April '65: Confederate Covert Action in the American Civil War

568 Pages·1995·4.7 MB·English

by  William A. Tidwell

April '65 : Confederate Covert Action in the
title:
American Civil War
author: Tidwell, William A.
publisher: Kent State University Press
isbn10 | asin: 0873385152
print isbn13: 9780873385152
ebook isbn13: 9780585239811
language: English
Confederate States of America--History,
United States--History--Civil War, 1861-
subject
1865--Secret service, Lincoln, Abraham,-
-1809-1865--Assassination.
publication date: 1995
lcc: E608.T5 1995eb
ddc: 973.7/86
Confederate States of America--History,
United States--History--Civil War, 1861-
subject:
1865--Secret service, Lincoln, Abraham,-
-1809-1865--Assassination.
April '65
Confederate Covert Action in the American Civil War
William A. Tidwell
Page iv
© 1995 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 94-33226
ISBN 0-87338-515-2
Manufactured in the United States of America
03 02 01 00 99 98 97 96 95 5 4 3 2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tidwell, William A.
April '65 : Confederate covert action in the American Civil War /
William A. Tidwell.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-87338-515-2 (cloth : alk.)
1. Southern StatesHistoryCivil War, 18611865Secret service.
2. United StatesHistoryCivil War, 18611865Secret service.
3. Lincoln, Abraham, 18091865Asassination. I. Title.
E608.T5 1995
973.7¢86dc20 94-
33226
CIP
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication data are available.
Page v
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction: Come Retribution Revisited 1
one 14
Confederate Gold
two 30
The Organization of Secret Service
three 57
The Greenhow Organization
four 77
Sage and the Destructionists
five 107
The Confederate Secret Service in Canada
six 160
April '65
Appendix A 197
Table of Requests for Treasury Warrants for Secret
Service Money
Appendix B 205
Organization of Private Warfare, by B. J. Sage
Appendix C: Bill to Establish a Bureau for Special and 213
Secret Service
Notes 223
Bibliography 243
Index 250
Page vii
Preface
In 1976 I bought a small piece of country property in Virginia in King
George County, in the "Northern Neck" of Virginia between the
Potomac and Rappahannock rivers. My sons and I discovered a very
old log cabin on the property and decided to restore it. When we were
fairly well along with our task, I told the local newspaper about our
work, thinking that their readers might be interested in learning about
this piece of local history. Indeed, the paper printed a nice story about
the cabin, complete with pictures.
I later learned that in working on the story of the cabin the editor had
gone to the County Clerk's office to find out who had owned the
property. The ladies in the office reported that they had looked up the
same property a short time before because "a couple of men were
writing a book about John Wilkes Booth, and they said that he spent
the night at that place."
1
That got my attention. I knew that Booth had fled to Virginia after the
assassination and that he had been killed in nearby Caroline County,
but I knew almost nothing else about Booth or the assassination. My
son, Robert, who at the time was working in his school library,
brought home Stanley Kimmel's The Mad Booths of Maryland for me
to read.2 This book had a fairly detailed description of the main events
of Booth's escape through southern Maryland and into Virginia,
treating it as a picaresque journey from one adventure to another. To
Kimmel, the escape was a series of unrelated coincidences; but to me,

Page viii
having spent my entire adult life in association with the American
intelligence community, it seemed clear that there were threads of
manipulation present. It appeared that Booth was being "handled" and
that there were players in the drama who did not appear on stage.
Determined to find out what really happened, I began to investigate
the literature bearing on Confederate secret service work and
discovered that very little had been written on the subject. One of the
principal books was by John Bakeless, with whom I had served in G-
2, the Military Intelligence Division of the War Department General
Staff, during World War II.
3 I had long admired Bakeless for his discovery of Christopher
Marlowe's association with the intelligence service of Queen
Elizabeth I, but I found that his book concentrated on the more
sensational exploits of pro-Confederate individuals who had been
caught during the war or who had written memoirs after the war.
Unfortunately, Bakeless did not try to analyze the concepts and
organizations used by the Confederates in their secret service work.
That information is essential if one is to understand the objectives and
the strategy of a nation, but it is dry stuff to some readers, and
Bakeless may have been forced to write in a more sensational manner
in order to attract readers for a commercial publisher.
I concluded that there was very little available in the existing literature
on clandestine activity in the Civil War and determined to work
instead with original source material. My first venture was to look into
the Records of the Governor of Virginia. I assumed that the records of
the Confederacy had already been worked over by other scholars but
that in all likelihood nobody would have thought to look for signs of
the Confederate secret service in the records of a state, even though it
would have been almost impossible to have conducted secret service
operations in Virginia without having some contact with the state
government. This inquiry turned out to be rewarding. There was direct
documentary evidence that at the beginning of the war Virginia had
secret service funds and was active in arranging for and organizing
clandestine courier services to bring information from Washington
and other points in the North across the Potomac. This clearly
established that leaders in the Confederacy were aware of secret
service activity and the body of lore accompanying it.
I located Virginia governor John Letcher's records of his dealings with
Richard Henry Thomas, also known as "Zarvona." Thomas, a