The Affair of the Confederate Cigars

[El Presidente]

From a series on history changing  security leaks 

 

The Affair of the Confederate Cigars

Another history-changing security breach involved three cigars. Those cigars probably changed the course of the American Civil War and freed millions of African-Americans from slavery.

On 13 September 1863, two Union soldiers; Sergeant John Bloss and Corporal Barton W. Mitchell were taking a break from a march near Frederick, Maryland. In a field, Bloss and Mitchell found three cigars wrapped in a piece of paper.

Incredibly, the cigar wrapper was , Headquarters, Army of Northern Virginia. Special Order №191 was Confederate commander Robert E. Lee’s plan for an invasion of Maryland and Pennsylvania. Special Order №191 detailed the route the Army of Northern Virginia would take.

Bloss and Mitchell passed Special Order №191 up the chain of command. Somewhere along the chain, a Union General Samuel Pittman saw the handwritten order. On the paper, Pittman recognized the handwriting of an old army buddy, Robert Chilton, who was serving as Lee’s adjutant general (chief of staff).

As a result, Pittman took the order to General George B. McClellan, the commander of the Union Army of the Potomac. Once he saw the order, McClellan knew where Lee was going.

Unfortunately, the Army of the Potomac was slow to move and unable to attack the Army of Northern Virginia on the march where it was most vulnerable. However, the Army of the Potomac could stop Lee’s invasion.

Defeat at Antietam forced Lee to abandon his offensive and retreat to Virginia. The North was safe from invasion and Lee’s efforts to cut Washington DC off from the rest of the Union failed.

The victory at Antietam gave Union President Abraham Lincoln (R-Illinois) political cover to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. The Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves in the Confederate States.

Since the vast majority of slaves were in the Confederacy, the Proclamation freed most of America’s slaves. However, the Emancipation Proclamation did not abolish slavery. Hence, slaves in states loyal to the Union had to wait until the 13th Amendment in 1865 for their freedom.

The Proclamation transformed the Civil War from a conflict over states’ rights to a crusade against slavery. One result of the Proclamation was to make a British intervention on the Confederate side impossible.

To explain, most British people were against slavery. As long as both sides in the Civil War embraced slavery, British support for the Confederacy was a political possibility.

British intervention could have led to Confederate victory because the Royal Navy was powerful enough to break the Union blockade of Southern ports. A broken blockade could have allowed the Confederates to import the weapons and munitions they needed the win the war.

Thus, two Union soldiers changed American history and freed millions of enslaved people by picking up a bundle of cigars. There is an intriguing mystery about the cigars.

Nobody knows who left the cigars and Special Order №191 for Bloss and Mitchell to find. Was the order left by a Union spy, a Confederate traitor, a British agent, or a slave who knew how to read? Some Confederate officers brought slave servants to war with them. Did somebody deliberately wrap Special Order №191 around the cigars, hoping a Union soldier would pick them up?

Moreover, were Bloss and Mitchell just resting, or were they were under orders to “find” the cigars? Notably, the cigar find sounds like a. A dead drop is a classic piece of espionage tradecraft in which a spy leaves hidden intelligence for another agent to pickup.

So yes, information leaks can change history. Hence, history justifies the paranoia leaders such as US Presidents Donald J. Trump (R-Florida) and Joe Biden (D-Delaware) have about leaks.

 

[NSXCIGAR]

This is true: https://www.nps.gov/mono/learn/historyculture/so191.htm

Note to self: do not drop important battle plans where the enemy can find them and not realize it...wow. 

 

[dealsrme]

Pretty neat. Love these history tidbits.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Ryan]

40 minutes ago, El Presidente said:

...The Proclamation transformed the Civil War from a conflict over states’ rights to a crusade against slavery.....

 

Isn't "State's Rights" as the main cause of the US Civil War a myth? 

I am asking for historical reasons, not to start a discussion on US Politics..😶

[NSXCIGAR]

1 hour ago, Ryan said:

Isn't "State's Rights" as the main cause of the US Civil War a myth? 

Several factors precipitated the war, slavery not chief among them. Slavery became more of an issue as the war went on. Not a perfect analogy, but similar to the allies using the Holocaust as justification in WW2 even though they really knew little of it until the late stages. Kind of a post-hoc rationalization. Lincoln's primary goal was to "preserve the Union" at all costs, slaves or not. There also may have been some pressure to push the slave issue by the British who the North desperately wanted to come in to assist on their side. 

I would say in 1859-1860 the chief cause was the tariff question. The North's tariffs disproportionately hurt the southern economy. The South's representation in congress was becoming diluted due to population differences. The writing was on the wall for the South. I think at the time, state secession could have been reasonably understood as a legitimate and peaceful option, and they went for it. The South would have won the war early if not for their decision to not sack Washington. They saw no need as they believed they were fighting a defensive war and had no interest in the capital. It was a lesson Hitler learned well--you must always push through and fully decapitate your enemy. 

They didn't, and they ran out of time. The Union eventually got British aid and were able to establish a naval blockade spelling the end for the South.

[Ryan]

I really thought the US Civil War began, and that South Carolina seceded in 1860, over their right to own slaves and specifically the right of slave owners to travel with their slaves and have fugitive slaves returned to them by other states that were refusing to do so.

[NSXCIGAR]

2 hours ago, Ryan said:

I really thought the US Civil War began, and that South Carolina seceded in 1860, over their right to own slaves and specifically the right of slave owners to travel with their slaves and have fugitive slaves returned to them by other states that were refusing to do so.

Not exactly. Again, the slave issue was certainly weighing on their minds, but primarily in that it appeared future states and the western territories were going to prohibit slavery in the future. They weren't going to be able to move west with their slaves. But there was no fear of slavery being outlawed in the slave states at the time. In fact, Lincoln had mulled over a proposed 13th Amendment that would have permanently enshrined slavery in the current slave states in exchange for the South remaining in the Union, accepting the tariffs and the prohibition of slavery in new states and western territories. 

And yes, the Fugitive Slave Laws were making life more difficult for the South but only in the border states. I don't think there was much public fury about that. Keep in mind, only a very small percentage of people owned slaves. I think the general public was more interested in "preserving their way of life" and I suppose "state's rights" were a part of that but as far as a "cause" or precipitating event, certainly the tariff issue led directly to the secession, which led to what the South considered a Northern invasion. Then it became the common soldier clinging to their cultural ideologies. The South was going to fight for everything including slavery and the North was going to fight for unity and abolishing slavery. I would say that the public sentiments somewhat evolved into that. So the history books write "The South was fighting to keep slaves and the North was fighting to free slaves" which is really a perversion of actual events and sentiments.

South Carolina was a flashpoint because Charleston was the primary port where the Northern tariffs were being collected. In 1832 SC told congress to kick rocks and refused to collect the tariffs. Congress backed off. I believe at the time secession was very much believed to be a recourse so SC's nullification had to be respected. In 1860, Lincoln decided not to back off and denied the right of secession. When SC seceded it told the US to get its troops out of Fort Sumter. They wouldn't go. They shot some bombs in the general direction of the fort. No one was killed by them but one soldier died in an accident. Lincoln used this incident as the justification to invade. There's been some good scholarly work on how Lincoln had worked hard to provoke the South to fire the first shots at Fort Sumter: https://www.tulane.edu/~sumter/Reflections/LinWar.html https://www.americancivilwar.com/authors/Joseph_Ryan/Articles/Lincoln-Instigated-War/The-Buried-Fact-Record.html https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=2&psid=3059 https://prizedwriting.ucdavis.edu/lincoln-and-outbreak-war

[Fuzz]

This is the real reason for the Civil War....

 

Oh wait, wrong Civil War...

[Nocoins]

The tariff thing is another cover story for the cause of the war.  It was caused by the South's insistence to maintain a slave-based economy and, specifically, the rich white South's desperate attempt not to have to work for a living.  So they concocted all sorts of rationalizations, like state's rights and such, to convince poor whites to bleed and die for them.  These justifications persist today.  

I grew up ten minutes from Antietam, across town from a high school founded in 1956 with Rebels as its mascot, which uses Fama Semper Vivat as its motto.  As a child, for some reason, our Cub Scout patch had a United States flag crossed with the Confederate Battle Flag.  There was no doubt in our part of the world, where the war was fought, that it was over slavery.  Thank god the Confederacy lost.  If only the Lost Cause narratives would die, too.

[NSXCIGAR]

1 hour ago, Nocoins said:

The tariff thing is another cover story for the cause of the war.  It was caused by the South's insistence to maintain a slave-based economy and, specifically, the rich white South's desperate attempt not to have to work for a living.  So they concocted all sorts of rationalizations, like state's rights and such, to convince poor whites to bleed and die for them.  These justifications persist today.  

Slavery wasn't going anywhere in the South. Why then would the South secede? 

You could argue that slavery was a more significant issue, but to claim it was the chief issue or the only issue is totally ahistorical. Lincoln's inaugural addresses and letters, and especially his support of the Corwin amendment in which he was willing to permanently protect slavery in the South in exchange for compliance pretty much obliterates any possible argument that the primary objective of the war was to eliminate slavery. Again, it's akin to arguing that WW2 was about ending the Holocaust. 

In fact, it is unfortunate that a significant amount of Northerners opposed total emancipation of slaves through 1862-63 as they feared former slaves coming to the North and undercutting northern wages. There's much more evidence that the general public did not believe the war was initially about slavery and that the anti-slavery sentiment grew as the war progressed.

[Bijan]

5 hours ago, NSXCIGAR said:

I would say in 1859-1860 the chief cause was the tariff question. The North's tariffs disproportionately hurt the southern economy.

Wikipedia seems to disagree:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War#Protectionism

"

Protectionism

Owners of slaves preferred low-cost manual labor with no mechanization. Northern manufacturing interests supported tariffs and protectionism while Southern planters demanded free trade.^[98] The Democrats in Congress, controlled by Southerners, wrote the tariff laws in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, and kept reducing rates so that the 1857 rates were the lowest since 1816. The Republicans called for an increase in tariffs in the 1860 election. The increases were only enacted in 1861 after Southerners resigned their seats in Congress.^[99][100] The tariff issue was a Northern grievance. However, neo-Confederate writers^[who?] have claimed it as a Southern grievance. In 1860–61 none of the groups that proposed compromises to head off secession raised the tariff issue.^[101] Pamphleteers North and South rarely mentioned the tariff.^[102]"

[NSXCIGAR]

55 minutes ago, Bijan said:

Wikipedia seems to disagree:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War#Protectionism

"

Protectionism

Owners of slaves preferred low-cost manual labor with no mechanization. Northern manufacturing interests supported tariffs and protectionism while Southern planters demanded free trade.^[98] The Democrats in Congress, controlled by Southerners, wrote the tariff laws in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, and kept reducing rates so that the 1857 rates were the lowest since 1816. The Republicans called for an increase in tariffs in the 1860 election. The increases were only enacted in 1861 after Southerners resigned their seats in Congress.^[99][100] The tariff issue was a Northern grievance. However, neo-Confederate writers^[who?] have claimed it as a Southern grievance. In 1860–61 none of the groups that proposed compromises to head off secession raised the tariff issue.^[101] Pamphleteers North and South rarely mentioned the tariff.^[102]"

I'm sure Wikipedia does. So does every high school textbook.

The tariffs were reducing the amount of agricultural goods being shipped to Europe as they had less money to buy them with, and the south was paying more for manufactured goods. The Democrats had been chipping away at the tariffs between 1832-1858 and which weren't even really being collected, especially in South Carolina. The fact that the tariff was only enacted in 1861 is of no consequence--Lincoln wasn't messing around this time and the South knew it was coming and proactively seceded. 

The fact that South Carolina had already threatened secession once over the "Tariff of Abominations" in 1828 shows that it was clearly important to some degree. 

Again, the Corwin amendment is a big problem for anyone arguing slavery being the chief cause. The South openly rejected the permanent enshrinement of slavery in exchange for remaining, so the reasons run deeper than that. 

One must be careful with Wikipedia and the references that often people hope aren't checked:

No reference to the "Neo-Confederate writers";

The Wiki reference 101 is to some esoteric book with no link;

Wiki reference 102 shows passages like this. They seem to be discussing the trade issue quite a bit:

[Bijan]

28 minutes ago, NSXCIGAR said:

I'm sure Wikipedia does. So does every high school textbook.

Are you suggesting every high school textbook is wrong?

I mean I understand that there is an ideological component to history. But if we were having an argument about algebra and I cited Wikipedia, and you said well Wikipedia would of course say such a thing as would every high school textbook, it would be more or less case closed.

Could you cite some reference to tariffs being the main cause of the civil war? I am not too well informed, but able enough to read.

[NSXCIGAR]

2 minutes ago, Bijan said:

Are you suggesting every high school textbook is wrong?

I mean I understand that there is an ideological component to history. But if we were having an argument about algebra and I cited Wikipedia, and you said well Wikipedia would of course say such a thing as would every high school textbook, it would be more or less case closed.

Could you cite some reference to tariffs being the main cause of the civil war? I am not too well informed, but able enough to read.

I would suggest almost all high school textbooks have very questionable interpretations of particular historical events, particularly ones that have ideological implications like most wars.

To be clear, my personal conclusion is that the tariff issue was the most important (or, maybe more accurately, as important as any other issue) in precipitating secession among many issues which certainly included slavery. The issue in this case is that slavery appears to have become more of a "rallying cry" as the war progressed for various reasons. I am only interested in the origin of the war or the events that led to secession, which then led to the North invading. It's the same reason why when many think of WW2 today, they think of Nazi atrocities when that really wasn't a factor in the war at all. 

There are a lot of questionable articles from very biased sources. Scholarly work I can link to is harder to find but here's a start:

http://www.thomaslegion.net/tariffsandtheamericancivilwar.html

[Bijan]

@NSXCIGAR the problem is that it doesn't matter exactly if the war was caused by the narrow question of whether the initial southern states could legally continue owning slaves if practically the issues that directly caused the war were issues that were ultimately incompatible with a slave based economy.

If the southern states were worried about new states not being slave owning and voting against them that points to the fact that their interests were related to slave owning itself. If new states own slaves they will vote with the south else the north. Otherwise whether new states can be slave holding is unimportant.

In that sense tariffs that hurt a slave based economy being a cause of the war also means slavery as cause of the war.

1 hour ago, NSXCIGAR said:

It's the same reason why when many think of WW2 today, they think of Nazi atrocities when that really wasn't a factor in the war at all. 

That is much different. I'll have to reread Raul Hilbert but my impression is that the nazi atrocities happened quite early in the war Auschwitz starting in May 1940 for example. It was not a last ditch effort, except for certain moves, which did have much historical significance in terms of who they affected, but anyways it was something that occurred quite early on.

You're right that it was not a major factor. But it was not a factor in a very different way from how you are proposing slavery was not a major factor in the civil war.

Edit: just to be clear the mass genocide of the Jews started in Auschwitz in 1942.

[NSXCIGAR]

On 6/28/2021 at 10:41 PM, Bijan said:

Edit: just to be clear the mass genocide of the Jews started in Auschwitz in 1942.

I'm not challenging that at all. It was absolutely occurring that early or earlier but the Allies and the world didn't know about it or at least not the extent of it until the final days. It wasn't a "cause for war" or a rallying cry but today we unconsciously associate it with the righteousness of the war even though it had nothing to do with the war itself, technically speaking.

On 6/28/2021 at 10:36 PM, Bijan said:

In that sense tariffs that hurt a slave based economy being a cause of the war also means slavery as cause of the war.

The tariffs weren't intended to punish the states for being slave states. It was simply a case of the agricultural states, which all happened to be southern slave states, feeling they were being unfairly hurt economically. This would have been an issue regardless of their slave status. 

On 6/28/2021 at 10:36 PM, Bijan said:

If the southern states were worried about new states not being slave owning and voting against them that points to the fact that their interests were related to slave owning itself. If new states own slaves they will vote with the south else the north. Otherwise whether new states can be slave holding is unimportant.

I don't believe that alone would have been cause for secession. New states were slow coming and with very low population wouldn't have diluted representation that much.

We also never define the term. "Because of slavery" meant what to the South? It's become a nebulous term. There was no chance slavery would have been banned in the South even with new anti-slave states added as it would have taken a constitutional amendment that still would not have passed. The South would not secede because they couldn't go west with their slaves. The South would not secede because of Fugitive Slave Laws frustrating them mostly in border states. And neither of those issues would have gone away with the establishment of the Confederacy.

And of course, Lincoln never publicly made any statement against slavery and never campaigned against it. There was no reason to think slavery was immediately threatened enough for the entire south to secede at that moment. And as usual, you have that pesky Corwin amendment that, in my opinion, makes it impossible to conclude that the North had slavery on its mind when contemplating going to war.

Slavery was dying on its own. It was only a matter of time. Public sentiment was rapidly shifting. It could not have survived in the South for more than another decade or two. The South would have been fools not to realize this--Britain was their primary trading partner and I'm sure pressure had already begun to mount. 

The issues the South had may have been incompatible as slaveholders, but since there would be no war without secession, we must know why the South seceded and why the North invaded. It makes little sense that the South seceded at the time it did in the way it did and the North invaded how and why it did if the overriding issue was slavery. I do not believe the slavery issues alone would have caused secession. 

I also find it hard to believe that the entire Southern population would be willing to fight for something that was an institution of the elites and, if ended, would increase unemployment among low skilled whites. I think it was one of many things that represented what the South felt was the North overreaching and infringing on their livelihood and culture. All the factors combined rallied the common southerner. I think the tariff alone would not have. I think the slavery issues alone would not have. I think the congressional representation issues alone would not have. All of them combined, yes. And they all just came to a head with a new president that they took seriously as an enforcer in 1860. 

[MooseAMuffin]

Great little piece of history.

There are 2 pretty fun videos on YouTube that talk through the US Civil War at a high level.

Part 1

Part 2

 

[Ryan]

There are quite a few primary sources of information that are publicly available.

This one, the Declaration of Immediate Causes of Secession, ratified by South Carolina in 1860. It looks like quite an important document, historically.

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp

The words "slave", "slavery" and "slave-holding" get 18 mentions in the document, none of them "in a bad way". The word "Tariff" isn't present.

States' Rights are mentioned but the document is mostly complaining about other states' rights, that is, the right of Northern states to pass laws preventing the transit of slaves, or the return of fugitive slaves. Then it calls out the names of the states who have enacted laws preserving rights it disagrees with. To sum up, other states' rights which are anti-slavery are bad and should not be allowed to interfere, but South Carolina's interpretation of states' rights, preserving slavery, are correct.

The document makes it fairly clear that slavery was the core issue. Maybe not as a "moral" reason, but as a cultural and economic reason. It could be said that the war was caused by "states' rights", but overwhelmingly the "states' rights" referred to were Southern states' rights to uphold slavery without being interfered with by other states.  

Here is a piece by History.com beginning with discussion of South Carolina's secession document and other states' secession documents and the self-declared reasons in those documents for seceding. 

https://www.history.com/news/how-the-cult-of-robert-e-lee-was-born

I like this video (by Vox) regarding the "Lost Cause" argument. Hats off to the Daughters of the Confederacy getting so organised and pulling this off, at a time when women couldn't even vote. Though they look like a formidable group of people!

https://ed.ted.com/best_of_web/ig6W6vJ5 

 

[NSXCIGAR]

On 6/29/2021 at 9:31 AM, Ryan said:

The words "slave", "slavery" and "slave-holding" get 18 mentions in the document, none of them "in a bad way". The word "Tariff" isn't present.

The various state declarations are a bit misleading if one isn't really reading and absorbing the document as a whole. First, if you look carefully, the word "slave" is used mostly in simply referencing the North, as in "non-slaveholding states" and "anti-slavery party". I think this was partly due to the South attempting to constantly use the label to essentially rouse the citizens--particularly the elites. Yes, the states took the opportunity to blast the North for being anti-slavery in every way they could think of in these declarations, which is to be expected for an issue that was longstanding. But just as much time is spent on the economic issues in these documents.

Second, one must look at exactly what the South is trying to exposit in those paragraphs. The South is constantly bringing up the issue of slavery most frequently in relation to the fact that they feel the US acted unconstitutionally in prohibiting slaves in the Western Territories. A lot of time is spent on that, not because the South cared about slaves in the west specifically (as I've pointed out, they wouldn't be able to go west if the Confederacy had survived) but because they are trying to make the legal and logical case for the US acting lawlessly and overstepping its bounds. Now, this is something that had been an issue for quite some time with no state seriously threatening secession over it. So why secede all the sudden in 1861?

CSA President Jefferson Davis' inaugural address has no mentions of slavery and strongly focuses on economic issues: https://www.houstonisd.org/cms/lib2/TX01001591/Centricity/Domain/9764/Jefferson Davis First Inaugural Address.pdf

I don't find it coincidental that the South seceded precisely at the time the already long-hated tariffs were effectively doubled after being chipped away at for 25 years--the exact same reason South Carolina had threatened secession in 1832. I think all the other issues--including the slave issues--would not have resulted in secession. Again, all these other issues had existed for a very long time without even a serious threat of secession. At best, I don't think you can assign more than 50% of the South's justification to secede to direct or indirect slavery questions. And it's hard to call anything but the tariff the precipitating event since the slavery issues had been longstanding yet as soon as the tariff hits with a president who's made it clear he's hell-bent on collecting it (because it was critical to implementing his agenda of protectionism and subsidy to industry) they immediately bolt.

Now, we are of course talking about a war. A war with two sides and two potentially differing agendas. I think it's important to point out that even if one side is focused on one set of issues the other might be focused on an entirely different set. When a war has what is considered the aggressor and a defender I don't think it's unreasonable to ask what the intent of the aggressor is to assess "cause". There's no evidence whatsoever that the North or Lincoln had slavery on their mind (other than offering to enshrine it in the South in exchange for compliance) and lots of evidence they were focused on nothing but collecting a tariff and preventing secession. I believe Lincoln would have been destroyed politically if the South left the Union. 95% of federal revenue came from the tariffs paid mostly by the South. The Confederacy would have purchased their manufactured goods from Europe and Northern industry would not have been able to compete. It would have torpedoed two of the three major Republican party/Lincoln planks--protectionism and subsidy to home industry.

[Smatthews607]

As a history teacher, it is infuriating that the textbooks that we use so oversimplify the period leading up to the American Civil War, among many other topics.  This amazingly complex time is almost literally oversimplified into 'Lincoln  wanted to free the slaves, so the Southern states seceded' and our societal reliance on Wikipedia do not help matters any. My final few weeks of the past school year were spent trying to explain all of the intricacies of early/mid-19th Century American sectional politics to our population of high school students who only seem to know how to locate information on Wikipedia. It is infuriating. 

I come here to buy and learn about cigars and spend my morning being refreshed as a teacher reading coherent, civil discussion about complex political issues. Bravo Nsxcigar and Bijan!

On 6/29/2021 at 12:48 AM, Bijan said:

Are you suggesting every high school textbook is wrong?

And yes, text books are wrong all the time. Some of the error is just in shading of the details, but some is just outright, they got it wrong. I once had a student keep track of how many errors a specific math textbook made over the year and then had him write a very respectful to the editors of the book at the end of the school year. Great lesson for the student to think critically about what they are reading and hearing. Funny thing is, we never got a response for the textbook editors...