Silent Victories: Union Clandestine Activities in the Western Theater, Part 1

A number of years ago I read, for the first time, William B. Feis’ Grant’s Secret Service: The Intelligence War from Belmont to Appomattox. A devout Eastern Theater guy, I knew I was going to need to take some notes while reading.

Well, fast forward to this past number of months where packing to move and unpacking to settle in has led to numerous discovers in my Civil War library, I thought I would share those notes. Hopefully it will be useful for those looking to glean more from that less important theater of the war and the even more relegated topic of intelligence gathering during the war. So, without further bloviating and shade throwing, here are some key takeaways from Feis’ Grant’s Secret Service.

The war in the Eastern Theater was still in its infancy when the need for organized intelligence agencies arose. With both nation’s capitals so close to the front, any available intelligence about enemy troop movements was indispensable, especially for commanders with paralyzing command styles because of a lack of information. In addition to discovering enemy strategy and troop movements, the threat of spies and spy networks was yet another reason for an organized, systematic network of covert intelligence agencies and agents.

For the Union army in the east, Gen. George B. McClellan enjoyed such agents as Allan Pinkerton, and future commanding generals were able to utilize the successful Bureau of Military Intelligence (BMI). Confederate generals Joseph Johnston and Robert E. Lee were able to utilize spies like Rose O’Neil Greenhow and various networks and organizations like the Confederate Secret Service.

These examples were not necessarily the case for commanders of both armies in the war’s Western Theater. Rising Union officer Ulysses S. Grant could attest to that fact. With each new post higher in the officer’s ladder of command within the Union army in the West, Grant saw firsthand the importance of strong intelligence about enemy operations and the woeful lack of organized intelligence networks and organizations in his military district and theater of operations.

By tracing Grant’s rising star, one cannot only see his use, cultivation, and development of, and need for intelligence agents and agencies, but also the many silent victories that they achieved during their clandestine activities in the war’s Western Theater.

During the clandestine activities performed by secret service agents, vast amounts of information were collected. In Civil War terminology, information was simply raw data on enemy movements; yet it was intelligence that was the most paramount.

Intelligence was the product of analyzed and synthesized information, and according to historian William Feis, Civil War commanders had three ways to deal with incoming information and intelligence. These methodologies included ignoring the intelligence, stepping-up intelligence collection efforts, and pursuing intelligence leads already collected.

For Ulysses S. Grant, his training in the field of intelligence collection and what decisions to make based on its reports came almost twenty years before the American Civil War during the Mexican-American War. Stationed in central Mexico, Grant learned these lessons from the best in the military at the time, Winfield Scott and Zachary Taylor.

Under their tutelage, Grant learned two very different approaches to intelligence. Scott and Taylor approached intelligence by avidly pursing information collection, as well as ignoring it altogether and relying on their own understanding of the situation respectively. With this training and background in mind, it is no wonder that friend and fellow Union Gen. William T. Sherman commented on Grant’s relationship with intelligence by stating, “He don’t care a damn for what the enemy does out of his sight….” For Grant, however, this approach to intelligence, as well as what he had available to him to use for intelligence gathering, changed and grew as his career rose and the war in the West expanded.

Grant’s beginnings in intelligence during the Civil War started off small, as well as unreliable, a notion that can be applied to the agents and non-existent agencies in the West at that time. While in Missouri at the start of the war, Grant relied primarily on local citizens, slaves, free blacks, and refugees and less frequently on actual scouts and spies. The bulk of his information from these untrained sources went unused due to his inability to determine their veracity, most of which spelled out disaster for the Union forces as massive, aggressive Confederate armies were unnoticeably marching in his direction.

Grant chose to ignore this information and intelligence, and as he had learned in Mexico, he relied on his own sense of the situation. During the 1861 campaigns, Grant continued to make his own assessments of the enemy’s operations and movements and hardly relied on rumors that were being taken in as intelligence.

This was particularly so after being transferred to Jefferson City, where Grant was dealing with wild speculation and rumors concerning two Confederate forces under Sterling Price and Ben McCulloch. For Grant, the early actions and campaigns that he had participated in thus far were not influenced by any intelligence he had received, rather his own intuition and desire for the initiative as a substitute for the general lack thereof.

Click here to read Part 2 and Part 3 of Silent Victories: Union Clandestine Activities in the Western Theater