An interesting Associated Press story this morning detailing some of the more daring assistance that Blacks provided the Union Army during the Civil War.
Ironically, it was the South's deeply held belief that Blacks were nothing more than simple, mindless, domesticated animals, devoid of any real intelligence, that allowed slaves, former slaves and freedmen to infiltrate the Confederate military and political structure, steal their plans, and turn them over to the Union government.
In the Confederate circles he navigated, John Scobell was considered just another Mississippi slave: singing, shuffling, illiterate and completely ignorant of the Civil War going on around him.
Confederate officers thought nothing of leaving important documents where Scobell could see them, or discussing troop movements in front of him. Whom would he tell? Scobell was only the butler, or the deckhand on a rebel sympathizer's steamboat, or the field hand belting out Negro spirituals in a powerful baritone.
In reality, Scobell was not a slave at all.
He was a spy sent by the Union army, one of a few black operatives who quietly gathered information in a high-stakes game of cat-and-mouse with Confederate spy-catchers and slave masters who could kill them on the spot. These unsung Civil War heroes were often successful, to the chagrin of Confederate leaders who never thought their disregard for blacks living among them would become a major tactical weakness.
"The chief source of information to the enemy," Gen. Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate Army, said in May 1863, "is through our negroes."
Often the most successful spies were Black women. In mid-19th century America, the conventional wisdom was that women were intellectually inferior to men and too shallow to learn anything more than housekeeping. In the South this probably made Black women seem even less a threat than Black males, so they probably had more access to secrets than Black men.
Another spy, Mary Elizabeth Bowser, was born a slave to the Van Lew family, who freed her and sent her to school. Bowser then returned to Richmond, where Elizabeth Van Lew was running one of the war's most sophisticated spy rings.
Somehow, Van Lew got Bowser a job inside the Confederate White House as a housekeeper. Bowser then proceeded to sneak classified information out from under Confederate President Jefferson Davis' nose.
According to the memoirs of Thomas McGiven, the Union spymaster in Richmond whose cover was that of a baker who delivered to the Confederate White House, Bowser "had a photographic mind. Everything she saw on the Rebel President's desk she could repeat word for word. Unlike most colored, she could read and write. She made the point of always coming out to my wagon when I made deliveries at the Davis' home to drop information."
I guess what makes this story so satisfying is that it was the South's own failure to recognize that their slave's were every bit as smart as they were that contributed to their defeat. (To be fair, northern whites - even abolitionists - appear not to have had a much higher opinion of Black's intellect. They vehemently opposed slavery on the basis that it is wrong for a person to own another person, but few considered Blacks as their intellectual equals. It seems that in parts of the country, many today still share that opinion.)
--Trakker
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