Few men have done as much for their country and been as quickly forgotten as George Henry Sharpe. As the creator of all-source military intelligence, he and the organization he created were the critical combat multiplier without which, it can be seriously argued, the victory of the Union in the Civil War would not have been achieved. It was a closer run thing than is generally supposed.
Who then was this most interesting of men in age filled with interesting men? Of German and Huguenot stock, the Sharpes had become Hudson Valley gentry by the time of George’s birth in 1828. He was surrounded from childhood by men and women of education and intellect who encouraged this precocious boy. He graduated with honors from Rutgers and later married the university president’s daughter, then sailed through Yale Law School in a year. Before marrying he went to Europe for three years, learning fluent French in Paris and serving in the U.S. legations in Vienna and Rome. Europe gave him an intellectual and cosmopolitan high polish and a wider sense of the world, which he was shrewd enough to appreciate. Returning home, he married, set out his shingle, and joined the militia. Such was the young man when President Davis of the new Confederacy gave the order to fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. From that point Sharpe’s life was forever changed.
He did 90 days’ service with the militia in the protection of Washington. In the summer of 1862, when President Lincoln called for 300,000 more men, he rose from a sick bed and raised his own regiment, the 120th New York Volunteer Infantry, in three weeks. The next five months were an intensive course in command and leadership. No man loved his regiment more and cared for his men more than Sharpe. Yet when Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker decided he needed a special man to professionalize the production of military intelligence, Sharpe did not hesitate to accept the opportunity. Sharpe’s initiative at the battle of Fredericksburg, as well as his interview, impressed Hooker. It was an inspired choice, which would eventually be of as great a service to the Army of the Potomac as his other organizational improvements. Sharpe took the job on February 12, 1863.
Colonel Horace Porter, one of General Ulysses S. Grant’s chief aides, made it clear that Sharpe “rendered invaluable service in obtaining information regarding the enemy by his employment of scouts and his skill in examining prisoners and refugees.”1 This was an understatement. Sharpe made it possible for his commanders, beginning with Major Generals Joseph Hooker and George G. Meade and ending with Grant, to know the enemy so well that their blows could be intelligently guided for maximum effect. Sharpe’s unique contribution was the creation of what is today called “all-source military intelligence.” The U.S. Army defines it as “the intelligence products, organizations, and activities that incorporates all sources of information, in the production of intelligence.”2 The magic element that turns all the sources of information into intelligence is analysis. In the past commanding generals were their own intelligence chiefs who put all the pieces together. By the time of the Civil War, that function had become far too complex for commanders to perform by themselves. Hooker was the visionary who recognized this and chose Sharpe to professionalize that effort. In the 10 weeks between his appointment and the beginning of the Chancellorsville Campaign, Sharpe created—almost from a standing start—a completely integrated and efficiently operating all-source intelligence organization, The Bureau of Military Information (BMI). Sharpe brought all the right personal elements to this creation—the organized mind, a lawyer skilled at questioning, a shrewd ability to judge men, the creativity to forge a new entity without precedent, the good nature to get along with others smoothed out with almost legendary skill as a story-teller, personal leadership of a high order, and a sense of humanity in his dealings with prisoners, deserters, refugees, and contraband slaves.
Sharpe had control of the areas of document exploitation, interrogations, army-level scouts, and networks of agents behind the enemy lines. Hooker encouraged him to coordinate with the cavalry, the Signal Corps and the Balloon Corps, the other intelligence collectors, and any other entity outside the Army of the Potomac. Sharpe took full advantage of this latitude and established fruitful allies in Washington and Baltimore, which gave him access to spies placed in Richmond.
By any standard, it was a brilliant achievement and one which provided Hooker with the intelligence that put Gen. Robert E. Lee’s head on a silver platter. The plan, based on that intelligence, was to be considered one of the boldest and best thought-out in the war, even by Confederate observers. Unfortunately, as the Prussian Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke observed, “No plan survives first contact with the enemy,” and so with Chancellorsville, though through no fault of Sharpe’s.3
It was Sharpe’s analysis that gave Hooker a head-start on moving to intercept Lee’s invasion of the North that led to the titanic collision at Gettysburg. During the battle his staff worked continuously to present the army’s new commander, Meade, with three golden gifts at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels of war that in their total effect were probably the most thorough, accurate, and decisive intelligence reporting ever supplied to an American commander before the Gulf War of 1991.
Sharpe and his staff would continue to keep a precise order-of-battle and ration strength of Lee’s army of almost uncanny accuracy. To this author, a former order-of-battle analyst for the U.S. National Ground Intelligence Center, that achievement, separated by 150 years, is awe-inspiring. But Sharpe did more than count the enemy. He added new realms to the traditional reporting that concentrated on the immediate enemy. He brought into his reports a larger picture of the enemy, one that explored Confederate subsistence, morale (both of the troops and the home front), logistics, communications, and war production. He was educating his commanders to look beyond the enemy’s numbers and tactical intentions. In effect, he fulfilled not only the functions of today’s army G2 but of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). This was especially important since the government had no national-level or War Department intelligence agencies.
The arrival of Grant as general-in-chief of the Armies of the United States in March 1864 would come to give a greater scope to Sharpe’s special talents. Grant would say during the Overland Campaign that he had never before been provided with such a knowledge of the enemy as that by Sharpe and his BMI. Later, during the siege of Petersburg, he stated flatly that Lee could not make a move without his knowing it. This was all due to Sharpe, but hard-learned by Grant. At the beginning of the siege of Petersburg, Grant had taken the notion that Early’s II Corps was there, despite Sharpe’s insistence that he could not confirm that. For Grant it was a case of the wish being father to the thought. This led to Maj. Gen. Jubal Early coming within a hair of capturing Washington in July 1864. Lesson learned, he immediately transferred Sharpe to his own staff from Meade’s. This would give rise to one of the great command-staff relationships in military history. Grant would promote Sharpe from colonel to major general because of it. That relationship was the margin of victory. By the time Lee surrendered, the patience of the Northern people had reached near exhaustion. Had not Sharpe helped to guide Grant’s blows, it is probable that Lee would have fought Grant to a standstill until the North said, “Enough. Let them go.” One of his greatest accomplishments after the armies besieged Richmond and Petersburg was to make contact with Elizabeth Van Lew, the gallant Unionist lady who had held the loyal community together for three years and was eager to provide information to Grant. She became one of the great spymasters in history, providing a flood of largely accurate information within 24 hours to Sharpe. She was the ULTRA system of the Civil War.
Sharpe knew how to pick good people and allow full scope for their talents and initiative, and that paid high dividends. Finding no previous organizational model, Sharpe was free to create his own. Realizing that military intelligence is an intuitive art rather than the rigid template sought by little minds, he fostered an unconventional and informal approach to his mission. Certainly, had the modern Director of National Intelligence (DNI) guidelines—that lawyer-driven template for timidity—been in effect, it would have crushed the creative spirit of his team and driven a stake through the heart of timely intelligence. The result would have been a victorious Confederate States of America.
Sharpe was certainly ambitious and not hesitant to put himself forward, but there was no meanness to it. Blessed with a healthy and self-confident ego, for Sharpe it was never about himself. In none of his many reports did he ever use the personal pronoun “I”—only “we”—and so trusted his deputies that were freely able to sign for him. He was respected and admired by his staff and scouts. He had been seconded to Hooker’s staff while commanding the regiment he raised, the 120th New York Volunteer Infantry. He never formally gave up command of the regiment because his rank was tied to it but stayed in close touch, doing everything he could for the welfare of his men. He was the only commander in the Civil War to set up an allotment system so his men could send their pay home to their families. After the war he remained devoted to the men of the regiment. He commissioned a statue to his regiment, the only commander to do so, rather than having his men dedicate one to him. He also stayed in close touch with the men of the BMI and did everything he could to secure pensions for the scouts whose health was ruined by constant exposure in the worst weather. For Elizabeth Van Lew, the brilliant spymistress of Richmond, he worked hard to secure her compensation for the expenditure of her fortune in support of the government.
When Grant planted his flag as general-in-chief of the Armies of the United States near that of Major General Meade, Sharpe became a frequent visitor to his headquarters. More and more Grant found himself listening to Sharpe’s evaluation of the enemy, enlivened by a good story here and there. During the Overland Campaign he would exclaim that “he never had any information while he was in the West that would compare” with what he had been receiving on this campaign from Sharpe’s organization.4 It was, however, Grant’s failure to heed Sharpe that cemented the general’s estimation of this staff officer. As Grant settled into the siege of Petersburg, he fixed on the belief that General Early’s II Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia was with Lee there. This was despite Sharpe’s lack of certainty and finally his growing realization the he was in the Valley heading for Washington. At the proverbial last minute, Grant realized he had been wrong and rushed reinforcements to Washington just in time to warn off Early. That sobering experience confirmed his opinion of Sharpe’s value. He immediately transferred him to his own staff, much to Meade’s displeasure. There Sharpe became one of Grant’s military family and a close advisor, not just in a military sense, but also in gathering political intelligence in Washington and acting as Grant’s agent there. Sharpe became the only one of Grant’s staff to be personally known by Edwin Stanton, the Secretary of War. At the end of 1864, Grant rewarded Sharpe by promoting him to brevet brigadier general. The end of the war would see a promotion to brevet major general. Grant would not forget the skills and loyalty of George Sharpe.5
Sharpe was a man defined by loyalty—to his country, to his regiment, to the BMI, to the Republican Party, and ultimately to Grant himself. Even before the war, Sharpe had found the Republican Party to be a perfect fit, and nothing would shake his political loyalty for the rest of his life. That loyalty was based on what the party represented then and later—adherence to national unity and the constitutional order, economic expansion, equality of opportunity, emancipation, and African-American civil rights.
He was adamant that the terms of national reconciliation were that the South recognize the decision of the sword as regards secession and slavery. As he had been determined to defend the Constitution, so was he equally a supporter of African-American civil rights in New York. His wartime reports reflect none of the prejudices of the time but are objective in their description of prisoners of war, deserters, civilians, and contrabands (runaway slaves). An expert on the history of his hometown of Kingston, he wrote its history in the War of Independence and gave full credit to its black population’s resistance to the British when all the whites had fled.
Sharpe could have dined out on his experiences of the war if he had done nothing else for the rest of his life. Yet, his postwar life was rich in accomplishment. Secretary of State William H. Seward sent him on a secret mission to Europe in 1866 to ferret out any Confederates there who had a hand in Lincoln’s assassination. When Grant was nominated for president in 1868, Sharpe leapt to the support of his old chief, lending his powerful oratorical skill to the campaign. In 1870 Grant turned to his old intelligence chief and appointed Sharpe to be the U.S. Marshal of the Southern District of New York to break the Tweed Ring’s corruption of elections to the House of Representatives. Three years later, Grant appointed him to be the Surveyor of the Port of New York, probably the most important appointive position in the U.S. Government. The friendship between Grant and Sharpe only deepened over the years, and the press referred to them as bosom friends. Sharpe would be a lifelong supporter and a “Stalwart” in the determination to nominate Grant for a third term in 1880. Though that failed, it was Sharpe who was a kingmaker for another president. Sharpe pushed through the nomination of his friend, Chester A. Arthur, as Garfield’s vice-presidential running mate. Within a year, Arthur was president upon Garfield’s death to an assassin’s bullet. Sharpe would be a close and valued advisor for the remainder of Arthur’s term.
Sharpe still had time to become a prominent member of the New York state assembly (1868–82) and a very well thought of speaker for two terms, praised even by the Democrat opposition for his fairness and willingness to listen. President Harrison, in appreciation for Sharpe’s help in securing his nomination, appointed him to the United States Board of General Appraisers, a semi-judicial position for pay, which was only second to that of a Supreme Court justice.
All this time, Sharpe remained the political power in Ulster County, and the machine he created survived his death. He remained a respected and well-liked citizen of Kingston. On any special occasion, it was Sharpe who was asked to lead or to speak. Again and again he was referred to as a man of personal integrity and generous spirit, a man of many warm friends and few personal enemies. He was a man of wide acquaintance. One writer of the period, Edward P. Kohn, noted, “Sharpe’s career seemed to cross paths with every prominent American since the Civil War.”6
Sadly, we have no direct accounts of Sharpe’s personality or a physical description other than photographs. From these he appeared to be of medium height, with short, neatly trimmed (a rarity in this period) dark brown hair. In a very bearded age, he was clean-shaven except for a drooping mustache.
We can infer from indirect references that he was a most interesting dinner companion and good company. His gifts as a storyteller were legendary and would have given Lincoln a run for his money. It was this gift that Grant found so engaging. Sharpe was also a man who liked to have a good time. Brig. Gen. Marsena R. Patrick, his nominal boss during the war, noted with puritanical disapproval that Sharpe had come back from the Irish Brigade’s St. Patrick’s Day party in 1863 “tight as a brick.” Patrick’s comment aside, he was not averse to enjoying a drink and being sociable. By all accounts he was a hail-fellow-well-met. His success in the law, politics, and the army suggests that he had an engaging and compelling personality. He genuinely cared about the welfare of others as shown by his efforts to ensure the welfare of the regiment’s families. He must have come across as an honest and earnest man, for he would be four times elected to the New York State Assembly after the war. His performance as speaker was followed by effusive praise by the Democrat minority for his fairness and open-mindedness. He was considered a powerful and effective public speaker, and his numerous speeches, historical papers presented, and lectures on subjects as far afield from Kingston as the Nile River or as close as the local history of the Revolution indicate a confident man at ease with himself.
At the annual reunions of the Society of the Army of the Potomac, Sharpe led the post-meeting fun and games in the Society of Bummers. A former congressman from Ulster remembered of Sharpe:
In one way or another I have been in touch with all the leading Ulster politicians of the time. If I were to name the best one of each of the great parties I would name General George H. Sharpe from the Republican … Sharpe was a college graduate, a scholar, widely read, a good talker, had travelled abroad, was in touch with all the prominent men of his day. Sharpe could go to East Kingston when the brick yards were in full blast, enter the dance hall, grab the first pretty girl he saw, swing her in the waltz, take the whole crowd up to Garry’s and buy the drinks, then call upon and smoke a cigar and drink a glass of wine with the priest, start for home and if it wasn’t too late stop and express his absolute belief in the doctrines of election and predestination to the Dutch Domnie.7
DeAlva Stanwood Alexander, author of A Political History of the State of New York, summarized the general opinion of Sharpe:
Sharpe’s credible service on Grant’s staff, his cleverness as a Stalwart manager, and his acceptability as a speaker of the preceding assembly, brought him troops of friends. Although making no pretensions to the gift of oratory, he possessed qualities needed for oratorical success. He was forceful, remarkably clear, with impressive manners and a winning voice. As a campaign speaker few persons in the state excelled him. Men, too, generally found him easy of approach and ready to listen.8
Despite the successes of his postwar life, Sharpe’s defining experience had been the war fought in the defense of the Union. For him, it was a sacred and ennobling experience, redolent of drama, sacrifice, shared brotherhood, and heady deeds. For all his postwar titles—Marshal Sharpe, Surveyor Sharpe, Speaker Sharpe, Appraiser Sharpe—it was General Sharpe that he most treasured and by which he was best known. He was in great demand as a speaker at veterans’ events sure to inspire his audience with artful and stirring words. To the veterans of the Army of Northern Virginia, he extended the hand of reconciliation and respect for a gallant foe. He was instrumental in organizing the first reunion at Gettysburg and personally traveled to Richmond to invite the former men in gray. From that would come a friendship with the Georgian Gen. John B. Gordon. It was fitting that his last military speech was to welcome home veterans of the Spanish-American War.
Why then did a man who made such a significant contribution to winning the war largely disappear from the study of that conflict? The very nature of military intelligence is to be in the shadows. At his death, his comrades in the veterans’ organization, The Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States (MOLLUS), wrote of Sharpe’s BMI and its efforts:
The system was an admirable one, and the service was full of fine achievements and romantic adventure. The very fact, however, that it was a secret service made it necessary, as a matter of course, to conceal in a great measure both from the Army and the public the admirable work of the men who directed it and those who carried out their orders.9
Although proud of his service and devoted to the veterans of his regiment, Sharpe left a very light footprint as to his duties as chief intelligence officer for the Army of the Potomac and then the Armies Operating Against Richmond (AOAR), essentially the army group consisting of the Army of the Potomac and the Army of the James. He wrote no memoirs and gave only one lecture on the subject. Neither of his two deputies, Capt. John W. McEntee and John C. Babcock, wrote memoirs or accounts. Only Sharpe’s second chief-of-scouts, Judson Knight, would write of his scouting adventures in a series of articles in the 1890s wherein Knight brings Sharpe to life here and there as an admirable and humane man. Grant, for whom he had done so much, never mentioned him in his memoirs. There was a general agreement, it seems, to draw a veil over Sharpe’s efforts. By von Moltke’s standards, he met the primary duty of a staff officer to be more than he seemed. He declined to write his own memoirs, though he was a skilled writer who would later write valuable histories of Kingston. It was an age when every distinguished general was writing a memoir. Winston Churchill would observe the same phenomenon after World War II, when he observed, “I hear my generals are selling themselves dearly.” There was no resentment on Sharpe’s part, and his friendship with Grant would only grow. If anything, he was loath to write anything that would tend to lesson Grant’s contributions.10
Only after his wife’s death in 1898, with Grant in his grave 13 years, did he agree at his son’s urging to write his memoirs, but death drew the curtain on his life before he could start. Slowly, his name sank into obscurity. He had been a prolific correspondent, but only 20 of his letters have survived. There was no body of work that would keep him as a key participant in the war. Many of his reports survived to be included in the War Department’s masterpiece, the 78 volumes (128 books) of The War of the Rebellions: A Compilation of the Official Records Union and Confederate Armies (1881–1901), commonly referred to as the Official Records (OR). Yet, there was no story to tie them all together. They were comprised of just the reporting that ended up in the files of the commanders of the Army of the Potomac. All the great military histories of the Civil War pass over Sharpe’s decisive contributions.
It was left to an intelligence analyst and the National Security Agency (NSA), Edwin Fishel, to play Odysseus and summon Sharpe’s ghost. This extraordinary man spent a lifetime researching the history of military intelligence in the Eastern Theater during the Civil War. His papers are now at the Georgetown University Library. His search took him to an obscure collection filed under an innocuous title in the National Archives. There he found the files of the Bureau of Military Information (BMI). Here were hundreds of interrogations, scout and agent reports, analyses, and the finished intelligence of this remarkable little band of intelligence professionals that did not find their way into the OR. Fishel’s monumental The Secret War for the Union: The Untold Story of Military Intelligence in the Civil War (Houghton Mifflin, 1996) was the first book to assign Sharpe his proper place in the context of the Civil War. Fishel’s book told the story from the beginning of the war through Gettysburg. It was left to Fishel’s protégé, Dr. William Feis, to carry the story from Grant’s arrival as general-in-chief to the end of the war in his Grant’s Secret Serve: The Intelligence War from Belmont to Appomattox (University of Nebraska Press, 2002).
These seminal works in the study of Civil War military intelligence concentrate on military operations but not so much as address Sharpe the man. This present work draws Sharpe’s entire life together and attempts to bring the man into the light of history, not only in the context of the war but also in a long and distinguished public life. Sharpe’s history then becomes the history of his BMI, that band of talented men and their adventures. We learn how Sharpe organized the BMI and how it functioned. It is also a story of relationships—within the BMI and between Sharpe and his commanders, the wide latitude given him by Hooker, the constraints imposed by a bad-tempered Meade, and finally the blossoming of one of the great commander–staff relationships in military history with Grant.
More than the OR and the BMI files were necessary to complete this story. I was fortunate to live in Alexandria, VA, just across the Potomac River from Washington, DC, and the historical riches of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and the Library of Congress, where I spent countless hours sifting their holdings. The military service records (MSR) and pension files of the participants located at NARA yielded a treasure trove of biographical information. Another treasure was found in the Library of Congress’s John C. Babcock Collection, as well as the collections of papers of Presidents Grant, Garfield, Arthur, and Hayes, and also Grant’s Secretary of State, Hamilton Fish. NARA was further scoured for more reports, to include telegrams sent and received. The Huntington Library in Pasadena contained the Hooker Papers, most of which were official documents he took with him when relieved of command of the Army of the Potomac, many of which are not found at NARA. They include the detailed tables of railroads, fords, and road march distances that Sharpe and the BMI created in their intelligence preparation of the battlefield (IPB) for the Chancellorsville Campaign. Their precision and comprehensiveness make them models of such reporting.
The articles written by Judson Knight, Sharpe’s second chief-of-scouts, in the National Tribune in the early 1890s are the only extensive account written by a member of the BMI. I was privileged to edit the collection in Scouting for Grant and Meade: The Reminiscences of Judson Knight, Chief of Scouts, Army of the Potomac (Skyhorse, 2013), which yielded engaging and well-written details of scouting techniques as well as insights into Sharpe, not published before. Vital to the story of Sharpe’s postwar life was the record of the times found in newspapers.com. Searches showed thousands of references to Sharpe.
In order to make all of this efficiently useful, they were combined into a chronological database of 4,000 documents by and to Sharpe and the members of the BMI and the various commanders. Studying this comprehensive collection in chronological order offers insights and relationships not readily apparent in traditional research. The organization of the material, the metadata in modern terms, has been a priceless lens that brings history into focus. Templated onto the record of military operations, both the interaction and influence of military intelligence becomes clear to a degree not seen before. Through the review of Sharpe’s reporting and other documents in chronological order, we see what the commanders themselves saw and when they saw it, the analyses upon which they based their actions. This is an invaluable vantage point from which to understand what drove so many military operations.
With the passing of Sharpe, Babcock, and McEntee, the thread of all-source intelligence for the army was lost for generations. The country was so anxious to put the Civil War behind it that all thought of incorporating lessons learned fell before the budget ax. The Army was shrunk back to a small force and dispersed in company-sized detachments across the continent; with it, the war’s experiment in all-source, professionalized intelligence was forgotten.11
Although the U.S. Army established the first permanent intelligence organization in 1889, it was at the national level. The rebirth of all-source intelligence at the operational and tactical levels had to wait until World War I, when organic intelligence elements were introduced from regiment to army level by copying the French system. At the army and corps level in 1918, intelligence had once again become all-source—55 years after Hooker and Sharpe had created the same system. For the first time since Sergeant Cline and Hooker’s Horse Marines, NCOs would be incorporated again into the tactical intelligence system. It would take World War II, however, for the army to develop a standard S2/G2 structure.
The professionalization of intelligence personnel would have to wait almost another 20 years. The Army finally recognized military intelligence as a distinct profession in 1962 when it created the Military Intelligence and Security Branch which subsequently was converted into the Military Intelligence Branch. In 1987 the Army created the Military Intelligence Corps to consolidate all military personnel and units into one large regiment. Military Intelligence prospered in the 1980s as it had never done before, as it created TOE units for the first time—five MI brigades and 30 MI battalions to support tactical units in the field and another five brigades and 10 battalions to carry out theater and national-level missions. The Army had 25,000 intelligence specialists, 15 percent of them women, the total equal in strength to the entire Army in 1885 shortly before the first post-Civil War intelligence function was established. The army had, in the words of retired Lt. Gen. James A. Williams, a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, “the equivalent of two combat divisions in collection and analysis.”12
Sharpe would certainly have been impressed but may also have wondered how so many people could help but get in each other’s way. Having run a brilliant intelligence operation with never more than 70 men and women carefully selected for their talents, he may have wondered whether the army had not gone to the opposite extreme and achieved only the rigidity and bureaucracy of the army staff bureaus of his day.
And well he might. During the Gulf War of 1991, despite its massive intelligence infrastructure, the army had to put its entire interrogation effort into the hands of one exceptional man, a man on the Sharpe model—Col. Stuart A. Herrington, to whom this book is gratefully dedicated. It was perfect proof that the art of intelligence flourishes in the hands of talented and exceptional minds, not bureaucracies. It was also perfect proof that such minds are driven out by a bureaucratic structure that is both perplexed and fearful of such one-of-a-kind creatures.
He would have been far more pleased with the performance of military intelligence after 9/11, when the forge of war and myriad new technologies drove the art of intelligence into unprecedented realms. Certainly, he would have been amazed at the magnitudes of complexity the art of intelligence must work within—the volume of data that is overwhelming. Without taking anything away from his ground-breaking efforts, he was dealing with a far more simple problem set. He was operating in an environment where the combatants shared the same language and culture and where the theater of war was geographically limited to his own country.
The army’s MI Corps today comprises thousands of professional military intelligence personnel, a far cry from the modest numbers of officers, civilians, and enlisted men in the BMI in 1863. Its resources are complex, deep, and almost of magical power. Yet, it would behoove this mighty structure an occasional look backward, to consider those who came before and put that sharp sword of effective military intelligence into Meade’s hand at Gettysburg and into Grant’s thereafter. It is a standard of intelligence excellence that may be equaled but never surpassed.
After immersing myself in the life of George H. Sharpe for 10 years, I freely admit that it become impossible not to like and admire this most interesting and big-hearted man who did so much for his country. Further cause for admiration and respect was that he embodied the ideal military intelligence professional, my profession for many years. He recognized intelligence as an intuitive and creative art, something we today are in danger of forgetting with all our technological toys and politically correct induced distortions of reality. I have endeavored to do his memory justice, not only as a recognition of his deeds but as an example to those who follow in the honorable profession of intelligence.
On a personal note, I was struck as I neared completion of this book that Sharpe and I share something in common. Both our mothers were named Helen, and we both had three children with two boys followed by a doted-upon daughter named Katherine/Kathryn.
I have on occasion thought that if I could go back in time, I would knock on his door and say, “For the love of heaven, General, write your memoirs!”