 Yeah, I turn to all of them, they're very rude, but just ahead of them, there's no way I don't see it, but I tell them straight to you. Yeah, it's Lynn's first name that they're going to be on the end of that program. Good afternoon. Welcome to the William G. McGowan Theater at the National Archives. I'm Trevor Plant. I'm the chief of the Archives One reference services branch with just a fancy way of saying I run a lot of the public side of the building on the other side of our building. Archivist of the United States, David Ferriero, was scheduled to provide the welcoming remarks today. He sends his regrets that he could not be here, but he's out of town on business. I'm pleased you could join us whether you are here in this room or participating through Facebook or YouTube. Also welcome to those of you who are joining us on C-SPAN today. Today we're here to listen to Douglas Waller discuss his most recent book, Lincoln's Spies, Their Secret War to Save a Nation, in which he will describe the exploits of four union agents, Alan Pinkerton, George Sharp, Elizabeth VanLew and Lafayette Baker. Mr. Waller is a former correspondent for Newsweek and Time. He has authored six books on the military and intelligence, including the bestsellers, Wild Bill Donovan, Big Red and the Commandos, and the critically acclaimed biographies, Disciples and a Question of Loyalty, which was on General Billy Mitchell. Civil War scholar James McPherson describes this book as a fast-paced and deeply researched narrative of union intelligence operations in the eastern theater of the Civil War that cuts through the myths and fabrications that grew up around Lincoln's spies. It's my honor to be here today. It's always a pleasure to welcome back someone who spent countless hours, if not months, researching in our vast holdings, especially when that research culminates with such a good narrative as this one. The big bibliography and notes section are a testament to the research Mr. Waller conducted here. You will find numerous citations to various record groups and series he utilized at the National Archives. I'm slightly biased, so my favorite part of the book is found in the acknowledgments where you'll find, and I quote, archivists are the unsung heroes of history books. So this guy gets it. His narrative opens with chapters devoted to each of his four union agents, Waller then provides a chronological approach to the Civil War that guides you through each year from 1861 to 1865. With the final chapter culminating in the post-war experiences of Pinkerton, Sharp, Van Leeuwen Baker. Before we hear from Mr. Waller about his new book on Lincoln's spies, I'd like to let you know about another program coming up next week. On Tuesday, August 13th at noon, Philip Mudd will present a lecture on Black Sight, the CIA in the post-911 world, in which he will discuss how after 9-11 the CIA transformed into a war-fighting intelligence service to help prevent future terrorist attacks. Please visit our website at archives.gov for more information about other upcoming National Archives programs and activities. Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Douglas Waller to the stage. Thanks, Trevor. One thing I want to mention, Trevor is one of the franchise players here in terms of Civil War history. He and his team spent countless hours with me helping me out. In fact, I don't think he could get from one part of the building to the other without me tackling him at one point, you know, begging him for information. I spent a number of years at the archives researching my last four books. Something like that. Not only Trevor, but Mitch Yackelson, who is here in the audience, guided me through World War I records when I researched that area. Tim Neniger, his team over at the National Archives at College Park, helped me out immensely with World War II records. The late Larry McDonald and John Taylor were extremely helpful over there. And Michael Music, who is here, who is retired from the Civil War as archivist, I harassed him unmercifully for information. Now, I got to admit right at the beginning I'm a little intimidated here because, A, all the historians are here in the archivist and I know there's probably a lot of Civil War experts. I want a little truth in advertising to start off with here. I'm not a Civil War historian. I don't even play one on TV. I covered the CIA for a number of years for Newsweek and then Time Magazine. And my last two historical biographies, as mentioned, were of major intelligence figures during World War II. One book was on Wild Bill Donovan, the head of Franklin Roosevelt's spy service, the OSS. The other one was on four key lieutenants of Donovans who eventually became CIA directors like Alan Dulles. For my next war, my next book, I decided to switch wars and write an ensemble biography of four Union spies during the Civil War. These are four of Lincoln spies. And I'm really glad I made the switch. When we think of the Civil War, we have this image of Union and Confederate soldiers posing stiffly in Matthew Brady photographs or the soft violin music of a Ken Burns documentary, which always put me to sleep, and mangled bodies strewn on desolate battlefields where thousands died in mass assaults like Pickett's Charge. And that all happened. But what also happened during this conflict was a revolution in war fighting technology like the world had never seen. Things like rifled cannon and muskets that could deliver more accurate and deadly fire at longer ranges. And the railroad that could move men and supplies quickly to the front. And the telegraph that could connect war departments and generals and far flung battlefields with rapid communications. This was a war that also saw a change in how armies maneuvered against each other. Instead of the old Napoleonic tactics of frontal assaults with soldiers packed tightly together, military leaders on both sides started choosing flank attacks and loose order tactics that they could use to win fights without incurring these horrendous casualties. But commanders quickly discovered that with all these new weapons and all the new tactics, they needed far more accurate information on where the enemy lurked ahead of them. Confederate General Stonewall Jackson boiled it down to four things that he wanted to know before he started a battle. Four important pieces of intelligence. Number one, the position of the enemy. Where was he out there? A very important piece of information. Number two, the number of hostile troops you faced and their movements. Also very important information. Number three, the generals in command on the other side who led their corps, their division, their regiments, their brigades. Remember, good many of these northern and southern generals have been classmates at West Point. So they usually knew how the other guy on the other side of the battle would react to certain situations. And the fourth thing Jackson wanted to know was the location of the headquarters of the enemy commander. Now, these were important pieces of information, but they didn't increase the odds, but they didn't necessarily guarantee a commander a victory. But they certainly increased the odds for success and they could stave off defeat. So what you discover is that beneath the surface of this vast war between the north and the south, the revolution was occurring in military intelligence and how armies spied on each other. That's what I found fascinating about as I dug more deeply into this subject. Of course, there was the traditional cloak and dagger work we've seen in previous wars. Each side sent scores of spies into the other's territories to steal secrets. In the Civil War, this job was made easier because these secret operatives spoke the same language and they knew the other side's culture. So they weren't dropping into a foreign country with a foreign language and customs that they weren't aware of, like what they did in World War II. Civil War spies had an easier time blending in and not being noticed by the enemy. If you were a northern spy, it wasn't too difficult to fake a southern accent. The new war-making technologies also ushered in new types of spying. The advent of the telegraph signal intelligence became important in this war. Today it's called SIGINT and spy jargon. Back then it was reading the enemy's messages that were tapped out on a morse code over a line or wigwagged in flags from a tall mountain. Each side suspected the other was constantly tapping into what it transmitted. So messages were encrypted using fairly primitive codes. Photography was soon found to be a useful spy tool. Photographers joined the Union Army to covertly take shots of enemy troop encampments and future battlefields. We saw aerial reconnaissance often used in this war, particularly on the Union side. Hydrogen gas-filled balloons were sent high into the air as high as 1,000 feet with aeronauts dangling in their wicker baskets to scope out the battlefield ahead and direct enemy artillery fire on the target. Incidentally, those poor aeronauts would often get air sick up there with the gondola or the little basket swinging around or spinning around. These were the forerunners of spy satellites we have today. During the Civil War, this was considered a pretty high-tech endeavor. Balloonists communicated their observations by shouting to the ground or using flag signals or tapping out the messages in morse code on a line to a soldier down below. A Philadelphia inventor even proposed what a century and a half later would be called an aerial drone. The aerial drones you've seen operating over Iraq and Afghanistan in the Middle East. A battery operated camera attached under a small balloon would be sent up with a camera hooked by a wire to a soldier on the ground who could deliver an electrical charge in order to activate the camera shutter. Great idea. A Union officer, though, eventually rejected the inventor's proposal. He couldn't see how the balloon could keep the camera stable enough up there to take a clear photo, which probably was the case. For this book, I decided to focus on three men and one woman who spied for the Union. I did so for several reasons. I found Union operatives to be far more interesting than their Confederate counterparts. Two of my spies were heroes in this war. One was a failure and the other was a scoundrel. So I had a pretty good mix of characters here to deal with. Also, Civil War movies often have the rebels outperforming the Yankees in espionage, but that really wasn't the case. For most of the Civil War, the Yankees had a much more comprehensive and effective intelligence gathering operation than the Confederates could ever feel. In fact, so by the end of the conflict, Ulysses Grant actually had a better idea of the count of Robert E. Lee's forces than Lee even had. The four Lincoln spies who are the subject of this book, and they're up here in these slides, or this slide, is Alan Pinkerton, Lafayette Baker, George Sharp, and Elizabeth Fanleau. Let's start with Pinkerton. He's up there in the upper left up there. Friends believe that Alan Pinkerton was gifted with unusual powers of observation. Born in Scotland in 1819 as a young man, he trained to be a cooper. That's a barrel maker. But he ended up spending more time working as a labor agitator, falling under the spell of Scottish revolutionaries. In 1842, Pinkerton emigrated to America with his young wife of ending up eventually in Chicago where he founded a private detective agency in the 1850s and became highly successful at it. Pinkerton hated slavery and he became a fanatical abolitionist. He thought his parents had been atheists and he considered himself a atheist as well. As a detective he honed a sixth sense to anticipate criminal activity before it happened. He was stubbornly persistent, refusing to ever be worn down by adversity, but he could be a tiresome prig who harangued employees, friends, and relatives on the virtues of honesty, integrity, and courage. He was a tyrant at home, completely dominating his wife. He named their three children she bore for him without even consulting her. Pinkerton had dark, brooding eyes, you can see them up there, set deeply under a wide brow with a heavy beard that covered his face safer, very often his upper lip, which he occasionally shaved. He was usually dour and humorless like he looks right up there. He was a master publicist skilled at promoting his detective business and shameless about airbrushing his image. In February 1861 on the eve of the Civil War Pinkerton, who by then had become somewhat famous as a private eye, launched what amounted to a covert operation to sneak Abraham Lincoln unnoticed in a railroad car through Baltimore. The detective who happened to be investigating threats to a rail line for a business client at the time had uncovered evidence that secessionists wanted to assassinate the new president-elect at a stopover in Baltimore in order to keep him from being inaugurated in Washington. Our next spy is Lafayette Baker. He's there to the right of Pinkerton in the general's uniform. He was a handsome man. He had brown hair and a full red beard and piercing gray eyes that were almost hypnotic. You kind of look at those eyes and they can really kind of bore into you. He was five feet ten inches tall and a muscular 180 pounds. He was agile, almost cat-like in his quick movements, always seemingly restless. Baker was a fine horseman on a crack shot and he didn't swear or drink alcohol. He was obsessed with Roman history. His idol became Eugene Francois Vidault who was this unsavory detective who helped create Francis' secret police force. Baker was as devious and manipulating as Vidault. He was prone to lie about himself and he had the heart of a sneak thief according to one profile that was done on him. Born in 1825, Baker's lineage traced back to fighters in the French and Indian war. Fed up with his father who was an insufferably stern Puritan, Baker renounced God and ran away from his Michigan home in his late teens largely uneducated except for a little schooling that taught him to read and write. For the next ten years, he drifted from job to job through a dozen states often having to flee a city after a gunfight with another man. He finally ended up in San Francisco by the mid-1850s joining a vigilante committee that rounded up suspected criminals in that lawless city. And lynched the ones they thought deserved the death penalty. When the Civil War started, Baker who was back on the east coast rode into Washington hoping to land a good paying job with the Union Army. He was outraged when rebels captured Fort Sumter on April 13, 1861. Baker had no spy training beyond what he might have picked up as a San Francisco vigilante. But he was a fast talker and he managed to talk General Winfield Scott, the Union Army's aging commander, into giving him a job as a Secret Service agent. Scott, whose nickname was old fussing feathers because he loved military pomp, had no spies to speak of and he figured that he didn't really have anything to lose by hiring Baker. Okay, our next spy is George Sharp. He's down the bottom left over there. His superiors considered him a natural military leader. He had a magnetic personality that made men want to follow him. And you can see from the photo he had a balding head and kind of sad eyes and a droopy mustache that gave him more of the look of a city preacher than a combat commander. Sharp was a learned man. In the breast pocket of his uniform he always kept a small, well-thumbed book of verses by his favorite poets that he routinely read to his men. And they never objected to those recitals. Sharp was born in Kingston, New York, a small town on the Hudson River. The son of a wealthy merchant, he received the finest education you could have at that time. He attended elite academies as a youngster. He graduated from Rutgers University with honors and he earned a law degree from Yale University. Before setting up his practice as an attorney in Kingston, Sharp spent four years in Europe studying French in Paris and working as a secretary to the U.S. legation in Vienna and Rome where he learned Italian. When war broke out, he first commanded a company of federal militiamen from the Kingston area and later he led a volunteer infantry regiment as a colonel. It all prepared Sharp for the most important job he would have as the Union Army's preeminent spy master. Now to our fourth secret agent, Elizabeth of Banloo on the lower right. Like Sharp, she too was a child of privilege but in a very different setting. Elizabeth's father was a wealthy Richmond hardware merchant. Her mother was a highly educated socialite who stocked a library in their mansion in the fashionable Church Hill neighborhood with almost 600 books. Elizabeth who developed an early empathy for slaves she saw being beaten on Richmond streets was sent to relatives in Philadelphia to be educated. A governess there lectured her on the abolition of slavery. She returned to Richmond with an even fiercer hatred of human bondage. When her father died in 1843, Elizabeth of Banloo spent much of her sizable inheritance which was about $350,000 in today's money helping family slaves flee north or secretly paying the salaries to blacks who remained at her mansion. She also bought other slaves on the market block to set them free. She was a short woman who had been quite beautiful in her youth but when the Civil War started she was in her 40s and unmarried and she was considered by Richmond society to be an old maid. She loved her state. She always spoke of Virginians in her soft southern accent as our people although that love would be tested sorely in the years to come. She wore her dark blonde hair and tight curls. In this photo it looks brown but you can see kind of the tight curls there. She had a thin, nervous-looking face with high cheekbones, a pointed nose and sparkling blue eyes that bore into anyone facing the stair. She was almost always a tired in the antebellum style with a black silk dress as you see her there, a bonnet whose ribbons tied under a chin in front. She was clever to the point of almost unearthly brilliance, a friend said and she was decidedly feisty. She could be acid-tongued and scalding in her contempt for people whose political views clashed with her own strong sense of right from wrong. Elizabeth acknowledged that it made her life intensely sad and earnest as she put it. Yet when she thought it would help her have her way, she could be gentle and flattering. She knew how to cultivate powerful men to get what she wanted. When the Union prisoners started pouring into Richmond, many of them housed in filthy tobacco warehouses that became makeshift jails, Elizabeth Cajole Confederate authorities to let her bring meals and books to the POWs and to minister to the Union soldiers who were wounded or ill. It soon made her a pariah in her city, neighbor Shunder. Richmond newspapers published dark warnings that she should be showing compassion for Southern soldiers, not those hated Yankees. A Ku Klux Klan organization called the White Caps sent her a menacing note threatening to burn down her mansion. But this was a woman, a Unionist who could not be intimidated. Soon Elizabeth van Loo began heading up a large and powerful spy ring in the capital of the Confederacy. Now, there's a fifth important character in this story about Lincoln's spies, and that's Abraham Lincoln himself. Honest Abe was the image his political campaign created. Lincoln didn't even really like the name Honest Abe. He preferred to be called Mr. Lincoln. He was one of the least experienced men ever to assume the presidency, but he was hardly a neophyte when it came to the dark arts of intrigue and subterfuge. During his brief brush with military service in the 1832 Black Hawk war, Lincoln actually spent several weeks in a unit called the Independent Spy Company, which carried out reconnaissance operations. He often wrote newspaper columns under aliases to attack opponents. He secretly bought a German language newspaper to print puff pieces on him for that important voting block in Illinois, and during his race for the presidency, he was a careful reader and evaluator of political intelligence. Once in the White House, Lincoln ordered General Scott to deliver him daily intelligence reports on the enemy and had freelancers all over the country send him information on the rebels and their sympathizers. He prodded his military commanders to accept new war fighting technologies like balloons used for aerial reconnaissance. He had no qualms about launching risky covert operations into the south. He found subversion and propaganda useful tools to undermine the border states that had joined the Confederacy and to keep the ones that remained with the Union under his control. And Lincoln could be ruthless when he felt he had to be, suspending the Rida habeas corpus, allowing the arbitrary arrests of thousands, and shutting newspapers considered hostile to administration war aims. Clearly this was a president who knew how to keep a secret and knew how to operate in secret. So what did our four spies do in this war? We'll start with Alan Pinkerton. He became the spy master for General George McClellan, the charismatic young Napoleon, as he was called the commander of the all important army of the Potomac, and at first the entire army. McClellan was the man Lincoln in the north had high hopes for defeating the south quickly and bringing this awful rebellion to a speedy end. But this young Napoleon had a huge ego, an even bigger Messiah complex. He turned out to be better at organizing and training and parading an army than he did at fighting with it. Alan Pinkerton brought about 20 employees to Washington from the Chicago detective agency. He recruited more agents from the army and other sources, and soon he was operating on a $6,500 a month budget, which was a lot of money back then. Pinkerton used the cover name E.J. Allen in all his communications and worried about security, he refused to divulge to army finance officers the names of his operatives, listing them on expense reports only by their initials. Pinkerton used women to infiltrate rebel social circles. He recruited runaway slaves to collect information. He infiltrated spies into Richmond. He sent McClellan lengthy intelligence reports on what those spies found, and he succeeded in breaking up a Confederate espionage ring in Washington. But he ended up being a failure as a military intelligence officer. Pinkerton and his agents had no military training or the experience they needed to effectively collect and evaluate intelligence on an enemy army. They were basically amateurs at war. His detectives were accustomed to slowly working cases until they had enough evidence to arrest a suspect and bring him to trial. But military intelligence collection had to move far more quickly than that, particularly in a wartime situation. And Pinkerton violated a cardinal rule for an intelligence officer. He told McClellan what the general wanted to hear, not what his boss needed to hear. That's a big difference and it's a big deal. Spymasters, the good ones that is, have to be unbiased. They have to be scrupulous in assembling accurate information. And they have to be willing to develop uncomfortable truths to their leaders. And Pinkerton failed to do this. McClellan was convinced the rebel army faced, that he faced always outnumbered him. He became practically delusional about it. And he peppered Lincoln with memos demanding more troops before he could move against the Confederates. Instead of setting his boss straight, Pinkerton stoked McClellan's delusions. He fed him wildly inaccurate intelligence reports that intentionally inflated the number of rebel troops that Union General faced. But these higher numbers of the enemy were exactly what McClellan wanted to hear. And even if Pinkerton had reported more accurate Confederate numbers that were lower, McClellan would have likely ignored it. McClellan by nature was a timid commander, afraid of winning on the battlefield for fear of losing. Pinkerton's intelligence reports only made him more timid. The Chicago detective also revered McClellan. And at one point, he even spied on Lincoln for political intelligence he thought might be useful for his general. And spy masters aren't supposed to do that kind of stuff. Lincoln soon realized that his young Napoleon had a chronic case of the slows, as he put it. He fired McClellan in early November, 1862, after the bloody Antietam battle. Pinkerton followed his boss out the door and resigned as the Potomac Army's intelligence chief. Now to our next spy, Lafayette Baker. Think of Baker as kind of like Lincoln's J. Edgar Hoover, I guess. Only with a couple important differences. First, Baker didn't have much interaction with Lincoln as Hoover did with presidents, even though Baker often bragged others that he and Lincoln were tight, which really wasn't the case. And second, Baker was far more corrupt. He ended up working as a secret agent for Edwin Stanton, the very efficient and very ruthless war secretary who became Lincoln's czar for internal security. Baker's operation grew eventually to some 30 full-time detectives who did more counter-espionage and criminal investigations than actually collecting intelligence. Simple crime back then was considered a national security threat as grave for the Union as espionage. So secret service organizations like Baker's and Pinkerton's often spent more time chasing smugglers, horse thieves, draft dodgers, crooked contractors, and counterfeiters than they did on Cloak and Daggerwood. Baker set up his headquarters in an old two-story building on Pennsylvania Avenue, not too far from here near the Capitol. A plaque hung in his office proclaiming death to traitors. Kind of cool. He bragged that his ideal operatives was somebody who was shrewd, courageous, and couldn't be bribed. But his men, many of them, former California vigilantes skilled with knives and pistols and killing without remorse, hardly lived up to that standard. Baker enjoyed shadowing suspects himself and setting up his own sting operations to capture them. He led raids into Maryland to break up rebel courier pipelines that carried mail and merchandise to the South. Baker enjoyed interrogating suspects. For example, tapping on a woman's breast to see if he heard the sound of tin being hit. It would indicate she concealed contraband drugs for the South and the top of her corset. Well, I'm not making this up, folks. I really haven't. One time he hacked a suspected Confederate spy to death using the rebel's own buoy knife. But he soon reports and complaints began accumulating that Baker and his detectives were abusing their authority. Baker's agents became notorious for routinely seizing suspects without warrants and jailing them for weeks. Washington officials also wondered how Baker, on a salary that only amounted to about $7 a day, maintained such a lavish lifestyle, staying at first-class hotels, a wad of cash always in his pocket and riding around Washington gaudily dressed on top of an expensive black stallion fit for a general. He did so by abusing his expense account from the Secret Service fund Stanton provided and by ingeniously finding ways to shake the money tree on many of the raids and arrests he carried out. For example, blockade runners who had been caught found they could soon be released if they paid Baker or one of his detectives a bribe. Baker's biggest intelligence failure came with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Guarding the president of the United States was not specifically Baker's responsibility, but uncovering threats to him certainly was. Baker liked to brag that there was no hostile agent in Washington that he or his men didn't know about, but that was clearly not the case, particularly not with John Wilkes Booth, who frequently gathered with his gang at Mary Surrat's boarding house on H Street here in Washington, just nine blocks from Baker's headquarters. Baker redeemed himself when his detectives, accompanied by a cavalry detachment, captured and killed Booth at Garrett Farm in Virginia. Incidentally, Baker was outraged when he had to share the reward money for Booth's capture with the other men on the raid at Garrett Farm. Now, our third spy there, George Sharp. When General Joseph Fighting Joe Hooker took command of the Army of the Potomac in January 1863, he summoned Sharp to his headquarters after he learned that the New York officer was fluent in French. Hooker wanted him to translate a book written in French on that country's secret service. Sharp did it quickly, which impressed Hooker, so the general appointed this regimental commander, his spy master. Hooker gave the espionage service Sharp created a bland cover name they called it the Bureau of Military Information, which conveniently hid or concealed his true intent. Although Sharp had seen combat and he was well versed in the military and what kind of information the Army needed, he knew nothing about spying when he took this job, but he proved surprisingly adept at Cloak and Dagger work. In some of his correspondence, he began to use the code name Colonel Straight, and many of his informants never knew they were working for a Union espionage agency. Sharp eventually had a force of some 70 agents, many of whom infiltrated into enemy territory wearing rebel uniforms and carrying thousands of dollars in Confederate dollars for bribes. He set up a large letter opening operation. His men captured bags full of Confederate mail exchanged between Virginia and Maryland, and they read the contents for hints on where the rebels were moving. And in what amounted to aerial propaganda, one of Sharp's officers rigged a kite to drop leaflets over enemy lines offering rebels money to defeat. The operation actually proved fairly successful. A lot of rebels came over with those leaflets. Sharp also wasn't shy about using torture to get the truth out of rebel deserters he thought were lying to his interrogators. Sometimes they were tied by their thumbs, which prisoners found particularly painful when it was applied for long periods. But more important with Hooker's blessing, Sharp pioneered what spy agencies today call all-source intelligence. Sharp now raked in all the intelligence coming into the Army of the Potomac. Not only reports from the spies, but also the reports from the interrogation of rebel deserters and prisoners, the reports from aeronauts and balloons, from signal officers intercepting enemy telegraph and flag signal messages, and the dispatchers from cavalry scouts. Sharp's officers then sorted, synthesized and analyzed all this flood of information and produced for Union commanders highly accurate intelligence with the most comprehensive picture of the enemy that they ever had. Now, it sounds pretty obvious, a pretty obvious way to run a spy agency, but this all-source intelligence wasn't done before Sharp. His Bureau of Military Information was a major innovation. It was decades ahead of its time. Sharp's men, for example, produced leather-bound 14-page booklets that Army commanders could carry in their coat pocket with accurate information on regiments, brigades, and divisions in Lee's forces. His estimate on the number of men in Lee's Army at one point was off by only one-quarter of 1% from the actual number that Lee had. That's truly remarkable. Sharp's best agent in Richmond became Elizabeth Van Loo, our fourth spy. This old maid, who everyone dismissed as a harmless yanking lover, just too free with her opinions, moved quickly from helping Union war prisoners in Richmond to organizing a sophisticated spy ring in the capital that Confederate security agents were never able to crack. Van Loo's spy network eventually was churning out an average of three intelligence reports a week for Sharp. They covered a wide range of subjects. Richmond's defenses, the condition of Lee's Army, the troop movements between the Confederate capital and the Shenandoah Valley, economic conditions in the city, the morale of its residents. Along with the messages, Van Loo also sent Grant editions of Richmond's newspapers, plus a rose she picked from her garden for each delivery. Grant thought the rose at his breakfast table was kind of a nice touch. Van Loo's Churchill mansion became her spy ring's base station. She had several dozen agents and couriers working for her. Each one carried a carved peach seed that identified them as a member of her network, which I thought was kind of interesting. Many of her operatives were farmers or storekeepers or factory workers she had recruited. Others were African-American servants who worked with Van Loo or other Unionists, other ring members. Her spies also included a clerk in the Confederate Adjutant General's Office who provided her with strength reports on rebel units. She had a mole in the engineering department who sent her blueprints for rebel defenses around Richmond and Petersburg. In the intelligence summaries for Grant and the other Union generals, Sharpener's Aids rarely mentioned Van Loo by her name. She often went by the code name Babcock or was simply referred to by her government documents as a lady in Richmond and her ring was called our friends in Richmond. At night in her mansion, Van Loo placed sensitive papers such as agent reports and her own intelligence notes at her bedside table to destroy them if she quickly had to or to quickly hide them in other places in the mansion, like the library. Documents there could be stored that reached part of the way up to its mantle. Two bronze Couchant lions with secret cavities in them sat atop the pilasters. They were ideal hiding places for her material. Elizabeth had several ways to write messages to her Union handlers. She could write letters to a fictitious uncle signing her name as Eliza A. Jones and send the letters through the regular mail that actually was allowed to pass between the north and the south. Between the lines of the innocuous family news and these letters she would dip her pen into a bottle of clear liquid and write out in invisible ink the real message she wanted to deliver. Then a Union officer on the other end would apply a mild acid and heat to the paper to read the secret report. Other times she didn't use the mail system and had couriers deliver intelligence reports directly to the Union Army. She would encipher her messages using a very simple key that Union officers provided her which was really just a small piece of paper a square sheet of paper that contained a chart to convert letters to a number code. Elizabeth kept that key folded up tightly and tucked into her watch case. As a further security measure Van Loo often tore her encrypted notes into several pieces and sent each piece by a different courier on different routes to the Federal's. Her family servants who acted as couriers sometimes put messages and scraped out eggshells hidden in the basket full of real eggs or among paper patterns that seamstresses carried. The Van Loo family had a vegetable farm near the Richmond, Henrico County line just below the city. That farm became the first of five stops on a windy road route along the James River where couriers could drop off messages for the Yankees and pick up instructions from Sharp on intelligence he needed. George Sharp would later boast that whatever Grant wanted in the way of information from the capital Van Loo's ring could provide it. This was an espionage triumph for the Union. It was truly remarkable. Okay, with that I'll end there and any questions, comments or whatever else is on your mind. If you have a question you got to go to one of these microphones here. Could you tell us a little bit about Pauline Cushman? I noticed that you kind of left her out of this group. Pauline Cushman. She was a female actress who used to get information from the Confederates and go to the Union troops. Yeah, no, I didn't follow her. She was, I did Van Loo mainly because she was a workhorse and she produced a lot. And there were women spying for the Confederates that I briefly mentioned like Rose Greenhouse who ran the Confederate spy ring in Washington. Alan Pinkerton broke up. Actually a lot of spies on the Confederate side were a more propaganda value than they were and Van Loo was really the primary workhorse for intelligence. Oh, I'm sorry. Thank you. What prevented sharpshooters from taking down the hot air balloons? Good question. Actually nothing did. As the balloon rose up above the trees, it was dangerous work being in them and from, I guess, tree level until the time it got to about 500 feet out of range it was subject to sharpshooters and so it was very risky getting up that high. Also very risky was the wind could blow the balloon in the wrong direction. Most of the time it was tethered. There was somebody, a soldier on the ground holding a rope so the balloon didn't go anywhere very often the rope slipped out and the balloon went off and several cases it went off at Union Generals who got scared of their life. Thank you. What kind of synergy did Mr. Lincoln extract from this group? Did they meet with him one on one or did he meet with all of them frequently together? A good question. It was different situations for each one. Alan Pinkerton, he knew from the Chicago days Lincoln had a lawyer for a railroad there and Pinkerton had been the investigator for the railroad and in charge of security. So they had somewhat of an acquaintance and of course he you know Pinkerton slipped him through Baltimore. Actually the president got here on a covert operation by Pinkerton when as the president was forming his administration he wrote Pinkerton and said he wanted to come to Washington and talk about forming a secret service. Pinkerton sent him a letter directly said he would offer his volunteers help and Lincoln had no secret service to speak of. He kind of dawdled on it and never came to a decision so Pinkerton went with McClellan. After that Pinkerton would not routinely but occasionally visit the White House basically to pump the information out of Lincoln and other White House aides on how McClellan was doing with the administration basically spying on him. He did after the Antietam battle McClellan wanted to scope out Lincoln to see what the reaction was in the White House. Interestingly Lincoln knew what he was up to and knew he was there to spy on him. So he turned the tables on McClellan was pretty unwitting on it and asked him a lot of questions I mean turned the tables on Lincoln and asked him a lot of questions about McClellan and conveyed specific messages he wanted to get back to McClellan which was speed up get moving. Lafayette Baker wrote several letters to Lincoln. Baker was an ardent abolitionist too and at one point he proposed or he was outraged that blacks in the District of Columbia were being treated unfairly and also in southern Maryland and he wanted to crack down on that problem. But other than that he had very little dealings with Lincoln and I don't even know if Lincoln knew him and Lincoln got thousands of letters I don't know how much attention he paid to bakers. George Sharpe's intelligence reports that many of them that went either to Hooker or General Mead or even Grant got forwarded to Washington very often and they ended up at the War Department and on Lincoln's desk so he knew about Sharpe. Lincoln would very often interrogate our officers Union officers visiting Washington just to get his sense of what conditions were like out there. So he got a lot of paper from him. I don't know whether he knew Van Lu or he may have been made aware of a lady in Richmond. Grant of course knew exactly what Van Lu was up to and greatly appreciated. He visited her after the war paid a visit to her with his wife and when Union troops moved into Richmond he ordered a contingent to encircle Van Lu's mansion and guard it so it wouldn't be burned down. Van Lu's efforts were ridiculously impressive considering the conditions. It seems a little odd that someone who was already identified as a bad guy could do so much damage inside and get away with it. So I'd love if there was anything else you could share about that dynamic also so she's still there after the war did you follow them their careers or anything after the war? I would have to imagine some of this would come out and the natives would be additionally restless. On the first question it was amazing she got away with this because Confederate agents infrequently not often but they did would just barge into her mansion just to see what was going on. Others who she'd become estranged from would report that there were strange men coming in and out of the mansion at all hours of the night and they couldn't account for it. At one point somebody not didn't accost her but met her on the streets and said I've got some important information these go to Washington can you help me and Van Lu's immediately sniffed out that it was a Confederate agent said I'm a loyal lady of the south I don't have anything to do with you. There at one point was an investigation a formal investigation by the general's office of Van Lu neighbors ratted on her and even Van Lu's sister-in-law who was a rabid cessationist testified against her and they conducted a fairly lengthy investigation of her they eventually concluded that she was basically she was saved by Southern sexism back then. They concluded that yeah this lady spoke a little too freely about pro-union sentiments but don't ladies all talk that way talk too much and everything she couldn't possibly be doing any damage to the union not a respected member of the community or a daughter of a wealthy merchant so that hit her throughout the investigation when they finally concluded that she was harmless she was still supplying information to the north now in terms of what happened to her after the war and it happens an awful lot to spies in countries that during World War II the American conquered the spies become reviled or pariahs by their own society that happened really to Van Loo she kept secret her intelligence work for as long as she could but there were newspaper stories in the north about her help for union war prisoners that made her deeply unpopular very alone in her final years Grant appointed her to be postmaster of Richmond which was a highly lucrative and politically important position but she didn't retain that job after Grant her presidency and in the end she died nearly broke at Church Hill kids would run by the mansion and taunt her yell things at her she when she died I think it was 1900 she was buried in Chaco Cemetery interestingly buried vertically because there were so many graves in the cemetery they didn't have room to bury people horizontally she didn't even have a marker for her grave eventually a group of Massachusetts donors many of whom were relatives or had been POWs in the prison that she helped bought a granite marker gravestone for and put it on her plot in the cemetery sounds like a great movie it is, yeah the other gentleman did they have a sort of code or backup plan if they were captured what they would have to do and did they have backup people who would take over for them if they were caught you know because I imagine they were quite valuable assets and you know obviously there has to be a plan in place for somebody to succeed them if they are caught I would imagine the short answer is no Pinkerton had some huge errors he sent one of his agents, operatives Timothy Webster to Richmond who was a very versatile very courageous spy and he sent him to Richmond about three or four times it was one time too many he had been in too much and his cover started wearing thin and he caught rheumatic fever and was incapacitated in Richmond and Confederate Thare was throwing in on him Pinkerton made a huge mistake for a spy master he sent a a guy named Price Lewis who was on his staff to Richmond to find out what had happened to Webster and get his intelligence back to Washington Price Lewis however had been involved in counter espionage work counter intelligence work in Washington which is a cardinal mistake to have somebody counter intelligence work suddenly going to intelligence collection work and Price Lewis correctly pointed this out to Pinkerton and said I've arrested a lot of people in Washington who have been deported or sent south to Richmond surely one of them will see me in Richmond and I would get caught there it would be a suicide mission and Pinkerton said don't worry I've checked it all out I was in Richmond to try and find out what had happened to Timothy Webster he was arrested somebody there recognized him and then they finally they closed in on Webster eventually hung Webster and Price Lewis stayed in a prison for a good bit of time until nearly the end of the war when they finally got him out in a prisoner exchange it was a huge intelligence failure they defected or surrendered they were given rewards I believe this was also used during World War II oh sure and may even be used to this day so this is a very advanced person and you mentioned tell us more about him he really kind of set the to a degree set the template for CIA operations you see even today a lot of the sources and methods he used you can see the agency is developing on a much more sophisticated level which explains why there are CIA analytical reports on their operations for lessons learned and Sharp was well aware of the value of deserters particularly as the Union Army encircled and closed in on Petersburg and Richmond the lines were very very close together so it was easy to send agents across a short distance to go to their jobs and there were several several operations he ran to try and convince defectors one of them was when the Confederacy considered at the end enlisting African Americans as soldiers in the Confederate Army which didn't really have much success doing Sharp proposed a covert operation to send black Union officers in to convince these Union soldiers that might be the Army to defect so he was constantly thinking about psychological operations or even like these type of propaganda operations well ahead of his time unfortunately a lot of Sharp's innovations then were ignored by General George Mead who took over the command of the Army of the Potomac after Hooker he had a very very hostile relationship with Sharp which happens very often you know leaders don't like what their spy masters bring to them you know there can be tension in that relationship thank you okay well thank you very much you're welcome