The military officers who received the reports of spies and scouts were also amateurs in the sense that, with one exception noted below, no staff organization in any army on either side was assigned full time to the gathering and analysis of intelligence. By way of contrast, a private in the Union Army was paid $13 per month. When the Army of the Potomac hired full-time civilian spies after 1863, their base salary was two dollars per day, with raises to three or four dollars for the most effective agents. A civilian scout who faced little danger might be paid $50 per mission, while spies who operated behind enemy lines and provided valuable information might be paid up to $500. Payments varied, depending on the risks individual agents faced, the expenses they incurred, and the value of the information they provided. The money to compensate spies came from “secret service” funds administered by the Union and Confederate War Departments. Most civilian spies on both sides were recruited by military commanders in the field to serve the needs of their specific organizations. However, this early Confederate advantage was later counterbalanced as Union armies advanced into the Confederacy, where the local African American population provided a ready source of information on the enemy. In the first year of the Civil War, the South had an advantage in recruiting spies due to the large number of confederate sympathizers in Washington, D.C., many of whom held government jobs that gave them access to useful military information, or were socially connected to Union officials who shared damaging information with their supposed friends. Without professional intelligence services, Civil War spies were always amateurs, serving either for pay or out of personal loyalty to one side or the other. Neither the United States nor the Confederacy had a single agency devoted to the collection and analysis of intelligence information. Ironically, during the Black Hawk War Lincoln had himself served in a mounted militia unit called the “Independent Spy Company.” īy modern standards, the espionage in the Civil War was highly decentralized. President Lincoln disapproved the sentence and ordered him to be held as a prisoner of war. Army military commission in Santa Fe convicted a member of a Confederate spy company of being a spy and sentenced him to death. In 1862, following the abortive Confederate invasion of New Mexico, a U.S. To add to the confusion, some military units were called “spy companies,” even though they were in fact ordinary cavalry units. Soldiers gathering information in disguise or under false pretenses, such as a Union scout caught wearing a Confederate uniform or civilian clothes, could be punished as spies. Soldiers captured in military uniform were generally treated as prisoners of war rather than spies, even if they were engaged in gathering military intelligence. In general, scouts engaged in military reconnaissance, either as soldiers or hired civilians, and were invariably male, while both men and women served as spies. The terms “spy” and “scout” were often used interchangeably during the Civil War. However, six of their comrades from the same mission were eventually granted prisoner of war status and exchanged. After capture, six were convicted by a Confederate court-martial of being spies and hanged.
In 1862, for example, a party of Union soldiers entered Confederate territory in civilian clothing on an official mission to destroy railroads. In the discretion of the authorities holding them, they might be simply held in custody as political prisoners or even treated as prisoners of war and exchanged for prisoners held by the other side. Not all spies were tried or executed after capture. The total number of spies executed during the Civil War is unknown.
Under the international military customs of the time, however, spies were subject to execution without trial, and at least some suspected spies were summarily executed by both armies. The Congress of the Confederate States gave Confederate courts-martial the same power to punish Union spies. Army courts-martial the power to try and punish by death spies who, in “time of war or rebellion,” were found in or about forts or camps of the Army. Espionage was not a crime under the civilian laws of either the United States or the Confederacy, so captured spies could only tried and punished by military tribunals, such as courts-martial or military commissions. If caught, death by hanging was the traditional punishment for spies. According to the Union army’s official definition, which was based on international law, a spy was “a person who secretly, in disguise or under false pretense, seeks information with the intention of communicating it to the enemy” in wartime.
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