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Τρίτη 4 Οκτωβρίου 2016

The Black Dispatches From the Civil War Spies


 Jinny McCormick
 
The south steps of the Confederate White House teeming with Southern officers and soldiers. Freedwoman Mary Bowser, posing as a slave, often spied here for the Union.
 


The typical Southern officer’s opinion of African Americans was that they were an inferior subhuman race, lacking in intelligence or cunning. Their ignorance and subsequent disregard of the slaves in their midst led to the most successful intelligence gathering of the Civil War.
The black men and women that provided information to the Union did so at extreme peril and risk that they would never outlive, even long after the war was over. They did this gambling that the pay-off would be winning the war and trusting that they would hopefully gain their freedom. There would be no accolades or acknowledgment. Such attention, even long after the South fell, would put them in danger of retaliation from disgruntled former Confederates.