Confederate Secret Service
The legislation was not enacted until March 1865 and was never implemented; however, a number of groups and operations have been referred to historically as having been part of the Confederate Secret Service.
The Confederacy benefited from the services of a number of "traditional" spies including Rose O'Neal Greenhow and Aaron Van Camp, who appear to have been members of an espionage gang during the formative period of the Confederate government.
The United Kingdom was officially neutral in the conflict between North and South, but private and public sentiment favored the Confederacy.
[citation needed] Britain was also willing to buy cotton that could be smuggled past the Union blockade, which provided the South with its only real source of hard currency.
Bulloch also arranged for the construction and secret purchase of the commerce raider CSS Alabama, as well as many of the blockade runners that acted as the Confederacy's commercial lifeline.
[5] For example, in Toronto, Southern agents operated freely and openly with little to no concern from local authorities who were governed by British North America’s official policy of neutrality.
Indeed, Southerners enjoyed the sympathy of most of Toronto’s political, social, and business elite—although few were as enthusiastic in supporting the Confederate cause as George Taylor Denison III.
In 1862, possibly due to a suggestion, the Confederate Congress enacted a bounty of fifty percent of the value of any vessel destroyed by means of a new invention:
The Congress of the Confederate States of America do enact, That the first section of the above entitled Act be so amended, that, in case any person or persons shall invent or construct any new machine or engine, or contrive any new method for destroying the armed vessels of the enemy, he or they shall receive fifty per centum of the value of each and every such vessel that may be sunk or destroyed, by means of such invention or contrivance...This attracted the attention of entrepreneurs.
It was involved in the October 19, 1864 St. Albans Raid in Vermont by personnel from Canada, the plan for arson in northern cities, and future Kentucky governor Luke P. Blackburn's biological warfare plot.
In 1988, two career intelligence officers, William A. Tidwell and David Winfred Gaddy, and an amateur historian who specialized in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, James O.
first planned, using Booth as its agent, to kidnap Lincoln and hold him hostage in order to pressure the North into ending the Civil War; the code word for this operation was "Come retribution".
When this plan failed to develop, they turned instead to an attempt to bomb the White House while a conference of Union officials was occurred.
This plot also failed, and the Confederate Secret Service made other plans, leaving Booth to perform the conspiracy to assassinate Lincoln and other U.S. officials without the backing of the C.S.S.
[18] There is little indication that the theories presented in these books have been accepted by significant numbers of Civil War historians, although John D. McKenzie, in his 1997 book Uncertain Glory: Lee's Generalship Re-Examined speculates that one of the reasons that Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis did not end the war after Lincoln's re-election in 1864, when a Confederate military victory was virtually impossible, may have been to allow time for these plots to come to fruition.
