April '65

A. Tidwell William

Description

William A. Tidwell establishes the existence of a Confederate Secret Service and clarifies the Confederate decision making process to show the role played by Jefferson Davis in clandestine operations. While the book focuses on the Confederate Secret Service's involvement with the Lincoln assassination, the information presented has implications for various other aspects of the Civil War. The most thorough description of the Confederate Secret Service to date, April '65 provides previously unknown records and traces the development of Confederate doctrine for the conduct of irregular warfare. In addition it describes Confederate motives and activities associated with the development of a major covert effort to promote the creation of a peace party in the North. It shows in detail how the Confederates planned to attack the military command and control in Washington and how they responded to the situation when the wartime attack evolved into a peacetime assassination. One of the most significant pieces of new information is how the Confederates were successful in influencing the history of the assassination.

Sujets

• Histoire
• USA
• United States of America
• History of the Americas
• American Civil War
• États-Unis
• Guerre de Sécession

Informations

• Publié par: The Kent State University Press
• Date de parution: 27 janvier 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781612771021
• Langue: English

Extrait

CONFEDERATE COVERT ACTION
IN THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR
April ’65
WILLIAM A. TIDWELL

THE KENT STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Kent, Ohio, & London, England
© 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 States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Secret service.
2. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Secret service.
3. Lincoln, Abraham, 1809–1865—Assassination.    I. Title.
E 608. T 5   1995 973.7′86—dc20 94-33226   CIP
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication data are available.
CONTENTS  
Preface  
Acknowledgments  
Introduction: Come Retribution Revisited one
Confederate Gold two
The Organization of Secret Service three
The Greenhow Organization four
Sage and the Destructionists five
The Confederate Secret Service in Canada six
April ’65
Appendix A: Table of Requests for Treasury Warrants for Secret Service Money
Appendix B: Organization of Private Warfare, by B. J. Sage
Appendix C: Bill to Establish a Bureau for Special and Secret Service
Notes
Bibliography
Index
PREFACE
I N 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, 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 young gentleman from southern Maryland, was an admirer of the European republican revolutionaries and had served with Garibaldi in Italy. Early in the war, Thomas and a small group of daring souls took passage on a ship in the Chesapeake Bay. Once on the Bay, the group whipped out their pistols and commandeered the ship, taking it into Virginia waters. Thomas was captured in an attempt to repeat the maneuver on another ship, but his adventure focused my interest on the clandestine activities of southern Marylanders during the Civil War. 4
Thomas had organized a unit known variously as the Maryland Guerrilla Zouaves, the Potomac Zouaves, or the Zarvona Zouaves and based it at Tappahannock on the Rappahannock River. What had happened to the unit after Zarvona’s capture? Did it continue to act in clandestine crossborder operations? If it did continue to act in irregular warfare, might this give us another lead into the world of Confederate secret service?
The Zarvona Zouaves had been incorporated into the 47th Virginia Infantry Regiment and many of the men were later assigned to the Second Battalion of Arkansas Infantry, but I felt that there was a possibility that some had stayed with the 47th and decided to study that unit in greater detail. 5 Indeed, a most interesting pattern emerged from the National Archives records of the men of the 47th. A great many of them were captured at the Battle of Sayler’s Creek on April 6, 1865, and only a few were left to take part in the general surrender at Appomattox three days later, which was more or less to be expected from what we knew of the unit’s history. What was not expected was the large number of men of the 47th who were paroled at Ashland, Virginia, fifteen miles north of Richmond, between April 22 and May 3, 1865, long after the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia. Furthermore, the soldiers came into Ashland in such numbers and during such a short period of time that they seemed to have been marched into the parole point in disciplined units. 6
What could account for such a phenomenon? Here was the Army of Northern Virginia, hard-pressed for manpower and fighting with every available resource, yet this regiment went off on the Appomattox campaign without a large number of its men, including its commander and several other senior officers. There were stories of many desertions from the Army of Northern Virginia during its retreat from Richmond, but no reports of such a large proportion of any single unit to include its commander and senior officers. Allowing for a generous number of men to be at home on sick leave or recovering from wounds and for a number of deserters enroute to Appomattox, there were still too many men paroled at Ashland. What was the cause?
Perhaps there was something unique about the 47th Infantry. I decided to compare its records with those of other units recruited in the same area to see if they differed in any significant way. To my surprise, the records of the men of the 40th and 55th Virginia infantry regiments, also recruited in the Northern Neck of Virginia and along the Rappahannock, showed a similar pattern. In a comparison of the infantry regiment pattern with a cavalry regiment recruited in the same area, I discovered that the 9th Virginia Cavalry, although not involved at Sayler’s Creek, had a similarly large number of men paroled at Ashland.
Further study showed that the infantry regiments belonged to Brig. Gen. Seth Maxwell Barton’s brigade of Maj. Gen. George Washington Custis Lee’s division, a recently organized unit made up of both regular and reserve units and assigned to a quiet sector of the Confederate defenses east of Richmond and north of the James River. Another regiment stationed nearby, the 30th Virginia, belonging to Brig. Gen. Montgomery Dent Corse’s brigade, had been recruited in the Northern Neck as well and also had a large percentage of its men paroled at Ashland.
With sickness and desertion ruled out as reasonable explanations for the large number paroled at Ashland, the alternative was that the situation must have been created with Confederate official blessing. But why? What reason could be important enough to remove several hundred able-bodied soldiers and their officers from combat units when the Confederacy needed every man who could carry a weapon?
From the mass of information collected about the history of the regiments du