The Secret War for the Union: The Untold Story of Military Intelligence in the Civil War

Most histories of the Civil War explain victory and defeat in terms of the skill of commanders and their troops. Intelligence records disappeared after the war, and thus a critically important element has largely been ignored. Fishel has unearthed substantial collections of such records, and his "intelligence explanation" radically alters history's understanding of the campaigns. The Secret War for the Union is one of the most important Civil War works ever published.

It's rare for a modern writer to make a genuinely new discovery about the Civil War, but former intelligence officer Edwin C. Fishel pulls it off in The Secret War for the Union. Having stumbled upon a large collection of previously unknown documents at the National Archives, he describes in this book the undercover operations of the Army of the Potomac. Federal intelligence, by Fishel's account, was crucially important to winning the war, and was of much higher quality than previously assumed. Among other accomplishments, it appears to have played a vital role in the Union victory at Gettysburg. This surprise--and a few others--await serious readers.