A hidden hand lay behind many Confederate operations aimed at altering the course of the war. Facing massive Northern armies, select groups of Southern men and women were forced to innovate and develop unorthodox shadow warfare methods. Collectively, they became the Confederate Secret Service.
Deliberately opaque, the organization was real but unofficial. Some departments were created overnight. Much of the organization remains cloaked in secrecy because its files and records were deliberately burned in the war’s final days. By 1864, however, “Confederates had acquired experience in clandestine operations, had developed a body of doctrine concerning such operations, and had created a cluster of organizations that, together, contained a considerable capacity for secret service work,”1 according to one historian who summed up the clandestine group.
The Confederate Secret Service was obsessed with gadgets and would invent espionage and sabotage devices: for example, the War Department Torpedo Bureau specialized in the groundbreaking technology of land mines.
Most of the devices flowed from the brilliant mind of sixty-one-year-old Gabriel Rains. His younger brother, George Washington Rains, an exceptional chemist and scientist, developed the South’s principal source of gunpowder: the massive works in Augusta, Georgia, without which the Confederacy could never have waged a sustained modern war. Together, the two siblings became known as the “bomb brothers.”
The “father of modern mine warfare,” Gabriel Rains first deployed booby traps, or “improvised explosive devices,” against Seminole Indians in Florida in the 1850s—one of their first uses in North America. In one incident, the deadly contraptions failed to detonate on a Native American war party attacking a fort. Rains personally investigated why the bomb failed to explode, and the Indians shot and nearly killed him and several other soldiers. But the mines terrified the Indians, and the fort survived the assault. Resigning from the US Army in 1861, Rains joined the Confederacy. Using pressure-sensitive fuses attached to shells filled with powder, Rains buried “sub terra” torpedoes outside Confederate defenses in Yorktown in 1862, to the great consternation of Union commanders, who called it a “dastardly business.”2
Rains’ Torpedo Bureau, an arm of the Confederate Secret Service, launched a shadow war on the Union. A myriad of cutting-edge “infernal machines” terrorized the North: “coal torpedoes.”3 Seemingly harmless-looking pieces of coal, the mines were actually hollow metal castings filled with gunpowder and coated with coal dust. When the coal torpedoes were tossed in a steamboat’s boiler by an unsuspecting tender, the resulting explosion could cause the craft to blow sky-high. The Submarine Bureau developed underwater torpedoes detonated by an electric current that guarded the James River and Southern ports. The bureau outfitted the novel submarine Hunley at Charleston with a torpedo, mounting an explosive device on a long wooden pole, or spar, in front of the sub. The Hunley’s spar torpedo had a long, barbed spear on the device’s business end to affix itself to the wooden hulls of enemy warships. On February 17, 1864, the Hunley attacked the USS Housatonic in Charleston’s outer harbor. The partially submerged vessel pulled away from the Union screw sloop, and once the sub reached the limit of the cord, it released a trigger mechanism that detonated the torpedo and sank the Northern vessel, making it the first combat submarine to sink a warship successfully. On her return to base, the Hunley sank, killing all eight crew members; a total of twenty-one died on missions in the vessel.
In 1864, Company A of the Confederate Secret Service pulled off a major coup using one of Rains’ “horological torpedoes,” better known as a time bomb. Two operatives, John Maxwell and his local guide R. K. Dillard, who reported to Rains, left Richmond and covertly worked their way through Union pickets to City Point, where Grant had a massive munitions depot; they “traveled mostly by night and crawled upon [their] knees to pass the east picket-line.” Maxwell disguised twelve pounds of gunpowder in a box of candles. After being halted by one of the wharf sentinels, he described the operation. “I succeeded in passing him by representing that the captain had ordered me to convey the box on board. Hailing a man from the barge, I put the machine in motion and gave it in his charge.”4 Maxwell set the timer on the torpedo for one hour and safely exfiltrated the area—and waited. A massive explosion ripped through the docks and nearly detonated all of the ammunition. A correspondent witnessed the huge mushroom-shaped cloud: “You have read of eruptions of Vesuvius, such as buried Herculaneum and Pompeii. You have seen illustrations of them in the books. This must have been such an explosion as one of these, except that instead of lava and dust and ashes, it rained over the circle of a mile, in whole packages and by piece-meal, everything you can imagine at a military depot. Entire boxes of fixed ammunition came down among the tents in the town, a quarter of a mile distant, and scarcely a tent or house or boat can be found within the circle of a mile that is not riddled by shell and shot, or small ammunition.”5
Four million dollars in munitions went up in smoke along with the barge, and scores of people, including “a party of ladies [who], it seems, were killed by this explosion. It is saddening to me to realize the fact that the terrible effects of war induce such consequence,” wrote Maxwell in his report; “but when I remember the ordeal to which our own women have been subjected, and the barbarities of the enemy’s crusade against us and them, my feelings are relieved by the reflection that while this catastrophe was not intended by us, it amounts only, in the providence of God, to just retaliation.”6
Another arm of the Secret Service was overseen by the State Department headed by Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin, who had multiple agents at his disposal. Sometimes called the “Brains of the Confederacy,” Benjamin was the first Jewish American to be elected a US senator. At the beginning of the war, Jefferson Davis appointed the attorney, railroad founder, and poker player attorney general, and later secretary of war. Benjamin was eventually confirmed by the Confederate Senate as secretary of state in March 1862. Benjamin’s State Department trafficked in election interference, bribing members of the Northern press to craft a favorable Southern narrative.
The War Department Signal Bureau and Signal Corps operated a series of covert stations to transmit messages across enemy lines. One signal line sent communications from Richmond to Confederates operating outside Washington, DC. The provost marshal of Richmond, established in 1861 by General John Henry Winder, focused on counterespionage and management of prisoner-of-war camps, as well as the defense of the city. The name “War Department Strategy Bureau” was a clever euphemism for sabotage teams and demolition experts.
While there was no official head of the Secret Service, Jefferson Davis acted as its director, authorizing operations and working closely with Benjamin and a handful of officials. Near the end of the war, the Confederacy was trying to pull the various loose branches and elements together into a central organization, but the war ended before this could be accomplished.
Many Confederate irregulars and partisan units had ties to the Secret Service and the Confederate government or reported directly to General Robert E. Lee. These irregular units would play a crucial role in special operations. Scouts and Signal Corps personnel and other specialists would be detached from the Secret Service for service in irregular units such as the 43rd Virginia Cavalry Battalion, Mosby’s Rangers.
Secret Service operations, in conjunction with partisan initiatives, would be part of the South’s retaliation in kind for the Dahlgren Raid. But most importantly, the Secret Service would try to influence the 1864 presidential election.