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

Introduction: "He Don't Care a Damn for What the Enemy Does Out of His Sight"

INTRODUCTION ‘‘He Don’t Care a Damn for What the Enemy Does out of His Sight’’ 1 ‘‘There are no more important duties which an officer may be called upon to perform,’’ asserted West Point professor Dennis Hart Mahan, ‘‘than those of collecting and arranging the information upon which either the general or daily operations of a campaign must be based.’’ With this passage, the foremost military thinker in America before the Civil War stressed the importance of military intelligence, or the collection and use of information, to generalship. Insights into an enemy’s organization , movements, strength, capabilities, and intentions provide a foundation upon which a commander formulates his own plans. After all, asked French theorist Antoine Henri Jomini, ‘‘how can any man say what he should do himself, if he is ignorant [of] what his adversary is about?’’ In nineteenth-century warfare, however, finding reliable and timely information was a Herculean task, especially since slow communications could render even good intelligence useless. In addition, both Federal and Confederate armies lacked formal intelligence organizations, operational guidelines, and personnel experienced in the secret side of war. Most Civil War officers learned about the intelligence ‘‘business’’ on the job. But generals are measured by their successes and failures, and these outcomes hinge upon decisions made at crucial times. To rephrase Jomini, how can historians judge their choices if we are ignorant of the information upon which their decisions were based? Determining what a commander knew, when he knew it, and how he used what he knew offers a valuable—and perhaps more evenhanded— perspective from which to view the nature of command in the Civil War. This book focuses on Ulysses S. Grant’s collection and use of military intelligence from his early command assignments in Missouri in 1861 to his final campaigns in Virginia in 1864–65. Analyzing the information and interpretations that shaped his decisions can provide deeper insights into Grant as a military leader and perhaps shed more light on how he became one of the war’s most successful generals.1 To examine Grant’s campaigns from this perspective, however, requires a brief examination of the nature of Union intelligence operations —or what contemporaries called ‘‘secret service’’— during the Civil War. In the modern military definition, ‘‘information’’ is merely raw, undigested news on the enemy that has yet to be analyzed and shaped into 3 a coherent form. ‘‘Intelligence,’’ though, refers to the product of the evaluation and interpretation of the information streaming in to headquarters . During the Civil War, however, the terms were synonymous and used interchangeably (a practice that will be followed in this study). Typically, if an officer claimed to have received intelligence, he meant only that bits of unprocessed information had reached his desk. Analysis and interpretation of this evidence was usually done in his head and not, like today, by professional intelligence analysts. In the mid-nineteenth century, no military or civilian personnel had any formal training in this specialty. As a result, professional and volunteer officers entered the war with little exposure to this facet of command. Accordingly, intelligence operations were mostly ad hoc affairs, as varied in their scope and effectiveness as the personalities and experience of the individuals directing them. With no permanent armywide intelligence apparatus at their disposal , neither side ensured a consistent emphasis on systematic and ongoing collection and analysis at any level of command. Most commanders recognized the importance of possessing information on the enemy, but finding it remained a complex task. Generals on both sides utilized various collection methods and received information from a multiplicity of human sources (called humint in modern terminology ).2 These can be further classified as either ‘‘passive’’ sources (prisoners of war, deserters, refugees, local civilians, and slaves) or ‘‘active’’ sources (spies, scouts, cavalry reconnaissances, visual observations, intercepted correspondence, and enemy newspapers). The terms ‘‘scout’’ and ‘‘spy’’ were also used interchangeably, though scouts were typically enlisted men or noncommissioned officers who prowled the no man’s land between the lines, while spies resided in enemy territory and reported via secret messenger. In his classic On War, Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz complained that ‘‘Many intelligence reports in war are contradictory; even more are false, and most are uncertain.’’ Civil War officers generally would have seconded this observation as they struggled to determine the veracity of sources, a constant and important variable in all calculations . For Union military leaders, the...