Civil War expert provides intelligence on black spy network

Hari Jones, curator and assistant director of the African American Civil War Memorial and Museum, said on Saturday that black spies used Confederate officers’ belief in their ignorance during the Civil War to help inform the other side.

Jones, a former intelligence officer in the U.S. Marine Corps and the six-year curator of the Washington, D.C.-based museum, delivered a talk for about 50 people at the New Bern Riverfront Convention Center as part of the U.S. Colored Troops National Symposium.

Jones explained how the spy network came out of an organization known as Lincoln’s Legal Loyal League, and how its members were able to deliver intelligence to Union military leaders.

“Our Constitution actually was used by a disenfranchised, enslaved population to win their freedom,” Jones said, explaining that the league believed the preamble to the Constitution had an anti-slavery message. “It becomes very clear that what they are making is what I’m going to call an American patriotic statement.”

When the Civil War began, Jones said black volunteers could not join the U.S. Army. At that time, he said, there was not a lot of support from the league for the Union war effort.

The network did not provide intelligence to Union Gen. George McClellan, he said. McClellan believed Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s army was three to four times its actual size, he said, and thought that wooden Confederate cannons, for example, were real.

“He has horrible information on the enemy,” Jones said.

He compared the success of Union Gen. Ulysses Grant in battles in Vicksburg, Miss., when the spy network was activated, to when it wasn’t.

He said that in the fall of 1862 Grant said the Confederates were like ghosts, because he didn’t know “where they came from and where they went.”

Later when the cell was activated, Jones said an African American gave the Union general key information to start his invasion at the siege at Vicksburg. He said landing at Bruinsburg, Miss., would send him into an “uncharted” area, but “a colored man tells him to go.”

Grant later noted that he knew “what the rebels are doing in the South before they do it,” Jones said.

Jones also said the spies “exploited” Confederate officers’ belief that they “could not think on a higher intellectual plane” to help them do their work undetected. They also used what he called “gospel talk,” or the use of scripture and religious songs, to deliver information.

Chapel Hill resident Patricia Davis, a post-doctoral researcher at UNC, attended Jones’ presentation because she said she’s in the process of revising her dissertation on African American Civil War re-enactors and she felt she could learn from it.

She said she hadn’t known how “extensive and effective” the network was.

Aubrey Cephas of New Bern took Qweshaun Nevels, 13, to hear Jones’ presentation. Qweshaun is Cephas’ little brother through Big Brothers Big Sisters of Southeastern North Carolina.

Cephas said he felt the talk brought a piece of Civil War history to light that was “often not publicized or understood.” 

Laura Oleniacz can be reached at 252-635-5675 or at loleniacz@freedomenc.com.