Spying in America: Espionage from the Revolutionary War to the Dawn of the Cold War

5. Espionage and the Civil War

  63 5 Espionage and the Civil War There was probably more espionage in one year in any medieval Italian city than in the four-year War of Secession. Allen Dulles, The Craft of Intelligence In the decades after the Revolution, the United States still faced threats from European nations jockeying for territory in the uncharted expanse of the New World. Americans, however, retreated into a self-imposed isolation , a precedent that would characterize their postwar experience for the next two centuries. They also dissolved institutions created during wartime to collect intelligence and catch spies. The capabilities developed in these key national security arenas eroded, and their leading practitioners went off to other pursuits. After the Revolutionary War, John Jay’s Committee for Detecting and Defeating Conspiracies was disbanded and Jay went on to become chief justice of the Supreme Court. Benjamin Tallmadge became a successful businessman and served sixteen years as a US representative from Connecticut. Enoch Crosby returned home to work the family farm in Carmel, New York, and serve as a justice of the peace. Intelligence collection fared slightly better than counterespionage. Among his first acts as president, George Washington established the Con- 64 The Civil War tingency Fund for the Conduct of Foreign Intercourse, a bland euphemism for monies to support clandestine intelligence activities. A few of his successors made ample use of these secret funds. Thomas Jefferson, for example , authorized the Lewis and Clark expedition to gather intelligence on the western United States, and James K. Polk dipped into this same pot of money to discover Mexico’s secret intentions regarding Texas and California.1 In spite of these presidential missions, American intelligence collection capabilities were still largely neglected. The nation’s intelligence exploits in the War of 1812 were undistinguished; and few generals, with notable exceptions like Andrew Jackson, devoted much effort to developing the capability that Washington had honed during the Revolution. As the intelligence historian Nathan Miller notes, “Virtually no intelligence or espionage activities of any importance were conducted at any level during the war. The United States was so unprepared with respect to warrelated intelligence that maps of the Canadian border areas were unavailable , even though the conquest of Canada was a major objective of the conflict.”2 Three decades later, the United States still remained without an established intelligence service in the Mexican-American War, when “no move was made to establish a permanent intelligence capability, . . . either in the fighting or in the peace that followed. [General Zachary] Taylor ignored intelligence almost to the point of dereliction in his invasion of northern Mexico.”3 The counterespionage front was even more dismal. Foreign espionage against the United States continued after the Revolution as European powers sought to protect their remaining possessions in the Americas or carve out new territory. Before the War of 1812, Great Britain ran an extensive network of spies in North America under the control of the royal governor in Canada. During this conflict, no significant spies in American ranks were uncovered, primarily because no counterespionage service existed to ferret them out. Espionage against the United States was ignored until the first shot of the Civil War was fired at Fort Sumter in 1861. The Civil War was fought on both sides by average citizens, doctors, lawyers , teachers, clerks, and farmers. The United States only had a small professional army of about 16,000 men when the conflict began, one that was to be split into the Union Army and the Confederate States Army. To wage a major war, both sides had to incorporate state militias, draft thousands of 65 Espionage and the Civil War citizens, and quickly train them. The US Army had a small cadre of professional officers, although more than three hundred of them left to lead the Southern military. Some, however, were well past their prime. Winfield Scott, the commanding general of the Union Army, was seventy-four years old at the outbreak of the war, and his age and tremendous girth prevented him from even mounting his horse. The situation was far bleaker in the intelligence and counterespionage arenas. Without a central organization on either side, commanding officers of individual units ran local networks of spies that paled in comparison with the rings run by George Washington. All these efforts were uncoordinated and, even in individual units, time and energy were wasted on duplication of effort and spies of marginal value. Information...