TheConfederate Secret Service refers to any of a number of official and semi-officialsecret service organizations and operations performed by theConfederate States of America during theAmerican Civil War. Some of the organizations were directed by the Confederate government, others operated independently with government approval, while still others were either completely independent of the government or operated with only its tacit acknowledgment.
By 1864, the Confederate government was attempting to gain control of the various operations that had developed since the beginning of the war, but often with little success. Secret legislation was put before the Confederate Congress to create an official Special and Secret Bureau of the War Department. The legislation was not enacted until March 1865 and was never implemented; however, a number of groups and operations have been referred to historically as having been part of the Confederate Secret Service. In April 1865, most of the official papers of the Secret Service were burned by Confederate Secretary of StateJudah P. Benjamin just before the Confederate government evacuatedRichmond, although a few pages of a financial ledger remain.[1] Thus, the complete story of Confederate secret operations may never be known.
The Confederacy benefited from the services of a number of "traditional"spies includingRose O'Neal Greenhow andAaron Van Camp, who appear to have been members of an espionage gang during the formative period of the Confederate government. Greenhow was incarcerated at theOld Capitol Prison inWashington, D.C.Thomas Jordan recruited Greenhow and provided her with cypher code.
Other known espionage agents includeBelle Boyd andCatherine Virginia Baxley.John Surratt served as both a courier and spy.
John H. Sothoron appears to have commanded the Confederate underground inSt. Mary's County, Maryland. Col. Sothoron lived nearCharlotte Hall Military Academy. His son, Webster, attended the school and was reputed to be a spy.Richard Thomas (Zarvona) andDavid Herold were also students, although Herold's attending is disputed.
Samuel Mudd, ofCharles County, Maryland, seems to have lent shelter to agents and harboredJohn Wilkes Booth, although Mudd's role is disputed.
The Confederacy's first secret-service agent may have beenJames D. Bulloch. In 1861, almost immediately after the attack onFort Sumter, Bulloch traveled toLiverpool,England, to establish a base of operations. The United Kingdom was officially neutral in the conflict between North and South, but private and public sentiment favored the Confederacy.[citation needed] Britain was also willing to buy cotton that could be smuggled past theUnion blockade, which provided the South with its only real source of hard currency. Bulloch established a relationship with the shipping company of Fraser, Trenholm & Company to buy and sell Confederate cotton, using this currency to purchase arms and ammunition, uniforms, and other supplies for the war effort. Fraser,Trenholm & Co. became, in effect, the Confederacy's international bankers. Bulloch also arranged for the construction and secret purchase of the commerce raiderCSSAlabama, as well as many of theblockade runners that acted as the Confederacy's commercial lifeline.
Jacob Thompson was the Confederate commissioner in Canada. He distributed money, coordinated agents, and may have planned covert operations. He was involved with the attempt to liberate Confederate prisoners atJohnson's Island, a Union facility which also housed political prisoners.
Thompson met withClement Laird Vallandigham, an Ohio politician. Vallandigham, a potential presidential candidate against Lincoln, was arrested by Union GeneralAmbrose Burnside and deported to the Confederacy. Vallandigham made his way to Canada.
The Confederate Signal Corps was established in 1862. Nearly 1,200 men were in the secret service, most of whom were well-to-do and knew more than one language. Example:Alexander Campbell Rucker, brother of ColonelEdmund Winchester Rucker, was in the Confederate Secret Service.[2] MajorWilliam Norris was their commander. Norris may have worked forBraxton Bragg. On April 26, 1865, Norris took the position of the Commissioner of Prisoner ExchangeRobert Ould. Ould may have been the civilian liaison to the corps, and Bragg the military liaison, with both reporting toJefferson Davis orJudah Benjamin.
Thomas Nelson Conrad was a scout and spy who worked with Norris.
The Torpedo Bureau, authorized on October 31, 1862, and commanded by Brigadier GeneralGabriel Rains, was charged with the production of various explosive devices, includingland mines,naval mines, and "coal torpedoes" (bombs disguised as chunks of coal, intended to destroy boilers).
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Created at the same time as the Torpedo Bureau, the Submarine Battery Service were the Confederate Navy's torpedo specialists. The service primarily utilized electrically detonated torpedoes to protect the South's waterways. Originally commanded by CommanderMatthew Fontaine Maury, known as "The Pathfinder of the Seas", Maury was succeeded by his protégé, Lt.Hunter Davidson, when Maury was sent abroad to further his experiments involving electrical torpedoes and to procure needed supplies and ships. The service operated along the James River between Richmond andHampton Roads, Virginia,Wilmington, North Carolina,Charleston, South Carolina, andSavannah, Georgia, among other locales.
During November 1864, the Confederate House of Representatives in secret session referred a bill “for the establishment of a Bureau of Special and Secret Service” to their Committee on Military Affairs. The bureau was to have a “polytechnic corps”. The existing “torpedo corps” was to be incorporated into the bureau. New inventions were to be encouraged.[3]
Confederate agents operated aroundHalifax,Quebec City,Niagara,Toronto, and (especially)Montreal.[4] Confederate agents operating in Canada were considerable enough to be widely tolerated.[5] For example, inToronto,
Southern agents operated freely and openly with little to no concern from local authorities who were governed by British North America’s official policy of neutrality. Indeed, Southerners enjoyed the sympathy of most of Toronto’s political, social, and business elite—although few were as enthusiastic in supporting the Confederate cause asGeorge Taylor Denison III.[6]
Canadian banks funded their activities and Toronto, Montreal,St. Catharines, and Halifax were among the bases of well-financed Confederate networks by Confederate agents and sympathizers in these cities.[5][6][7][8][9] Several Canadian hotels across the territory, including theQueen's Hotel, Toronto andSt. Louis hotel in Quebec City, acted as informal headquarters for Confederate Secret Service activities.[6][10][5]
The Confederacy knew it was in trouble from the beginning of war without its own Navy. The few ships owned privately that could be converted to military service were no match for the Union Navy. On May 21, 1861, theConfederate Congress enacted an amendment to their May 6, 1861Declaration of War which provided that
[T]he government of the Confederate States will pay to the cruiser or cruisers of any private armed vessel commissioned under said act, twenty per centum on the value of each and every vessel of war belonging to the enemy, that may be sunk or destroyed by such private armed vessel or vessels, the value of the armament to be included in the estimate.
In 1862, possibly due to a suggestion, theConfederate Congress enacted a bounty of fifty percent of the value of any vessel destroyed by means of a new invention:
The Congress of the Confederate States of America do enact, That the first section of the above entitled Act be so amended, that, in caseany person or persons shall invent or constructany new machine or engine, or contrive any new method for destroying the armed vessels of the enemy, he or they shall receivefifty per centum of the value of each and every such vessel that may be sunk or destroyed, by means of such invention or contrivance...
This attracted the attention of entrepreneurs.Horace Lawson Hunley organized a group of investors to finance thesubmarine H. L. Hunley that bears his name, hoping to profit from the bounties. Private individuals with engineering experience such as E. C. Singer, C. Williams, and Zere McDaniel developed and patented newtorpedoes andfuses.
Developed byThomas Courtenay of the Confederate Secret Service,coal torpedoes were hollow metal castings resembling a lump of coal. The castings were filled with powder and then secreted in the coal bunker of enemy vessels. When the coal replicas were shoveled into the fire boxes of ship's boilers, the resulting explosions either damaged or sank the ship. A hollowed out piece of wood filled with powder was used against river steamers. These could be concealed in the fuel piles of cord wood stacked along the river banks.
TheDahlgren Affair was a Union cavalry raid on the Confederate capital,Richmond, Virginia, intended to free Union prisoners being held there. The plan was to use the Union men to burn down the city and assassinate Confederate President Jefferson Davis. The raid failed, but it incensed Davis and the Confederate leadership. In view of this, and the Confederacy's dismal fortunes on the battlefield, the secret service was re-invigorated in 1864. It was involved in the October 19, 1864St. Albans Raid in Vermont by personnel from Canada, the plan forarson in northern cities, and future Kentucky governorLuke P. Blackburn's biological warfare plot.
In 1988, two career intelligence officers, William A. Tidwell and David Winfred Gaddy, and an amateur historian who specialized in theassassination of Abraham Lincoln,James O. Hall, publishedCome Retribution: The Confederate Secret Service and the Assassination of Lincoln,[11] in which they presented a circumstantial case that the Confederate Secret Service and MajorCornelius Boyle's intelligence station atGordonsville, Virginia were involved with the death of Lincoln. According to this scenario, the C.S.S. first planned, using Booth as its agent, to kidnap Lincoln and hold him hostage in order to pressure the North into ending theCivil War; the code word for this operation was "Come retribution". When this plan failed to develop, they turned instead to an attempt to bomb theWhite House while a conference of Union officials was occurred. This plot also failed, and the Confederate Secret Service made other plans, leaving Booth to perform the conspiracy to assassinate Lincoln and other U.S. officials without the backing of the C.S.S.[12][13][14][15] Similar arguments are presented inEdward Steers Jr.'s 2005 book,Blood on the Moon: The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln.[16]
In 1995, Tidwell returned to the subject with the publication ofApril '65: Confederate Covert Action in the American Civil War,[17] in which new evidence is examined to show that the capacity of the Confederate Secret Service for secret warfare was larger than had previously been thought.[18] There is little indication that the theories presented in these books have been accepted by significant numbers of Civil War historians, although John D. McKenzie, in his 1997 bookUncertain Glory: Lee's Generalship Re-Examined speculates that one of the reasons thatRobert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis did not end the war after Lincoln's re-election in 1864, when a Confederate military victory was virtually impossible, may have been to allow time for these plots to come to fruition.[19]
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Notes
The Confederate Secret Service set up operations in Halifax (Saverly House);Point Levi outside Quebec City (St Louis Hotel); at Niagara (Clifton House) and in Toronto (American Hotel). But it was in Montreal, Canada's largest city and banking center, that the center of gravity for Confederate activities was located. [...] The head of the Confederate Secret Service in Canada wasJacob Thompson, supported byGeorge Sanders,Clement Clay, and others. [...] To finance their operations, Confederate Secretary of State Judah Benjamin had transferred a fortune in gold to Canadian banks early in the war. (The size of these gold deposits has been estimated at between $500,000 and $1 million.)
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