Chapter 3
November 15, 1862
Corinth, Mississippi
General Grenville Dodge was writing a letter in response to a request from Brigadier General Stephen Hurlbut when he received notice that a rider with escort had passed the pickets north of the camp. His aide, in announcing the party, said, “They look pretty good, General. Their horses do, too. They ain’t been to battle, I’d say.”
When the soldier returned to announce that General Edward D. Townsend had arrived from Washington, Dodge had him wait. He put aside the letter he was composing and sat quietly for a moment and put General Hurlbut’s request out of his mind. When he felt his equanimity had returned, he called his aide to bring Townsend in.
The man introduced himself and pulled a leather case from his waist and handed it to the General. “The President of the United States sends his greetings and asks that you read and respond to these messages at your earliest convenience.”
Three years earlier, in the fall of 1859, Illinois Senator Abraham Lincoln had visited Council Bluffs, Iowa to see about a parcel of land he had invested in. There he met politicians and railroad people, among them Grenville Dodge. “I met with every politician within a hundred miles on this trip,” he confided to Seward later, “but I had to meet with only one man from the railroad.” He wrote his wife Mary, “I am confident now. I believe I have a chance for the Republican nomination for President and, if that doesn’t work out, we have a place to homestead in Nebraska.”
The General opened the aide’s letter and read it.
General Dodge:
“Thank you for your support of the Pacific Railroad Enabling Act, and thank you for your service to the Union and your attention to the railroads in the Mississippi region. It would please me to know that you agree to extend your service to the nation even further. General Townsend has the details and will carry back your response. Yours, A. Lincoln.”
He smiled at the President’s sense of irony. Two years ago the man who was to become the President had promised him and his people that Council Bluffs would be the eastern terminus of the Transcontinental Railroad. In return, Dodge had assured the senator that a bridge across the Missouri was in the works and would be ready by the time the first spike was driven. The year before, Dodge had surveyed the route for the railway from the Platte River Valley all the way to the Pacific, and both men agreed that a northern route was essential, as Lincoln put it, “to keep the balance between the industrial north and the agricultural south.”
At the end of Lincoln’s trip to Council Bluffs, Grenville Dodge had taken the Senator across the Platte River Valley to Elk Horn to look at another piece of land.
The General opened a second letter that came in a sealed packet. It was a personal appeal from the President. He politely dismissed the Adjutant to the anteroom and sat and read the letter. The President’s request cited the opinions of Dodge’s superiors--Stanton, Grant, and Sherman. The President remarked on the faith these men had in him and acknowledged the intelligence system already had in place in the South. If he would tentatively agree to the President’s request and add one more responsibility to the long list, Secretary Stanton would spell out the details of the President’s plan and would be pleased to listen to any ideas the General might have on the matter.
Dodge took his time writing his response to the President. Then he called his aide to deliver it to General Townsend. He felt more confident as he turned his attention to his written response to General Hurlbut’s telegram.
Nov. 15
Brigadier General Stephen Hurlbut
Commander, Fourth Division
District of Western Tenn.
Memphis, Tenn.
Sir:
At the risk of losing funding for my operations, I cannot submit to your request for the names of my agents in the field. The security of my scouts is paramount. No one beneath me in my command and no one above me, General Grant included, is privy to that information.
Very respectfully,
G. M. Dodge
Corinth, Mississippi
The General gave his aide instructions to seal the letter and send it via courier to General Hurlbut and to wait for a reply.
A week later Dodge was in Washington. He listened to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton as a private listens to his captain. The Secretary outlined his plan and the General caught his enthusiasm, not just for the necessity, but also for the beauty of the design. When given leave to speak, he already had a list of refinements he wanted to add.
Dodge spun them out, and when he paused, Stanton added, “We want you to keep in place the people you have in the South, of course, and perhaps refine it a bit as you have elaborated. The military has two problems with intelligence--people and the system of delivery. Let me address the first because it is the easiest.
We have used Pinkerton because, quite frankly, he was successful at espionage. He found people under our noses. He was good with a magnifying glass, good at uncovering corruption, but he never saw the larger scope of the war. McClellan is gone and Pinkerton has resigned. Lafayette Baker now runs the show. Grant and Burnside both like your work, and we do, too. We are especially grateful for the work you did at Pea Ridge and we are sorry for the wounds you suffered.”
Dodge knew that the President was aware of the intelligence debacle at Fredericksburg, but he wondered what he knew about Pea Ridge, that it was Dodge’s scouts that alerted Curtis of Van Dorn’s plan and that it wa Dodge’s troops that had saved Curtis’s men. When the battle was over, the units from Iowa had suffered one third of the 1400 Union casualties, but it was a win for the generals. At the end of the month, Curtis became Major General and Dodge was promoted to Brigadier General.
Dodge’s way of doing things was so different from Pinkerton’s that it seemed they were engaged in two different wars, and he was glad the man was no longer in charge. Dodge gathered information using people he knew, and he instructed his people in ways to assess the information they had gathered before it was sent along. He recruited people who were committed to either the cause of the Union or the cause of abolition. Most of them worked without pay. He wondered what, if anything, would change in Washington under Baker’s command.
When Stanton moved on to the second problem, Dodge agreed with him and went further in examining it. “The biggest problem is logistical. It takes too long for information to be passed up the chain of command. I have known it to take as long as ten days for a message to get to the right people. Hierarchies work efficiently from the top down, never from the bottom up. And if the message is dropped on the ladder, it is lost. My people work as in a web rather than as on a ladder, and the message is replicated, redundant. And this brings up a third issue--interception. The telegraph is vulnerable. For critical messages I use couriers, and I use more than one. If the message is important enough to risk one life, it is important enough to risk two or three. Every critical message is in split cipher. You need two or more parts of the message to read it.”
Stanton reassured the General. “The President would like you to keep your practices and your people. He would like you to direct your attention to the north, especially to Kansas, Missouri, and Kentucky. Missouri and Kentucky are part of the war, yet they are not part of the Confederacy. Kansas, on the face of things, is on our side, but their enthusiasm for abolition causes problems with their neighbors.”
He immediately bridled at the Secretary’s cavalier attitude. Did the Secretary not understand the phrase “Bleeding Kansas”? And what did the man really know about Missouri? Or was Stanton picking up Lincoln’s sense of humor? He decided to put judgment aside and listen.
“As you know, operating in the South we can act on certain assumptions. In the border states we can’t. The big threat in those states are guerrillas who disrupt road, rail, and river traffic and cause political turmoil that sends ripples in measure far beyond their level of violence.”
Dodge knew the insidious threat that guerrilla fighters presented to the milita
ry. A solitary sharpshooter who melts into the woods. One man with an axe who attacks a truss in the middle of a bridge. A fire at night on a hillside.
He also knew the political chaos--the loss of respect for political structures and the primacy of law. The conflict between local, state, and federal officials. The nighttime guerrilla raids on towns and farms. The executions and tortures. Communities torn apart. People not trusting their neighbors.
Dodge wondered what Stanton knew that he himself didn’t know. He waited patiently as the secretary went on with his agenda, describing the problems inherent in working in the South vs. working in Missouri. When the Secretary had fired all his guns, Dodge addressed the practicality of the request. “The President is asking me to assume responsibility for building and running what is essentially a spy operation in the north. As you have just said, in the South you can make certain assumptions, and in Missouri you can’t. That makes the challenge of finding people and gathering information in the North all the more difficult.
A second consideration is cost. While the people I have recruited in the South, for the most part, work for the Union and not for pay, I trust I will not find that so in Missouri. A black slave in Dixie has some recourse if things get bad. He can appeal to me and I can extricate him and he will become a fugitive in the North. Every negro in the South is waiting for the President to issue his proclamation to free all slaves in the Confederacy from bondage. A fugitive slave in Missouri is still a slave, and there is no guarantee that someone, anyone--military or civilian--won’t take him back to his master.
An abolitionist woman, a wife living in Booneslick country, puts herself and her family at risk if she is even suspected of being an abolitionist. People don’t know who to trust.
I don’t mean to muddy the waters here, Mr. Secretary, but simply put, I will need money to operate. I will not be able to administer both the northern and southern spying operations while building and repairing railroads and bridges.” He paused and added, “And from time to time taking my troops into battle.”
“Well said, General,” Stanton said. “While I cannot solve both problems, I think I can help you solve the money issue. There are direct funds for scouts, and we can channel those on the military payroll to you and you can give them their orders. The people you use beyond the military, the extra-legals, must be paid out of extra-legal funds.”
Plunder, General Dodge thought. Illegal markets. Extortion and ransom. Graft and political corruption.
Secretary Stanton waded into a complicated description of contraband, the market operations, and international trade. He ended it. “As a commanding officer you forage, expropriate, and impress. You live off the land. What I am suggesting here is no different in kind, only in scale. The Union is waging an economic war, General. If we can break the back of the South’s economy, which is based on the plantation system and its fruits, we will have won the war. What I am suggesting is that instead of ‘burning as we go,’ as General Sherman tends to do, we confiscate and ship the contraband north. Right now there are pens full of hemp and warehouses are full of cotton. Anything the army can’t eat, we can sell. We can market that contraband and we can use the money to fund your operation in the North. We will give you access to the fiber and our contacts in the markets. The price of cotton in the last two years has gone from ten cents to nearly two dollars. French ships are waiting in Boston, General. We just have to fill them.”
“I can’t possibly do that. I don’t have the skill or the time or the people.”
“You can hire it done. Before the rebellion, you were a successful businessman. I’m sure you know people who can carry out your directives, people you can trust to bring back the money.”
Stanton paused. Then he said, “I am here to convince you, General, to do what is best for the Union. And I know you will agree to do it or we wouldn’t still be talking about it. Let’s let it rest for a while. Come to my house for dinner. I promise we won’t talk about any of this or about the war, if you like. You can come tomorrow and see me here and we can hammer out the details.”
He stayed one more day and met with the Secretary and Lafayette Baker. At the end of the day, Dodge sent telegrams to the men he knew he could count on to put the northern operation in place.
Back in Corinth a week later, Grenville Dodge spent the first thirty minutes of his meeting with Will Brown, and Floyd Burkley reliving the glory days of Omaha-Council Bluffs. Floyd pulled out a flask and passed it around. When it was time to get down to business, the General outlined the President’s charge.
“Why are you asking me?” Will Brown turned to Floyd. “And he’s asking you, too, Floyd. Why is he asking you? We don’t know anything about spies or spying.” He turned back to the General. “You know that. Doesn’t the Union Army have people who do that?”
“Hell, Will. Everbody knows I can spy,” said Floyd. “I spent much time with the Injuns and learned many of their ways. General Long Eye here is right to call us into his service.”
Dodge laughed and shook his head. “Will, this is why I wanted to see you. I knew Floyd wouldn’t come unless you did, and I needed his Indian ways to understand the enemy. Let me get you some of my firewater, Chief.” He got up and pulled a decanter and three glasses from a cabinet. He poured and held up his glass. “To good friends, old friends, trusted friends.” The men touched glasses and drank.
“All fun and done,” Dodge said. “I called you both here because I know you. I’d come to you even if the army had its own intelligence system, which it doesn’t. We’ve been friends a long time. You are extremely loyal and you are circumspect in your dealings.”
“That means I’m secretive, right? Good for spying.” said Will. “How about honest? Can you throw honest in there?”
“I don’t want to, but I can. If I thought it would make you take the deal.”
“Honest Will Brown.” Will Brown grimaced. “No, you’re right. It doesn’t sound right. I’ll settle for trusted friend.”
“Then you’ll take it on?”
“I’ll listen, and I’ll sign on one step at a time. This isn’t the kind of business I like.”
Floyd Burkley grinned, held up his glass, and took a drink.
“Let’s get started then,” said Dodge. “Down here everybody’s politics is taken for granted. Even if they don’t one-hundred-percent believe it, everybody down here professes that the war is about defending a way of life. As a result, operating as a spy is traitorous for every white male in the South. Men are not good candidates. There are exceptions and I’ll get to them later.
The best candidates are slaves. They are faceless and invisible. And there are a lot of them. They are a walking history of dissembling. They know things their masters don’t know, and they have their own channels of information.
The second group of candidates are the women. They also learn to serve, smile, and get along. Many are likely candidates for recruiting because they want to rebel and can’t. They have been oppressed, and often they identify with the negro. On the other hand, they may be crueler and more repressive than their plantation-master husbands. It can go either way.
There’s a third group. These are men who turn away from the Confederacy and disavow the system. Some men signed up at the beginning of the rebellion to defend their community, or they signed up as soldiers in a state militia. When Jefferson Davis began conscription and soldiers were assigned to units away from their homes, many deserted--in some cases whole families left--and if the men didn’t, the women did, and that makes for unhappy husbands. The best examples are the Tennessee Cavalry families. I have many in my service here and I will get together a dossier for you.
And in the fourth group you have real scouts. These are more than spies. They are men who know the landscape and the communities and can move in and out and come and go. Most of them are not paid and are on no one’s list, blue or gray.
Up north, especially in Missouri, recruiting will be difficult, but some of the work is
already done. It’s not highly organized, but you should be able to use what is in place. Each general has his own scouts, and he husbands them jealously. Some generals share intelligence, some do not. Beyond the range of official military control are what we euphemistically call guerrillas. They know the people and the countryside. In peacetime the community would turn against them and either have them lynched or charged as criminals. For our purposes we cultivate them, reward them, and for what it’s worth, take what they offer. They can go places and do things a soldier or a scout cannot.
Two years ago Fremont freed all the slaves in Missouri, and General Curtis, in defiance of the national law and the will of the President, ordered his troops to give safe harbor to any fugitive slave. Both those men have been removed and generals who are less enthusiastic about freeing slaves have replaced them. Schofield, for example, believes every abolitionist should be hanged, and he has said so on numerous occasions. He has also been accused of getting bushwhackers sympathetic to the Confederacy to do some things that soldiers are not allowed to do.
It’s best to think of Missouri as another country that also just happens to be a state that may or may not be in the Union. You know the history and the politics, and the war has made things in Missouri only worse. Where jayhawkers in the border wars rode in to burn and pillage, now the Federals march in to burn and forage. I feel sorry for the people. They’re not defending a way of life or a political system. Mostly they just want to be left alone. Bushwackers continue to intimidate them and jayhawkers continue to terrorize them. But that’s what happens in a civil war, like it or not. In this war, the casualties are not all counted.
Two of the best generals who operate out of Missouri are Ewing and Blunt.”
Floyd cleared his throat and scooted his glass toward the center of the table. “You suppose…?”
Dodge responded by picking up the carafe and setting it next to Floyd’s glass. Floyd poured a measure and held it up to the General.
“As I was saying, you can count on Ewing and Blunt.”
“And stay clear of Schofield,” said Floyd.
“You won’t have to worry about General Schofield. He won’t know you exist. Blunt and Ewing, however, can be a big help. You can go to them if you are in a pinch. I wouldn’t play them off against each other, though. They are not exactly friends, but they are able to work together, and the men and women they pay as scouts cooperate. The generals have even managed to organize some of the jayhawkers. A month ago Blunt was able to convince some of the remnants of the Seventh Regiment of the Kansas Cavalry, the men who walked away after Col. Jennison resigned, to work together as a loosely organized unit. He promised to pay every enlisted man as a scout--that’s seven dollars a day--and the official scouts would have license to recruit “irregulars,” men not on the payroll, who are paid with what they find.
Col. George Hoyt is in charge of what he calls the Seventh Cavalry Irregulars. His men nicknamed him ‘Will’, for ‘at will Hoyt’. They say it’s his favorite way of dismissing his men. He rules with a shrug and an upturned palm and he offers his orders as suggestions. There is no chain of command. He has a company of a hundred men who come and go according to whim and suggestion from a warehouse south of Kansas City and an inn known as the Six Mile House, just north of Wyandotte. Individuals in the unit follow the men who stand for what they admire most. There’s a cadre of avowed abolitionists. Some of them rode with Read Anthony and some have families who worked to help runaways. Some are friends of Jim Lane. For the most part these are skilled cavalry who got fed up with the politics of the military. You’ll want to look for two men who have taken Confederate ‘noms-de-guerre,’ Joseph Bloom Swain and Jack Bridges, also known as Jeff Davis and Beauregard. They will be invaluable to you.
There are men on the payroll who are paid as scouts, but their real métier is spying. Ewing’s best spy is Red Clark. Blunt trusts Walt Sinclair. There’s a third, Will Tough.”
Floyd held up his hand. “Jesus Johnson! Wait a minute, General. I can’t follow this. All these names! And I don’t understand half of what you’re sayin’.” He nodded to his companion. “I’ll bet Will O. here can’t follow it either, although he’s too polite to say so. What do you think, Will?”
“You lost me back there, General,” said Will Brown. “My attention stopped and my curiosity took over when you said Jeff Davis and Beauregard were part of the cavalry. Can you tell me how they got those nicknames? And can you write all this down? Then Floyd and I can concentrate on listening.”
General Dodge laughed and promised notes and maps and addresses and anything else Will and Floyd found necessary. “As to the origin of their nicknames, one of the stories is that they were wearing Confederate uniforms on one of their missions and succeeded in bedding two sisters by convincing them they were Jefferson Davis Jr. and General Beauregard. It’s a good story, don’t you think?”
“You bet!” said Floyd. “Gimme one a them! I bet Abraham Lincoln’s already taken, though, huh? Tell me I’m wrong, General.”
Dodge shook his head and laughed. “Floyd, as a spy you can be whoever you want to be. No one’s going to argue with you.”
“I’ll work on that. O.K. Now go on. I’m ready to listen.”
“I was coming to a real character, Will Tough. He’d rather be an out-and-out horse thief than a spy. Hoyt lets him be both. There are men who sometimes attach themselves to these three, but these three are the men you trust. I would look to them if you want to recruit new people.
Hoyt has scouts who go out on particular missions and come back with information. The scouts are reliable, although sometimes they fall in with this last group, the truly dangerous men. When these men ride, they ride under a black flag. Their motives are various and personal. They all understand revenge. They are young and old--they’ve got a cold blooded killer who is 15 and a 72 year old who’ll backshoot you without ever seeing your face.
They have cultivated the reputation of being Redlegs, all of them. Despite their individual lack of character, they are extremely loyal to each other. They follow no flag and wear whatever uniform suits them. They love their horses and prize their weapons. They ride armed to the teeth. They equip their saddles with four pistol holsters, a saber sheath in front, and two long gun racks in back. One for a rifle and the other for a shotgun. They strap a Bowie knife on their thigh and carry their ammunition in their shirt pockets.
Aside from the Redlegs, your best source for information are the Jessie Scouts. Presently, these are part of my people, but I will gradually turn their management over to you. They’re organized and they don’t ride as guerrillas. General Fremont, before he was removed, selected a bunch of smart men under his command and assigned them as his scouts in Missouri. Jessie’s scouts, he called them, after his wife. He passed the Scouts on to me. Charles Carpenter initially commanded the Scouts, but if you see him, run the other way or shoot him. Schofield had him arrested and he’s not supposed to be in Missouri. I will send a man from the unit I trust, Robert Milroy. He’ll be of service to you, I know. He’ll be our liaison.”
“General, do you have someone here, an aide, maybe, I could count on for some of the details? There are things I don’t want to bother you with, and I’d like Floyd and me to take a day or two and digest this, ask our questions, and then take off and not bother you. Let’s say I write a monthly report and keep it safe, and send it on if necessary. I’ll send you summary reports by courier--I heard you don’t like the telegraph.” Will Brown smiled.
“It will come into its own after the rebellion is put down. For now, it is vulnerable to interception, counterfeit, and mayhem. The biggest problem is that if a message is compromised, you don’t know it. If a letter is stolen, a courier killed, you know you’ve lost the message and whatever confidentiality you had. That’s all. I accept telegrams, but if the information is critical, I may or may not believe what is in it.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. I myself like person-to-person cont
act, but those days are gone, I’m afraid.”
“Mr. Brown, I don’t have a confidante you can rely on here in camp. Stay here as long as you like and don’t hesitate to come to me. Come to me any time. My men say that, like a horse, I sleep standing up. That’s a charming exaggeration. There are two men you have to get through, and they both have orders to let you pass at any time. Now if you have no questions, you are dismissed.”
“General, I’ll do what I can and I’ll tell you when that doesn’t work. I look forward to working with you.”
Will and Floyd were escorted to the officers’ quarters, where their bags were already at their bunks. “I think the General misses us,” said Floyd. “Well, not maybe us in particular, just people like us. He did go on and on.”
“When a man sees another man he truly respects, he sees himself. Grenville Dodge is the careful one.”
“He’s circumspect, wouldn’t you say?”
“Very. But he trusts us. We are not in his world. I would guess that the military is a dangerous and brutal world. And I’m talking about the good guys.”
“Will, we can go back to Omaha any time we want, am I right?”
“That’s right, Floyd. We don’t live here. And we can leave any time we want.