Military Intelligence  in the American military prior to the Civil war was non-existent except during the revolution General Washington had a rather impressive gathering and analysis system in place. However this concept was lost shortly after that war as it was not how gentlemen do business.

Intelligence is more than just spies and scouts running around getting information on the enemy.  That is only a small piece of what goes on.  The problem with both sides in the Civil War was there was no central control over what the priorities were to be.  There was also no proper analysis of the information gathered from the various groups gathering the information (i.e. scouts, spies, signal corps, and cavalry).

However, late in the war, General Hooker instituted the Department of Military Information to gather and sift all the information coming in. It was also set up to organize the collection of appropriate information.  The sad part of this is that it was limited to the Army of the Potomac.  Most people who study the war and look at the spying that took place go no further than the Pinkertons and cavalry in a scouting role and the occasional balloon.  This was all true in the early part of the war on the side of the Union.  None of this had an actual structure to sift the data that had been gathered.  One reason for this was that McClellan wanted to view all the data himself.  The only data he did not review was that of the Pinkertons.  Trust me, as someone who was in modern Military intelligence, that is a lot of data to look at and make decisions about.  No wonder he took so long on stuff he was overwhelmed with trivial details that would normally be sifted out.

Needless to say, modern military intelligence in the American armed forces was set up by General Hooker months before Chancellorsville and was instrumental in the NEAR success. It was that the good general could not follow up on it.

Well that is a very brief overview of military intelligence of the time period. When you start looking into the actual nuts and bolts of the spy craft during the civil war you see it to had a transition to the modern age and lessons learned are also lessons forgotten.  There are also things in place that had their beginnings during that war (i.e. communication intelligence, imagery intelligence, and Arial observation) that we see being used on television today in our modern war.

Your obedient servant
PVT Martin J. Hickey
97th PVI

Follow Up Reading.....By pure coincidence, I (Robert Niepert) had just finished reading a book by Philip Van Doren Stern titled Secret Missions of the Civil War, just a week before I received Martin Hickey's article.  There were quite a few men and women who risked their lives in underground activities for both the North and South.  As Stern states in his book, "there are still files containing a strange hodgepodge; in some cases the true meaning of the material is still hidden."  He goes on to make the observation that "A code - especially an old one - is even harder to break than a cipher."  No modern cryptanalysis expert is likely to want to waste his valuable time trying to unravel the meaning of a long-obsolete bit of military information."  For this reason alone, we may never know what these messages from the Civil War actually say and what secrets they hold.  Secret Missions of the Civil War also has examples of the codes used by both the Union and Confederacy and how they work.  Some are quite ingenious.

Other related reading....Confederate Agent by Capt. Thomas H. Hines, The Hidden Civil War by Wood Gray, and Confederate Operations in Canada and New York by John W. Headley.

Union Spies Trivia.....A Jesse Scout is the name applied by Confederates to Union scouts/spies who disguised themselves in Confederate uniforms.  These men would then slip behind enemy lines to gather information for the Union.