Burning Shame
8.40 P.M. New York. July 14, 1863
New York July 14th sixty three
For E. M. Stanton Washington We are expecting
momentarily that our Southern wires will
be cut as the rioters are
at work in their immediate neighborhood
It seems very important for the
United States government to define its
position immediately in this city and
if not done immediately the opportunity
will be lost. Governor Seymour has
sent for is to come here
immediately and he is on his
way the police so far report
themselves as having been successful in
every fight of which they have
had many but they say they
are exhausted and cannot much longer
sustain the unequal contest not less
than ten thousand good native soldiers
ought to be here at this
moment to restore and enforce order
signed E. S. Sanford burning shame
On the day when Edward Sewall Sanford (1817-1882), the president of the American Telegraph Company and the supervisor of the telegraphic messages in the United States, sent this telegram, July 14th, 1863, the New York Times came out with the headline: “A DAY OF INFAMY AND DISGRACE.”
What had begun a day early, on Monday, the 13th as a rowdy protest against the draft, had turned into a riot of mass pillaging, marauding, murder, and pogroms. The rioters, dominated by Irish Catholic industrial laborers, targeted police officers, government officials, prominent Republicans, journalists of Republican newspapers, as well as African-American, German and Chinese residents.
By noon of the 14th, the city was plunged into a full-blown race riot. One eyewitness, school teacher Samuel Morehouse, heard the rioters shouting that “this land is for white men only.” The horrified New York Times reporter described the scenes that “were painful in the extreme, and humiliating to human nature,” as mobs of “foul-looking boys and men” went door to “in pursuit of negroes, who were assailed wherever found.” At 4 p.m. a mob set fire to the Colored Orphan Asylum of Forty-Third Street and Fifth Avenue and blocked the firemen from saving the building or its occupants. At 8 p.m., a crowd of about 400 white men attacked a black coachman with clubs and paving stones, hung him, and set his body on fire.
The Riot in New York. The Mob Lynching a Negro in Clarkson Street. Harper’s Weekly. 1863, Aug. 1.
The Times reporter singled out the “inhuman treatment of the negroes of the City” as “the cunningly-devised cue that had been given to the rioters by the instigators of the outbreak.” This not too subtle hint endorsed a popular suspicion that the riots had been orchestrated by a network of Confederate sympathizers.
Another cue was the fact that the rioters set out to tear up railroad tracks, ferry slips, gas factories, and telegraph lines. Historian Iver Berstein noted that it was this assault on the city infrastructure, rather than the common attacks on draft offices or racial violence, that set the New York Draft Riots apart from other instance of mob violence of the Civil War era (The New York City Draft Riots, Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 34).
To many commentators this certainly looked like sabotage designed to plunge the city into darkness and chaos and thus help the “Southern rebels,” perhaps even enable a Confederate invasion. This was how it appeared to Sanford. Reporting to the Secretary of War, he described the riots as “an organized attempt to take advantage of the absence of military force.” With the state militia fighting in Pennsylvania, the city could count only on a few troops protecting the Navy Yard and harbor forts, the untested Invalid Corps and Provost Guard and the Metropolitan Police.
What worried Sanford most was the fact that, as he informed Stanton on the evening of July 13, “the telegraph is especially sought for destruction.” Several hours later, he reported that rioters had torn down the wires around the Third Street. By Tuesday evening, as seen from the above telegram, the communication with Washington, D.C. was under threat. The lines were still operating, though, for he used them on evening of July 15 to report that he had to receive a telegram from Boston “from New Rochelle by horse-power, our lines up to that point being destroyed.”
Bernstein suggested that by tearing down telegraph lines, the rioters sought to prevent the city authorities to request troops from Albany or Washington. For New York City, the resort to federal troops was unprecedented; neither the Republican mayor, nor the Democratic governor were willing to go that route. Governor Horatio Seymour, summoned from this summer home at Long Branch, announced that the city was “in the state of insurrection” and declared a state of emergency, in part to forestall federal interference.
By the early afternoon of July 14, there was no choice. In a city plunged into chaos, the calls for “an immediate and terrible” display of federal power spread from Republican politicians to merchants and financiers. New York mayor George Opdyke formally asked Secretary of War to send what military force he could spare. Several hundred troops were diverted from the Gettysburg battlefield.
The theory of a Confederate conspiracy, never substantiated, soon dissipated, but the press and the public opinion seized upon the all too familiar image of the Irish Catholic immigrant as the sole culprit of the outrage. Even some Union regiments were suspect. General Henry W. Halleck was told that the only New York regiment that could be trusted with the riot duty was the native-born and Protestant Seventh Regiment of New York infantry. In this Sanford concurred, as seen the telegram, in his calling for “native-born,” i.e. non-immigrant, soldiers.
The New York Draft Riots that came only ten days after the double victory at Gettysburg and Vicksburg shocked the nation. It was, as Sanford’s telegraph operator, bitterly remarked, “a burning shame.”
How to Escape the Draft. Harper’s Weekly, 1863, Aug. 1
Olga Tsapina, Norris Foundation Curator of American History. Huntington Library.
A Superabundance of Female Spies
From Washn. Oct. 31’62
For Geo H Bangs Adams HdQrs
Madame Williams wife to the Clerk
of Major Cameron Paymaster now with
Army of Potomac passing off is
a South Carolinian was sent for
to join her husband & information
says has letter for the south
quilted in her chemise or skirts
is to go through the lines
& will also Carry intelligence she
ought to be found & searched
As also her husband signed E
J Allen cut open her things
What makes a war civil? The Romans who invented the term ‘civil war’ (bellum civile) defined it as a war among fellow citizens (cives). The same Latin root element that produced the adjective describing the worst and most barbaric type of warfare also created the notions of “civility” and “civilization.”
With the outbreak of the Civil War, these last notions seemed to come crashing down. The values that Americans had long cultivated – national unity, moderation, compromise, aversion to secrecy and subterfuge, and what Abraham Lincoln called the “mystic cords of memory,” were swept away under the combined onslaught of sectional loyalties, disputes over slavery, and military necessity.
Yet some foundations held. The shared bonds of personal friendship, marriage, and family, transcended sectional divides and political interests. Officers and soldiers on both sides held the ties of manly friendship sacrosanct, and both Union and Confederate authorities felt compelled to stick to the norms of “civilized” warfare or at least aspire to it. Among these norms were the respect for the obligations imposed by marriage and family and the codes of behavior dictated by ideals of gentlemanly manliness and feminine gentility.
Thus, despite ever growing concern about smuggling and espionage, neither side attempted to close off the borders and ban traveling and communications between divided families. Regulations put in place by the beginning of 1862 by both sides allowed family members to cross the lines, provided that they obtained a pass from a provost marshal or the Secretary of War. The standards of vetting the applicants were rather loose; often they did not extend beyond having the applicant to give his or her word not to do anything untoward.
The word of a lady carried additional weight. As historian Amy Murrell Taylor (The Divided family in Civil War America, University of North Carolina Press, 2005) shows, women could count on preferential treatment. No honorable man could ignore, or decline, a plea of a dutiful wife, devoted sister, or a loving mother. Treated as “the weaker sex” and urged not to bother their pretty little heads with the filth of politics, ladies could also plead detachment from the war which was, after all, a man’s business. As one woman with admitted Confederate sympathies remarked: “I think inasmuch as ladies did not make this war, they are silly in the extreme to mix themselves up in it.” Being a lady was synonymous with integrity and trustworthiness.
A lady was entitled a respect that no gentleman, Union or Confederate, could fail to honor. Yet there was growing evidence that ladies were deeply involved in the conflict. In early 1862, the New York Tribune, fuming over the fact that “nearly every instance” of a pass granted to a lady ended up in her carrying “letters and other documents” hidden in her clothes, called for a complete ban on the passes issued to women. The Union authorities, however, never went as far as to dismantle the system. The most they could do was to issue fewer passes, even despite what Halleck lamented in 1864, as “a superabundance of female spies among us now.”
With the exception of such celebrities as Rose O’Neal Greenhow, Belle Boyd, Elizabeth Van Lew, or Pauline Cushman, the information about these female spies is hard to come by. A historian is often left with limited information offered by applications for passes, arrest records (in case a woman spy was ever caught), or an occasional mention in a diary of a private letter. For example, a letter from the Huntington’s collection of papers of New Yorker John Burrud relates of “one woman” who was “allowed to go with the army. She is a Capt. Wife on Gen. Sheridan’s staff. She acts as a spie. She is very successful in her business. She will go all through the Rebel army, and is of great service to the Union cause. This must be kept in secret of course.” (John Burrud collection, mssHM 75242 1864, Sept. 23).
The archive of the United States Military Telegraph offers a new and untapped resource for historians. To wit: the above telegram.
Gardner, Alexander. Antietam, Maryland. Seated: R. William Moore and Allan Pinkerton. Standing: George H. Bangs, John C. Babcock, and Augustus K. Littlefield. Courtesy of the Library of Congress https://www.loc.gov/resource/cwpb.01151/
The message is addressed to George H. Bangs (1831-1883), a superintendent of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. The sender, “J. Allen,” was Bangs’ boss, Allan Pinkerton. Contrary to Pinkerton’s later claims, he did not head the United States Army Secret Service. Rather, much like Anson Stager, Pinkerton was an entrepreneur contracted to perform a vital service for the Army of the Potomac. In the first months of the war, his old friend George B. McClellan asked him to head his intelligence operations. Because Pinkerton’s name was so familiar, he operated under the pseudonym Major E.J. Allen.
Greenhow, Mrs. & Daughter (imprisoned in old Capitol Prison in Wash. D.C.) Confederate spy. Glass negative. Courtesy of the Library of Congress https://www.loc.gov/resource/cwpbh.04849/
Pinkerton turned out to be patently unqualified to conduct military intelligence. As a private detective, however, he proved very adept at exposing spies and saboteurs. It was he who exposed Rose O’Neal Greenhow as a Confederate spy, a feat that he accomplished by utilizing his surveillance skills honed working divorce cases.
“Madame Williams,” a mere paymaster’s clerk wife, is, of course, harder to place than the Washington socialite. She would have received her pass from the office of the Provost Marshal of Washington D.C., and it’s possible that her application file could still be located among the papers of the Provost Marshal at the National Archives and Records Administration (RG-110.2)
Lafayette C. Baker, by Matthew Brady. Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration (RG 111) https://catalog.archives.gov/id/525323
The office was then headed by Lafayette C. Baker who also presided over the National Detective Bureau, another private outfit employed by the War Department. It is possible that it was Baker who had alerted Pinkerton to the danger posed by a clerk’s wife.
“Madame Williams” indeed could do considerable damage. Paymasters, i.e. military accountants charged with distributing soldiers’ pay, reported to the office of Quartermaster General. They were not attached to particular regiments, but rather shuttled between Washington and the various army units. Since her husband’s boss, Major Bruce Cameron, was a paymaster assigned to the Army of the Potomac, “Madame Williams,” a “South Carolinian,” would have ample opportunity to gather and transmit intelligence, as she accompanied her husband on his errands.
No wonder Pinkerton raised the alarm an instructed his employee to dispense with the norms of civility due to a lady and “cut open her things,” including her “chemise and skirts.”
Two weeks later, Pinkerton, who was fiercely loyal to George B. McClellan, would leave the army, to protest his friend’s removal from command.
Thank you Decoding the Civil War Volunteer Stork for finding this gem!
Olga Tsapina, Norris Foundation Curator of American History, Huntington Library.
Gardner, Alexander. President Lincoln, Major Allan Pinkerton, and Major General John A. McClernand. Antietam, October 1862. The Huntington Library.
“The most memorable Independence Day in American history.”
Olga Tsapina, Norris Foundation Curator of American Historical Manuscripts.
On 10 a.m. July 4, 1863, the United States Military Telegraph transmitted this notice:
“The President announces to the country that news from the Army of the Potomac, up to 10 p.m. of the 3rd. is such as to cover that Army with the highest honor, to promise a great success to the cause of the Union, and to claim the condolence of all for the many gallant fallen. And that for this, he especially desires that on this day, He whose will, not ours, should ever be done, be everywhere remembered and reverenced with profoundest gratitude. ABRAHAM LINCOLN.”
This was the President’s press-release of the victory at Gettysburg. Two hours later, Ulysses S. Grant accepted the surrender of the Confederate army at Vicksburg, Miss. The double victory of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, made July 4, 1863, in the words of historian James McPherson, “the most memorable Independence Day in American history since the first one four score and seven years earlier.”
Yet, apart from the traditional celebrations on the White House grounds, there were few signs of jubilation elsewhere in the Capital. The immediate reaction to the battle of Gettysburg was a mixture of relief and frustration at the failure to capture Lee’s army. It would take three days for the news of the fall of Vicksburg to reach Washington.
The work of the United States Military Telegraph proceeded at a frantic pace, as a team of operators were busy receiving, sending, and routing messages. On 6 p.m., for example, one operator entered a message in his ledger (EC 6), reporting the progress (or rather lack of thereof), General William F. Smith’s unsuccessful pursuit of Lee’s army.
6 P.M. Harrisburg Pa. July 4, 1863
For SecWar Genl Smith on his
march met a flag of truce
two miles from Mt. Holly on
the Bendersville road with two thousand
prisoners which he recd & sent
the escort back trusting that the
exaggerated idea which they had of
his numbers would have a good
effect he delayed his march for
for two hours as his route was
thus discovered he says with
references to news “nothing unfavorable”
Signed L. Thomas Adjut Genl
Sent to Fredk & Baltimore 7 P.M.
At the same time, another operator, his own ledger (EC 8) on his desk, was receiving this message from Dana Couch to General Meade:
6 PM Harrisburg Penna July 4,1863
for Genl Meade Genl Smith’s
advance in the mountain
passes beyond Mount Holly
met two thousand paroled
prisoners from your army
under Escort period Smith
being discovered recd the
prisoners I will send
them to Camp at
West Chester Signed D. N. Couch
Not sent to Meade. One from Thomas gives same information.
Thirty minutes later, Thomas T. Eckert transmitted this cipher from the Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton (Arabia) to William H. Ludlow, the Union commissioner for exchange.
630 Pm
Sheldon Ft Mon. Wash DC July 4, 1863
Rosetta Venus Lud-low you will
if it has not already been
done forward to Adorn by Express
the copy of Jeff Davis’ dispatch
sent him today also my telegram
of this Evening and until you
receive the Adam’s instruction hold no
communication with Mr Stephens or Mr
Ould nor permit either of them
to come within our lines period
Our Victory is complete Lee in
full retreat Arabia Bully
The blotted out “Bully,” (meaning “Well done!”), at the end of the message is one of the few signs of celebration at the War Department.
Yet the telegram showed that the victory at Gettysburg had already born results. Alexander H. Stephens, the vice-president of the Confederate States of America and Robert Ould, chief agent for prisoner exchange of the Confederate Army, were envoys of the President of the Confederate States of America. Jefferson Davis dispatched the two on July 2, in anticipation of Lee’s successful invasion of Pennsylvania. Lee’s victory was expected to force Lincoln’s hand not only in the negotiations over cartel of the prisoner exchange — suspended in retaliation for the harsh treatment of African American prisoners of war — but in recognizing the independence of the Confederate States of America.
Stephens acted as the bearer of the official communication addressed to Lincoln and intended to start international diplomatic negotiations “which public law recognizes as necessary and proper between hostile forces.” The communication was filled with complaints about “numerous difficulties” in “the execution of the cartel of exchange,” for which Davis, unsurprisingly, squarely blamed the Union side. More ominously, Davis accused Lincoln of war crimes: some of “your officers” asserted “a right to treat as spies” and execute prisoners of war, i.e., “the military officers and enlisted men under my command who may penetrate into States recognized by us as our allies.” Davis referred to the execution of William Orton Williams, a staff officer in Braxton Bragg’s command, and a cousin-in-law of Robert E. Lee, and his adjutant, Walter G. Peters. Captured by in Tennessee, while impersonating Union officers, Williams and Peters were hanged on June 9 on the order of William S. Rosecrans.
Rosecrans had acted in accordance with the Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field, a.k.a. Lieber Code, the first United States Army field manual, (and a foundation of the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 as well as the 1949 Geneva Conventions). The Code distinguished between a prisoner of war, “a public enemy armed or attached to the hostile army for active aid, who has fallen into the hands of the captor, either fighting or wounded, on the field or in the hospital, by individual surrender or by capitulation” (Section III, Article 49), and a spy defined as “a person who secretly, in disguise or under false pretense, seeks information with the intention of communicating it to the enemy.” (Section IV, Article 88). While a prisoner of war was “subject to no punishment,” nor any acts of “the intentional infliction of any suffering, or disgrace, by cruel imprisonment, want of food, by mutilation, death, or any other barbarity,” a spy was “punishable with death by hanging by the neck, whether or not he succeed in obtaining the information or in conveying it to the enemy.” The execution of Williams and Peters was, in fact, the lead item in the July 4, 1863 issue of the Harpers’ Weekly:
Stephens’ mission hinged on the success of Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania. But when Stephens and Ould arrived to Fort Monroe in the afternoon of July 4, they were greeted by the news of the Union victory at Gettysburg. When Stanton found out about their arrival, the Secretary of War “swore and growled indignantly.” He then fired off the above telegram, instructing Ludlow to forward Davis’ message to John A. Dix (Adorn) and refrain from any communication with the envoys until he received Lincoln’s instructions.
Lincoln’s instructions were telegraphed a couple of hours later. The President of the United States refused to meet with Stephens. Stating that all questions having to do with prisoner exchange were to be resolved through “Military channels,” he added that “nothing else, will be received by the President, when offered, as in this case, in terms assuming the independence of the so-called Confederate States.” (Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 6, p. 315)
On July 7, after the news of the fall of Vicksburg reached Washington, a procession with bands of music marched to the Executive Mansion. The crowd cheered as the President marveled at the double victory in Pennsylvania and Mississippi marking the “birthday of the United States of America. It was no accident that “the cohorts of those who opposed the declaration that all men are created equal” should “turn tail and run” on the very same day when, “eighty odd years” ago “for the first time in the history of the world a nation by its representatives, assembled and declared as a self-evident truth that ‘all men are created equal.'” Lincoln then added as an afterthought: “Gentlemen, this is a glorious theme, and the occasion for a speech, but I am not prepared to make one worthy of the occasion.” He finally delivered that speech on the Gettysburg battlefield on November 19, 1863.
Now, Jesse …
No 47 P.
J. H. Bunnell (1) Washn. Mar 31st 1864 5 P.M
Grapes, Laugh, Plug, March, Lucy, For, Knapsack Embrace
or Bridle Unity I would Quince the Welch
as far to the Ripley of Chart as
possible Zebra It is a good plan to
Pine all the Saints you can when Rapturing
is expected and make all other Territory Tartar
to hold defensible for the smallest possible number
of Whiskey yoke John Lieut Shelter Now Jesse
As with many ciphered telegrams, this message, found in ledger EC 19, looks mostly like gibberish. This was the end product of a complex and sophisticated system of word substitution encoding originally developed by Anson Stager. Words that described sensitive data — names, time indicators, numbers, military terms, places, etc. were replaced by replacement words or arbitraries. The text was broken into squares formed by columns and lines and then scrambled during the transmission. The keys listed not only the arbitraries but also the commencing words and line indicators specifying the number of columns and lines and routing instructions listing the order of the transmission that scrambled the sentences. Thus encoded, the text assumes the appearance of an assemblage of random words, impossible to make sense of, let alone decipher.
This telegram, luckily, can be relatively easily deciphered, as we happened to have a copy of the key to this particular code. This would be the ledger EC 44, titled Cipher for Telegraphic Correspondence; arranged expressly for Military Operations, and for important Government despatches and known as Cipher No. 1. It contains codes for commencing words, line indicators, routing instructions, and arbitraries as developed in 1862 but implemented in February 1864.
For example, as seen on this page, “John” was one of the codes used for Ulysses S. Grant, and “Knapsack” was reserved for William T. Sherman. The entire telegram reads:
J. H. Bunnell (1) Washn. Mar 31st 1864 5 P.M
Washington, 30, 1, March, 5 p.m, For, W. T. Sherman Nashville
or Chattanooga Period I would destroy the railroads
as far to the east of Knoxville as
possible Period It is a good plan to
concentrate all the forces you can when fighting
is expected and make all other Territory necessary
to hold defensible for the smallest possible number
of troops signed U.S. Grant Lieut General Now Jesse
The message is part of a rather anxious back-and-forth between Grant, just two weeks into his tenure as the commander of the Armies of the United States, and Sherman, just appointed the commander of the Division of the Mississippi. The exchange was prompted by Forrest’s raids in the Union occupied Western Tennessee. Grant, who was passing through Washington on his way to Fortress Monroe scribbled this telegram and handed it to a USMT operator. Grant’s original note, now held by the United States Military Academy and published in the Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, reads:
“I would destroy the rail road as far to the East of Knoxville as possible. It is a good plan to make the country to be held to concentrate all the forces you can wher fighting is expected and make all other territory necessary to hold defensible for the smallest possible number of troops. ”
The telegram appears in OR (Ser. 1, vol. 32, part 3, p. 213), but only as part of another telegram from Sherman’s aide-de-camp Lewis Mulford Dayton sent to John Schofield; in this case Grant’s “territory” has been replaced with “preparations.”
But what are the words and numbers that swarm around the message? The telegram was directed to Jesse H. Bunnell (1843-1899), the operator attached to the George H. Thomas of the Army of the Cumberland. The note “Sent from Book 5:20 P.M. Tinker” tells us that the telegram was re-transmitted twenty minutes later by Charles Almerin Tinker (1838-1917). The scribble on the bottom of the telegram appears to indicate that 75 words were charged in total. The main body of the telegram contains 63 words, including “Now Jesse” that the operator managed to squeeze in at the end of the line. Apparently he had more to say. Using the entry in the ledger, Mr. Tinker sent the same message with some additional words and an extra layer of coding intended for Bunnell’s eyes only.
The marks on the lower left side contain the commencing word (Mobile) followed by the line indicator (Horse – Deal). In the cipher key, “Mobile” indicated a nine-column transmission. However, the line indicators called for an eight-column set up, and the telegram is indeed broken into eight rather than nine columns. According to the key, the telegram was to be routed in the following order: up the 8th column, down the 5th, up the 7th, down the 1st, up the 6th, down the 3rd, up the 2nd and down the 4th.
The little numbers indicated the place of the word in the column, with additional words supplied on top and bottom of the columns. For example, the number 4 on top of the 1st column pointed towards the 4th word from the top, i.e. “possible.” The last two words which began the private message (“Now Jesse”) were not included in the count, so the 1st from the bottom in the column 8 is “number” rather than “Jesse.”
If we follow the coded instructions, the embedded message would read: “Now Jesse your number you would full when possible bad good draw and you about Bridle (Chattanooga) Grant here.” This sort of makes sense to us. It certainly made sense for Jesse.
At this point we can only speculate as to the nature of this exercise. Most likely it offered the operators, who, after all, were not supposed to use government communications for their own needs, a way to bypass the rules.
This little puzzle, (which took yours truly some two hours and elicited some highly descriptive epithets), must have been a piece cake for Bunnell. By the ripe age of nineteen, he boasted a six year career with the telegraph, (yes, he became a full-fledged operator at 13), and a speed record which he set in 1860, transmitting President Buchanan’s last message to Congress (14,040 words) in two hours.
Studies of the USMT personnel is one of the new and exciting directions in the Civil War studies offered by the Decoding the Civil War project. I’m certain that historians will find out what Mr. Bunnell and Mr. Tinker were up to in March 1864. Until then, we can simply stand in awe of the ingenuity and the skill involved in this multiple-layered coding and decoding.
Olga Tsapina, Norris Foundation Curator of American History. The Huntington Library.
The Dust of War
9:40 p.m. HeadQrs A of P May 29th 63
For A. Lincoln Following taken from Enemys
Signals today period any news from
Vicksburg signed Capt. F. answer
it is certainly taken with all its
blank blank blank period the last
part of the message failed to
be read on account of the
dust intervening Sig. Butt = er = field
The month of May of 1863 was a trying time for the president. If he hadn’t enough dealing with the fallout from the defeat at Chancellorsville, there was a feud between Samuel P. Curtis with the governor of Missouri, not to mention a constitutional crisis triggered by the arrest of Clement L. Vallandigham, the leader of the anti-war Democrats. The only bright spot was the reports from Ulysses S. Grant’s army: on May 18, Vicksburg, the “Gibraltar of the Confederacy” was under siege. By the end of the month, however, Lincoln’s elation had given gave way to anxiety: there was no news of progress, and Grant appeared to be bogged down.
Daniel Butterfield, the chief of staff to the commander of the Army of the Potomac, supplied the anxious president with bits of intelligence gathered from the Confederate sources. On June 4, for example, he telegraphed a gleeful report from the Richmond Sentinel: “The federal troops are demoralized & refused to renew the attack on Saturday. The enemy’s Gunboats are firing hot shot at the City the federal loss is estimated at 25,000 or 30,000.” Lincoln dismissed this report.
One of Butterfield’s main sources of information were intercepted wig-wag signals. This type of communication involved waving flags in a binary code similar to Morse’s system of dots and dashes.
Waud, Alfred R. (Alfred Rudolph), 1828-1891. Signaling. Paper , pencil. Morgan collection of Civil War drawings (Library of Congress); DRWG/US – Waud, no. 845 verso
The system had been developed in the 1850s, by Albert J. Myer who was appointed to lead the Union Army’s Signal Corps in March 1863. The Confederate Army beat the Union command: the Signal Corps headed by William Norris and attached to the Inspector General’s Department had been in operation since April 1862. Because the Confederates used a slightly modified Myer’s system, their intercepted messages could be deciphered without much difficulty.
The Confederate command relied on signal communications to a much greater degree than their Union counterparts, largely due shortages of telegraph wire and trained telegraph operators. Confederate signal men could be privy to valuable information. The Confederate Secret Service Bureau was folded into the Signal Corps , and thus intelligence gathering and covert operations fell under its aegis.
Butterfield’s men seemed to watch the enemy signal officers very closely, and Butterfield routinely telegraphed the findings to Washington. Apparently, the Confederate signal men not only provided tactical battlefield communications, but also transmitted news and even rumors. On 9:40 of June 3, for example, Butterfield reported that “Rebel signals yesterday say ‘Nothing new from Vicksburg.” Twelve hours later, news had moved on, as seen from this telegram (Papers of Abraham Lincoln at the Library of Congress; Series 1. General Correspondence, 1833-1916):
Our, previously unknown, telegram uncovered by our volunteers escholzia and S.Holm reveals that there were rumors to the contrary. This is probably why Butterfield felt compelled to convey a message, despite the fact its large chunk could not be read “on account of the dust intervening.”
This was not the first-time news of the Union victory popped up. Just five days before, Lincoln anxiously telegraphed to Anson Stager “Late last night Fuller the quartermaster telegraphed you, as you say, that “the stars and stripes float over Vicksburg, and the victory is complete.” Did he know what he said, or did he say it without knowing it?” Stager replied that the message that William G. Fuller, the telegraph superintendent for the Army of the Tennessee, was “no doubt based upon the hopeful feeling.”
So far, we don’t know how or whether Lincoln responded to Butterfield’s update. If refused to get his hopes up, he, of course, was right: Vicksburg would not be taken “with all its blank blank blank” until the Glorious Fourth of 1863.
Chief of Signal Corps; Capt. L.B. Norton, Col. A.J. Myer, Capt. WS Stryker. James E. Taylor Collection. The Huntington Library.
Olga Tsapina, Norris Foundation Curator of American History, Huntington Library
Cannot They Be Exchanged
Nashville Tenn Jany 13
Col. Anson Stager
Two or three rebel telegraphers
one named Butler who claims
to rank of Major have been captured
& sent north from here Cannot they
be exchanged for my men yet at
Cahawba & meriden three of my
Opers are still there James C. Pettett
(2)
John F. Ludwig and J.J. Painter the laborers
and repairers have been exchanged.
J.C. Van Duzer
Capt. & Asst. Supt
The Decoding the Civil War project provides the ultimate playground for grammar nerds, a community of which I am a proud member, the type that delights in comma jokes:
This is particularly true for Eckert’s own letterpress books. When he received his own messages, Eckert obviously did not bother with sticking with writing conventions. Everyone who ever took down one’s own voice mail message knows that you often end up with a scribble that makes perfect sense to you but could be mystifying for an outside observer, especially if said observer tries to read it some hundred and fifty years later.
Exhibit A: the telegram found by crmiller211 in the 1865 letterpress book. I must confess, it was a bit of a head-scratcher, because James C. Pettett’s name looks like a signature. This, however, made no sense. The man, whose name was actually James Edward Pettit (1842-1909) had no business sending telegraphs from Nashville. He and his assistant John F. Ludwig had been captured by Nathan Bedford Forrest’s men in Athens, Ala. in early October 1864 and spent the next several months in Confederate prison camps Meridian, Mississippi and Cahaba, Alabama.
The message only makes sense with correct punctuation. It was a single telegram from John C. Van Duzer, the superintendent of the telegraph office in Nashville, an attachment to the this message from Stager to Eckert: “Cleveland. Jany 13 [186]5. I forward Capt Van Duzer’s telegram concerning exchange of operators and recommend that request be placed in proper hands for action.” The sign (2) that separates the two last lines of the message does not indicate a second telegram; rather it was most likely a page number or a mark indicating that the remainder of the attachment was received after a pause. Van Duzer informed Stager that Pettit, Ludwig and another operator named J.J. Painter were still prisoners, while the USMT laborers and repairers have already been exchanged.
In March 1865, Pettit and Ludwig turned up near Vicksburg, the site of Confederate and Union parole camps. The pair was engaged in maintaining what was known as the “Flag of Truce” Line, the only instance of a telegraphic communication between the Union and Confederate commands. Pettit operated the telegraph at the Confederate office of prisoner exchange near the Big Black River Bridge, and Ludwig was assigned to the Union headquarters four miles from the city.
The Eckert ledgers have been yielding a wealth of previously unknown data about the process of prisoner exchange. Complicated enough when it came to military personnel, it was particularly tortuous, (and much less documented), when it involved civilians. Under the terms of the cartel of exchange, a civilian employee could not be exchanged for a commissioned officer. It was also questionable whether civilian employees could legally be detained as prisoners of war, but few field commanders were bothered with legal niceties.
While most of the USMT operators were civilian employees of a firm contracted by the United States government, their Confederate counterparts were commissioned officers assigned to the staffs of field commanders. The “one named Butler” was most likely Major Jack Butler who superintended the Shelbyville office of the Confederate Army of Tennessee and reported to the Assistant Adjutant General of the Confederate Army of Tennessee Kinloch Falconer. Apparently, at the end of the war, exchange military personnel for civilians became possible.
In Pettit’s case, it may have helped that he, unlike many of his colleagues, had come to USMT from the army, the 1st Regiment of Wisconsin Infantry. Ludwig, on the other hand, was a civilian: he operated the telegraph for the Lake Shore and Michigan Railway until he joined USMT in July 1864 only to end up in a Confederate prison camp two months later.
The two were certainly lucky. They were scheduled to leave Vicksburg on April 15, 1865, along with 14,000 of Union prisoners released from Cahaba and Andersonville. Pettit, however, was too ill to board the transport, the steamer Sultana. The severe diarrhea that Pettit had contracted while in the Confederate captivity spared him the fate of the 1196 Sultana passengers killed when the steamer’s four boilers exploded on April 27, one of the worst maritime disasters in American history.
Pettit was destined to die peacefully in his bed in March 1909, having worked for forty years for the Postal Telegraph Cable Company in Chicago and served as the secretary of the Society of the United States Military Corps. Ludwig ended his career managing the Western Union office in Prescott, Arizona.
Explosion of the Steamer Sultana, April 28, 1865. (Harper’s Weekly, (1865 May 20), p. 316)
Helping Mary Lincoln with Her Finances
By Daniel Stowell, Decoding the Civil War Independent Researcher.
One of the most exciting aspects of digital humanities projects is the ability to make connections among materials that would not have been possible earlier. One citizen researcher, Linda Dodge, recently brought to our attention that a telegram from Decoding the Civil War connects to a receipt held at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum and digitized through Chronicling Illinois.
The telegram from Mary Lincoln to Thomas Eckert reads:
640 P[M] March 1 [186]6
Chicago
Mr. Eckert
Asst Secy
Will please deliver this message
to A Williamson
March 1st
To A Williamson
Have answered
your letter of 27th Gen Spinner
has list that will suffice to
settle without bills. Have it
done at once. Send receipt
Mrs Lincoln
Alexander Williamson (1814-1903) became tutor to Willie and Tad Lincoln when Mary Lincoln hired him in September 1861. In March 1863, Abraham Lincoln obtained a clerk position for Williamson in the Second Auditor’s Office of the Treasury Department. Williamson remained a friend of the Lincoln family and assisted Mary Lincoln in her financial difficulties following the President’s death.
Francis E. Spinner (1802-1890) was Treasurer of the United States from 1861 to 1875. He also assisted Mary Lincoln in settling her husband’s estate and in obtaining a pension. On February 13, 1866, Mary Lincoln’s friend and New York businessman Norman S. Bentley sent Spinner a list of ten merchants to whom she was indebted; this document is also a part of Chronicling Illinois. It is possible that Williamson was assisting Spinner in settling the former First Lady’s accounts and that the following receipt was for his services in that effort.
The receipt reads:
17th March 1866 Received from General
Spinner, U.S. Treasurer the sum of Ten
dollars ($10.) on account of Mrs. M. Lincoln
Alexr Williamson
These two documents, held in institutions 1,600 miles apart, each tell a part of the story of Mary Lincoln’s efforts to settle the estate of her murdered husband and to obtain a pension to support herself and her youngest son. Now, thanks to digital projects like Decoding the Civil War and Chronicling Illinois, researchers can access both documents and others that are a part of this tragic story.
Chronicling Illinois is a digital archive project that the writer, Decoding the Civil War researcher Daniel W. Stowell, organized and implemented.
The Amnesty Telegram
105 AM 4th Chattanooga Oct 3 63
1 PM For The President If we can
maintain this position in such strength
that the Enemy are obliged to
abandon their position and the Elections
in the great states go favorably
would it not be well to
offer a general Amnesty to all
officers & soldiers in the rebellion
it would give us moral strength
and weaken them very much Rosecrans
On 1:05 a.m. of October 4, the USMT operator in Washington received this message from Major General William S. Rosecrans, the commander of the Army of the Cumberland. Unbeknownst to Rosecrans, this telegram would play a fateful role in his career.
Rosecrans, a rising star in the United States military, was possessed of a brusque and outspoken manner which did little to endear him to his fellow officers and his superiors — his enemies included Ulysses S. Grant and pretty much the entire War Department. Just three months earlier, the Secretary of War chose to mark the end of Rosecrans’s superbly executed campaign in Middle Tennessee by crowing over Grant’s victory at Vicksburg, finishing his telegram with a parting shot: “You and your noble army now have a chance to give the finishing blow to the rebellion. Will you neglect the chance?”
The events of September 1863 must have filled Stanton with a sense of grim satisfaction as Rosecrans failed to deliver the “finishing blow.” His loss at Chickamauga on September 20 was the worst defeat for the Union forces in the West. Rosecrans who, as Lincoln put it, acted “stunned like a duck hit on the head,” retreated to Chattanooga.
Two weeks later he sent the above telegram. The President replied ten hours later, noting that he was planning on “doing something like what you suggest,” but added that an amnesty would make sense only if it did not follow a major defeat. Lincoln was worried that such an amnesty would be perceived as “a confession of weakness and fear.” In contrast to Lincoln, Stanton was furious. Not only did Rosecrans take it upon himself to advise the President on matters of policy, but he did so over the Secretary’s head. Stanton seized on the “amnesty telegram,” which he painted as defeatist, as a pretext to dismiss the general.
On October 16, Lincoln’s cabinet voted to relieve Rosecrans from command. He would wait months for another command. Appointed to head the Department of Missouri, he would finish the war riding a desk in St. Louis.
In late November 1863, Grant used Rosecrans’s plan to win a series of battles at Chattanooga. Two weeks later, on December 8, 1863, Lincoln issued his amnesty proclamation.
William S. Rosecrans. Lithograph (Boston, Mass.: J.H. Burford, 1861). The Huntington Library.
Big thanks to our volunteer Stork for this find!
When in Doubt, Eat the Cipher!
By Daniel Stowell, Decoding the Civil War Independent Researcher.
Courtesy of Seth Kaller, Inc.
When working with numerous collections, sometimes one stumbles across a little nugget that just calls out to be told. Working with the Eckert telegrams has made me familiar with the codes and ciphers used by the United States Army and Government. So, imagine how my curiosity was piqued when I saw the following story from August 1862:
“During all the spring months I alone in all the Army Corps was entrusted with the Government Cyphers. During General Pope’s retreat, I was one day sent for by Generals Pope & Banks, to put into cypher a very important dispatch to General McDowell, with whom direct communication had been cut off by the enemy.
I was obliged to reply that during the severest part of the Battle of Cedar Mountain when I was in the greatest danger of being killed or captured at any moment, I had felt it my duty to destroy the cypher which I tore up into a hundred or more very small pieces & swallowed some of them. My action was approved. I then offered to carry the orders, unwritten, myself to General McDowell, if I could find him, and take my chances.
My offer was accepted, but while the instructions were being prepared, the advance of General McDowells Corps came in sight, & I was relieved from a duty which would have put me in the greatest danger of capture or otherwise.”
This is excerpted from a twenty-five-page handwritten memoir written by Frederick d’Hauteville on his service in the American Civil War. d’Hauteville was writing about the the Battle of Cedar Mountain, fought on August 9, 1862. Brigadier General Crawford in his report on the battle specifically commended Captain d’Hauteville, “who from the first rendered me especial and important service, attended with great personal exposure.” Crawford probably wasn’t thinking of d’Hauteville’s willingness to eat the cipher when commending him, and it is impossible to tell whether the cipher which he ate was one of Stager’s telegraph ciphers, but d’Hauteville’s memories do illustrate the extent to which those entrusted with the ciphers went to protect them.
After the battle d’Hauteville discovered that a ball had pierced his blankets, strapped behind his saddle, with more than a dozen holes. Among the regiments in d’Hauteville’s division at the battle was the 2nd Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, with officers from “the leading families of the City of Boston,” many of them, like d’Hauteville, graduates of Harvard University. The regiment with fewer than 500 men suffered 173 casualties, and 16 of its 23 officers were killed, wounded, or taken prisoner. “All of them were my friends, & very dear friends,” d’Hauteville recalled, “Their loss was enormous, but they went to their deaths with sublime courage.”
Frederick Sears Grand d’Hauteville (1838-1918) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to a Swiss nobleman and American mother, who returned to the United States while pregnant. Their marital conflict led to a contentious custody battle over Frederick in 1840 in a Philadelphia court, which his mother eventually won. D’Hauteville graduated from Harvard University in 1859. He was appointed volunteer aide-de-camp to General Nathaniel Banks in December 1861, and served at the Battle of Winchester in March 1862. Commissioned captain on June 30, 1862, he served on Brigadier General Samuel W. Crawford’s staff, including action at the Battle of Cedar Mountain in August and at Antietam in September 1862.
By December, 1862, d’Hauteville had returned to General Banks’ staff and traveled to New Orleans, where Banks commanded the Department of the Gulf. D’Hauteville resigned his commission on March 1, 1863. Later in 1863, he married the daughter of former New York Governor Hamilton Fish, but she died the following year. In 1872, he married Susan Watts Macomb, whose grand-father Major General Alexander Macomb was a hero of the War of 1812 and general-in-chief of the United States army from 1828 to 1841. The d’Hautevilles kept a home in Newport, Rhode Island, but they spent much of their time in his paternal family’s thirty-room chateau overlooking Lake Geneva in Switzerland.
Men Visible and Invisible
Telegram to William B Franklin. 1862, Mar. 8. (Ledger EC 3, p. 38).
Camp Williams Mar 8th 62 –
Gen WB Franklin
Washn
Jonathan Roberts says he could
not procure the two guides
he spoke to you about _
one has gone north &
the other is sick but
he recommends a man named
Myron Gregg who knows the
country well & he would
like to go himself. Gregg
is a New Yorker but
has lived here several years
E Sparrow Purdy
AAG
This seemingly routine and insignificant communication is a good example of how the communications in the Eckert ledgers can open new insights into those largely invisible corners of the Civil War. On March 8, 1862, the field operator at the headquarters of Brigadier General William B. Franklin’s division of the Army of the Potomac at Camp Williams, Va. tapped out a message to the commanding general. The message had to be sent to Washington as Franklin had traveled there the day before, summoned by George B. McClellan.
On March 7, Lincoln had informed McClellan about doubts by some in Washington of McClellan’s loyalty. There were fear and suspicions that McClellan’s plan to shift the base of operations from Washington to Urbanna, a small tobacco port in the Lower Chesapeake, was designed to leave the Capital exposed to a Confederate attack. Furious, McClellan told the President that he would call a council of war and let the generals decide on the course of action.
Thus, Franklin’s arrival in Washington. McClellan’s plan was approved by the council of war, and on March 8, Lincoln gave his formal approval. As with many of the officers from the Civil War, we know quite a bit about the recipient of the telegram, William Buell Franklin. But who were the rest whose names appear in the telegram?
The man who sent Franklin the message, his AAG or Assistant Adjutant General, was Erastus Sparrow Purdy (1838-1881). A New Yorker turned Californian and son of the Golden State’s third Lieutenant Governor, Purdy had had a rather colorful career before the war. Among other things, he was involved in the Charles P. Stone’s survey of the Sonora, which ended with an open confrontation with Mexican authorities. Later Purdy would end his career as an officer in the Egyptian army of Khedive Ismail.
But what of the subjects of the telegram, the local guides assisting the Union army? These are the ultimate invisible men of the Civil War. Like telegraph operators, they were civilians employed by the United States Army as scouts, guides, or spies. That distinction was somewhat arbitrary; guides and scouts could act like spies. And because the dealings between the army command and civilian scouts were kept off the books, there were no records kept, nor were the civilians entitled to any of the army benefits.
But who were these men? Was Jonathan Roberts the same man mentioned in the Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston’s report of about six hundred Union infantry “piloted by Jonathan Roberts” (OR, Series 1 – Volume 5, p. 950)? Perhaps. But what of Myron Gregg? This telegram is so far the only record of this other invisible man, the civilian willing to work with US Army in hostile territory. Myron Gregg, a New Yorker who had “lived here for several years,” is forgotten no more.
William B. Franklin. Hand colored lithograph. (Cincinnati, Ohio: Ehrgott, Forbiger & Co., ca. 1863). The Huntington Library
Decoding the Civil War 