Risky business

Rico says one of the privileges of having Esha Thornton as a friend is staying in touch with black history, and the Daily Mail (a UK newspaper) has an article of interest:

Confederate officers thought slaves were powerless and oblivious; they were dead wrong. Leaders in the South would openly discuss troop movements and battle plans and leave important documents right under their noses, without any fear they would comprehend and relay the information. Who would they tell? They were just butlers, deckhands on a rebel sympathiser's steamboat, or field workers. But some weren't just slaves; they were also spies working undercover as Union intelligence officers.
"The chief source of information to the enemy", General Robert E Lee, commander of the Confederate Army, said in May of 1863, "is through our negroes."
Little is known about the black men and women who served as Union intelligence officers, other than the fact that some were former slaves or servants who escaped from their masters and others were Northerners who volunteered to pose as slaves to spy on the Confederacy. There are scant references to their contributions in historical records, mainly because Union spymasters destroyed documents to shield them from Confederate soldiers and sympathisers during the war and vengeful whites afterwards.
"These spies and operatives come up over and over again, many of them unnamed and rarely do they receive glory," said Hari Jones, curator of the African American Civil War Museum in Washington, who lectures on the Civil War's African American spies. Jones and other experts are hoping the 150th anniversary of the Civil War will include some measure of remembrance for these officers.
Allan Pinkerton, head of the Union Intelligence Service at the onset of the Civil War (photo), detailed his recruitment of black spies in his autobiography, including a couple of successful missions by Mississippi slave John Scobell and the extraction of valuable papers from a Union defector.
Scobell in particular, Pinkerton said, was a 'cool-headed, vigilant detective' who easily duped the Confederates around him by assuming 'the character of the light-hearted, happy darkey.'
'From the commencement of the war, I have found the negroes of invaluable assistance and I never hesitated to employ them when after investigation I found them to be intelligent and trustworthy,' Pinkerton said.

 Harriet Tubman (photo) is the most recognisable of these spies, sneaking down South repeatedly to gather intelligence for the Union army while also leading runaway slaves to freedom through the Underground Railroad. Often disguised as a field hand or poor farm wife, she led several spy missions into South Carolina while directing others from Union lines.
Another spy, Mary Elizabeth Bowser, was born a slave to the Van Lew family, who freed her and sent her to school. Bowser then returned to Richmond, where Elizabeth Van Lew was running one of the war's most sophisticated spy rings. Somehow, Van Lew got Bowser a job inside the Confederate White House as a housekeeper. Bowser then proceeded to sneak classified information out from under the nose of Confederate President Jefferson Davis.
According to the memoirs of Thomas McGiven, the Union spymaster in Richmond whose cover was that of a baker who delivered to the Confederate White House, Bowser 'had a photographic mind. Everything she saw on the Rebel President's desk she could repeat word for word.' Stories about Bowser, who is also known as Ellen Bond, Mary Jones, or Mary Jane Richards, show up as early as May 1900 in Richmond newspapers, and her name was revealed in 1910 in an interview with Van Lew's niece, according to Elizabeth Varon, author of a book about Van Lew. There is no proof that Bowser existed beyond these recollections. Van Lew, like Pinkerton before her, requested that Union forces turn over all her intelligence records at the end of the Civil War and destroyed them, leaving no proof of her vast network.
Jefferson Davis' wife, Varina, publicly denied that a black female spy could have infiltrated their White House. But Varon's book suggests that Bowser's true name was Mary Richards, she survived the Civil War, and she married a man named Garvin. Richards even writes in an 1867 letter that during the Civil War she was 'in the Service... as a detective.'
Others are not as well-known. Take, for example, the three slaves who escaped the Confederate army on Morris Island, outside Charleston, South Carolina, in 1863 and went to Union Brigadier General Q.A. Gillmore with crucial information. "They were officers' servants, and report, from conversations of the officers there, that north and Northwest faces of Fort Sumter are nearly as badly breached as the gorge wall,' Gillmore said in a report to his army superiors. Using African American troops, Gillmore later ordered the attack on Fort Sumter that was fictionalized in the film Glory. The Union retook Fort Sumter in February 1865, almost four years after the Civil War began, with the Confederates firing on the federal facility and taking it over.
One such informant was Marie Louvestre, a former slave working for a Confederate engineer who was transforming the USS Merrimac into the Virginia, the first Confederate ironclad warship. Realising the importance of her employer's breakthrough, Louvestre took some of the paperwork, headed north, and requested a private meeting with Navy Secretary Gideon Wells. The Union navy was working on a similar ship, the USS Monitor. In an 1873 letter, Wells said: "Louvestre told me the condition of the vessel, and took from her clothing a paper, written by a mechanic who was working on the Merrimac, describing the character of the work, its progress and probable completion." The Union navy intensified its construction of the Monitor and sailed it down to Virginia, leading to the world's first ironclad naval battle, a stalemate that kept the Confederate Navy from breaking the Federal blockade of Norfolk.