Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Secrets of the Civil War: Intel from the Inside

Episode Date: March 17, 2023

Today in our new series, we are going to discuss the Union, and it might surprise you to learn that spies and spy balloons, classified documents, and racially-motivated riots aren’t just the headlines of today but were also hallmarks of the American Civil War. We often think of the North as the emancipators, the champions of freedom, but that’s not quite the whole story.  Hosted by: Sharon McMahon Executive Producer: Heather Jackson Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Written and researched by: Heather Jackson, Valerie Hoback, Amy Watkin, and Mandy Reid Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As a Fizz member, you can look forward to free data, big savings on plans, and having your unused data roll over to the following month, every month. At Fizz, you always get more for your money. Terms and conditions for our different programs and policies apply. Details at fizz.ca. Hey friends, welcome. Today, we are going to discuss the union. And it might surprise you that spies and spy balloons, classified documents, and racially motivated riots

aren't just the headlines of today, but were in fact hallmarks of the American Civil War. Many of us were taught in school that the South, and not just Texas, wanted to secede and preserve their quote-unquote traditional way of life, while the North championed the freedom of the enslaved people. But that's not quite the whole story. I'm Sharon McMahon. Here's where it gets interesting. On Christmas Day in 1850, in a three-story home in Richmond, Virginia, a mother and daughter sat down to a festive dinner. They wore all black because they were in mourning after the death of the late Mr. Van Loo. The widowed Mrs. Eliza Van Loo and her daughter

Elizabeth sat while the people they enslaved stood around the table, eagerly waiting to be dismissed to have a holiday celebration of their own. It was common for enslaved families, including the ones in the Van Loo home, to be split apart, hired out, or sold to others. The patriarch of one enslaved family there had been sold to another household years ago, but he'd been given an invitation and permission to visit his wife and daughter for Christmas. Elizabeth Van Loo asked the nine enslaved people in the house to join her and her mother at the table. Though they were likely anxious, they sat, and a few moments later, Elizabeth stunned them with a surprise announcement. All the enslaved people of our household are now free. There may have been a slight legal catch

because her father's will had stipulated that none of the enslaved in the household should be freed, but the widowed Eliza and the determined Elizabeth were now running the household because they felt differently than the late John Van Loo. Elizabeth presented them with a potential plan. They were welcome to stay in the home and work for her while building a nest egg to eventually support themselves. stay in the home and work for her while building a nest egg to eventually support themselves, she would pay them all a fair wage. And when they felt they were ready, they were free to leave and work wherever they chose. Elizabeth's biggest disappointment that day was that she hadn't been able to secure the freedom of the enslaved patriarch, Mr. Richards. He worked as a blacksmith in another Richmond household,

and the man who enslaved him refused Elizabeth's offer. Elizabeth said that she would keep trying, and she had invited him to dinner so that he might at least share in the joy of seeing his wife and daughter begin a new chapter. Mr. Richards' 11-year-old daughter was named Mary, and Elizabeth knew that Mary was special. In fact, she knew that Mary was exceptionally bright and had a photographic memory and that she would need a top-notch education. And even though Elizabeth was a classic Southern lady, one of Virginia's most elite. Christmas Day in 1850 was the very beginning of her double life as a fierce abolitionist and later as a Union spy. Elizabeth's journey from traditional wealthy Southern woman to abolitionist was said to be at least in part as a result of her education at a boarding school run by Quakers. We've talked a lot about Quaker history on this podcast before, and the Quaker creed was that everyone should be valued equally, as they were

opposed to anything that could threaten or harm a human being. They were pacifists. They did not believe in violence, and they believed in educational opportunities for all. And so in 1774, the American colonial Quakers took an official stance against the enslavement of all people. Many of them lived what they preached and got involved in the abolition movement, working to aid the escape of enslaved people from the South to the North through the Underground Railroad. Because Elizabeth Van Loon knew the value of education, she knew how it influenced and evolved her own way of thinking, she was determined to give the same opportunity to Mary Richards. She arranged for Mary to be educated at a school in the north, likely Philadelphia. The Pennsylvania city had a

reputation for being a haven for free blacks, and it would offer Mary community and connection. After finishing school, Mary went on a missionary trip to Liberia, sponsored by the Van Loo Women. She sailed with members of the American Colonization Society, a group that believed that free African Americans in the United States should return to Africa. The South wanted to continue their way of life indefinitely, with economic and political control over the institution of slavery, including being allowed to expand enslavement into the Western territories. The North, however, opposed this. They wanted Western territories open only to hired labor. So one of the biggest points of contention amongst people in the North and the West was what should happen to the millions of African Americans if slavery was abolished. Our old pal Henry Clay influenced many political leaders with his ideology, and his biggest fan

might have been Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln famously referred to Clay as my beau ideal of a statesman, and he used Clay's political ideology as a building block for his own. And so while Henry Clay never embraced equality of the races, he did openly say that he believed enslavement was wrong and wrote publicly in support of gradual emancipation. In the 1830s, Clay wrote to a friend that slavery is unjust and a great evil. The difficulty has always been how to get rid of it. Henry Clay, by the way, voiced those opinions while he himself purchased, sold, and owned human beings. Clay supported transporting freed Black Americans to Liberia and believed that they should go to the land of their origins, Africa. Lincoln, early in his career, seemed to agree wholeheartedly with Clay. Years before the Civil War, in 1854, Lincoln gave a speech in Illinois saying,

I should not know what to do as to the existing institution of slavery. My first impulse would be to free all the slaves and send them to Liberia, to their own native land. Even many of those who favored a country without enslavement did not necessarily believe in equality. The fear was that treating the Black population as equals would lead to what people referred to as the mixing of the races, which of course was code for relationships between black men and white women, especially childbearing ones. There had been a longstanding societal campaign in the newly formed America to create an ideology of separateness between whites and blacks. In fact, I mentioned this at the start of the series. Most Southerners, whether they enslaved others or not, considered the system of enslavement to be a

beneficial institution. They truly believed that black individuals needed a guiding hand to exist in the world and considered them intellectually inferior to whites. Of course, this is like hugely paternalistic and problematic. Northern populations more or less believed that the Black population should be allowed to earn their own living, but they should still be excluded from equal social standing. This meant that the opportunities for free black people in the North were often inferior to the opportunities of whites. Many were paid low wages to do demeaning, labor-intensive, dirty jobs. They may have been free, but there was no equality and no real respite from racism. Interestingly, when the Civil War began, both the North and South fervently believed they were fighting to preserve the kind of country that the constitutional framers had set out to create. The Confederacy had seceded in order to retain the independence they believed the

Constitution afforded them, an independence that allowed them to have the freedom to own human beings without interference from the federal government. That's what they believed. The Union was committed to preserving the country as unified under the Constitution. When the war began, Northern soldiers weren't fighting for the freedoms of the Black population who were enslaved. They were fighting to save the Union. So there was Abraham Lincoln leading a newly fractured country under the belief that the Union needed to be preserved above all else, and that the enslaved population should be emancipated, but that it would be impossible for whites and blacks to live equally together. That was the belief of Abraham Lincoln. And it took a relationship with a man, also named Abraham, Abraham Galloway,

to fully evolve Lincoln's beliefs on equality. Lincoln's beliefs on equality. laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve! It's Steve Carell in the studio! Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from the office and our friendship with brand new guests, and we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Ladies 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there.

Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. get your podcasts. Abraham Galloway followed the condition of the mother, which is a concept that meant he was born into slavery. His mother, Hester Hankins, gave birth to him in 1837, and his father was a white boatman. Abraham was taken from his mom when he was a child and sold to a man named Marston Milton Hankins, who was so delighted when Abraham showed a great aptitude during his training as a brick mason that he moved to Wilmington, North Carolina, the largest city and busiest seaport at the time, in order to capitalize on Abraham's talents and maximize his business profits. But Abraham wanted his freedom at any

cost. And in 1857, he chose to risk his life by hiding in the cargo hold of a ship that left Wilmington for Philadelphia. From there, he made his way to Canada with the assistance of the Underground Railroad. Abraham Galloway was ambitious and intelligent, and he immediately emerged as a leader in the abolitionist movement, working in the free cities of the North, educating reluctant citizens about the benefits of emancipation. When the Civil War began, Abraham served the Union Army as a spy for Major General Benjamin Butler. He worked as a scout who scanned Confederate areas in advance of Union military campaigns, moving stealthily through the states of North Carolina, Louisiana, and Mississippi, and gathering intel, mostly from enslaved watermen and contacts he knew from his enslaved life in Wilmington.

As a fugitive slave, Abraham's freedom and his life were constantly in jeopardy, but he became one of the Union's most reliable spies. During his travels through the South, he assisted a few of the enslaved people he met in escaping to their own freedom, including his mother. When Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, which allowed African Americans to join the ranks of soldiers fighting for the Union, Abraham Galloway shifted away from military intelligence and began to recruit enslaved men from the South. And within just a few months' time, he had helped recruit thousands of Black soldiers to fight for the North. Abraham also regularly

spoke at abolition fundraising events, culminating in what would be the most important meeting of his career, an audience with President Abraham Lincoln on April 28, 1864. Over the course of his presidency, interactions with Black American abolitionist leaders began to influence Lincoln's thinking about equality beyond the act of emancipation. It was the conversations during those meetings that led the president to fully embrace the idea of allowing Black troops to contribute to the fight. Crucial meetings with the abolitionist Frederick Douglass convinced Lincoln to provide better pay for Black soldiers. Originally, the Union Army classified them as laborers instead of soldiers, which allowed them to be paid less than the white soldiers. On top of that, black men were charged a $3 clothing fee per month,

and that fee was deducted from the base rate of their pay. White soldiers, on the other hand, earned far more and were not required to pay any fees for their uniforms. Corporal James Henry Gooding of the 54th Regiment sent Lincoln a letter advocating for better pay. He wrote, we have done a soldier's duty. Why can't we have a soldier's pay? In June of 1864, Congress granted equal pay to Black soldiers who had been recruited to the Union Army, and they made the action retroactive to the start of the year, so soldiers received back pay. Other Black leaders moved Lincoln toward a belief that citizenship should be granted to Blacks, which was a drastic change from his original idea to send people who were freed

back to Liberia. But there was a final step Abraham Galloway wanted Lincoln to take, and that was to give Blacks political equality. When Galloway was granted his audience with the president, he gave his speech confidently, asking Lincoln to, quote, finish the noble work you have begun by granting that greatest of privileges to exercise the right of an equal vote. Galloway brought with him a delegation of freed, formerly enslaved men who had established their own careers as barbers, carpenters, farmers, bakers, and preachers. They presented Lincoln with an official document that they had written thanking him for the Emancipation Proclamation. After the meeting, President Lincoln promised that he would heed their petition

and encourage Black suffrage once the Union was restored. On April 11, 1865, Lincoln honored that promise by delivering a speech from the White House balcony, publicly calling for educated Black men and those who had served as soldiers to be given the right to vote. He did not advocate for full suffrage. Black women were left out of the speech altogether. But it was a start. Lincoln had proved that he was willing to change his mind, to consider new information, and to evolve with it. He may have continued to expand on this position in the years that followed, but that balcony speech was the last time Lincoln would advocate for Black suffrage. John Wilkes Booth, listening in the audience below, seethed over Lincoln's call for Black citizenship. Three days later, he assassinated President Lincoln.

When the Civil War began, Mary Richards returned to America from Liberia and settled back into Elizabeth Van Loo's Richmond home. But the home was being run a little differently than it had been a decade earlier. Elizabeth had connected with the very same Benjamin Butler who had facilitated Union spy work for Abraham Galloway and together, along with a few other Southern Unionists in Richmond, they established an intricate espionage circuit. For her part, Elizabeth played up her persona as a wealthy Southern belle. But behind the gossip and social calls, she was gathering information about the activities in the Confederate capital and sharing it with the Union. Using her connections, Elizabeth recommended Mary for a position in the household of Jefferson and Verena Davis, the President and First Lady of the Confederacy. Lady of the Confederacy. None the wiser to Mary's free status or the spying activities of Elizabeth,

the Davises planned to use Mary in the office portion of the president's home, potentially giving her access to unlimited information. Mary entered the Davis household and assumed a new persona, the former enslaved woman with a photographic memory who could read, write, and speak multiple languages played the part of a now-enslaved, slow-witted, clumsy woman who barely spoke above a whisper. It's difficult to say for sure what actually happened once Mary began working in the Davises' Richmond home because there are no written records beyond a few mentions in Elizabeth Van Loo's personal diary. Plus, Mary used different aliases and surnames over the years to keep herself safe, and when she talked about her wartime spying, the details changed a lot. wartime spying, the details changed a lot. But most often, she told it like this.

Jefferson Davis and his revolving door of government officials bought her act hook, line, and sinker. Davis and his cabinet members and military leaders spoke freely in front of her about troop strategy and movement. Due to her assumed illiteracy, she was able to read war dispatches and, are you ready for this, classified documents that were left openly lying around. Mary, with her photographic memory, only needed glance at them, to commit them to memory, and obtain the highest level secrets of the Confederacy. She devised a plan with Elizabeth Van Loo to pass along her intelligence, which was immediately sent to Union officials, including, she claimed, Abraham Lincoln himself. including, she claimed, Abraham Lincoln himself.

Eventually, Jefferson Davis realized there was a major intelligence leak within his system, and Mary left the prime post to preserve her safety. She continued to work within Elizabeth's espionage campaign called the Richmond Ring, and kept the Union informed of what the Confederacy was doing for the remainder of the Civil War. When Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, it gave abolitionists and Black men and women hope and a reason to aim for more progress, but for some in the North, those who were primarily concerned with restoring the Union, North, those who were primarily concerned with restoring the Union. The proclamation was widely unpopular. The act helped to pad the troops by allowing Blacks to join the regiments, but thousands of Union soldiers had already died, and the war was dragging on. To stretch his reach for victory. Lincoln used a strategy that he knew would be unpopular,

but necessary. A draft. The draft came with a buyout clause. A drafted man could buy out his draft by paying the government $300. It enraged low-wage workers, most of whom made only around $500 a year. For those struggling to survive, it felt like class warfare. The rich were literally allowed to buy their own lives. And lower-class folks who couldn't afford the buyout, primarily Irish-American immigrants, couldn't strike up. So they struck down. couldn't strike up. So they struck down. They channeled all of their rage against a freed Black population who they feared would steal their jobs while they were being forced to fight for the union. Fierce intentions of conscription and job replacements erupted into violence on July 18,

replacements erupted into violence on July 18, 1863, when names were drawn for the draft, and employers made immediate offers to Black workers to replace the men who had been called up to serve in the Army. Mobs formed and spilled into the streets of New York City. Defying any police that tried to stop them, they attacked draft headquarters, assaulted residents caught in their way, and burned buildings. Many Irish American immigrants specifically turned their wrath on the homes and businesses of innocent Black families who had already battled discrimination and a bottom-of-the-heap existence in order to carve out space for themselves in the city. Rioters lynched at least a dozen Black men. They looted and burned the city's colored orphan asylum. City leaders pleaded for peace, but the rioters were not listening. The Manhattan draft riots raged on for four days. When rioters were finally subdued, the damage was catastrophic. They had caused $1.5 million in damage, a fortune in 1863

that adjusted for inflation would be around $40 million in today's money. Imagine a riot that did $40 million worth of damage in four days. And what's worse, 119 people had been killed. The week after the riots began, the New York Times front page marked the moment by saying, no period in the history of this city will be more memorable than the riot week. It will not be forgotten by this generation, and the stories of it will be transmitted to the generation that follows us. The riots were so significant that they even made it onto the big screen in Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York. As the riots raged in Manhattan, the Union's northernmost battle at Gettysburg had just been fought. Gettysburg was a turning point for the Union as they gained some victory ground, which made them less fearful of losing the war.

Because the bulk of the battles had taken place in the South, many residents of the northern states felt pretty removed from the war beyond what was reported in the newspapers. But one morning in late June of 1863, the citizens of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, woke to find the Civil War at their doorsteps. the Civil War at their doorsteps. Confederate soldiers had been led to believe that there they would find warehouses overflowing with shoes in the city of Gettysburg. Because many of them had often gone barefoot into battle, the potential gold mine in Gettysburg was their hope of easing some of their own suffering. But when they got there, they found the storehouses had been cleared of all supplies. Everything had already been distributed to the Union army. Demoralized, but still determined, the Confederate soldiers decided to continue on with the plan to push through towards Philadelphia and New York City and take what ground they could.

An army of 35,000 Confederate troops made their way to the Wrightsville Bridge, where they'd be able to cross the mighty Susquehanna River and descend into the heart of the Union for the first time in the years-long war. On the other side of that bridge, there were no organized Union troops in place to meet them. Instead, a mere 1,500 citizens gathered together at the last minute to stage a defense. There was a company of African-American troops still in training, some of whom had just joined the Army literally days earlier, a small regiment of Pennsylvania militia, and throngs of men and women, citizen volunteers from the town of Columbia on the other side of the bridge. But the numbers were not in their favor, and the assembled northerners knew they would not be able to fend off the advancing Confederate troops with

artillery fire. Instead, they resorted to a different kind of fire. They burned down the Wrightsville Bridge. The flames over the Susquehanna River that night changed the course of the war. The incinerated bridge successfully pushed the Confederate troops back to Gettysburg, where Union troops had organized and were waiting to send the rebel army back to the South. Sometimes in war, you have to think fast and use quick tactics like burning down a bridge. But war has also often been the source of new technologies that took years of advanced planning. And the Union Army Balloon Corps is just one example of that. Chinese surveillance balloons might be in the news today, but 160 years before that,

the Union Army had developed a similar drone-like technique to spy on their enemies in the South. In the summer of 1861, the Union invested in the scientific work of a civilian professor named Thaddeus Lowe, who was given the title of Chief Aeronaut for the Union Army. Earlier that year, Thaddeus had sent President Lincoln a telegram that described the view from 500 feet above Washington, D.C. from the basket of a hot air balloon. Professor Lowe blew Lincoln's mind enough that he directed the professor to implement balloon technology into the war effort. The logistics of balloon operations were no joke. The balloons themselves, gas, and other balloon-related gear had to be transported by ship, train, and wagon. The largest hot air balloons, called the Union and the Intrepid, had a capacity of 32,000 cubic feet of lifting gas and could carry up to five people, or four people and a telegraph machine.

The Union wasn't alone in using balloons in warfare. The Confederacy had its own balloon called the Gazelle. According to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, when the balloons were in the sky, there was nothing secretive about them. They were often brightly colored with patriotic designs. And while this might sound risky, the balloons were always positioned well behind the front lines at an altitude of near a thousand feet, which made them difficult or impossible to shoot down. There were obviously no planes that could fire missiles at the balloons like there are today. Lowe's designs were intended to intimidate the Confederates by making them feel like the Union Army was always nearby and always watching. In the early days of the war, the seven balloon

outlooks that were stationed around the Washington DC area made it possible for Union General McClellan to organize his army because they were able to view Confederate troop movements from a day's march away. It gave the general time to form a plan of defense. And because they allowed generals to get an aerial view of the battlefield, Civil War balloons were primarily used in a reconnaissance capacity. A thousand feet of elevation allowed for a great vantage point to see miles in all directions. In a balloon tethered to the ground with a telegraph line, operators were able to give real-time updates on troop movements. And once a telegrapher even directed Union artillery fire from the sky.

So these are not hot air balloons that are like flying around where they're like a little to the left oh set it down over here no they were tethered to the ground they were just able to get really up high and being a part of the balloon corps came with its own sort of risk risk. On April 11, 1862, during the siege at Yorktown, Union General Fitz John Porter decided to do his own reconnaissance and ascended in a balloon. To keep the aircraft under control, Professor Lowe suggested three or four tether ropes be used during the balloon's ascent into the air. Porter rashly opted to use only one rope in order to move the balloon higher and faster. And unfortunately for Porter, the rope snapped with the sound of a pistol, and the balloon drifted helplessly over Confederate lines. Despite the uncertainty of the situation and a few

shots taken at him by Confederate marksmen, Porter remained calm and collected, and the balloon eventually made it back across Union lines, where the general continued to make sketches of Confederate positions around Yorktown from his drifting position in the air. The incident disturbed General McClellan enough that he wrote to his wife about it, calling it a terrible scare. He went on to claim, you may rust a shirt of one thing, you will not catch me in the confounded balloon, nor will I allow any other generals to go up in it. Despite Professor Lowe's efforts to

continue the program, the Union Balloon Corps was less effective than they had hoped, and it disbanded in 1863 before the war ended. In our next episode, we'll be talking about more Civil War era advancements in everyone's favorite topic, food. I'll see you then. Thank you for listening to Here's Where It Gets Interesting. This episode is written and researched by Sharon McMahon, Heather Jackson, Valerie Hoback, Amy Watkin, and Mandy Reed. Our executive producer is Heather Jackson. Our audioack, Amy Watkin, and Mandy Reed. Our executive producer is Heather Jackson. Our audio producer is Jenny Snyder, and it's hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. If you enjoyed

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