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...