The cause of American civil war
Another accomplished female secret agent was Elizabeth Van Lew. She had created and headed a successful spy agency in Richmond, Virginia. Being a beloved undercover agent of General Ulysses S. Grant, she helped Union prisoners to abscond from prison and skulk throughout Richmond. Elizabeth’s abolitionist attitude led her to support Union and aid it in liberating slaves. She used former slaves to help her deliver secret messages to the government hidden in their clothes and shoes. She eventually had a vast spy network throughout Richmond and even a trusted spy in the Whitehouse. After the war, she was appointed as a postmaster of Richmond (“Intelligence in the Civil War — Central Intelligence Agency,” 2017).
To say this is not to idealize the working class. In the long struggle that has followed the Russian Revolution it is the manual workers who have been defeated, and it is impossible not to feel that it was their own fault. Time after time, in country after country, the organized working-class movements have been crushed by open, illegal violence, and their comrades abroad, linked to them in theoretical solidarity, have simply looked on and done nothing; and underneath this, secret cause of many betrayals, has lain the fact that between white and coloured workers there is not even lip-service to solidarity. Who can believe in the class-conscious international proletariat after the events of the past ten years? To the British working class the massacre of their comrades in Vienna, Berlin, Madrid, or wherever it might be, seemed less interesting and less important than yesterday’s football match. Yet this does not alter the fact that the working class will go on struggling against Fascism after the others have caved in. One feature of the Nazi conquest of France was the astonishing defections among the intelligentsia, including some of the left-wing political intelligentsia. The intelligentsia are the people who squeal loudest against Fascism, and yet a respectable proportion of them collapse into defeatism when the pinch comes. They are far-sighted enough to see the odds against them, and moreoever they can be bribed – for it is evident that the Nazis think it worth while to bribe intellectuals. With the working class it is the other way about. Too ignorant to see through the trick that is being played on them, they easily swallow the promises of Fascism, yet sooner or later they always take up the struggle again. They must do so, because in their own bodies they always discover that the promises of Fascism cannot be fulfilled. To win over the working class permanently, the Fascists would have to raise the general standard of living, which they are unable and probably unwilling to do. The struggle of the working class is like the growth of a plant. The plant is blind and stupid, but it knows enough to keep pushing upwards towards the light, and it will do this in the face of endless discouragements. What are the workers struggling for? Simply for the decent life which they are more and more aware is now technically possible. Their consciousness of this aim ebbs and flows. In Spain, for a while, people were acting consciously, moving towards a goal which they wanted to reach and believed they could reach. It accounted for the curiously buoyant feeling that life in Government Spain had during the early months of the war. The common people knew in their bones that the Republic was their friend and Franco was their enemy. They knew that they were in the right, because they were fighting for something which the world owed them and was able to give them. One has to remember this to see the Spanish war in its true perspective. When one thinks of the cruelty, squalor, and futility of war – and in this particular case of the intrigues, the persecutions, the lies and the misunderstandings – there is always the temptation to say: ‘One side is as bad as the other. I am neutral’. In practice, however, one cannot be neutral, and there is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction. The hatred which the Spanish Republic excited in millionaires, dukes, cardinals, play-boys, Blimps, and what-not would in itself be enough to show one how the land lay. In essence it was a class war. If it had been won, the cause of the common people everywhere would have been strengthened. It was lost, and the dividend-drawers all over the world rubbed their hands. That was the real issue; all else was froth on its surface. Rose O’Neal Greenhow was a renowned Confederate spy. Being a socialite in Washington, D.C. before the Civil war, she moved in highest political circles and elaborated relationships with senators, generals, presidents, and high-ranking military officers including John C. Calhoun and James Buchanan. She used her connections to transfer vital military information to the Confederacy at the beginning of the war. Ultimately, detective Allan Pinkerton suspected her of espionage and placed under surveillance. However, being under constant watch did not prevent her from maintaining daily contact with the South. Eventually, Pinkerton placed Rose under arrest, but this did not stop her either. She deceived the agents who were guarding her with an invisible ink she used to misdirect them from the coding she implemented in her letters. Later, the government moved Rose and her daughter into prison where she still contrived to send information to the South. After Union finally exiled her to the South, President Davis used her as an unofficial diplomat to deliver messages to Europe. Intelligence has found its use before the war. At that time there were not any formal secret agencies established by the government. That is why they used private detectives to assist them. Colonel Charles Pomeroy Stone, a career United States Army officer and civil engineer, used a private detective to uncover the plan against Abraham Lincoln, a new president of the Union. This person was infiltrated into the enemy lines to later find out about the plot to storm the Treasury and take over Washington, the scenario that the National Rifles constructed. He also reported that the group of people comprising of 300 heads and calling themselves as National Volunteers were also conspiring against the Union. Several private detectives from the New York city have reported to the government about numerous assassination attempts on President Lincoln. Hearing of this moving, “Samuel Morse Felton, president of the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore Railroad, had hired Pinkerton after hearing reports that rabid secessionists in Baltimore were planning to cut Baltimore off from Washington by burning bridges and sinking the Susquehanna River train ferry. Pinkerton went to Baltimore with five operatives, including a trusted assistant, Kate Warne, described by Pinkerton as America’s first woman detective. Pinkerton set up an office and posed as a stockbroker named John H. Hutchinson” (“The Federal Secret Service,” 2017). Nevertheless, President Lincoln in spite of his remonstrative mood was safely smuggled into the White House by Pinkerton and his agents. This event and all assassination attempts marked the beginning of the informal central intelligence networking system successfully established by the government. But is it perhaps childish or morbid to terrify oneself with visions of a totalitarian future? Before writing off the totalitarian world as a nightmare that can’t come true, just remember that in 1925 the world of today would have seemed a nightmare that couldn’t come true. Against that shifting phantasmagoric world in which black may be white tomorrow and yesterday’s weather can be changed by decree, there are in reality only two safeguards. One is that however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back, and you consequently can’t violate it in ways that impair military efficiency. The other is that so long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered, the liberal tradition can be kept alive. Let Fascism, or possibly even a combination of several Fascisms, conquer the whole world, and those two conditions no longer exist. We in England underrate the danger of this kind of thing, because our traditions and our past security have given us a sentimental belief that it all comes right in the end and the thing you most fear never really happens. Nourished for hundreds of years on a literature in which Right invariably triumphs in the last chapter, we believe half-instinctively that evil always defeats itself in the long run. Pacifism, for instance, is founded largely on this belief. Don’t resist evil, and it will somehow destroy itself. But why should it? What evidence is there that it does? And what instance is there of a modern industrialized state collapsing unless conquered from the outside by military force? At the beginning of Civil War, neither Union nor Confederation had a widespread network of undercover agents in the enemy’s rear. However, it soon surfaced that both parties are in necessity of secret service and bureau of intelligence. Under a patronage of a president and military ministry of the Confederation the Signal Corps, a military organization, responsible for military communications, was created. Its members conducted ciphered correspondence with the Confederation’s agents and managed couriers that were continually crossing the borders between Union and Confederation. The leader of the bureau was a Major William Norris, that coordinated the actions of numerous spies and counterintelligence agents, integrating the undercover activity deeply into North, all the way up to the border with Canada. At that time, Chicago detective Allan Pinkerton created a similar espionage organization in the North, that was under control of the State Department. Later, at the edge of the war, it abdicated the post in favor of military ministry. In both north and South, the members of the military department were actively engaged in reconnaissance activities.
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The only propaganda line open to the Nazis and Fascists was to represent themselves as Christian patriots saving Spain from a Russian dictatorship. This involved pretending that life in Government Spain was just one long massacre (vide the Catholic Herald or the Daily Mail – but these were child’s play compared with the continental Fascist press), and it involved immensely exaggerating the scale of Russian intervention. Out of the huge pyramid of lies which the Catholic and reactionary press all over the world built up, let me take just one point – the presence in Spain of a Russian army. Devout Franco partisans all believed in this; estimates of its strength went as high as half a million. Now, there was no Russian army in Spain. There may have been a handful of airmen and other technicians, a few hundred at the most, but an army there was not. Some thousands of foreigners who fought in Spain, not to mention millions of Spaniards, were witnesses of this. Well, their testimony made no impression at all upon the Franco propagandists, not one of whom had set foot in Government Spain. Simultaneously these people refused utterly to admit the fact of German or Italian intervention, at the same time as the Germany and Italian press were openly boasting about the exploits of their ‘legionaries’. I have chosen to mention only one point, but in fact the whole of Fascist propaganda about the war was on this level.
History Civil War Essay - The American Civil War Essay The ....
I remember saying once to Arthur Koestler, ‘History stopped in 1936’, at which he nodded in immediate understanding. We were both thinking of totalitarianism in general, but more particularly of the Spanish Civil War. Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories, and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’. Yet in a way, horrible as all this was, it was unimportant. It concerned secondary issues – namely, the struggle for power between the Comintern and the Spanish left-wing parties, and the efforts of the Russian Government to prevent revolution in Spain. But the broad picture of the war which the Spanish Government presented to the world was not untruthful. The main issues were what it said they were. But as for the Fascists and their backers, how could they come even as near to the truth as that? How could they possibly mention their real aims? Their version of the war was pure fantasy, and in the circumstances it could not have been otherwise.