C8| Saturday/Sunday, August 17 - 18, 2019 ** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.**
The Secret War
for the Union
By Edwin C. Fishel (1996)
1
In 1959 Edwin Fishel
discovered, in the National
Archives, the intelligence
files of the Army of the
Potomac still wrapped in the red
ribbons they had been bound
with at the end of the Civil War.
A National Security Agency
analyst, Fishel realized that all
the histories of the Civil War
had been written with little or
no understanding of the role of
intelligence. A key figure turned
out to be Col. George H. Sharpe,
who, by 1863, had created a
fully functioning and potent
intelligence operation—the
Bureau of Military Information.
Prior to the Battle of
Chancellorsville in 1863, the
bureau’s analysis had provided
the Union’s Maj. Gen. Joseph
Hooker with an accurate
estimate of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s
strength, the location of every
brigade-size unit, and a
complete picture of the region’s
roads and the enemy’s main
supply-route railroad. Hooker’s
battle plan (which failed for
other reasons) was built around
this information. Two months
after the battle, the bureau’s
efforts would prove critical to
the Union victory at Gettysburg.
There, Sharpe’s men transmitted
one of the most important
intelligence reports in the
history of the U.S. Army—the
information that told Maj. Gen.
George Meade how thin Lee’s
reserves were. Even by today’s
high-tech standards, the
operations of Sharpe’s agency
stand as nothing less than
brilliant.
Grant’s Secret Service
By William B. Feis (2002)
2
“I do not expect to be
still,” Gen. Ulysses S.
Grant wrote after his
victory at Vicksburg in
July 1863. He had been ably
served in that battle by Brig.
Gen. Grenville Dodge, but there
had nonetheless been gaps in
the intelligence that Dodge
provided—a weakness for
which Grant believed he could
compensate with relentless
offensive operations. This tactic
proved successful until Grant
moved to the eastern theater
of the war, where his opponent
was Robert E. Lee. Grant now
began to rely increasingly on
the intelligence provided by
Col. Sharpe’s Bureau of Military
Information. At the Siege of
Petersburg, Grant wrote that Lee
“could not send off any large
Peter G. Tsouras
The author, most recently, of ‘Major General George H. Sharpe
and the Creation of American Military Intelligence in the Civil War’all the great philosophical questions
and providing the last word about the
great philosophical subjects: reality,
truth, beauty, goodness. In its early
years in Europe, philosophy was by
its nature a radical activity, always
in danger of stepping out of bounds,
either by questioning religion or
threatening to replace it. The early
English philosophers, living in a thor-
oughly Christianized society, needed
to tread carefully lest religious sensi-
bilities be aroused against them, which
they frequently were.
The sub-rosa antagonism between
religion and philosophy is revealed on
religion’s side in Martin Luther’s re-
mark that “any potter knows more
than him [Aristotle],” and in John
Donne, who, in Mr. Rée’s words, “con-
sidered philosophy closer to music
than theology.” The English Puritans
viewed philosophy as anti-Christian,
while in Holland Spinoza was excom-
municated by the Jews. Until late into
the 19th century, religion remained
firmly in command. David Hume, who
was no Christian but not entirely an
ContinuedfrompageC7
atheist either—Thomas Henry Huxley
coined the word “agnostic” only as
late as 1869—remarked that “errors in
religion are dangerous; those in philos-
ophy only ridiculous.”
As religion declined from its posi-
tion of pervasive dominance, philoso-
phy did not correspondingly rise. The
two, religion and philosophy, were
never armies of thought openly bat-
tling to the death. Philosophy’s posi-
tion vis-à-vis religion was generally
less a direct attack than a sniper oper-
ation. But during the 20th century,
philosophy tended to retreat—to all
but vanish, some would say, up its
own bottom.
This came about through philoso-
phy’s new interiority—its questioning
of its own assumptions, premises,
tools. Among the assumptions up for
questioning were such basic items as
numbers, colors and chiefly words
themselves. By the close of the 19th
century metaphysics, with its concen-
tration on first principles and on the
higher abstract concepts, had been de-
feated by the British empiricists, prag-
matists, logical positivists and others.
Then there appeared Ludwig Witt-
genstein, perhaps the only authentic
genius among modern philosophers.
“The difficulty in philosophy,” Witt-
genstein held, “is to say no more than
we know.” His aim, as Mr. Rée puts it,
was “to trace the limits of what can
be thought, and forestall any urge to
go beyond them”; or, in Wittgenstein’sstein, kept to his own course, contemp-
tuous of academic philosophy, indepen-
dent until his death in 1951 at age 62.
Philosophy, Wittgenstein thought,
ought to be treated as poetry, and
“philosophy should really written only
as one would write poetry.” His own
ostensibly modest view of the goal of
philosophy was “to be rid of a particu-
lar kind of puzzlement”—that brought
about by imprecision in language lead-
ing to muzzy thought. In one of his
famous similes, he held philosophy was
more like “tidying up a room” than
“building a house.” He believed “it is
not enough to state the truth, you
must find the path from error to
truth.” Comparing himself to Hegel,
Wittgenstein remarked that “my inter-
est is always in showing that things
which look alike are really different,”
where Hegel was “always wanting to
say that things which look different are
really the same.”
Wittgenstein did not write books,
at least not in the conventional sense
of compositions in which paragraph
follows paragraph, chapter follows
chapter. His preferred form was the
sentence. Many of these sentences are
highly technical (“‘p.q’ only makes
sense if ‘pvq’ makes sense”), their
meanings well beyond the mental
grasp of this philosophast; others are
in the form of questions; several fea-
ture paradox; a few attain to dazzling
aphorism. In Wittgenstein’s “Note-
books 1914-1916” one finds that “Mymethod is not to sunder the hard from
the soft, but to see the hardness of the
soft.” Or: “It is one of the chief skills of
the philosopher not to occupy himself
with questions which do not concern
him.” Or: “All theories that say: ‘This
is how it must be, otherwise we could
not philosophize’ or ‘otherwise we
surely could not live,’ etc. etc., must
of course disappear.” His first work,
the “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,”
begins, “The world is all that is the
case”—to which the poet Donald Hall
retorted, “Now stop your blubbering
and wash your face.” One feels that
Wittgenstein would have enjoyed the
riposte.
Next to the lively periods over
which, in its long history, it has
passed, philosophy in English (and one
gathers in every other language) is
now on to dull days. At present there
are no towering figures, no fruitful
heresies, no new schools that com-
mand the attention of those outside
the academy. Jonathan Rée does not
predict its future. But he has no need
to do so; his lively chronicle of philos-
ophy in English is a splendid accom-
plishment sufficient unto itself. Highly
intelligent, always even-handed, qui-
etly but consistently witty, “Witcraft”
is an excellent guide along the twisted
and tricky path of human thought.Mr. Epstein is the author, most
recently, of “Charm: The Elusive
Enchantment.”In Praise
Of the Lovers
Of Wisdom
own admonitory words, “whereof one
cannot speak, thereof one must be
silent.” The silence Wittgenstein
called for within philosophy was deaf-
ening—though Bertrand Russell, who
in later years was often at odds with
Wittgenstein, remarked that “Mr.
Wittgenstein manages to say a good
deal about what cannot be said.”Wittgenstein dominates the last
150-or-so pages of “Witcraft.” Apart
from being the most significant figure
in modern philosophy, Wittgenstein is
a fascinating human specimen. The
scion of a wealthy family, he gave away
much of his inheritance. He abandoned
philosophy to serve five years on the
side of Austria in World War I. For no
fewer than six years, he left a fellow-
ship at Cambridge to teach 11-year-old
students in a village in the Austrian
alps. Wittgenstein held H.G. Wells,
Albert Einstein, and Bertrand Russell
to be three of the greatest vendors of
nonsense of his time. As philosophy ev-
erywhere began to settle into standard
university departments, he, Wittgen-Philosophy was long a
radical activity, always
in danger of stepping out
of bounds by questioning
the answers of religion.FIVE BESTBOOKS ON MILITARY INTELLIGENCE IN THE CIVIL WAR
BOOKS
‘Only a brilliant ruler or a wise general who can use the highly intelligent for espionage is sure of great success.’—SUN TZU
body of men without my
knowing it.” William Feis
concludes that fighting Lee had
taught Grant that his judgment
was not infallible. The result
was a more pronounced reliance
on military intelligence. By the
fall of 1864 Grant’s intuition,
his initiative and Sharpe’s
intelligence network had fused
to create a potent weapon.Southern Lady,
Yankee Spy
By Elizabeth R. Varon (2003)3
Elizabeth Van Lew
was a member of the
Richmond, Va., elite
but also, remarkably,
a diehard Union patriot and
abolitionist. Determined to
serve, she connected with Union
intelligence sources. Employing
a cover story that portrayed her
as an eccentric who was not to
be taken seriously, she operated
a highly effective spy network
for the Union and worked
tirelessly to aid Union prisoners
of war, helping to plan their
escapes. When Richmond began
to fall in early April 1865, this
bold patriot displayed a huge
U.S. flag on her roof while an
angry mob threatened to burn
down her house. After the war,
as Elizabeth Varon recounts in
her fine biography of Van Lew,
President Grant made her
postmaster of Richmond, but
Grant’s successor, Rutherford B.
Hayes—hoping to appease
prominent former Confederateswho never forgave Van Lew—
refused to continue her
appointment. Having beggared
herself in service to the Union,
she ended her days supported
by the families of the Union
prisoners she had helped
escape to freedom.Confederate Agent
By James D. Horan (1954)4
Copperheads were
Northern Democrats
so bitterly opposed to
Abraham Lincoln’s
war for the preservation of
the Union that they were
determined to destroy the
federal government and take
Illinois, Indiana and Ohio into
the Confederacy. Their name
came from the copper Indian
Head penny they wore inside
their lapel as a recognition
symbol to the like-minded.
Their plan—instigated by
Thomas Hines, the Confederate
agent at the center of James
Horan’s investigative study—
was to liberate and arm the tens
of thousands of Confederate
prisoners held in Midwest
prisoner-of-war camps. The
1864 Democratic convention
in Chicago was established
as zero hour for the plan.
Already prominent Democratic
politicians sympathetic to the
cause had gathered Confederate
gold to finance the revolt, but
it would never take place.
Union intelligence had not been
asleep, inserting its own agentas the Copperhead corres-
ponding secretary. Before the
convention began, the ring-
leaders were arrested, the
conspiracy crushed.Lincoln’s Spymaster
By David Hepburn Milton (2003)5
“It would be superfluous
of me to point out to
your lordship that this
is war.” Charles Francis
Adams, the U.S. ambassador
to Britain, had delivered the
warning to John Russell,
Britain’s foreign secretary,
on Sept. 5, 1863. The British,
turning a blind eye to their
own neutrality laws, had been
building, in private shipyards,
so-called commerce raiders—
ships designed to raid merchant
shipping—for the Confederacy.
Among them, in Liverpool,
were two armored warships
of such power that, once
completed, they could break
the Union blockade of the South
and ravage the Northern ports.
The U.S. had been informed of
this danger by the detailed
intelligence provided by Thomas
Dudley, the U.S. consul in
Liverpool and the subject of
“Lincoln’s Spymaster.” Dudley
occupied a role equivalent to a
CIA station chief today. For two
years, he had been waging an
espionage duel with Confederate
agents. Upon receiving Adams’s
warning, the British blinked,
seized the ships and transferred
them to the Royal Navy.SECRET AGENT MEN George H. Sharpe, left, and other officers of the Bureau of Military
Information in front of their headquarters in Brandy Station, Va., in 1864.LIBRARY OF CONGRESSThe Cradle
Of Cultural
Anthropology
luctant to admit that she and Benedict had parted
ways with “Papa Franz.” Her bland and evasive
memoir, “Blackberry Winter,” published in 1972,
played down the extent of her own rebellion, and I
think she would have welcomed Mr. King’s presump-
tion that she and Benedict were carrying forward
the orthodox Boasian program. In the summer of
1976, I spent a week in New York, interviewing Mead
for a BBC documentary on her work and life. She
brushed aside my questions, preferring to quote
almost verbatim from “Blackberry Winter” and
recite, for the thousandth time, the origin story of
her intellectual baptism by Boas and the epic of her
two most famous field studies.
By that time, however, a backlash was building.
A few years after her death, in 1978, Derek Freeman,
a professor of anthropology in Canberra, Australia,
published a savage critique of Mead’s Samoan study.
He claimed that she had twisted her findings to fit
the Boas doctrine that culture trumps biology. More
damagingly, he insinuated that her young Samoan
informants had deliberately fooled her, boasting
about their sex lives, whereas in fact these adoles-
cents were firmly controlled by their fathers and
had to remain virgins until marriage. To top it off,
Freeman trumpeted that he was, by rubbishing
Mead’s apprentice study, delivering a decisive blow
against the whole edifice of cultural relativism.
Freeman was a cranky obsessive, and his attack
on Mead’s research was wildly overblown, but his
claims were welcomed by some conservative intel-
lectuals. In his 1987 polemic “The Closing of the
American Mind,” Allan Bloom took aim at the
cultural relativists. Mead herself was a particular
target. Bloom accused her of disrespect for Ameri-
can civilization, and also of being a “sexual adven-
turer.” And that she was. Mr. King offers a striking
image of Mead on her way to Samoa to begin her
first field study: “She had left behind a husband
in New York and a boyfriend in Chicago, and had
spent the transcontinental train ride in the arms of
a woman.” That woman was Ruth Benedict. In the
1980s, a flood of biographies began to appear, with
sensational accounts of her three marriages and a
variety of heterosexual and lesbian partnerships.
As it turned out, however, these revelations served
to make Mead and Benedict interesting again. Free
spirits and pioneering women scholars, they were
recast as icons for a new feminist generation.
These two were not the only remarkable women
in Boas’s circle. Mr. King tracks Boas’s “intellectual
revolution” through the work of several female
acolytes, and provides a particularly fascinating
profile of Zora Neale Hurston. The daughter of a
Baptist minister who was mayor of Eatonville, an
all-black town in Florida, Hurston was encouraged
by Boas to collect folk tales in the American South
and the Caribbean. She went on to publish folklore
collections and also several novels that featured
zombies and voodoo, but she died in obscurity in- The poet and novelist Alice Walker tracked
down her archive and championed her work, and
Hurston is now counted as a significant figure in
the Harlem Renaissance.
Arguably, she was a more orthodox Boasian
than Mead or Benedict, because what she took
from Boas was not a big idea, as Mr. King implies,
but rather a method. She summed this up in terms
that many anthropologists will instantly recognize:
“Just squat down a while, and after that things
begin to happen.” Or, more memorably, in the
words of one of her fictional characters, “It’s uh
known fact, you got tuh go there tuh know there.”
So is Mr. King’s account history or myth?
Like the Kwakiutl narratives collected by Boas in
British Columbia, it is a bit of both.
Mr. Kuper, a specialist on the ethnography of
Southern Africa, has written widely on the history
and theory of anthropology.ContinuedfrompageC7