Grant's Secret Service: The Intelligence War from Belmont to Appomattox (review)

"The art of war is simple enough," Ulysses S. Grant reportedly observed. "Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can and as often as you can, and keep moving on" (268). In this book William B. Feis provides the first full-scale study of Grant's efforts to obey the first maxim: locate the enemy—and, one should add, assess his strength and learn his plans.

Feis makes clear from the outset that, among these rules, Grant consistently favored most the striking and moving on. He much preferred to seize and retain the initiative, leaving the guesswork as much as possible to his opponent. The initiative could compensate for poor intelligence. Grant was seldom more ill at ease than when temporary weakness or orders from above forced him to remain on the defensive. Those moments were confined largely to his service in the western theater before 1864, when he was subject to the orders of John C. Frémont and the ever-cautious Henry W. Halleck.

That said, there is plenty of subject matter for this book. Grant always sought and often profited from information concerning the location, strength, and plans of his Confederate opponents. But military intelligence, whether obtained from Union spies, Confederate deserters and prisoners of war, Southern newspapers, or other sources, was notoriously conflicting and inaccurate. Unlike George B. McClellan and others who accepted the most exaggerated reports of enemy strength and were immobilized by them, Grant was all too apt to discount bad news that conflicted with his own aggressive preconceptions. He sometimes paid a heavy penalty for this self-assurance, as at Shiloh and Cold Harbor. But he always moved on.

Early in the war, Grant deferred to the widely recognized topographical and other intelligence skills of Generals William S. Rosecrans and Grenville M. Dodge. Under Grant's direction Dodge built a massive intelligence network extending through much of Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, and into Georgia. Where possible it used southern unionists such as those mobilized into the First Alabama Cavalry (USA), commanded by Col. (later Senator) George E. Spencer.

Moving to Virginia as general in chief in March 1864, Grant inherited a small Bureau of Military Information (BMI) within the Army of the Potomac, created earlier by Maj. Gen. Joseph H. Hooker. Grant was initially slow to use the BMI, but was shocked into reappraisal by his failure to learn in timely fashion of Jubal Early's separation from Robert E. Lee's army around Richmond in June 1864, culminating in Early's near-catastrophic descent on Washington. (As it happened, Early's departure coincided with Grant's own surreptitious crossing of the James River toward Petersburg. Lee and Grant were each taken aback at the other's coup.)

Grant now oversaw the development of the BMI into a crack intelligence unit under Col. George H. Sharpe. Two of its top agents in Richmond were the wealthy Elizabeth Van Lew and Samuel Ruth, the exceedingly well-placed superintendent of the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac Railroad. By the time of Appomattox, Confederate communications had worn so thin and the BMI's information was so broad that Sharpe, charged with issuing paroles to Lee's men after the surrender, was actually informing many of them what brigades and divisions they belonged to.

Feis has done a thorough job, exploring the requisite sources and telling his story clearly. It is difficult to quarrel with his arguments that Grant gradually learned by experience in the intelligence field as elsewhere; that he increasingly respected, invested in, and benefited from intelligence work; but that he continued to value the initiative above all. Despite some notable failures, his intuition served him well. Finally, both author and publisher deserve special commendation for the number and quality...