©1996, ProMotion, inc.
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The answer for Edwin C. Fishel was that authentic records did not exist -- that is, until 1959, when he made the sensational discovery of "a half-roomful" of them, untouched for almost a century. The Secret War for the Union, Fishel tells us, "is the first book to put these intelligence records to use." To very good use, I am eager to add.
The telling of this story needs to be long, detailed, clear, and interesting. That is Fishel's achievement. Beyond that, such a story must provide new perspectives and insights as to why and how key battles were conceived, conducted, and concluded as they were. Fishel concentrates upon eight campaigns, featuring Meade and Lee at Gettysburg, Hooker and Lee at Chancellorsville, and McClellan and Pinkerton, "clandestine" creators of the intelligence service, in the Antietam and other campaigns. For instance, Fishel's excruciatingly exact study of Hooker's unique and innovative intelligence bureau revealed Lee's exact position at Fredericksburg, resulting in the "outstanding coup of the war," Hooker's 55-mile flank march to Lee's immediate rear, undetected by Lee, to Chancellorsville.
"In every case this 'intelligence explanation' changes, sometimes radically," says Fishel, "the known history of a campaign."
One major problem remains. "The effect of intelligence on the decisions of commanding generals -- the whole point of this study -- is almost never stated for us by the generals or other participants." Deliberately. For security reasons, Fishel's task is not only to tell what the participants could not or for various reasons would not report, but to suggest for his own readers how the intelligence information would have, most probably, given the outcome, affected decision making. Our dilemma is this: either we go along, watchfully, with Fishel's mind-reading exercise -- the validity of which his source notes allows us to test -- or we "throw up our hands and ignore such motivation."
While the reader grapples with that crucial question of interpretation, Fishel draws attention to some types of intelligence that have been neglected. For instance, the calvary's first duty was reconnaissance, but scouting was also done by intrepid individuals, and scouting itself produced more critical results than the more glamorous espionage exploits that fill most of the books about men and women spies. In this book, the relatively unromantic Signal Corps receives a detailed treatment -- involving signal towers, codes and ciphers, telescopes, telegraph lines -- that will fascinate many readers.
The story of other means of intelligence gathering is fully told in this groundbreaking study: interrogation of runaway slaves and of pseudo-deserters who planted misinformation; balloon surveillance; the role of ironclad warships, and, of course, Pinkerton's detective network. Fishel's analysis of McClellan's and Pinkerton's deceptive relationship radically alters our perception of McClellan's famous hesitations.
Some readers are inclined to shrug off appendices. Try shrugging off "Successes and Failures of Federal and Confederate Intelligence," in which the two sides are compared side by side in columns. Also enthralling, among the eight appendices, are "A Few Lessons from (and About) Civil War Intelligence" and "Rose Greenhow's Reports." Twenty-four maps augment Fishel's arguments.
Having served in Army Intelligence during World War II, as intelligence officer at the National Security Agency for more than 30 years, and as chief intelligence reporter and director of the National Cryptologic School Press, Edwin C. Fishel certainly has the background to fill what Steven Sears in his foreword calls "a major gap in our knowledge and understanding of the Civil War. . . . Until now we have known almost nothing -- nothing authentic -- of the critically important role of intelligence in the Civil War campaigns. The Secret War for the Union is a truly groundbreaking story." This is perhaps one of the most important works ever published about the Civil War.
Fishel spent over 5,000 hours in National Archives, Hooker's papers, Pinkerton's boring but information-rich reports, obscure library sources, and little-known caches of letters and personal memorabilia -- the work of 4,200 Federal and 600 Confederate spies, scouts, guides, and detectives. That exhaustive task finished, he had to avoid exhausting the reader with that great mass of facts. The facts stand up, alive and breathing, on the page.
David Madden is Director of the United States Civil War Center.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.