A detailed study based on the previously forgotten files of the
army's Civil War - era Bureau of Military Information, buried in a
storage room until 1959 when they were found by the author in
Washington's National Archives. Fishel, a career intelligence
officer at the National Security Agency, dispels the many romantic
legends of superior spying by the Confederates as mostly fiction;
he concludes that the North, after a poor start, became more adept
than the South. He carefully describes the spying that helped shape
the campaigns of the Army of the Potomac from Bull Run in 1861
through the Peninsula, Chancellorsville, Fredericksburg, Antietam,
Gettysburg, and on to Grant's great 1864 Virginia campaign. Fishel
finds much fault with George McClellan, commander of the Army of
the Potomac in 1862, and his adviser, the famous detective Allan
Pinkerton, hinting at a conspiracy to inflate the estimates of the
numbers of enemy soldiers to justify McClellan's inaction and his
pleas for more troops. Civil War intelligence is depicted here as a
constant cat-and-mouse search for the enemy. Information was
obtained by the Bureau, beginning in 1863, in a variety of ways:
from cavalry scouts, balloons, telescopes, and spies, somewhat
superseding Pinkerton's method of interrogating prisoners,
deserters, runaway slaves, and civilian refugees, who were
sometimes Confederate "plants." Robert E. Lee and Stonewall
Jackson, Fishel says, were masters at fooling the enemy, deftly
using misinformation, feints, sudden disappearances, and surprise
attacks. The North's greatest intelligence feat, according to the
author, was tracking Lee's 150-mile march into Pennsylvania and
taking the high ground at Gettysburg, negating the widespread
opinion that the two armies met there by chance. Fishel's
prodigious, breakthrough research provides a treasure trove for
historians to ponder and constitutes a real addition to Civil War
history. The dense prose, however, makes one long for the graceful
style of a Catton, a Foote, or a McPherson. (Kirkus Reviews)
Most histories of the Civil War explain victory and defeat in terms of the skill of commanders and their troops. Intelligence records disappeared after the war, and thus a critically important element has largely been ignored. Fishel has unearthed substantial collections of such records, and his "intelligence explanation" radically alters history's understanding of the campaigns. The Secret War for the Union is one of the most important Civil War works ever published.
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