Surveillance and Spies in the Civil War: Exposing Confederate Conspiracies in America’s Heartland by Stephen E. Towne (review)

The objective of this book is to highlight army intelligence operations in support of civilian law enforcement to “counteract growing criminal conspiracy” resisting the Lincoln administration’s efforts to subdue the southern rebellion. Stephen E. Towne employs his skills as a university archivist in focusing on the states of Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio where this resistance was centered.

Given the absence of active combat in the states in question, intelligence efforts to combat conspiracy had mostly political rather than military overtones. Civilian efforts to identify and restrain resistance to government policies early in the war were unsuccessful for a variety of financial and motivational reasons, which led to the assumption of espionage duties by military entities within these states. Tools used to combat efforts to undermine the government included reading private telegraphic and postal correspondence and following political leaders and others deemed to be threats.

Surveillance and Spies in the Civil War details discovery of opposition to the government by alienated individuals and factions, who organized themselves into a secret front group called Knights of the Golden Circle (kgc). This awakened officials at the state level to the emerging threat. When U.S. secretary of war Edwin M. Stanton assigned Colonel Henry B. Carrington to Indiana in response to Governor Oliver P. Morton’s request for a capable officer to organize mobilization efforts, this energetic Yale graduate and lawyer by trade would become “the U.S. Army’s most important intelligence officer to investigate conspiracy in the North.” His background mirrored arguably the two most important military intelligence practitioners in the East during the war, the Army of the Potomac, Bureau of Military Information’s Colonel George H. Sharpe and the Confederacy’s head of the Signal Corps and Secret Service, Major William Norris—both lawyers and graduates of Yale.

Branches of the kgc also gained adherents in Illinois and Ohio, and spread to other nearby states. Democrats, such as Congressman Clement Vallandingham, promoted the conspiracy thinking their interests better served by separation of the Old Northwest states from the Union. A major issue for the federal government was large numbers of soldiers who deserted—fueled mainly by disaffection with Washington’s policies, and exacerbated when President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

With Democrats controlling both houses of the General Assembly in Indiana, Morton, a Republican, transferred all state-controlled arms and ammunition to Carrington, who in turn began arresting and interrogating suspected conspirators. In Illinois, Republican governor Richard Yates acted to put down this “infamous rebellion” when he learned that lodges of the kgc had formed especially in the southern portion of the state. Likewise, in Ohio, Republican governor William Dennison Jr. was concerned about “Demo-secessionists” organizing and plotting against the government. However, neither of the governors had a detective force to combat these threats, and their requests to the federal government for funding for this purpose went unfulfilled. Vallandigham, who assumed leadership of the conspiracy, was arrested, tried, convicted and exiled to the South. He later operated with impunity from Canada to undermine the federal government and aid the secession movement, before returning to the United States to continue his efforts.

Lack of appreciation at the federal level of the seriousness of the conspiracy in the Northwest states, particularly general-in-chief Henry W. Halleck and Secretary Stanton, limited the ability of governors and their intelligence operatives to deal with the problem. Nonetheless, men like Carrington and his counterparts in Illinois, Lieutenant Colonel James Oakes, and in Ohio, Colonel Edwin A. Parrott, were at the forefront of the fight to suppress antigovernment activities. Absent sufficient funds, hand-to-mouth intelligence operations got underway in the states where conspiracies had become rampant. Intelligence chiefs hired spies and detectives, or employed officers and soldiers to serve in these capacities in order to infiltrate conspiratorial organizations and learn their secrets...