The Blue and the Gray Undercover

by Ed Gorman

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  INTRODUCTION: Ed Gorman

  John Lutz

  HOBSON’S CHOICE

  Gary Phillips

  THE MEASURE

  Edward D. Hoch

  THE COUNTERFEIT COPPERHEAD

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  THE DEAD LINE

  Loren D. Estleman

  SOUTH GEORGIA CROSSING

  Brendan DuBois

  THE INVISIBLE SPY

  James H. Cobb

  MONICA VAN TELFLIN AND THE PROPER APPLICATION OF PRESSURE

  Aileen Schumacher

  WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS

  Bill Crider

  BELLE BOYD, THE REBEL SPY

  Robert J. Randisi

  THE KNIGHTS OF LIBERTY

  Jane Haddam

  PORT TOBACCO

  Ray Vukcevich

  THE SWAN

  P. G. Nagle

  THE COURTSHIP OF CAPTAIN SWENK

  Jane Lindskold

  THE ROAD TO STONY CREEK

  Janet Berliner

  OTHER ……… 1

  Doug Allyn

  THE TURNCOAT

  Ed Gorman

  A SMALL AND PRIVATE WAR

  Marie Jakober

  SLITHER

  Forge Books by Ed Gorman

  About the Editor

  Copyright Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  Harnett T. Kane wrote a masterly overview of Civil War spying, noting that what the spies lacked in acumen they more than made up for in enthusiasm. But for all the books that have been written on the subject, including Secret Missions of the Civil War by Philip Van Doren Stern, or Spies and Spy Masters of the Civil War by Donald E. Markle, the vast array of undercover missions and spy networks that sprang up on both sides of the Civil War will never be completely known.

  For although the documents regarding espionage during the war collected by the U.S. Government became available to the public in 1953, the rows of crumbling, faded files are just a small fraction of the secret correspondence during the War between the States. The vast majority of reports and secret messages were carried verbally, so vital information would not fall into the wrong hands. Also, thousands of documents, both secret and public, were destroyed during the burning of Atlanta, Richmond, and other cities during the war. Who knows what secret missions of patriotic men and women, who risked their lives on a daily basis to bring a scrap of information to their leaders, have been forever lost in the annals of history?

  When the Civil War began, both the North and the South were woefully unprepared for espionage activities. Although they played catch-up fast, the Confederacy did not have any official kind of secret service bureau until November, 1864. By then both armies bad ciphers and codes, daring heroes and heroines, but most of the spying activity during the conflict was done by a cadre of amateurs from both sides, who were able to gather information with relative ease, though in many instances at great peril to their lives.

  Take the newspapers, for example. Neither the blue nor the gray censored the press, so papers frequently ran extensive coverage of military plans in advance of battles. This practice was so common that Robert E. Lee appointed people to do nothing but collect and study Northern newspapers. Both sides quickly got smart and starred planting false information in such stories. Lee himself spent many hours sifting through the major papers from the North, separating wheat from chaff.

  Women played a significant role in spying. Charm, seduction, and overall cleverness got them many of the secrets they needed. One such female spy was Elizabeth C. Howland. Trained in medicine by her father, she used her skills as a cover while spying for the Confederacy. In one instance, she smuggled documents with Northern fortifications marked on them past enemy lines in a ham bone carried by her own children.

  One of the more famous spies was Elizabeth Van Lew, who carried on a nerve-racking spy operation in Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy. Her eccentric behavior caused many of her neighbors to dismiss her as harmless, enabling her to gather information more easily. When Richmond fell, she entertained Union generals at her home, causing the city’s aristocracy to denounce her as a traitor.

  Perhaps the most daring female spy was Sarah Emma Edmonds, a Canadian who not only brought back valuable information from the Confederate garrison at Fort Monroe, but painted her skin black and wore a rough wig to impersonate a slave to do it.

  Toward the end of the war, blue and gray alike had formal intelligence operations. In large part, these operations stuck to large enemy cities, and points where troops were massing—or were about to mass (newspapers frequently carried this information, too).

  As for sabotage, there were two prime targets—railroads and munitions plants. The former inspired great rage in both the Union and the Confederacy; a lot of young men died when a troop train was blown up or derailed. Fire was a great asset to the saboteur. In 1864 a plot by a small group of saboteurs to burn New York City was uncovered by Union detectives. The plan failed when the “Greek fire” brought in by the Confederates failed to incinerate the building as the chemist who had sold it to them had described, and the fires were easily put out.

  Historians today are struck by how easily one side slipped into the camp of the other. As Kane and Stern both pointed out, this was easy to do. Troops of both sides looked pretty much alike and—except for thick Southern accents—sounded pretty much alike. In fact, Union cavalrymen under the command of General Philip H. Sheridan’s chief of scouts, Harry H. Young, often donned rebel uniforms and entered the enemy lines to gather information. Northerners working to hinder the Union were called Copperheads. Any number of well-known spies not only infiltrated the enemy camp but, in some cases, became popular members of it … all while conducting their surveillance.

  However amusing some aspects of Civil War spying was, it was still a deadly business. Spies were regularly found out and hanged. And some of the espionage was so crafty and immoral—did Lincoln, for instance, unwittingly appoint a Confederate spy to his cabinet?—that thousands of young men’s lives were lost due to revealed information and misinformation. In this age of James Bond and post-Cold War espionage, we sometimes forget that spying has terrible consequences. For both sides.

  This, then, is a collection of original stories about that time and that occupation. The writers have used various aspects of the war as dramatic backdrops to their fiction. From Gary Phillips’s gritty story of a black man doing whatever he had to do just to survive the war, to Bill Crider’s fictionalized account of one of the most famous spies in all of the war, Belle Boyd, these eighteen stories re-create the days when American espionage was in its infancy, and, even worse, when it pitted countryman against countryman. Obviously, as in all fiction, liberties were taken with some of the facts, but this is a collection meant to entertain, not to instruct.

  I hope you enjoy reading this book as much as I enjoyed editing it.

  —ED GORMAN

  John Lutz is one of the most skilled mystery writers working today. His settings and descript
ions always have the ring of authenticity, whether he’s writing about the blues scene in New Orleans or the relationships between men and women. His series characters are also in a class by themselves, whether it be the hapless Alo Nudger or the more traditional detective Fred Carver. A favorite contributor to both Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, his work has also appeared in numerous anthologies, most recently Irreconcilable Differences. In “Hobson’s Choice,” a unit of wounded Rebel soldiers comes upon a Southern woman doing her best to survive the depredations of the North, and find more than simple shelter on her abandoned plantation.

  HOBSON’S CHOICE

  John Lutz

  Eighteen sixty-four. Sherman had been here.

  The fields were dark but for scatterings of green shoots and white and purple wildflowers that had fought their way through the ashes of the dry summer crops. Blackened corpses of farm animals lay grotesquely alongside the road or piled where they’d crowded panicked against fences in their attempt to escape the flames. The distant sight of the skeletal remains of farmhouses and outbuildings, where once prosperous and happy families had lived, tightened Jedediah Logan’s guts as he sat astride his mount on the road south. The horse whinnied and stomped, so he had to pat its neck and calm it. Like him, it could feel and smell death all around them, the scent of decay instead of flowers, the taste of ashes instead of the clean moist air of open land. Even animals knew of the general’s passing through their country.

  Sherman.

  Captain Jed Logan was the surviving ranking officer of the Tennessee Ninth Volunteer Cavalry. Riding slumped in their saddles behind him were his remaining men, all twelve of them.

  On a scouting mission they had blundered across a contingent of Yanks prying the timbers from beneath a rail line into Atlanta, only ten men. Colonel Shivers had called a charge.

  It had been a trap.

  A larger body of Yanks had risen from where they were hidden in the high brush and opened fire with what seemed like everything in the Northern arsenal, even with light artillery that was concealed among trees on a nearby hill.

  The Tennessee Ninth had stopped in midcharge, caught in a crossfire as well as frontal fire from the Yanks on the rails. Horses and men screamed and fell as they fought their way back the way they’d come, seeking shelter from the withering barrage.

  But there was no shelter. Not for quarter of a mile. It was a dash that only thirteen survived. A dozen and Jed Logan, with a bit of grapeshot in his right thigh.

  They kept going, pushing their horses full out, listening to the gunshots and screams and shouting become fainter behind them. It was like riding out of a nightmare.

  Out of range at last, they regrouped, gritted their teeth when they assessed the damage, and turned south. Always they turned south now after such a whipping at the hands of the Yanks. It had become instinct for them. Retreat was set deep in their bones, even if fight was in their blood.

  The noise behind them faded but for a few high-pitched screams. Yanks crowing over a victory, mimicking the Confederate Rebel yell. It was a sound Logan had come to hate.

  He heard hoofbeats hard on his left and saw a shadow on the road. Sergeant Billy Matoon had spurred his horse so he would be alongside Logan’s.

  Matoon, a big blond man from Murfreesboro, wiped his sweaty and grimy broad face with his gray shirtsleeve and looked over at Logan. “How could the Yanks have set the bait for us? No way they coulda known we’d be along.”

  “Luck,” Logan said. “They were ripping up some rail, and one of their outlying scouts saw us and rode ahead to report.”

  “Could have happened that way, sir,” Matoon said. He didn’t sound as if he believed it.

  Logan knew what he was thinking. The Yankee spy Hobson—if that was his real name—was rumored to be in the area. Hobson, who seemed to have been in the area before and after every major battle of the war. Logan wasn’t so sure there really was a Hobson. He was certainly a convenient way for officers to explain their failings when battle plans didn’t work as intended. Hobson’s fault. Perhaps every war had its Hobson.

  “Country in Georgia sure ain’t as pretty as back home,” Matoon said. He held the reins lightly as he rode, his elbows out, one of the Ninth’s most skilled horsemen.

  “Wouldn’t be too sure,” Logan told him. “We haven’t seen home for a while.” As he spoke he realized home, Tennessee, was north of them, surely a saddening thought.

  “Far, far from home,” Matoon said, thinking the same as Logan. Then he glanced around. “At least Satan’s son didn’t torch the woods.”

  On the road’s right, sparsely spaced trees had become closer together, so that now the area was thickly wooded.

  “Only because the woods are too green to burn,” Logan said. Then he raised his right hand and reined in his horse. Behind him, what was left of the Ninth came to a halt.

  Everyone was silent now. The sudden quiet after the relentless thudding of horses’ hooves seemed eerie. Not the slightest sound emanated from the woods. This was a spot Logan himself might have chosen for an ambush, in case a Yankee patrol came along the road. He liked the situation not at all.

  Without speaking, he pointed to Jensen and Roache, two men not wounded back at the rail line. Silently he signaled them to ride ahead, then he waved the men off the road so if need be they could goad their horses east toward burned-out fields where there was little cover for ambush.

  Ten minutes later Jensen and Roache returned. From the sound of their horses’ hoofbeats Logan knew they were riding at military cancer, so he guessed they’d encountered no danger.

  Both men reined in their mounts next to Logan and Matoon.

  “No sign of the enemy, sir,” Jensen, a boy of sixteen from Morgan Springs, said. “But what we found us was a road.”

  “More like a path, sir,” the older, sad-faced Roache said. He spat off to the side. “Mostly grown-over, and it looked like maybe somebody’d arranged some branches to make it less noticeable from the main road.”

  Logan knew that many of the large farm- or plantation-houses were set far away from roads, in the middle of vast fields, and ringed as they were by trees, escaped detection by Sherman’s men. Or, if a house was grand enough, it was used as shelter by the Yanks, and it might be spared while the fields around it were destroyed.

  “Let’s have a look at this path.”

  “Road, sir,” Jensen said. “I seen wagon ruts. Deep ones.”

  Logan gave a hand signal, and the Ninth urged their weary horses forward.

  Roache was right. The branch off the main road didn’t look like much more than a path. It was overgrown with grass and some hickory saplings where it met the road, and a few felled tree limbs looked as if they’d been dragged across it strategically for concealment.

  And Jensen was right. There were wagon-wheel ruts, deep but old.

  Logan looked at the cloudless sky still bright with afternoon sun. He knew the Ninth was testing its luck, pushing on though beaten and exhausted. His plan was to lead his troops south until they might meet up with and join a larger force commanded by General Wheeler. They weren’t on a timetable. And they certainly could use some rest and water and—God willing—some food beyond what was left of their meager rations.

  He looked at Matoon, and both men nodded simultaneously.

  Logan sat straighter in the saddle and motioned Jensen and Roache ahead to scout. He gave them a few minutes, then waved the rest of the men on and spurred his horse lightly.

  The trail led through woods that were thick at first, making the going slow. Oak and locust trees close on either side tent shade. Then the trail widened, and the wagon ruts were quite visible. Some of them appeared fresh.

  When they were clear of the trees they saw the house.

  Jensen and Roache sat mounted off to the side, waiting. There was nothing to scout here, only a dark, level plane of burned field and beyond it a white plantation house. The house was almost l
arge enough to be called a mansion, with seven columns across the front of a wide gallery porch.

  Logan smiled. This looked safe enough, but who could know for sure? The massacre at the rail line was still bitter in his stomach and poison to his heart. He smiled grimly and nodded to Jensen and Roache. “You two ride ahead and skirt the woods, then approach the house from the rear.”

  “We’ll do ’er,” Jensen said, as the two men tugged right on the reins and their horses set off at an angle.

  Logan knew Jensen wouldn’t have talked so casually to the colonel, but he didn’t figure it mattered.

  When his scouts hadn’t signaled immediately for them to approach the house, Logan wasn’t surprised. Danger was everywhere now, and the rail-line massacre was still vivid in his mind. The screams of dying men would echo for a long time, maybe forever.

  Coming across this place was a touch of fortune, though. The Ninth would have concealment and shelter. But Logan doubted if they would find food in the house, and the well would surely be poisoned. It was possible that despite the pure white of the structure from a distance, the interior had been burned out.

  “Nobody there, sir,” Roache said, when the scouts had returned. “Inside of the place ain’t been torched, but it sure don’t look lived in.”

  “Not for a good while, anyways,” Jensen said. “Dust over everything thick as peach fuzz. And spiderwebs and those white cloths over the furniture. Looks like it’s haunted.”

  “We can be sure it is,” Logan said, thinking of what must have happened to the inhabitants. The crops had been burned, so the Yanks who’d first passed this direction had known about the house.

  “We go in,” he said, and led the way.

  * * *

  The great house looked even larger, but much more decrepit, as they got closer. There were fine cracks in the white facade. Some of the shutters were hanging slightly crooked or were missing.

  Logan dismounted, testing his weight on his wounded leg. It would do for a while.

  He limped up onto the wide porch and toward the tall oak doors, noticing that several of the floor planks were rotted through. Ivy had found its way through one of the openings.