Military writers have not been entirely agreed as to whether the rôle of spy is an honorable part to play in warfare. Much stress has been laid on the necessarily disgraceful nature of a calling that can justly subject one to the hangman. The ignominy of this punishment is held to relieve all soldiers from the duty of service as spies, even under orders, and in consequence all spies are necessarily volunteers. But it is agreed, on the other hand, that the death penalty which is inevitable for the detected spy is intended, not as a punishment for the individual, but as a measure of preventing the spy from carrying on his work, so full of danger to his enemy. This lack of personal responsibility is so well understood, that a spy successful in his expedition is not liable to death after its completion, and if subsequently captured in battle may not be executed for having previously been a spy.
But however at variance they may be as to the nature of his calling, all critics are of one mind in regarding the work of the spy an absolutely necessary element in the conduct of a campaign by the commander. Without it, he would be at a loss as to the most essential facts that must govern his movements. The strength of the enemy, the nature and advantages of his position, the best approaches to it, the ground commanded by his batteries, as well as his intentions—all these and many other details must be in some degree known to a commander who would direct his troops with safety or success. Some of this information he can pick up from resident non-combatants; some he can wrest from his unwilling prisoners; some he can purchase from treacherous members of the force opposing him. But for most of it he is absolutely dependent on the brave men in his own command who are willing, for the sake of their cause, to risk the death that awaits the spy caught in the enemy's country.
These men certainly cannot be regarded with the contempt which a commander feels for the mere tools of whose treachery, cupidity, or indifference he avails himself while scorning the instrument. And, if not that, then they must be regarded as heroic even beyond those of their fellows who are as brave as lions on the field of battle. For their mission is a solitary one, and they have none of the cheering companionship and stimulating emulation that bring courage for the charge. Instead of being under fire for a few brief moments or hours, their nerves are on the rack for days and weeks. With no commanding officer to obey as he orders them here or there, they are thrown on their own resources in the most perilous and trying situations. They must avoid dangerous meetings, disarm suspicions, turn aside questions, invent lies by the hundred without having one contradict another. A constant play of quick wits, steady nerves, and, at the right moment, prompt and courageous physical force, elevates the work of a spy to a fine art, in comparison with which the mere enthusiastic bravery of the battlefield is child's play. Darkly threatening throughout all this perilous work is the imminent and ever-present risk of detection, with its certainty of a death, not glorious like that of those who fall in the hand-to-hand conflict, not the ordinary fortune of war like that of the sharp-shooter's victim brought down at long range, not even invested with the pathos of a death, however sudden, among sympathizing comrades—but the death of a dog, promptly dealt out, without a friendly face among the spectators.
A good illustration of the consummate skill, coolness of head, and strength of will and nerve required in this duty was given by a scout named Hancock, attached to General Grant's army in Virginia. He had failed to escape detection, and was sent under guard to Castle Thunder, in Richmond. His situation was most perilous; but this did not prevent his utilizing his innate joviality to lighten the life of his fellow-prisoners, and bringing his wonderful power of facial expression to bear on the great object of his own escape. In the midst of one of his songs in the prison he suddenly threw up his hands with a cry, fell to the ground in a heap, and lay there so obviously dead that the post surgeon—not over-solicitous to keep a Yankee above ground—pronounced him a case for the grave-digger, and he was bundled into a pine coffin and started on his last journey. But when the driver reached the burying-place, the coffin was empty. Hancock had dexterously slid from the wagon, and, it being night, had joined the followers on foot without detection. When the driver reported back to the prison, the trick was suspected, and a sharp lookout was ordered, which he evaded in the most unexpected way. He went direct to the best hotel in Richmond and registered from Georgia, had a good night's rest, and spent the following day, in the character of a government contractor, in learning what he wanted to know about the city. He was twice arrested by the guards, and escaped the first time through the intervention and identification of the hotel clerk. The second time he was returned to the prison, where for seven days he concealed his identity by assuming a squint and a distortion of feature, which he abandoned when he learned that imprisonment was all he had to fear, as by that time the war was virtually over. Ten days later he was set at liberty with his fellow-prisoners.
The peril of a spy's career is not intermittent, like that of active fighting; it is continuous. A moment may give him his liberty or may bring him face to face with death. An unnamed scout of the Army of the Potomac—so many of these heroic men are even to this day unnamed—had collected his intelligence in the enemy's country, and had arrived close to the stream beyond which were the Union lines. In the darkness of the night, with the sense of danger keen within him, he groped his way along the shore, seeking the skiff he had concealed there for his return. To his horror it dawned on him that he had missed his landmark and could not find the boat. There he stood, the evidences of his calling unmistakably on him, knowing that he had been suspected and followed, and realizing that only a few minutes were his in which to complete his escape. Nothing could exceed the mental agony of the next quarter hour. Under stress of danger he had just let himself into the water, determined to attempt to swim the wide stream as a forlorn hope, when suddenly the baying of a bloodhound dashed even this faint hope from him, and presently the crackling of twigs announced the near approach of the savage pursuer. But there were evidences that for the moment the dog was at fault, and in mere desperation the hunted man waded beneath the overhanging banks where he might sell his life as dearly as possible. Something struck against his breast. He could not restrain a cry as he seized what proved to be his missing boat. In an instant he had clambered in and cast off the line, when a sudden gleam of moonlight breaking through the clouds revealed at the other end of the log to which the boat had been moored the crouching figure of the bloodhound, poising for a spring. Simultaneously with the leap of the dog, the skiff darted out into the stream. A blow with the oar aimed at the head of the animal nearly upset the fragile craft and was easily eluded by the dog, which, swimming forward, laid its forepaws on the gunwale and attempted to seize the edge of the boat with his teeth. The situation was desperate. Laying aside his revolver, a shot from which would have drawn a volley from the shore, the brave scout seized his bowie-knife, and with one frenzied stroke cut the throat of the bloodhound, severing its neck clean to the back. The dog sank from sight, and the man was free! A few minutes' quiet pulling landed him on the further shore, whence a brief walk brought him to camp, to tell his adventures and turn in his stock of information.
Perhaps as thrilling an experience as ever was reported was that which fell to the lot of Captain Leighton, formerly of a Michigan battery, but led by the fascination of adventure into scout and spy duty. It was brief, but so charged with peril and nerve-tension that in a few short hours he seemed to have lived days, and needed a long sleep after it, as though he had been awake for a week. In a single afternoon he left his own camp and rode into the enemy's country, passing two pickets, killed a guard, listened to the council of war in the tent of the rebel general, fought his way back through the pickets, who now knew his mission, set off the signal agreed on, and rode to safety on his unusually fleet horse. The first picket he met on his way out was misled by supposing him to be a spy of their own returning with information, and from them he got what sounded like the countersign, but was not, as he discovered when, riding on, he attempted with it to pass the sentry near the rebel general's tent. The sentry pulled trigger on him, but the cap snapped on the musket, there was a hand-to-hand scuffle not a hundred yards from the camp, and the sentry was stabbed to the heart. Clad in the sentry's uniform, under cover of the night, he heard from the very lips of the general and his council the secret he was in search of—that the enemy would mass on the left wing to meet the attack of the morrow—sauntered carelessly about as the council dispersed, and then mounted his superb gray and was off. It was a perilous ride, for every picket he had passed in the afternoon fired on him as he rode through, and it was indeed a charmed life that escaped their bullets. The last picket he had to pass—the same that had mistaken him for a rebel scout—was numerous, and met him with a volley, followed up by a sharp attack with sabres and revolvers. Shooting, stabbing, slashing, and swearing like a fiend, wounded and wounding, he fought his way through them, and then fled onward, reeling in his saddle with excitement and loss of blood, until, arrived at the hollow stump where his rockets were concealed, he set them both off (thus giving the desired information to his own commander). Then, emptying his revolver at his nearest pursuer, he again rode away, unharmed further by the shots that followed him like hail. What added to the bravery of this deed was the fact that he knowingly went out to replace a scout who had been killed the night before on the very same mission.
| REDUCED FACSIMILE OF POSTER ISSUED BY THE WAR DEPARTMENT. |
| JOHN WILKES BOOTH. |
All spies were not so fortunate as to complete their expeditions in one day. Sometimes, although in comparative safety, they were unable to get out of the enemy's territory for many days. An Illinois private, named Newcomer, who had just missed some important battles, was accustomed to vary the monotony of his camp life in Alabama by making secret trips after information overnight. This work suited him so well that he determined on a more extensive expedition among the guerilla cavalry that he learned from a negro lay some miles below the Union camp. His first bold act was to crawl into a corn-crib where a number of these men lay sleeping, their horses picketed outside, and, feeling around, he calmly drew a good revolver from the belt of one of the unconscious sleepers, having the good luck to wake none of them up. He had provided himself with a forged certificate of discharge from the rebel army, by means of which he was by some unsuspecting Southern sympathizers put in communication with a Southern agent for the purchase of stores, named Radcliffe, who was known to everybody in and about Franklin, Tenn., and who vouched for him throughout his stay among the Confederates. He took on the character of one seeking office in the rebel army, and as a seller of contraband articles obtained from the North. In this guise, turning up at Radcliffe's house as occasion required, he explored the situation and reported back to his superiors at Nashville. Before he got back he had serious trouble in getting away from Shelbyville, for lack of a pass. A good-natured crowd, to whom he had dispensed the contents of his whiskey flask, were willing to help him away, but stuck at telling the provost marshal that they knew him; but it was finally managed by writing his name on the collective pass on which they travelled. Lagging behind them on the road, he turned off in the direction he wanted to go, only to fall into the hands of one of Morgan's bands of scouts, who swore he was a Yankee, and actually had the halter around his neck to hang him on the spot, when he succeeded in persuading them to take him back to Radcliffe for identification, where he was released, and then was furnished by Radcliffe with a written voucher on which he succeeded in making his way, after many exciting and perilous adventures, to his commander. He brought him the important news, confided to him by a rebel who took him for a fellow spy, of a projected attack on the Union fleet on the river, and steps were taken that saved the ships.
Perhaps the most varied experience was that of Col. L. C. Baker, who organized the secret service, and performed himself every duty, from that of actual spy to that of chief of the national police, beginning with a personal expedition to Richmond and ending with the capture of Wilkes Booth, the assassin of President Lincoln. His first Richmond trip was made in July, 1861, under cover of a general movement of Southern sympathizers away from the North. General Scott himself sent him to obtain information concerning the strength and disposition of troops in the Confederate capital. His greatest difficulty at the outset was to get through the Northern lines without betraying his errand, and three times he was sent back to General Scott as a Southern spy. Finally he got through, and, armed with letters to prominent residents of Richmond, he was promptly forwarded on his way, but was carefully turned over to Jefferson Davis himself, who kept him under guard while he made up his mind whether the stranger was a spy or the "Mr. Munson" he pretended to be with business in Richmond. Succeeding in getting satisfactorily identified through a sort of "bunco" self-introduction to a man from Knoxville, where he claimed to have lived, he was paroled and turned loose in Richmond. When he had picked up the information he desired, he began his efforts to get back to Washington with his precious news. A pass to visit Fredericksburg enabled him to leave Richmond, but an attempt to go further on the same pass only got him into the hands of a patrol. But he soon not only eluded his sleepy guard, but rode off on the sentry's horse as well. Followed and surrounded in a negro cabin where he had stopped to rest, he managed to hide under a haystack, where he narrowly escaped the searching sabre-thrust of his pursuers, and then made again for the Potomac. Hunger induced him to risk introducing himself to two German pickets guarding the bank on the Confederate side of that river, and they hospitably kept him in their tent overnight, though they watched him closely and made him a semi-prisoner. The watches of the night he consumed in vain endeavors to crawl out of the tent while his captors slept; but they slept "with one eye open," as it were, and it was not until dawn that he managed unobserved to get down to the river-bank, secure the pickets' boat with its single broken oar, and push for liberty out into the stream. The men were quickly after him, however, and he had to shoot one of them to save himself, while the other ran for assistance. The detachment that quickly reached the shore made the water about his craft uncomfortably lively with their bullets; but he fortunately managed to paddle out of range without being hit, and after a row of four miles, which was the width of the river at that point, he reached the Maryland shore and made his way to Washington.