The backstory behind The Secret War For The Union is interesting just by itself. Author Edwin Fishel was an intelligence officer at the NSA and an amateur Civil War historian in 1959 when he found out about a “half-roomful” full of papers pertaining to the Army of the Potomac in the National Archives. They turned out to be the records of the Bureau of Military Intelligence. Fishel went to work on the documents; once they were discovered they attracted attention from other historians (who, according to Fishel, were not very careful about keeping them catalogued properly). In 1962 there was a raid by “professional document thieves” that looted a good part of the records. Fortunately, most were recovered and Fishel had already copied some of those that were permanently lost. Nothing if not thorough, Fishel spent forty years working on this book; it was published in 1999.

Although the subtitle is “The Untold Story of Military Intelligence in the Civil War”, the book is much more limited; except for occasional passing references it only covers the Union side and only the Army of the Potomac. Even with that limited focus, there’s a lot of fascinating stuff here that raises or lowers the stock of a lot of Civil War generals – and historians.

Stock going down: McClellan. Conventional wisdom among Civil War historians – even the distinguished Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote – has blamed Alan Pinkerton for McClellan’s conviction that he was badly outnumbered by the Army of Northern Virginia. Fishel has unearthed correspondence between McClellan and Pinkerton showing Little Mac encouraged Pinkerton to exaggerate Confederate forces, then took Pinkerton’s pessimistic estimates and doubled them. Pinkerton was, in fact doing a good job at finding Confederate units – his agents correctly identified every regiment facing McClellan on the Peninsula – but his strength estimates were based on the incorrect assumption (encouraged by McClellan) that every regiment was up to strength (in fact, the largest Confederate regiment had a strength of around 700 effectives, and the average was 500. Nominal TO&E was 1000). McClellan maintained to the end of his life that he was outnumbered – despite postwar confirmation of Confederate strength – but the fault is his, not Pinkerton’s. Fishel finds further evidence for McClellan’s intelligence incompetence with the famous Order 501 for the AONV’s deployment before Antietam/Sharpsburg , used to wrap cigars, lost by a Confederate officer, then picked up by an alert Union scout. McClellan refused to acknowledge that operational contingencies might force Lee’s commanders to deviate from the order, and assumed that all the Confederate corps were following the routes specified in the order even after there was abundant evidence that they weren’t. Some Civil War scholars have speculated that McClellan would have been better off if he hadn’t found the order; Fishel doesn’t go that far but agrees that an aggressive Union general in possession of the order might have smashed Lee’s army right there by defeating the separated components in detail.

Stock going up: Pope. Pope always gets dissed base on his apocryphal statement that his “headquarters were in the saddle”, supposedly leading Lee to quip that “Pope had his headquarters where his hindquarters should be”. Pope later claimed he’d never said anything like that, and if Lee made the comment it would be the only joke Lee ever made in his life. At any rate, Pope’s intelligence performance before Second Manassas was actually not that bad. He correctly identified that Lee was going to try and flank him based on reports of troops movements; his problem (common to the Army of the Potomac, and the Union Army in general until almost the end of the war) was that his tactical intelligence – provided by cavalry scouting – was inadequate. Thus even though he moved his army properly he didn’t appreciate how fast the Confederates were moving until receiving a hard lesson from Professor Jackson.

Stock going up: Hooker. Fishel has a lot of praise for Hooker. In particular, he notes Hooker was the first American general since Washington to use “total intelligence” – combining data from many sources. In fact, Hooker seems to have been the first officer since Washington to actually use the term “intelligence” in a military context. Prior to Hooker, intelligence had been divided piecemeal among the various components – spies in enemy territory (neither the Union nor the Confederates liked the term “spy” and thus tended to call them “scouts”), reports from cavalry scouting, interrogation of deserters and contrabands, observations from balloons, and intercepted flag signals – which all reported separately, generally to their commanding officer, who then might or might not pass the information up the chain. Hooker created an intelligence staff and saw to it that they got all the data available (well, he tried to at least; he still didn’t get any cooperation from Pleasanton’s cavalry). Hooker’s great coup was the flank march at Chancellorsville – by a combination of sharp intelligence work and much tighter picketing than the Union Army was used to he successfully got in Lee’s flank and rear (the fact that he then proceeded to blow that advantage doesn’t detract from it). A critical component of the effort was a false Union flag signal. Both the Union and the Confederates could read each other’s flag signals at this stage of the war (the Union later introduced a “cipher disk” that allowed daily variation of the flag alphabet). However, the Union knew the Confederates had broken the original flag code. They were able to plant a false message – disguised as routine “chat” between stations rather than a formal military order – that suggested Hooker was going to remain opposite Fredericksburg. Lee took the bait and remained in position while the Union Army marched around his flank. Alas, Hooker then demonstrated an old military maxim – if there’s only two things the enemy can do, he will always do the third. Hooker thought the only possibilities for the AONV were retreat or stand in place at Fredericksburg; he never considered the possibility that they might counterattack. Thus when intelligence reports came in of Confederate movement across his front, he assumed they meant retreats toward Richmond rather than moving around his flank in turn.

Hooker still had good intelligence work when Lee started toward Gettysburg – he got the Army of the Potomac moving as soon as reliable information came in that Lee was moving north behind the mountains. His intelligence network was handed over intact to Meade, who made good use of it.

Stock going down: Pleasanton. In his memoirs, Pleasanton reported that his cavalry had discovered Lee’s movement north; Fishel finds no contemporary evidence for this. Despite his own claims his orders that resulted in the Battle of Brandy Station were not, as he claimed, to “see what the Confederates were up to” but just to attack and break up a cavalry camp. Pleasanton’s claims that he had captured numerous important papers were also false, according to Fishel; there was a sack of mail that had some useful information from soldier’s letters home, and an organization chart for a small Confederate unit, but nothing earthshaking like Order 501.

Stock going down: Confederate female spies. Despite memoirs and Lost Cause tradition, neither Belle Boyd nor Rose Greenhow contributed anything of importance to the Confederate cause; much of the information provided was either too late to be of any use or just plain wrong. In this regard, Fishel notes that both governments were convinced that the other had much more effective spies than they actually did. Another myth in this general category is the belief that Confederate cavalry raids routinely tapped into telegraph lines; Fishel can find only one occurrence of this, and then the Confederate operator merely used the line to brag rather than sit quietly and gather information. (Fishel notes that John Hunt Morgan in the Ohio theater did make use of telegraph taps, but that’s outside Fishel’s area of concern).

Stock going up: Unionist residents of Northern Virginia and contrabands. Again, Lost Cause tradition has brave men and women in Union occupied territory enduring their oppressors during the day, then slipping out at night to carry all sorts of secret information to Mosby or Stuart or whatever Confederate commander happened to be handy. In fact, Fishel documents lots of information that went the other way – Union sympathizers, including wealthy farmers and slave owners, repeatedly made their way into Union lines to deliver information on Confederate positions. Of particular note were the efforts of a Unionist manager on the Orange & Alexandria railroad, who deliberately delayed shipments to the Confederate armies. Unfortunately, a lot of names have been lost, as they were suppressed in official documents – even after the war – lest their Secessionist neighbors take some action about it. In the contraband department, Charley Wright made it into Union lines with an abundance of reliable information before the Gettysburg campaign. Lee noted that “Negroes” were a prime source of intelligence information for the Union; uncharacteristically Lee then commented that “Negroes were easy to deceive” – an example of the perils of believing your own propaganda.

Stock going up: Residents of Pennsylvania. In an interesting contrast to the situation in Northern Virginia, where the Confederacy got little and poor information from residents in Union-occupied areas, Pennsylvanians went out of their way to provide information on Lee, sometimes walking miles to get to a working telegraph line. Meade’s intelligence staff made excellent use of all this information.

Stock remaining the same: J.E.B. Stuart. Fishel notes that Stuart’s absence from the Gettysburg campaign was disastrous for Lee, but also notes that it was the only mistake in an otherwise outstanding career. Stuart and the Confederate cavalry were vastly better at scouting and picketing than their Union equivalents. As noted, if Hooker hadn’t started his move north as soon as his own intelligence network picked up Lee’s move, Stuart would have been able to get in front of the Army of the Potomac and join up with Lee; instead he was blocked off and had to go all the way around to the north. Fishel notes that Lee’s orders allowed this – or at least didn’t discourage it – and that the Confederates had other cavalry assets that could have been brought into service but instead remained in the Shenandoah valley.

Well, there’s lots of interesting information here. Fishel provides abundant maps for all the major campaigns, often with the useful feature of showing where Confederate positions were plus where the Union thought Confederate positions were; it’s enlightening how they get more and more accurate as time goes on, so by the Gettysburg campaign even Ewell’s scattered elements were positioned within a few miles, and Meade had better information on Stuart’s location than Lee did. However, all is not glory; Fishel is a ponderous writer – no Catton or Foote. He’s addicted to endnotes; not necessarily bad in a scholarly work bu the has the habit of putting important information in them rather than including it in the text or a footnote; that means you have to go thumbing back and forth to find some crucial details. He also assumes that the reader is familiar with Civil War history. Although the movements leading up to crucial battles are well documented (since they usually pertain to intelligence work) the details of the battles are not; for example, if you don’t know that Stonewall Jackson was killed at Chancellorsville, you won’t find it out here. There are eight appendices, one of which is a comparison of intelligence failures before the destruction of Milroy’s division in the Shenandoah before Gettysburg and the attack on Pearl Harbor; Fishel apologizes for the comparison but notes that there was an equivalent amount of shock in the North, since it was suddenly realized that Lee was invading. It would be interesting to see Fishel’s comments on 9-11.

As a final comment, I’m a little concerned about Fishel’s relationship with “conventional” historians. Fishel had abundant information that, as noted, changes the common wisdom about several Civil War generals and campaigns. I’m not sure how long it took him to develop that information, except that he started working in 1959 and published in 1999. There was plenty of time to get in contact with people like Catton and Foote and let them know what he was finding; so why didn’t he? Lots of explanations are possible; maybe he took a long time categorizing and sorting the papers before actually diving into them; maybe he was reluctant to approach professional historians out of diffidence over his amateur status; maybe he was jealous of the data and wanted to publish first. He does comment, a little grumpily, that others had access to the papers (including the document thieves) so their existence was known. Not sure what to make of it. ( )