Rebecca+War+Spies

= = =Civil War Spies= During the Civil War, just like any competitive event in history, the opposing sides wanted to know what was going on in their enemies camps. They came up with codes and different methods of finding out what exactly was going on within the other camps. By using different characters, words, and symbols, the spies were able to bring back their information to their generals in secrecy. There were many famous spies in the civil war who contributed in such a successful outcome that we have today. toc

Cipher:
A cipher was a message is written in secret code. Ciphers were used in the Civil War so if the cipher was to be intercepted then the enemy/person who did not have the cipher's key would not be able to interpret the message. During the Civil War, Union Army. U.S. Military Telegraph employed civilians. One of them was Anson Stager, who worked and created ten numbered cipher systems. Among the ten ciphers, the basic underlying mechanics were the same. First, keywords were substituted with their corresponding code words, and then the message was written down in a predetermined number of lines and columns. The number of lines and columns determined the route to be used with the message. Here is a list of words and the code words that represented them, from the Cipher 9 Codebook.
 * General Sherman || BLACK ||
 * Division || WHARTON ||
 * Tennessee River || GODWIN ||
 * Midnight || MARY ||
 * Advance || WAFER ||
 * Attack || WALDEN ||
 * General Bragg || QUADRANT ||
 * Fortifications || SAGINAW ||
 * Capture || WAYLAND ||
 * Chattanooga || JASMINE ||
 * Wounded || WHIST ||
 * Killed || WALRUS ||
 * Arms || RANDOLPH ||
 * Artillery || RICHARD ||
 * Ammunition || RAMSAY ||
 * General Grant || BANGOR ||
 * 6 p.m. || JENNIE ||

In addition to the more common ciphers, where a keyword would be placed by itself or in front of a secret message to tell how to decipher the message, there were also other ciphers which used shapes to decode messages. For example, one way of setting up a cipher was like this:

In this cipher, different letters of the alphabet are set in different shapes so that they could be understood when shapes were drawn to show a secret message.

To write a secret message with this type of cipher, a person would first draw the shape that corresponded to the letter that they wished to use, and then, depending on whether the correct letter was on the right or the left side of the shape, a dot would be added. If a soldier wanted to write the message "nurses" with the dot being added if the letter was on the left, it would probably look similar to this:

as can be seen here, the "n" is in the bottom left square on the right (no dot), the "u" is on the left in the top triangle, etc.

After looking at the various types of ciphers and secret codes, it appears that the soldiers became very tricky over the course of the Civil War in terms of communicating with fellow troops, and that there were many different ways of conveying the same message.

Beginning of the Civil War:
The North and South each developed a Secret Service during the war and the leader of the Secret Service for the Union was Allan Pinkerton. His spies were far more efficient while on enemy lines and could easily prevent imprisonment. The Confederate leader for the Secret Service was Thomas Conrad, he was appointed by General Grant since Grant relied on Confederate spies information. Grant decided to make brigadier Grenville Dodge set up spy networks all over the Confederacy so generals would know what to do next.
 * Almost all the outcomes of each battle is influenced by the information spies received and sent to their generals. At the beginning of the war the earliest spies for the Union and the Confederacy were not given much credit as the spies at the end of the war for the idea of spying was new. The North and South could not detect spies in the early years and when a spy would report back to the general who assigned them for the mission, that general would not share the information with other generals. When there was information on assassination attempts the generals would ignore them.

**

Confederate Spies:
An important Confederate Spy was Sam Davis who was a soldier and scout in the Civil War. Davis was captured by Union forces while holding important information for the South, he was given the choice to die or be free and name the source who gave Davis the information. Davis chose to not reveal the source of his information, and was hanged at 10:00 am on November 27, 1863. When Davis died he not only won the respect of his comrades, friends and family, he had won the respect of his enemies as well. Davis is called the "Boy hero of the Confederacy". A few other important Confederate Spies were Belle Boyd who passed Union information to Confederate General T.J. (Stonewall) Jackson, she was caught and imprisoned. Another was Antonia Ford who told General J.E.B. Stuart of the Confederate army Union whereabouts in Fairfax, Virginia. Ford was imprisoned but since she married a Union major he helped to get Ford released. Nancy Hart was known for discovering what the Union government was up to and for knowing where to find rebels. When Hart was caught she tricked the man who caught her into showing his gun and she killed him with the gun to escape.

Rose O'Neal Greenhow:
Rose O'Neal Greenhow or "Wild Rose" was one of the most commonly known Civil War Spies. She was born in Montgomery County, Maryland in 1817. Greenhow was a popular socialite in Washington, D.C. and befriended many influential politicians such as President Jams Buchanan and South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun. In 1835 married Dr. Robert Greenhow and after the death of her husband Greenhow was approached and asked to spy for the Confederacy after hosting a dinner party in 1859. Greenhow was given a key so she can decipher and write coded messages to Confederate generals about Union military plans. Greenhow was given credit for helping Southern General Pierre G.T. Beauregard win the first battle of Bull Run and President Jefferson Davis of the Confederacy gave her credit for winning the battle at Manassas. Greenhow was put under house arrest by U.S. Intelligence service Leader Allan Pinkerton in 1861 and was transferred to the Old capital Prison along with her daughter Rose in Washington D.C. for the second time in her life. Greenhow, despite imprisonment still wrote encoded messages to the Confederates and the Confederates still gave Greenhow messages without prison guards aware of the exchanges. After her hearing in 1862 Greenhow was exiled to the South for the remainder of the War and was deported to Richmond, Virginia. Confederate President Jefferson Davis then sent Greenhow on a diplomatic mission to Europe in 1863. When returning to Virginia on October 1, 1864 Greenhow was intercepted by Northern forces and she tried to escape in a rowboat but the boat was turned over due to a storm on the water and Greenhow drowned.



Union Spies:
Towards the end of the Civil War the number of black men who served the Union was 179,000. 10% of the Union Army served as soldiers and 19,000 served in the Navy. Several black women also served as nurses, spies or scouts. Black slaves were also known for being spies for telling the Union troops of their master's affairs with Confederate Officials. Mary Elizabeth, a slave who worked inside the Confederate White House gave Union Officials firsthand on what the Confederacy was planning. The Northern Secret Service leader was Allan Pinkerton and was the agent who ordered Rose O'Neal Greenhow arrested. Notable female spies for the Union were Pauline Cushman whom was caught by Confederate soldiers with valuable information, Cushman was rescued three days before she was expected to be hung. Sarah Emma disguised herself as a man and also disguised herself as a black man in order to spy on Confederate troops. Elizabeth Van Lew was an abolitionist living in Richmond, VA. She brought supplies to Union prisoners and smuggled out information the prisoners had for Union officials.

Harriet Tubman:
One of the most famous slaves during the Civil War was Harriet Tubman. Tubman was born in 1820 (exact date not known) and died March 10, 1913. Tubman was 25 years old when she fled to the North in 1845 to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She met William Still, who was the Stationmaster of the Underground Railroad and Still taught Tubman how to get farther North by the Railroad. In 1851 Tubman sought members of her family and when she did Tubman led them all the way to St. Catherines, Ontario. Called 'Moses' she led at least 300 people to freedom and during the Civil War she served as a soldier, a spy in South Carolina and nurse for the Union Army. Tubman recruited former slaves to help her hunt for rebel camps and spy on Confederate Troops. In 1863 Tubman assisted Colonel James Montgomery of the Union on a gunboat raid in South Carolina. Union gunboats had been able to surprise Confederate rebels for Tubman had inside information from her team of former slaves now spies for the Union.

Belle Boyd:
Isabella Marie Boyd was born in Martinsburg, Virginia from her parents Benjamin Reed and Mary Rebecca (Glenn) Boyd. Her first experince that made her become a Confederate spy was on July 4, 1861 when band of Union army soldiers saw the Confederate flag hung outside her home. They tore it down and hung a Union flag in its place. This alone made her angry, but when one of them cursed at her mother, she became enraged. Belle pulled out a pistol and shot the man down. Her first job as a spy was with Captain Daniel Keily. She obtained secrets of the military and passed them on to her her slave, Eliza Hopewell, who carried the messages in a hollowed-out watch case. At this first attempt at spying she was caught and told she could be sentenced to death, but was not. Instead of backing of from fright she thought she needed to find a better way to communicate. One evening in mid-May 1862, Union General James Shields and his staff gathered in the parlor of the local hotel. Belle hid in the closet in the room, eavesdropping through a whole she had carved in the door. She gathered that Shields had been ordered east from Front Royal, Virginia, a move that would reduce the Union Army's strength at Front Royal. That night, Belle rode through Union lines, using false papers to bluff her way past the sentries, and told the news to Col. Turner Ashby who was scouting for the Confederates. She told the Confederate general of these plans and they then had an enormous advantage. For everything that she accomplished for the Confederate Army, she was awarded the Southern Cross of Honor. Jackson also gave her captain and honorary aide-de-camp positions. Unfortunately she died in Kilbourne City, Wisconsin on June 11, 1900.

After the War:
During the war several spy-offices opened in Confederacy but these offices were not thoroughly formed, and spying was open for the Union, and so most of the spy-offices shut down. Union spy-offices had the same problems too; despite the spy-offices formed better there were far too many spies in the Union and more offices with weak components to the offices so Confederates were able to spy without being detected. In 1865 when the war ends Confederate spy-offices and spies end but the Union spies remained. A handful of spies who survived the war were given high rewards for their duties as spies.

B ibliography:
__Harriet Tubman__. African American History Month. Library of Congress. April 29, 2010. 

__Black soldiers in the Civil Wa__r. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. April 29, 2010.  __Civil War Spies.__ Civil War Academy. com. May 6, 2010. 

__Seized Correspondence of Rose O'Neal Greenhow__. Archives. gov. April 29, 2010. 

__Define:Cipher__. Google Search. May 3, 2010 

"Early U.S. Military Cryptography." //Signal Army Offical Website | Fort Gordon, Georgia//. Web. 11 May 2010. <[]>.

__Harriet Tubman Conductor of the Underground Railroad Civil War.__ American Civil War. com. May 5, 2010. 

__Female Spies of the Confederacy__. About. com: Women's History. May 5, 2010. 

__Female Spies of the Union__. About. com: Women's History. May 5, 2010 

__Rose O'Neal Greenhow 1814-1864__. University Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. April 29, 2010. 

__Rose O'Neal Greenhow Confederate spy American Civil War Women__. American Civil War. Com. May 5, 2010 

__Sam Davis__. Suite 1o1. com. May 5, 2010 

__Secret Codes.__ Fort Ward Museum and Historic Site. May 11, 2010. 

__Spies of the Civil War__. Essortment. May 6, 2010. 

Pictures:

__Harriet Tubman__. African American History Month. Library of Congress. April 29, 2010 

__Mrs. Greenhow and Daughter.__ Archives. gov. April 29, 2010. 

__The Cipher Manuscripts.__ Hermetic. Com. May 2, 2010. <http://hermetic.com/gdlibrary/cipher/>