in 1995. 

Belle Boyd, after two stints in Union prison, went to

Europe to recover from typhoid. In May 1864, she 

headed for America on a blockade runner that was 

captured by a U.S. Navy warship. She fell in love with an

officer on the warship and married him in England. Her

husband, dismissed from the Navy, later was arrested in

the United States and died soon after being released.

Belle launched a theatrical career both in England and 

America. She died in 1900 while on a speaking tour 

in Wisconsin. 

Grenville Dodge became chief engineer of the Union

Pacific Railroad and was in charge of building the portion of the transcontinental railroad from Council Bluffs

to Utah. 

After being freed from a Union prison, 

Rose O'Neal Greenhow joined Confederate 

propaganda agents in England and France and wrote a

book about her work as a spy. In 1864, she sailed to

America onboard a Confederate blockade-runner, which

ran aground at the mouth of Cape Fear River, near

Epilogue

47
Wilmington, North Carolina. She left the ship in a

lifeboat and was drowned when the boat swamped. She

was buried in Wilmington with military honors. 

After the war, Thomas Henry Hines, a member of the

Northwest Conspiracy, signed an oath of allegiance to

gain amnesty, returned to the United States, and practiced law in Bowling Green, Kentucky. He became the

chief justice of the Kentucky Court of Appeals.

William A. Lloyd, Abraham Lincoln’s contracted spy,

probably would have remained unknown if it were not

for an unusual court case. After Lloyd’s death, the administrator of his estate, noting that Lloyd’s contract had

been lost, sued the United States government for unpaid

salary. In 1875, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against

the salary claim, saying, “Both employer and agent must

have understood that the lips of the other were to be forever sealed respecting the relation of either to the matter.” The court compared the secret relationship between

agent and his superior to that between husband and wife,

client and lawyer, patient and physician—and “the confidences of the confessional.” 

Balloonist Thaddeus S. C. Lowe moved to California

after the war and built a home that included a tower and

a telescope. His enthusiasm for astronomy led to another

project: the building of the world-famous Lowe

Observatory in Pasadena, California.

Charles Pomeroy Stone, whose gathering of intelligence

helped to protect President-elect Lincoln, was promoted

to brigadier general and led troops in a minor battle in

October 1861 at Ball’s Bluff, Virginia, 35 miles from

Washington. Panicking in confused fighting, many

Union troops were drowned. The Congressional

Committee on the Conduct of the War blamed Stone for

the tragedy and had him arrested. He was held without

charges for more than six months. After the war, Stone

served as chief of staff in the Egyptian army for 13 years.

Later, while working as an engineer, he helped to build

the foundation of the Statue of Liberty. He died in 1887

and was buried at West Point. 

55

48
56

On a wall of the CIA’s Visitor

Control Center at the Agency’s

main entrance, there is an

enlarged drawing that appeared

in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated

Newspaper during the Civil

War. The drawing shows a

small wooden building identified as “Guard House Near

Langley”—a reminder that

Langley, now known as

McLean and the location of CIA Headquarters, once was

known as the location of a Union Army outpost.

During the winter of 1861-1862, troops of the 2nd, 3rd,

4th, 5th, and 6th Vermont Infantry regiments were stationed at Camp Griffin, which encompassed much of

what is now eastern McLean, including part of what

would become the Agency’s Headquarters compound. 

At the beginning of the war, in a move to protect

Washington, Federal troops had seized Virginia land

across the Potomac from the capital. Later, the army set

up Camp Griffin there. The encampment lasted for

about six months and was replaced by Fort Marcy, one of

48 forts built around Washington. 

The Vermont troops were among the 70,000 Union soldiers who assembled at Bailey’s Crossroads on November

20, 1861 for a grand review. “As far as the eye could

reach there was nothing but lines of bayonets and uniformed men,” one of the Vermonters wrote in his journal. The troops passed in review before President

Lincoln, Major General George B. McClellan, and guests

who included Julia Ward Howe. 

When Mrs. Howe headed back to Washington, troops

returning from the review passed by her coach, singing

marching songs that included “John Brown’s Body.” A

fellow passenger suggested to Mrs. Howe that she might

consider writing better lyrics for the stirring melody. She

awoke before dawn the next day in her room at the

Willard Hotel and wrote the words of “The Battle

Hymn of the Republic.” On her journey back from the

grand review, she had seen the “watch-fires of a hundred

circling camps,” and some of those fires were flickering

on what are now the grounds of the CIA Headquarters.

Men of the Vermont regiments were assigned picket duty

between the camp and the Potomac River—“standing,”

as one wrote, “on the outer verge of all that is left of the

American Union.” They eventually broke camp to fight

at Antietam, Gettysburg and in the Battle of the

Wilderness. They also served in the Shenandoah Valley,

where on October 19, 1864, they helped to win the

Battle of Cedar Creek, near Middletown, Virginia.

In 1992, the Agency commemorated the anniversary of

the battle with a ceremony at Headquarters. “We feel a

strong tie to the soldiers of Cedar Creek,” said 

Robert M. Gates, Director of Central Intelligence.

“There is a key lesson to be learned” from the battle, he

said: “intelligence is decisive, not only in preparing for

war, but in defending the peace.” He noted that

Confederate Major General John Gordon had personally

gathered intelligence as he stood at the summit of

Massanutten Mountain and observed the Union troops

gathering in the valley below. “He pinpointed the location of Union trenches and artillery positions,” Gates

said. “he saw the weakness in the Union’s left flank. And

he observed that Union guards—so necessary for

advanced warning—were not deployed around the fringe

of the Union camp.” 

Armed with this intelligence, Gordon launched a surprise attack on the morning of October 19, routing the

Union troops. In the afternoon, Union forces regrouped

under Major General Philip Sheridan and defeated the

Confederates–who withdrew–ending the South’s control

of the Shenandoah Valley. 

Postscript:Then and Now, the Guard Posts at Langley

Guard House near Langley,

courtesy of Harpweek, LLC

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57

Suggested Readings 

Catherine Clinton, Harriet Tubman. (Boston: Little,

Brown, 2004). 

Virginius Dabney, Richmond: The Story of a City.

(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976). 

William B. Feis, Grant’s Secret Service. (Lincoln, Neb.:

University of Nebraska Press, 2002). 

Edwin C. Fishel, The Secret War for the Union. (Boston:

Houghton Mifflin, 1996). 

Philip S. Foner, History of Black Americans from the

Compromise of 1850 to the End of the Civil War.

(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983). 

Ervin L. Jordan, Jr., Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees

in Civil War Virginia. (Charlottesville: University Press of

Virginia, 1995). 

Jay Luvaas, “The Role of Intelligence in the

Chancellorsville Campaign, April-May, 1863,”

Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 5, No. 2, 

April 1990. 

Donald E. Markle, Spies and Spymasters of the Civil War.

(New York: Hippocrene Books, 1994). 

Peter Maslowski, “Military Intelligence Sources During

the American Civil War: A Case Study,” “The

Intelligence Revolution: A Historical Perspective,”

Proceedings of the Thirteenth Military History

Symposium, U.S. Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs,

Colorado, October 12-14, 1988., edited by Lt. Col.

Walter T. Hitchcock, USAF., Washington, D.C.: Office

of Air Force History, United States Air Force. 

James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom. (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1988). 

David Hepburn Milton, Lincoln’s Spymaster.

(Mechanicsville, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 2003). 

Frank Morn, The Eye That Never Sleeps: A History of the

Pinkerton National Detective Agency. (Bloomington, Ind.:

Indiana University Press, 1982). 

G. J. A. O’Toole, Honorable Treachery: A History of U.S.

Intelligence, Espionage, and Covert Action. (New York:

Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991). 

G.J.A. O’Toole, The Encyclopedia of American Intelligence

and Espionage: From the Revolutionary War to the Present.

(New York: Facts on File, 1988). 

Ishbel Ross, Rebel Rose: Life of Rose O’Neal Greenhow,

Confederate Spy. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954).

Meriwether Stuart, “Operation Sanders,” The Virginia

Magazine of History and Biography, April 1973, Vol. 81,

No. 2, pp. 157-158. 

William A. Tidwell with James O. Hall and David

Winfred Gaddy, Come Retribution. (Jackson: University

Press of Mississippi, 2000). 

Elizabeth R. Varon, Southern Lady, Yankee Spy. (New

York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

NOTE: A Manual of Signals: For The Use Of Signal

Officers In The Field, written by Albert Myer in 1864,

can be seen on the Signal Corps Association Reenactors'

Division website 

http://69.3.157.98/SCARD/signalmanual/

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