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  • Surveillance and Spies in the Civil War: Exposing Confederate Conspiracies in America’s Heartland by Stephen E. Towne
  • Robert M. Sandow (bio)
Surveillance and Spies in the Civil War: Exposing Confederate Conspiracies in America’s Heartland. By Stephen E. Towne. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015. Pp. 488. Cloth, $90.00; paper, $34.95.)

Scholars of the northern home front have long debated the nature, extent, and significance of wartime opposition and the threats posed by those labeled “Copperheads.” In a deeply researched monograph, Stephen Towne reexamines the intensely scrutinized Midwest and underscores the case for widespread organized “Confederate” conspiracy. Focusing on events in Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Missouri, and Kentucky, Towne foregrounds the perspective of military leaders and the information gathered in a dragnet of government surveillance. With the impotency of civilian law enforcement, it fell to army officers to investigate, punish, and prevent acts of “disloyalty” that could undermine the war effort. [End Page 112]

Towne summarizes a broad spectrum of potential threats that included smuggling; Confederate raids and recruiting; Union desertion and draft resistance; sabotage or seizure of Federal ships, arsenals, communications, and supply lines; plans to free and arm Confederate prisoners; and even desperate plots to set fires in major cities. Most vexing to military authorities was the perceived threat posed by a series of nebulous Democratic secret societies that included the Knights of the Golden Circle, the Order of American Knights, and the Sons of Liberty. Federal officers felt certain that such societies were vast in number, intimately tied to the Democratic Party, in communication with a network of Confederate agents, armed and organized along military lines, and prepared to engage in concerted revolutionary insurrection that could lead to the secession of the Midwest. After exhaustive analysis of government records, Towne judges them not “delusional” but “clear eyed and level headed in their assessments of the threat. The threats were real” (6).

The great strength of Towne’s work is his unwavering attention to the military perspective and records. The book gives us the fullest understanding to date of the varied means by which the army gathered information on civilians away from the front. The networks of spying became extensive though complicated by a welter of overlapping military posts and jurisdictions. Towne stresses that intelligence efforts “arose in an unsystematic, decentralized, and ad hoc manner” (4). Over time, bureaucratic heads of military spy rings became more adept at synthesizing information and coordinating responses that averted disaster. This was often done with little material support or direction by War Department heads in Washington or by President Lincoln, who thought the dangers of conspiracy exaggerated.

Surveillance and Spies in the Civil War enters a contentious historiographical field. The accusation that a large swath of midwestern Democrats were dangerous pro-Confederate insurrectionaries parallels wartime Republican views of Copperhead disloyalty. During the war and after, that characterization could serve partisan ends to discredit political opponents. In the world wars of the twentieth century, the story of the “fifth column” Copperheads was retold to inoculate against defeatism and dissent. The reputation of antiwar Democrats languished until the publication of Frank L. Klement’s The Copperheads in the Middle West (1960). Over the next four decades, Klement made reevaluating Copperheads the centerpiece of his active scholarship. His work Dark Lanterns: Secret Political Societies, Conspiracies, and Treason Trials in the Civil War (1984) argues that conspiracy mythologies of the war became an enduring “consensus history” that could serve nationalistic purposes. His revisionism, coupled with the cynicism of the Vietnam-Watergate era, had far-reaching influences. [End Page 113]

Towne’s weighty tome—the notes alone comprise eighty-eight pages— is a broadside into the hull of Klement’s revisionism. While Klement acknowledged draft resistance, Confederate plots, secret societies, and scheming politicians, he played down the real dangers that existed in the border states. Towne meticulously demonstrates that Klement could be guilty at times of errors of fact, omission or misinterpretation of evidence, and biased selection. Klement also was more circumspect of the grand conspiracy theories that united disparate elements into a single pro-Confederate nexus. While Republican exposés and newspaper articles made enormous claims for the reach and aims of “dark...

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