Civil War Espionage: Spies & Codes

Marc Kollbaum, curator of the Missouri Civil War Museum at Jefferson Barracks, gave a lecture titled “Civil War Espionage: Spies & Codes” on Saturday, July 23, at the Arnold Branch of the Jefferson County Library. The audience in the library meeting room was small, thus affording time and opportunity for question and answer dialogue.

“Both sides in the Civil War set up espionage systems and both sides thought theirs was the best,” Kollbaum said. “Both used codes to encrypt messages, and today we will be breaking some original coded messages from the Civil War.”

As to who made the best spies during the Civil War, Kollbaum said that women and black servants were at the top of the list. In an anecdotal story, Kollbaum told of a spy for the South named Rose O’Neill, a prominent debutante and socialite in Washington society who was an avid secessionist. O’Neill used her social connections and popular parties to mingle with prominent, influential people to gather military information, which she then passed on to the Confederacy.

Kollbaum explained the various types of codes used during the Civil War, such as a word spacing code, encrypted Morse code and letter-wheel substitution code. After demonstrating a few examples, he challenged the crowd to decode an actual message from Robert E. Lee to J. E. B. Stuart. Using a model of an authentic Confederate letter- wheel, the audience eagerly took the challenge and had varying degrees of success.

The Arnold Branch of the Jefferson County Library has a case of Civil War artifacts on loan from Jefferson Barracks Park in their entrance lobby. The artifacts will be on display until the end of this month. In addition, reference librarian, Myra Hill has a large selection of Civil War fiction on display inside the library.

“I think that there has been an increased demand for books about the Civil War due to the events and publicity commemorating the 150th anniversary,” Hill said. “We have both fiction and non-fiction titles available.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly spelled Marc Kollbaum's name. The writer erred.