Recent writings: How a British Spy Drank His Way Across the Americas—and Missed the Civil War

Exploring the mystery that first led me to Our Man in Charleston.

How a British Spy Drank His Way Across the Americas

Richard Francis Burton was one of the great adventurers of the Victorian era, and a spy. But several weeks just before the Civil War are curiously missing from his life's account.

CHRISTOPHER DICKEY

https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-a-british-spy-drank-his-way-across-the-americasand-missed-the-civil-war

For more stories from the last several months, several of them written with colleagues, visit:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/author/christopher-dickey

Confessions of the Confederate Spymaster at Shiloh

This piece written for The Daily Beast and published in its entirety on May 5, 2016, grew out of a talk I gave while accompanying a New York Times Journeys tour of the Shiloh, Corinth and Brice's Crossroads battlefields earlier in the month. 

SHILOH BATTLEFIELD, Tennessee—It’s rare in history that spymasters get credit for victories, but, then again, only occasionally are they blamed for disasters. Few are so bold or so foolish as to declare that something is an absolute fact, as CIA Director George Tenet did when he told President George W. Bush the intelligence confirming Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction was a “slam dunk.”

No, the language of espionage is a language of qualification. Do the Iranians have a nuclear weapons program? A key National Intelligence Estimate in 2007 concluded they sort of didn’t but, then again, might just. (“We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program; we also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons.”)

One can imagine the frustration of presidents, or for that matter, generals, when they get that kind of fact-fudged information. So the question often becomes, for them, less about what information can trusted than about whose information and whose judgment can be trusted, and that person, whether as spymaster, chief of staff, or with some more mysterious title, becomes the bearer of good news, bad news, and, most importantly, trusted news.

But that person is not in the public eye. The leader he or she reports to gets the credit or the blame. And when it comes to the military, the spymaster or staff officer remains in the shadows, without a command, and without a reputation; a footnote in hundreds of histories, the central figure in few or none.

Such a man, here at the horrific Battle of Shiloh in April 1862, was Adjutant-General Thomas Jordan, who had been Confederate Gen. Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard’s right-hand man since before the first Battle of Bull Run the year before, who would stay with him through most of the war, and who defended Beauregard’s reputation ferociously—one might say as if it were his own—ever afterward.

Shiloh, which took place almost one year after the Rebel attack on Fort Sumter that started the American Civil war, was the first truly bloody battle in a conflict that eventually turned slaughter into an industrial activity. At Shiloh there were more casualties (killed, wounded and missing) than in all the previous American wars combined: from the Revolution to 1812, from the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, the carnage pales by comparison.... MORE

A derelict filling station that's a relic of the South where I grew up.

Rifles, including assault rifles, for sale at the Bass Pro Shop pyramid in Memphis.

The statue of Jefferson Davis in Memphis, Tennessee

A quiet corner of Corinth, Mississippi

Wasps on a cannon at Shiloh Battlefield

Black Spies in the Confederate White House (excerpt)

My latest coverage of the American Civil War for The Daily Beast:

The servants knew. The Confederate White House in Richmond, Virginia, was not a happy home. The coachman had heard Varina Davis, the first lady of the South, wondering aloud if the rebellion her husband led had any prayer of success. It was, he heard her say, “about played out.” Less than a year into the war, she had all but given up hope. And the president himself, Jefferson Davis, gaunt and sere, was under tremendous strain, disheartened and querulous, complaining constantly about the lack of popular support for him and his policies.

What the servants at the dinner table heard could be even more interesting: insights into policy, strategy and very private lives. They could glimpse up close the troubled emotions of Varina, who was much younger than her husband. She was in her mid-30s, he was in his mid-50s, and her energy, even her sultry beauty, were resented by many in that small society. She had a dark complexion and generous features that led at least one of her critics to describe her publically as “tawny” and suggest she looked like a mulatto.

Varina’s closest friend and ally in the cabinet was Judah P. Benjamin, the cosmopolitan Jewish secretary of war and then secretary of state. He was a frequent visitor to the Davis residence. He shaped Confederate strategy around the globe. And over port after dinner, what intimacies might have been revealed about this man, whose Louisiana Creole wife lived in self-imposed exile in Paris, and whose constant companion in Richmond was her beautiful younger brother?

As in any of the big households of yesteryear (one thinks of “Downton Abbey,” to take a popular example), what the servants knew about the masters was a great deal more than the masters knew about them. And in the Davis household the servants were black slaves, treated as shadows and often as something less than sentient beings. The Davises knew little of their lives, their hopes, their aspirations, and they certainly did not realize that two of them would spy for the Union.

History is almost equally oblivious. When it comes to secret agents, or servants, or slaves, all learned to tell the smooth lie that let them survive, and few kept records that endure. When it comes to the question of the spies who worked in the Confederate White House, where solid documentary evidence has failed, legend often has stepped in to fill the gaps and, to some considerable extent, to cloud the picture. ... MORE

Audio of my (rather passionate) interview on NPR's Here and Now

July 8, 1861 - "Wicked designs of the South"; arrests in the North

From Our Man in Charleston: Britain's Secret Agent in the Civil War South, to be published July 21.

Purcell M’Quillan was an Irishman who’d been working as a clerk in a Charleston carpet warehouse, and asked for a passport from Bunch so he could go visit his father in Baltimore. When he was arrested, manacled and sent to the infamous prison at Fort Lafayette in New York harbor, M’Quillan was, like many other suspected Southern agents and sympathizers, denied habeas corpus. The

ostensible charges were spying for the rebels and trying to buy weapons, but M’Quillan was released after a few weeks following protests by Lord Lyons. He may never have been involved in anything, and it is plausible that the main reason the clerk was picked up was so Seward’s men could gather more information on Bunch.

The Charleston consul pretended to be unperturbed by all this. After all, M’Quillan was just one of so many messengers he’d sent northward. “I had some conversation with him when I gave him his passport (which I did after full inquiry, an examination on oath, etc.),” Bunch wrote to Lyons. “I asked him if he were going to Washington on his return to Charleston, and on his replying in the affirmative gave him a line to Your Lordship stating that he was a respectable young man and might be trusted with anything you might have for me. Of course he may have been buying arms for the Southern Confederacy, but I really do not believe it.” The last two pages of that letter are in code, which has not been deciphered and, from context, appear to deal with Southern plans for retribution against Britain if it does not recognize and support the Confederacy. They are summed up on the back of the document by the phrase “wicked designs of South.”

Engraving of "the political prison at Washington, corner First and A Streets" from "Harper's Weekly," courtesy of The American Library of Paris.

July 6, 1861 - Seward's spies go after Consul Bunch

From Our Man in Charleston: Britain's Secret Agent in the Civil War South, to be published July 21:

Seward saw spies everywhere, and his spies were everywhere. His police, informants, and private detectives kept a constant flow of information and allegations piling onto his desk. Legal guarantees

for suspected traitors and spies were thrown out.  When William Howard Russell met with Seward in July he accused him of running what amounted to a police state, and Seward was unapologetic. “The government will not shrink from using all the means which they consider necessary to restore the Union.” But as word got back to London of Seward’s activities, Palmerston raged against the effrontery of it all. “These North Americans,” he said, “are following fast the example of the Spanish Americans and the Continental despots. They commit all sorts of violence without regard to law, take up men and women and imprison them on mere suspicion, and rule the land by spies and police and martial law.” …

Lyons was worried. The secret mission to Richmond was approaching, but his man was already under scrutiny. “Her Majesty’s Government does not wish for an éclat here, so be particularly careful to avoid bringing one on, either as respects yourself or me,” Lyons warned Bunch on July 6.  “They have already got stories about you and the persons to whom you have given passports to the North, which I shall do all I can to put straight. They make it necessary for you to be particularly cautious.”At about the same time, Lyons wrote to Russell that he saw “symptoms of a determination here to make [Bunch] an object of attack. To withdraw his exequator would be just the sort of half-violent measure which would, I am afraid, be to Mr. Seward’s taste. It would not be an absolutely brutem fulmen [empty threat], for his recognized official character is necessary to enable him to communicate with the U.S. Blockading Squadron, and to obtain respect for messengers sent to and from him with dispatches.” Lyons concluded by saying, “I have no doubt he will manage the negotiations about the Declaration of Paris as well and as prudently as any man.” But the secrecy around the mission to Richmond was compromised before it ever started.

Seward on the cover of "Harper's Weekly" soon after he took office, courtesy of The American Library of Paris