Category Archives: military

by | 14 March 2023 · 6:28 am

Eastern Europe After Mohacz

From The Making of Eastern Europe: From Prehistory to Postcommunism, by Philip Longworth (Lume Books, 2020), Kindle pp. 250-252:

The political consequences of the battle of Mohacz were also considerable. Louis II had died childless; and the Habsburgs of Austria, long-sighted dynastic politicians and shrewd diplomatists, became the leading contenders for the thrones of both Hungary and Bohemia, and soon gained both. But in Hungary there was strong backing for a local candidate, John Zapolyai, and he, too, was crowned king. This political division weakened resistance to the Turks, who by the end of 1541 had occupied the southern and central parts of the country, including the capital Buda; and gained suzerainty over the east, which became a largely autonomous principality, Transylvania.

The death of Louis had ended one Eastern European dynasty. Two others failed to survive the sixteenth century. The last Jagiellonian King of Poland-Lithuania died in 1572; the last of Russia’s ancient Riurikid dynasty in 1591. In both instances political hiatus encouraged tumults, though, as we have seen, the long-term outcomes were quite dissimilar. While Russia returned to dynastic rule, Poland abandoned it. In this respect she came to resemble the smaller polities in the region, the Danubian Principalities, self-governing tributaries to the Turk, which also lacked dynastic rule: The instability of their domestic politics is suggested by the fact that, in the course of one century Wallachia had twenty-four, and Moldavia no fewer than forty, changes of ruling prince, or hospodar.

These religious and political changes were obvious to contemporaries. But there were other shifts, no less profound in their effects, which were much less noticeable at the time, or recognized only in retrospect.

Europe’s centre of economic gravity had been moving from the Mediterranean to the countries bordering on the North Atlantic; from the basin of the River Po to that of the Rhine (where it has remained); and from the emporia of Istanbul and Venice to that of Amsterdam. Furthermore, a surge in the population of Western Europe, and in particular of its cities, was stimulating a sharply increasing demand, and hence higher prices, for imported foodstuffs which Eastern Europe was able to supply. This was to have marked social as well as economic effects, especially on those regions with access to the Baltic, not least in encouraging the rise of serfdom.

At the same time the importation of silver from the Americas was promoting a sharp increase in the money supply and hence serious inflation. This was to throw the finely-tuned mechanisms of the Ottoman state out of kilter and prove a major factor in its subsequent decline. And there was one change perceived by very few, if at all, the indirect effects of which were felt by almost everyone. This was ‘the little ice age’, a slight but insidious drop in the average temperature beginning late in the sixteenth century. By restricting the latitude and height at which agriculture was viable this precipitated famines, population movements and the great disorders which were to overtake most of Eastern Europe at the turn of the century, turning the frontier lands especially into a crucible of violence.

And there was a plethora of other factors which intervened at various points with varying intensity to influence the course things took. Linguistic differences, for example, sometimes fed into religious and political struggles; and social classes sometimes gained or lost constitutional rights according to the religion they embraced at a particular moment. Low population density in Poland-Lithuania contributed to the enserfment of the peasant; yet high population density in the Ottoman Empire contributed to the disruption of that state. Sometimes the effects seem paradoxical. The Turkish presence, so often assumed to be a wholly negative influence, slowed down and even reversed the process of enserfment in Hungary for a time. The Baltic grain boom had helped to promoted serfdom, yet the end of the boom around the turn of the century served not to remove serfdom, but to entrench it. And though Protestantism is often associated with the origins of modern science Copernicus was a priest whom Polish Protestants rejected, while the patron of Tycho Brahe and Kepler was a Habsburg. The interactions of circumstances and catalysts that shaped Eastern Europe in the period from 1526 to 1648 far exceeded in complexity the most complicated transmutation process in any alchemists’ laboratory.

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by | 13 March 2023 · 5:01 am

The Ramshackle Habsburg Empire

From The Making of Eastern Europe: From Prehistory to Postcommunism, by Philip Longworth (Lume Books, 2020), Kindle pp. 225-227:

Like the Hohenzollerns of Prussia, the Habsburgs had a variety of rights and powers in many different lands. They were Archdukes of Austria, hereditary Kings of Bohemia, traditional candidates to the elective throne of Hungary (though the Turks occupied much of it and Transylvania was an autonomous principality); and, besides holding a plethora of other titles, were Emperors of the Holy Roman Empire (again as hereditary candidates), a position which gave them little direct power, but a great deal of prestige and not a little patronage. The Habsburgs, then, governed in various ways at once – sometimes exerting direct authority backed up by force; more often abiding by precedents, negotiating, persuading, exerting influence through their powers to grant titles and make appointments.

Theirs was a ramshackle empire, which had expended much of its wealth and sustained much damage during the Thirty Years’ War; and it was still threatened by powerful enemies, notably Ottoman Turkey and France. Furthermore, although the Habsburgs had been the chief protagonist of the Catholic cause in the war, and although the peace sanctioned their imposing it on all their subjects, it was not practicable to do so in Hungary, where there were many Protestants; and the suppression of Protestantism elsewhere, as in Bohemia, tended to promote sullen resentment which might be exploited in the cause of rebellion. How, then, were these obstacles to Habsburg authority to be overcome? What glue could be found to bind these disparate peoples and territories into a cohesive body politic?

According to a leading authority the recipe called for the mutual support of the dynasty, the Counter-Reformation Church and a cosmopolitanized aristocracy, who formed a community of interest; and the use of religious mysteries, the mystique of kingship and the magic of the arts to hold people in thrall. But the military was also important.

The Habsburgs emerged from the war with a permanent standing army and thereafter strove to enlarge it, though as late as 1683 the establishment was only 36,000. Since this was a professional, disciplined, force which did not normally live off the land, it did not arouse the resentment of the population in the localities where it was stationed, as had formerly been the case. Indeed, in time, the army came to promote loyalty to the dynasty not only among those who served in it (the new permanent armies presented welcome new career opportunities to gentlemen and commoners alike), but among a wider public. The sight of neat ranks of men in attractive uniforms marching by to the invigorating sound of flutes and drums tended to arouse popular enthusiasm, and when the army won victories the dynasty gained prestige.

Nonetheless, as in Russia, the practice of religion and the institution of the Church were recognized as being of prime importance in legitimating the dynasty and promoting deference among its subjects. Both Ferdinand III and his successor Leopold I (1657–1705) were personally devout and, like Alexis of Russia, made public show of it. Leopold often made pilgrimages, visited monasteries three or four times a week and dispensed a great deal of charity to the needy. He also believed oaths, including those he himself swore, to be binding. Yet, like Alexis, insofar as he showed himself to be as pious as any prelate, he felt entitled to interfere in church affairs. Not only did he control the more important ecclesiastical appointments, order special prayers to be said and proclaim religious holidays by decree, he imposed taxes on the clergy and milked the church of funds, plate and valuables as the need arose. One can therefore understand the wry comment of the papal nuncio who wished the Emperor were not quite so pious.

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by | 5 March 2023 · 6:45 am

Eastern Europe After World War I

From The Making of Eastern Europe: From Prehistory to Postcommunism, by Philip Longworth (Lume Books, 2020), Kindle pp. 99-101:

The consequences of the war were grievous. The loss of manpower in this overpopulated region was the least of them. A large proportion of the survivors were exhausted, ill-clothed and had forgotten the skills they had possessed before the war. They were also ill-fed. Losses of livestock were to take twenty years to make up. Partly as a result of the dearth of draught animals, cereal production everywhere except Bulgaria had diminished by between a quarter and a half by comparison with 1913. Even if this had not been the case, the earning potential for agricultural exports, which had been very considerable before the war, especially from Romania, Hungary and Ukraine, had fallen sharply, for, thanks to the war, the United States and Canada had become the world’s granary instead of Eastern Europe. And increased production in the West had caused world prices to slump. Czech industry, among the least affected, was producing 30 per cent less than before the war; in most of the other countries production was halved. The war had also dissipated savings, so funds available for investment were scarce. Inflation grew apace, ruining many members of the middle classes; so did interest rates. Business confidence was very low.

Matters were made worse by the Peace Settlement, which allowed other criteria to override the concern to draw frontiers that made economic sense. As a result towns lost their agricultural hinterlands; villagers found their access to mountain pastures, on which they traditionally grazed their cattle, suddenly blocked by frontier posts; the headquarters and branch offices of many a firm found that, overnight, they were in different countries where different laws and taxation systems applied. Railways lines were cut off from their former termini and cities from their railway stations. Romania’s newly-acquired port of Bazias had no communications to link it with the rest of the country. Hungary’s second city, Szeged, once a thriving regional emporium, became a sleepy frontier town. Grass was soon growing on the once busy docks of Trieste, now part of Italy, which had no need of another port.

The new frontiers cut across communication systems in a way that made nation-building the more difficult and expensive. Resurrected Poland found herself with parts of three different railway networks, each with different gauges and signalling systems; and, since they had been built with military purposes rather than international trade in mind, they did not usually meet up with one another. In Czechoslovakia all the main lines ran north-south, radiating from the old centres of Vienna and Budapest, whereas the new country’s axis lay east-west. Her predicament led to a bitter struggle with Poland for possession of Tesin (Polish Cieszyn), whose stretch of line was the only link between the head and the tail of Czechoslovakia, although Tesin’s population was predominately Polish and its mines a hotly disputed prize for both countries.

Such predicaments encouraged the continuation of a ‘war psychosis’. There was not only a desperate concern to protect one’s territory against one’s neighbours (and, if possible, to acquire more from them), but a willingness to wage economic warfare and, when opportunity offered, to loot. When, with the encouragement of the Powers who wanted to see Bela Kun’s Communist regime brought down, Romanian troops occupied Budapest in August 1919, they carried away as much of the telephone equipment and railway rolling stock as they could, even if they could put it to no use. Hungary retaliated later by cutting Romania’s telephone access to the West. When Romania was in dispute with Yugoslavia, she closed the locks controlling the flow of water from the Danube and so brought river traffic on the Yugoslav side to a halt. The Czechs refused to supply Hungary or Austria with coal, or to allow Polish coal to be shipped to them across her territory. The frontiers between Poland and Lithuania and between Yugoslavia and Bulgaria were repeatedly closed, and it was to take fifteen years to repair a two-mile gap in the telephone line between Belgrade and Sofia. The beggar-my-neighbour attitude was also reflected in fierce tariff wars.

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by | 3 March 2023 · 5:42 am

Fate of 1968ers in Greece and Poland

From The Making of Eastern Europe: From Prehistory to Postcommunism, by Philip Longworth (Lume Books, 2020), Kindle pp. 39-40:

Student unrest, first marked in Italy in 1966, began to spread throughout Europe, including some countries in the Bloc, while in Greece a junta of colonels staged a coup d’etat against everything the students stood for and in support of traditional values. It was ironic that Greece, despite massive injections of American aid and sizeable income from Greeks working abroad, had failed to match even neighbouring Bulgaria’s increase in living standards since the war. What happened in Greece raised the question of how many Soviet Bloc countries, with their still largely traditional cultures, might have resorted to military government in the postwar era had they not been taken into the Soviet orbit. More immediately, however, it raised the question of how their governments would react to the imported Western phenomenon of student protest.

In Poland, one of the two countries most affected, there was a reaction analogous to that of the Colonels. Early in 1968 the production of a play by the nineteenth-century romantic, Mickiewicz (see Chapter 5), was banned because it included some anti-Russian remarks. This provoked fierce student calls for greater freedom and ‘national autonomy’. The students’ zeal found an echo among many intellectuals, not least among economists who had been pressing for reform. There was no echo, however, among the working classes. Nonetheless the Interior Minister, Mieczyslaw Moczar, reacted strongly.

Like the Colonels in Greece, Moczar was cast in the old, heroic mould, and he was motivated by two traditional values in particular: nationalism and antisemitism. By extension he also disliked intellectuals and economists who were threatening the position of so many loyal, bureaucratic place-men. Moczar saw a chance of defusing tension by exploiting long-standing popular prejudices. Accordingly he arranged for students to be beaten up and for many of them to be arrested. He set up a commission to ‘supervise’ the handful of Jews remaining in Poland after the Holocaust, and to coordinate antisemitic propaganda. But the experiment was short-lived. In December 1968 the commission was abolished and Moczar disappeared from the stage.

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by | 2 March 2023 · 5:27 am

Eastern Europe, 1990s: Disappointment

From The Making of Eastern Europe: From Prehistory to Postcommunism, by Philip Longworth (Lume Books, 2020), Kindle pp. 9-10:

The rejoicing was widespread, and particularly intense among the young as well as those who had run foul of the pervasive officialdom and the secret police. Yet the euphoria did not last long. The sudden removal of controls and taboos encouraged entrepreneurs and foreign investors, but also crooks and asset-strippers. Attempts at systemic change and reorientation of trade resulted in economic dislocations and both industrial and consumer shortages. Production plummeted; so did real incomes. Inflation rose and hoarding made things worse. As rules and procedures associated with the old order were increasingly ignored, and as uncertainty about the law, the value of things and, not least, the validity of legal titles increased, so did a degree of chaos. At the same time crime rates soared.

Measures to control inflation and reduce subsidies and over-manning produced rising prices and unemployment, industrial discontent and rising pessimism. There had been hopeful talk of another Marshall Plan, but President Bush held out an empty wallet. The world, after all, was in the throes of one of those periodic economic turns which Communists used to refer to scornfully as ‘crises of capitalism’. Help did come but chiefly in the form of loans with harsh conditions attached. The millions who had innocently assumed that revolution would bring them instant betterment were disappointed.

There were unexpected political, as well as economic, consequences. To the ill-disguised dismay of many countries East and West, the two Germanies rushed to reunification. In Poland the ‘Solidarity’ movement soon split asunder; an unknown emigre attracted more votes than the conscientious Premier Mazowiecki in the presidential elections won by Lech Walesa; and Polish cities were disfigured by anti-semitic graffiti. In Romania, as in Bulgaria, reformed Communists were victorious in what were substantially free elections, yet the opposition ‘Democrats’ refused to accept the electorate’s decision. In Hungary parliament became the scene of endless bickering between a multitude of different parties; in Czechoslovakia bitter resentment soon surfaced between Czechs and Slovaks; and at the time of writing (March 1991) unbridled nationalism and strident populism were threatening the break-up of Yugoslavia and the collapse of the USSR itself.

As a new order emerges from the turmoil some features that had previously characterized the region have begun to disappear. But what were these countries like before the changes? What was the stable state before the state of flux?

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by | 24 February 2023 · 5:38 am

Ethnic Status in 1920s Kenya

From White Mischief: The Murder of Lord Erroll, by James Fox (Open Road Media, 2014), Kindle pp. 16-18:

The Masai had been the favoured tribe from the days when Delamere first met them, laughing with pleasure and cracking skulls with their long clubs. Only the feudally minded could make allies of them while they were still raiding cattle from Lake Victoria to the Indian Ocean, killing herdsmen and their women and children as a matter of pride. At first the Masai stole mercilessly from Delamere’s herds, practising their belief that all the cattle under God belong exclusively to their tribe and that even Delamere’s imported Hereford bull had been taken from them long ago. (Hence their withering looks when they came to watch the European cattle auctions.)

There is nothing more valuable to the Masai than cattle, and next to that, perhaps, their passion for physical adornment. Because they never ate meat and never slaughtered or sold their livestock, the Masai chiefs that Delamere befriended owned upwards of 50,000 cattle each, and by 1910 the tribe was estimated to own three million head. But they had consistently lost grazing land in the several treaties made with the white man since the setting up of the tribal reservations in 1905. No consideration was given, for example, to their traditional places of retreat in times of drought or pestilence, and by 1914 they were suffering from land hunger.

The Somalis were the fashionable servants, the top “boys” in any household in the early days. They were immensely proud and elegant, the essence of nomadic nobility, with their waistcoats and gold watch chains, their low guttural voices and their strict Mohammedan ways. Many of them, like the Masai, were rich in cattle in their own country across Kenya’s northern frontier. They were linked in fame and fortune with their employers and associated by name, Delamere with Hassan, Berkeley Cole with Jama, Denys Finch Hatton with Bilea, Karen Blixen with Farah. Blixen wrote that a house without a Somali was like a house without a lamp: “Wherever we went we were followed at a distance of five feet by these noble, mysterious and vigilant shadows.”

The Kikuyu, whose land stretched from Nairobi to the slopes of Mount Kenya, who were later to outstrip all other tribes in political ambition, were hired as labourers and domestic servants. At the outbreak of the First World War, they were drafted, with the other tribes, into the King’s African Rifles and the Carrier Corps as porters, and died in their thousands in one of the most shameful campaigns ever waged by a British Army, in which, at the start of hostilities, 250,000 British Empire troops were held down by 10,000 Germans under Count von Lettow Vorbeck, who had to forage for supplies for the duration of the war. When it was over the British force had been reduced to 35,000 and the German force to only 1,300.

As the monuments were put up to the African soldiery, the usual sentiments were expressed. In this case the natives had “responded most loyally to the call by the Government for porters.” In fact, of course, they had little choice. (One of the unremembered battles of that war was between draft-resisting Masai and the British forces themselves.)

The Kikuyu, in particular, went unrewarded. After the war, a new scheme was devised to persuade ex-soldiers from Britain to settle in Kenya to swell the European population. The land this time was distributed by lottery. As this new wave of settlers invaded the highlands, more pressure was exerted on the Kikuyu. The farm wage was reduced, hut and poll taxes were levied, and identification cards issued, forcing their dependence on the white wage.

By the early 1920s the general areas of production were set up. Gilgil and Nakuru were the centres of the livestock business, Thika was coffee, Njoro was wheat, Naivasha was sheep and cattle and Londiani, in the west, was flax.

All the land schemes had clearly favoured the European at the expense of the African population. It was a short-sighted policy and the Kikuyu made their first organised protest in 1922, only two years after Kenya became an official Crown Colony.

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by | 17 February 2023 · 1:36 am

Who Fought for Whom, 1861-65?

From Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War, by David Williams (New Press, 2010), Kindle pp. 245-246:

Though the conflict may have been a rich man’s war, it was not as much of a poor man’s fight as the rich tried to make it. That was true for North and South. On both sides, the lowest of the lower classes tended to be as adamant as the rich in their refusal to fight—or refusal to fight for their region’s dominant regime. In the South, while most Confederate soldiers were nonslaveholders and poorer than their slaveholding neighbors, southerners even poorer still were more likely to dodge the draft, desert, or serve in the Union army. As for the North, James McPherson, in his Battle Cry of Freedom, presents evidence suggesting that the poorest northerners were among the least likely to serve. It was in fact their resistance to the draft, and northern dissent generally, that goes a long way toward explaining how a Confederacy at war with itself as well as the North was able to survive for as long as it did….

Despite the North’s population advantage of two to one, only about a million native-born northerners served in the Union military—roughly the same as the number of southerners who served the Confederacy. Nearly a fourth of the Union armed forces were made up of immigrants, and almost another fourth were southerners, black and white. It was, in the end, southerners who gave the Union armies their numerical superiority on the battlefield. Given the limits of support Lincoln was able to muster in the North, the war’s resolution largely came down to Southerners themselves. Had all soldiers from the South fought for the South, or more precisely for the Richmond regime, the result would have been at least parity on the battlefield and perhaps Confederate victory.

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by | 15 February 2023 · 3:31 am

Southern Indians in the U.S. Civil War

From Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War, by David Williams (New Press, 2010), Kindle pp. 209-210:

For the South’s other “persons of color,” the southern Indians, both those in the southern states and in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), loyalties were often more difficult to sort out. Many tried to steer a neutral course. But caught as they were “between two fires,” southern Indians were usually forced to weigh their options and, often against their better judgement, choose sides. In South Carolina’s tiny Catawba band, numbering just fifty-five, almost every adult male at one time or another served in the Confederate army. Long since stripped of their own land, most Catawbas were day laborers working plantation lands that had once belonged to their ancestors. The enlistment bounty of $50 was very attractive for these impoverished and dependent men. They were too few to form a company of their own, and there were no “colored” units in the Confederate army for them to join, so they fought alongside their white neighbors in several South Carolina regiments of the Army of Northern Virginia. These were among the Civil War’s few racially integrated units.

Some southern Indians, more isolated and less dependent on the whites, were more successful in avoiding military entanglements. The Florida Seminoles, left to themselves nearly two decades earlier after fending off efforts to root them out, deftly maintained neutrality while allowing both the Union and the Confederacy to court them. In exchange for gifts and supplies, they shrewdly held out the possibility of an alliance without ever committing to either side.2

Others tried to remain neutral with less success. In Virginia’s tidewater region, descendants of the once powerful Powhatans—the Pamunkey, Mattaponi, Chickahominy, Gingaskin, Nansemond, and Rappahannock Indians—had little love for the Virginians who had stripped them of nearly all their lands and stigmatized them as “free persons of color.” With the war’s outbreak, the Powhatans tended to remain at least nominally neutral. But when Union forces arrived in the spring of 1862, they found ready allies among the Powhatans. Many served the Federals as river pilots, land guides, and spies. They led gunboats and supply vessels as far as one hundred miles inland along the navigable waterways of eastern Virginia.

The Lumbees of eastern North Carolina at first declared neutrality but became solidly pro-Union after Confederates began conscripting them to do forced labor, essentially enslaving them. Lumbee guerrilla bands took revenge by raiding local plantations, attacking Confederate supply depots, tearing up rail lines, and doing whatever else they could to disrupt Rebel operations. Most notable of the Lumbee bands was the one led by Henry Berry Lowry, whose exploits became the stuff of legend. Called The Robin Hood of Robeson County, Lowry became, in the words of one Lumbee scholar, “a folk hero to his people, a symbol of pride and manhood.”

The Confederacy also tried to conscript some Indians to serve as soldiers, though they proved to be no less resentful than those conscripted for forced labor. In the spring of 1863, Eastern Choctaws drafted into the First Choctaw Battalion, Mississippi Cavalry, deserted en masse to the Federals just before the Vicksburg Campaign got under way.

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by | 13 February 2023 · 7:03 am

Recruiting Ex-slaves, 1863

From Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War, by David Williams (New Press, 2010), Kindle pp. 196-198:

The Emancipation Proclamation had its intended effect on African American men. Eager to enlist, they poured into recruiting offices across the North and flocked to Union lines across the South. Frederick Douglass was among the most enthusiastic supporters of black enlistment. “The iron gate of our prison stands half open,” he told African Americans as he urged them to arms. “One gallant rush … will fling it wide.” Two of Douglass’s sons joined that rush, along with more than two hundred thousand other black men who served in the Union’s land and naval forces. Over 80 percent of them were from the southern states. Nearly all of those had been slaves. But no longer. “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters, ‘U.S.,’” Douglass proclaimed, “let him get an eagle on his buttons and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship.” Prince Rivers, a self-emancipated sergeant in the First South Carolina Volunteers, made clear what that meant to him: “Now we sogers are men—men de first time in our lives.”

Despite the enthusiasm of men like Rivers, there were some former slaves who were reluctant to exchange one kind of servitude for another, much less fight for the Union. Recruiters in Kansas sometimes had difficulty finding volunteers among refugee slaves. In South Carolina, Union General David Hunter so often resorted to heavyhanded coercion in trying to get recruits for his first black regiment that some of the conscripts quickly deserted. When blacks enlisted, they did so for their own reasons. “Liberty is what we want and nothing shorter,” wrote an anonymous black soldier in Louisiana. “We care nothing about the union. we have been in it Slaves for over two hundred And fifty years.” At a “war meeting” of former slaves on Georgia’s St. Simons Island, a northern correspondent witnessed several speakers, including one black man, trying to draw new recruits.

They were asked to enlist for pay, rations and uniform, to fight for their country, for freedom and so forth, but not a man stirred. But when it was asked them to fight for themselves, to enlist to protect their wives and children from being sold away from them, and told of the little homes which they might secure to themselves and their families in after years, they all rose to their feet, the men cam forward and said “I’ll go,” and the women shouted, and the old men said “Amen.”

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by | 12 February 2023 · 6:46 am

Black Civil War Spy Networks

From Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War, by David Williams (New Press, 2010), Kindle pp. 187-189:

Harriet Tubman, famous for her prewar service on the Underground Railroad, headed a ring of spies and scouts who operated along the South Carolina coast. Mary Louveste, an employee at Virginia’s Gosport Navy Yard, where the Confederacy’s ironclad warship Virginia was under construction, smuggled out plans and other documents related to the new secret weapon. She carried the material to Washington, D.C., where she placed it in the hands of Union Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles. “Mrs. Louveste encountered no small risk in bringing this information … and other facts,” Welles recalled years later in support of her pension application. “I am aware of none more meritorious than this poor colored woman whose zeal and fidelity I remember and acknowledge with gratitude.” There was even a black Union spy in the Confederate White House. Mary Elizabeth Bowser, an associate of Unionist Richmond socialite Elizabeth Van Lew, worked as a maid at the presidential residence. She funneled anything worthy of note to Van Lew, who passed the information on to the Federals at City Point.

A black Virginia couple named Dabney proved to be one of the most innovative spy teams of the war. In early 1863, as Union and Confederate armies eyed each other across the Rappahannock River, they escaped enslavement and the husband found work as a cook and groom for the Federals stationed at the river. He became interested in the army’s telegraph system and asked some of the soldiers how it worked. Soon after, his wife went back across the lines to get a job doing laundry for a Confederate general. Within a short time, the husband began updating Union officers on Rebel troop movements. The officers were astonished at how accurate the information seemed to be and asked the man how he knew such things. He took them to a hill overlooking the river and pointed across to the headquarters of General Robert E. Lee.

That clothes-line tells me in half an hour just what goes on at Lee’s headquarters. You see my wife over there; she washes for the officers, and cooks, and waits around, and as soon as she hears about any movement or anything going on, she comes down and moves the clothes on that line so I can understand it in a minute. That there gray shirt is Longstreet; and when she takes it off, it means he’s gone down about Richmond. That white shirt means Hill; and when she moves it up to the west end of the line, Hill’s corps has moved upstream. That red one is Stonewall. He’s down on the right now, and if he moves, she will move that red shirt.

Blankets with pins at the bottom revealed deceptive troop movements intended to distract Union commanders. During the weeks leading up to the Battle of Chancellorsville, thanks to the Dabneys’ clothesline telegraph, Confederates could not make a move without the Federals knowing about it.

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