Twenty Thousand Potential Spies

January–July 1861

IT WOULD BE DIFFICULT to imagine a nation entering a war more unprepared to obtain information about its enemy than the United States of 1861. In the almost ludicrously small U.S. Army there was no intelligence staff, no corps of spies, trained or otherwise. There was not so much as a concept on which a plan for these services could be based. If, hidden away in some file of regulations, there was even one paragraph for the guidance of a commander with an intelligence problem to solve, it was for all practical purposes unknown in 1861, and its obscurity was preserved throughout the war.

There was not even an official name for such activities. The word intelligence meant new information on any subject. Its nearest equivalent in the military lexicon of the 1860s was "secret service" — without initial capitals. However, "secret service" referred not only to the work now known as intelligence but often to nonmilitary detective work as well. And though it denoted this group of activities, it did not refer to any organization that conducted them, for there was none; the national Secret Service that has often been mentioned and even depicted by Civil War historians did not exist, from the beginning of the war to its end.

Yet there were reasons why the nation might have had a strong "secret service." Espionage directed by George Washington — who used the term intelligence in its modern military sense — had made a definite contribution to the winning of the Revolutionary War. So there might well have been a tradition of activity and adeptness in intelligence work strong enough to last until the next great test of national strength eighty-five years later. But it was forgotten by the time of the second war with Britain in 1812; then there was a total lack of organized intelligence work, with results such as the loss of Detroit and Washington, when British deception persuaded the Americans that they were outnumbered. In the Mexican War army engineers were drawn into the intelligence business as investigators of terrain features and the enemy's man-made defenses; Captain Robert E. Lee and Second Lieutenant George B. McClellan, engineer officers and future commanders of opposing armies, distinguished themselves as providers of intelligence. For coverage outside the engineers' reach, their commander, General Winfield Scott, had a company of Mexican banditti. The association of engineers with intelligence work was becoming a tradition, but it was an activity without a name or an identity.

European military writers, whom American officers could quote from memory, had strongly, almost vehemently, urged the importance of having good information about the enemy. Hundreds of the nation's career officers knew the dictum of Frederick the Great: "It is pardonable to be defeated, but not to be taken by surprise." Equally familiar was Marshal Saxe's injunction that "too much attention cannot be given to spies and guides. ... they are as necessary to a general as the eyes are to the head"; and Jomini's question, "How can any man decide what he should do himself if he is ignorant of what his enemy is about?" Evidently the Europeans' urgings on the importance of intelligence were regarded as precepts to be taken into account only when the nation would go to war. But the neglect of the example set by General Washington is less easy to explain away. It is true that the records of his espionage service lay buried until the twentieth century, and that without history tradition has a hard existence. Yet the seeds of a strong intelligence organization had been planted in the nation's first army. That they withered away probably was due to the nation's isolation; a healthy wariness of foreign powers was lacking.

But the absence of intelligence organization or activity is no more strange than half a dozen other lacks that plagued the 1861 army. Although good weapons had been invented and were available, nearly all of those in use were badly antiquated. There was a dearth of officers trained in the higher arts of generalship; the septuagenarian Generals Winfield Scott and John E. Wool had commanded forces that were called armies in earlier wars but would not be large enough to merit the term in the 1860s. Younger officers' command experience was almost altogether limited to the companies, battalions, and regiments that had served on the western plains and the Pacific coast. The only way to acquaint these officers with the management of large forces was to send them to European armies as observers, and very few had that experience.

If some officers with ideas ahead of their time had set about to found an intelligence organization, the approaching division of the nation into warring halves would have stood in their way. Conducting, or even planning, espionage against foreign powers would have seemed a waste of money, when the only war likely to occur was an internal one. With all of the top positions in the army held by Southern officers, it would have been impossible to limit such preparations to officers certain to remain with the North when war came. And other factors discouraged intelligence planning. Overt sources of information — prisoners, deserters, refugees, enemy pickets — required only the application of interrogating skills. Cavalry reconnaissance, certain to be a major source, was already practiced against hostile Indians. Captured documents could be counted on as a source in any war that should develop, but how could a planning or training officer prepare for that? Enemy newspapers would be useful; they would be acquired as part of the contraband commerce that develops in a war.

Definite opportunities for intelligence planning were offered by two technological advances of recent times. Balloon reconnaissance was adopted early in the war, but only at the initiative of the balloonists. The other new technique was visual signaling by flag and torch; invented by Major Albert Myer, an army surgeon, in the late 1850s, it was the world's first successful system of alphabetic communication in forward areas. The inventor's assistants in his experiments were Southern officers; the certainty that the system would be adopted in the Confederate army at least meant that the Federals would have opportunities to intercept enemy signals. But on the Federal side the system was so poorly provided for in personnel and equipment that it was not available for battle when the war broke out. (The Confederates made decisive use of it at Bull Run while its inventor stood empty-handed on the same field.) The Federals, unable even to operate their own communication system, made no plans for the interception of the enemy's signals. Eventually intercept operations arose spontaneously when signal officers found enemy flag stations within view of their telescopes.

When the war began, Winfield Scott, weighted down with years and obesity, a victim of dropsy and vertigo, had been head of the army for two decades. The old hero, a Virginian, had surrounded himself mainly with Southern officers. When he saw war coming and set about to equip himself with a "secret service," its operations had to be kept secret from the officers closest to him. The sharp-bearded quartermaster general, Joseph E. Johnston, would soon cast his fortunes with the South. Army routine called for him to pay spies along with all other civilian employees; instead Scott handled the funds for espionage himself. Adjutant General Samuel Cooper, though a Northerner, was Southern in his sympathies and also would soon join the Confederacy; his office, normally the army's information center, had to be short-circuited by Scott. So intimate a subordinate as the general-in-chief's military secretary was another who would soon go South. And the old general's son-in-law, Henry L. Scott, also an army officer, was believed in military circles to have been banished to Europe because of pro-Southern activities. Although the story qualifies as only an unproven rumor, it is an excellent example of the climate of suspicion that the country's troubles engendered. It was emphatically branded as a slander on Colonel Scott when General George McClellan denied having been the source of the report that the colonel had betrayed military documents to the enemy; he took occasion to label the story a slander. Even Attorney General Edwin M. Stanton, later Lincoln's secretary of war, had security problems; his office was so riddled with Southern sympathizers that he had to walk to its entryway to have a confidential conversation with a Republican senator. Stanton, a newcomer to President Buchanan's cabinet, considered his position a vantage point for keeping an eye on Southern influence in the administration.

At this stage of oncoming war the government was standing by like a fond father while the professional soldiers chose up sides in the manner of boys organizing a baseball game. Its leniency extended to members of the diplomatic service and to career civilians in the military departments. Some who went South helped themselves to military documents before leaving. And some obtained clerkships in Richmond. The situation offered the Federals an opening to plant their own men as spies in the Confederate bureaucracy, but this opportunity is not known to have been seized — though John B. Jones, writer of the well-known Rebel War Clerk's Diary, had "no doubt that there are many Federal spies in the departments. Too many clerks were imported from Washington."

The story of one of the "secession clerks" shows the seemingly hopeless problem of preserving military secrets at that time. His name was John F. Callan, and he held at different times two important clerkships, one in the adjutant general's office and the other on Capitol Hill, where he served the Military Committee of the Senate. He owed his committee position, which dated from 1852, to Jefferson Davis, then a United States senator from Mississippi. Davis, later secretary of war, had something to do with the other appointment as well. On February 21, 1861, three days after his inauguration as president of the Confederate States, Davis began a telegraphic campaign to bring Callan to Montgomery as chief clerk of his new War Department. Callan kept Davis on the string for two months — until after the war began — before declining on the ground of family illness. Neither the offer nor its final outcome need raise eyebrows, but the same cannot be said of the Confederate leaders' cheek in addressing their telegrams to Callan at the United States War Department. Equally conspicuous, or equally puzzling, is the generosity of Callan's Washington employers in retaining him in at least one if not both of his positions of high trust.

Since the telegraph wires were open to sedition, they were certain to be used by authorities of much greater puissance than John Callan. The capital harbored congressmen and even cabinet members who worked earnestly for the new nation forming in the South. By now the Confederate States of America had become a growing concern, and Southern elements in Washington had far less legitimacy in being there. One object that kept them hanging about was information on the doings of the Northern government; another was military recruitment. The channels of communication remained open regardless of how inimical to Northern interests was the content of what passed over them.

Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee, on duty in Texas, was a special problem of divided loyalties. He was the favorite of both General Scott and the administration to take command of Northern armies in the field and eventually succeed Scott as general-in-chief. Such was the offer made to him in April, when he was home on leave at Arlington; he understood that it originated with the President. His answer was to resign his commission and offer his services to his beloved Virginia, which by now had joined the Confederacy. Before reaching this decision Lee had a three-hour talk with Scott in which the old generalissimo faced the problem of exercising persuasion on the younger man without confiding any "intelligence" secrets whose disclosure he would regret if Lee joined the Confederates. In this interview the awkwardness of handling military secrets in the situation of divided loyalties reached its peak.

When in the closing days of 1860 President Buchanan finally obtained the resignation of his secessionist secretary of war, John B. Floyd, and Postmaster General Joseph Holt, a Unionist, moved over to take charge of the War Department, affairs were in a state of crisis because of events in Charleston Harbor. Major Robert Anderson had moved the tiny garrison of the defenseless Fort Moultrie into Fort Sumter, which was unfinished but incomparably more secure. The secessionist reaction in Washington was about as violent as in Charleston itself. Texas Senator Louis T. Wigfall on January 2 telegraphed the commander of the military forces of the now sovereign State of South Carolina: "Holt succeeds Floyd. It means war. Cut off supplies from Anderson and take Sumter soon as possible." Wigfall proceeded later on to telegraph word — not very accurate — of plans for the provisioning and reinforcement of Fort Sumter.

Only 300 or 400 Marines and a small company of army ordnance men stationed at the Washington Arsenal stood in the way of an armed coup by the Southern element. Unionist leaders in the cabinet and Congress — such men as Attorney General Stanton, Secretary of War Holt, Senator William H. Seward — strongly believed that such a coup was in the making. Situated between two slave states, Washington was a Southern city in most ways. Its mayor and chief of police were secessionists; the part-time general who headed its militia organization was a Virginian, and the political complexion of his troops was uncertain.

Clearly the protection of the government rested with the army, and its Virginia-born general-in-chief moved quietly but effectively. His first step was to take army headquarters back to Washington from New York, where it had been for some years; Winfield Scott, the personification of the U.S. Army, had preferred to live at some distance from Jefferson Davis, secretary of war at the time Scott made the move. Upon returning to the capital he found President Buchanan fearful of inflaming Southern sentiment if he brought in more uniformed men. But Scott, declaring that he could not guarantee the safety of the capital for more than five days, reached out and moved in eight companies from widely scattered posts. He also asked for the loan of as many Marines as their commandant could spare.

The President's expectations in regard to Southern feeling proved correct; on February 11 the House of Representatives passed a resolution asking him to explain "the reasons that had induced him to assemble so large a number of troops in this city, ... and whether he has any information of a conspiracy ... to seize upon the capital and prevent the inauguration of the President-elect." Secretary Holt responded with a report assuring Buchanan that he believed such a conspiracy had been "in process of formation, if not fully matured," and that the presence of the troops caused it to be "suspended, if not altogether abandoned." But for this timely precaution, said Holt, the capital would have met the fate of the forts and arsenals in the South; it would be in the hands of "revolutionists, who have found this great Government weak only because, in the exhaustless beneficence of its spirit, it has refused to strike, even in its own defense, lest it should be the aggressor." Buchanan did not forward this impassioned communication to the House; presumably he considered their resolutions an impertinence.

For the task of dealing with the possible disloyalty in the local militia, Scott chose Charles P. Stone, an ex-officer of the army in his late thirties. Stone, a native of Massachusetts, had been out of the service for four years engaging in business in Mexico and the West. Now in Washington, he had been studying the sentiment of its people; when he made a courtesy call on Scott, the general asked his opinion on that subject. The younger man replied, "Two-thirds of the fighting-stock of this population would sustain the Government in defending itself." Scott announced, "These people have no rallying-point. Make yourself that rallying-point!" The next day Stone found himself a colonel and the inspector general of the District of Columbia.

Stone's estimate that two-thirds of Washington's 61,000 white citizens were pro-Union was comforting; still it meant that the government would have to worry about policing 20,000 people who would be glad to send the Confederacy information they might acquire by such easy means as observing new troops detraining or construction crews working on fortifications — or by deliberate spying. The loyalty of the local militia was the most critical problem, but at least it was identifiable and fairly manageable. There were four old-line militia units; a new one was forming. The captain commanding one company had stated its mission thus: to "... help to keep the Yankees from coming down to coerce the South." Whether Stone knew of this declaration is not certain, but he did find enough evidence of disloyalty to place detectives in that company and one other. They uncovered unmistakable secessionist connections; Stone came to believe there was a plot that extended to "seizing the public departments at the proper moment and obtaining possession of the seals of the Government." Against some reluctance on the part of Buchanan he organized and armed sixteen new companies; without these, Stone was convinced, "Mr. Lincoln would never have been inaugurated."