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The Secret War for the Union: The Untold Story of Military Intelligence in the Civil War, by Edwin C. Fishel
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Most histories of the Civil War have largely ignored the issue of military intelligence. At the end of the war, most of the intelligence records disappeared, remaining hidden for over a century. This is the first book to examine the impact of intelligence on the Civil War, providing a new perspective on this period in history.
- Sales Rank: #635918 in Books
- Published on: 1996-08-08
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: .0" h x .0" w x .0" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 734 pages
Amazon.com Review
It's rare for a modern writer to make a genuinely new discovery about the Civil War, but former intelligence officer Edwin C. Fishel pulls it off in The Secret War for the Union. Having stumbled upon a large collection of previously unknown documents at the National Archives, he describes in this book the undercover operations of the Army of the Potomac. Federal intelligence, by Fishel's account, was crucially important to winning the war, and was of much higher quality than previously assumed. Among other accomplishments, it appears to have played a vital role in the Union victory at Gettysburg. This surprise--and a few others--await serious readers.
From Publishers Weekly
The former chief intelligence reporter for the National Security Agency brings his professional expertise to bear in this detailed analysis, which makes a notable contribution to Civil War literature as the first major study to present the war's campaigns from an intelligence perspective. Focusing on intelligence work in the eastern theater, 1861-1863, Fishel plays down the role of individual agents like James Longstreet's famous "scout," Henry Harrison, concentrating instead on the increasingly sophisticated development of intelligence systems by both sides. Fishel treats intelligence as a continuum, one that in the Civil War included cavalry reconnaissance and the systematic interrogation of prisoners and deserters, as well as the use of local sympathizers to observe and report on enemy forces. Above all, he shows, intelligence required record-keeping?the compilation and cross-checking of fragments of information furnished by a broad variety of sources. Here, the bureaucratized Union army had an advantage over its more casual Confederate counterpart. But if the South was inferior in the collection and interpretation of intelligence, it possessed in Lee a commander gifted in applying the information he did possess. The result, as Fishel shows in this expertly written, organized and researched work, was a rough balance of forces in the intelligence war, a balance that contributed to the bloody, head-down fighting as both sides sought to gain on the battlefield an advantage unobtainable in the war's more subtle areas.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
At the start of the Civil War, neither the Union nor the Confederate armies had any formal military intelligence-gathering activities. Fishel, an intelligence officer for over 30 years at the National Security Agency, studies the different ways that the Army of Virginia and the Army of the Potomac looked for information about each other before every battle. He begins with the first Battle at Bull Run and takes the reader through the Battle of Gettysburg. The South depended almost entirely on cavalry, while the North utilized spies, aerial observation, captured soldiers, the Pinkerton Group, and Union sympathizers living in the South. The author takes each battle in succession and describes the military information available to each army, how it was obtained, how it was utilized, and how it affected the outcome of the battle. In the epilog he summarizes the remainder of the battles fought in Virginia but not in the same detail as the earlier battles. Very detailed and well written, this book gives an excellent overview of the use of military intelligence in the Civil War. Recommended for all Civil War collections.
-?W. Walter Wicker, Louisiana Tech Univ., Ruston
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
Ponderous Pondering on the Potomac
By El Cutachero
I will praise this book first for a comprehensive coverage of what the author found. The story of Gen. McClellan's over-caution and Allen Pinkerton's overestimation is well known. And has been published before but not in such well noted detail. That said, the first third of the book could well have been published independently so that the reader would not get a sore chest from propping it up!
On the other hand, the great virtue of this work is the thorough mining of later material concerning the period after the establishment of a military-led true intelligence organization.
The other side of clandestine operations in this same period in this area has been covered in the excellent study [u]Come Retribution[/u] which appeared earlier. The history of operations in the Western Theatre is yet to be written. My greatest disappointment is the author's relegating of "lesson learned" to an appendix and his omission of modern tradecraft comparisons. As it was, the lessons we learned in the Civil War, when we fought essentially ourselves still had general relevence thirty some years later in the War With Spain and even later on the Mexican Border. (I wrote my thesis on the latter era.)
The text, [u]Service of Security and Information[/u], written by Col. Wagner, which was used in the 1890s, at the Fort Leavenworth Service Schools, was based on the Army's experience in the Civil War. Slightly revised after the war with Spain, the work remained in use til the Great War.
But, perhaps, pointing out this continuaton of military thought was not the author's intention. As to the unfortunate title, promisimg more than the book delivers, I place blame on the publishers. This book is so much better than the other recent book on Civil War spies which simply rehashes all the old tales about Crazy Betty, Belle Starr, et al. It's just a pity it's so hard to read. I never did finish it. I read the conclusions, and the appendices, and, frankly, there's just more here than I wanted to know.
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
Tough Going, but worth the effort.
By Nicholas Fry
Yes, Fischel does not give you the lightest and easiest narrative to go through in "The Secret War for the Union" but one has to consider what they as a reader will gain from this book. Quite simply, it is the ONLY single volume history of CW Military Intelligence in the East. This is it. From Bull Run to Mine Run you get the whole kit and the footnotes and sources are worth their weight in GOLD to the serious CW scholar or researcher. Fischel took a long time to write this book and if he is guilty of anything it is over-inclusion. However, given that nobody else except William Feiss has used his source material in a book-length study of CW Union Military Intelligence, I forgive him for this. If he had wanted, Fischel could have taken this enormous amount of material he had researched and broken this work into several books of lighter prose and still been a great success. Yes the prose is dense, but it's a fine book and if you want to understand why certain decisions were made by the commanders of the Army of the Potomac, you HAVE to at least read the portions that are pertinent to your research. Trust me on this one, I used that method to help with my own MA Thesis in History and Fischel saved me a lot of work in going through piles of material to locate items for my thesis. Because of that and its wealth of other data, I have no probelm saying, "It's a good book to have on the shelf."
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Excellent story on intelligence operations in the Civil War
By N. Smith
Though covering 594 pages of material, I did not find the material as plodding or as painful to read as some of the other reviewers. I don't disagree that this is not a book for the common reader. It is for those individuals very specifically interested in the Civil War or perhaps the early development of America's intelligence operations. Fishel's book is very intriguing and I specifically find his treatment of General Joe Hooker very fascinating. Indeed, I now look at Hooker in a far different light, conceding that he was a much better general than I gave him credit for. I certainly agree with most assessments that he was not a great commander of the Army of the Potomac, but I do believe he was very effective at division and corps levels, positions where he could physically direct the action of his men. At higher responsibility levels, he simply couldn't not move the battle pieces around without seeing them. He needed to be on the battlefield to be effective. But, he was the first general, and is credited with, building the military's first concept at all-source intelligence reporting. He built the Military Bureau of Information so he could have an office that could collect intelligence from citizen-scouts, cavalry, prisoner interrogation, slaves, and spies and then synthesize the data into a collective strategic picture. No other commander, nor the War Department, had ever done this. It was this concept that allowed him to get his stolen march on Lee. Fishel points to evidence of the Union Signal Corps transmitting a fake message that was picked up by Lee's Signal Corps that resulted in Lee dispatching JEB Stuart on a ride to pursue a phantom force. Stuart's departure left the hole that Hooker used to get around to Lee's flank. How often is this discussed in books? It isn't. Hooker reorganized the cavalry, consolidating them into one corps, another logical and new concept. He rode in intelligence balloons, further showing his interest and understanding of the importance of intelligence gathering. No other general really understood the importance of intelligence gathering like he did. His work and understanding of it dwarfed all others. He would have done great service if an intelligence bureau at the War Department was created and he was placed in charge of it. This new dimension of Hooker is what Fishel brings forth in his work.
Fishel documents his facts well; his footnotes cover 82 pages. There are also 25 maps. Fishel analyzes all forms of intelligence utilized in the war: cavalry, the signal corps, citizen-scouts, spies (women and men), slaves, freedmen, clandestine actions, deserters, POWs, and double-agents. His efforts span primarily the events from 1861 through the battle of Gettysburg. It is a remarkable work that a student of the Civil War should find most intriguing since it adds a new dimension to think about regarding the prosecution of the war's campaigns. I'm perplexed how one reader comments on the book's lack of worth when he states he didn't bother to read very much of it after finding the author using phrases such as "may have," "possibly," or "could have." The intelligence game played by the Union and Confederate side is not consumed with extensive amounts of documentation. Confederate Treasury Secretary Judah Benjamin destroyed many of his government's secret service and intelligence files. Thus, it is up to authors to try and piece together what is available to do the best to tell the intelligence story. If one keeps this in mind, the material should not be offensive, but insightful simply because the author is attempting to explain what hardly anyone has ever bothered to write about. Many authors today put their own spin and interpretation on the war. Fishel is no different and he's dealing with far less information to build the story.
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