Questioning Rebels pays off at Gettysburg

Maj. Gen. George G. Meade called a conference with his commanders on the evening of July 2, 1863, after two days of fierce combat between the Union Army of the Potomac and Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.

Before the meeting, Meade’s intelligence organization, the Bureau of Military Information (BMI), informed him that Lee had already committed all of his units in battle, with the exception of the brigades of Maj. Gen. George Pickett’s division.

The BMI had acquired this information through interrogation of more than a thousand prisoners and deserters taken during the first two days of fighting at Gettysburg. It was accurate except for one other brigade it did not detect. From this Meade knew that his army was in much better condition than Lee’s and that he would have a distinct advantage in available troop strength the following day.

Armed with this intelligence, Meade and his commanders decided to maintain their defensive position on Cemetery Ridge and await an attack. On July 3, that attack came as the Union Army held its ground and repulsed Pickett’s Charge and, thereby, gained a critical victory.

Sharpe’s unit

The BMI’s performance at Gettysburg was an indication of its rapid development as an intelligence bureau. It had been in operation only since January 1863, when Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker, the army commander at the time, established it, and selected Col. George H. Sharpe as its leader.

Sharpe, a lawyer and State Department diplomat before the war, was a native of Kingston, N.Y., and had been in charge of the 120th New York Regiment. The BMI’s mission was to collect and analyze information gathered from a variety of sources and generate intelligence reports for the use of the Army of the Potomac commander.

During the months before Gettysburg, Sharpe’s bureau had become adept at ascertaining the organization, disposition, intentions and morale of enemy forces through the interrogation of prisoners and deserters.

To entice these men to divulge the information it sought, the BMI held out the hope of avoiding prison as well as a speedy release for those who made, as Sharpe phrased it, a “full discovery of their knowledge of the enemy.”

The problem

The BMI offered the possibility of release primarily to those who had no strong ties to the Confederacy and who expressed a desire to remain within Union lines. There were many prisoners and deserters who gladly traded military information for their freedom. Some of these men had Union sympathies but had been forced into the Rebel army.

A problem existed, however, in that on occasion large numbers of captives came into the BMI’s hands at the same time and the unit did not have the ability to interrogate them all before they were shipped to Washington, where some were processed and sent to prisons in the North, while others were held to exchange for Union POWs under the terms of a July 1862 agreement.

Having received a continuing stream of letters from these men asking for consideration of their cases, Sharpe knew there were many who would not wish to be exchanged and, thereby, returned to the Southern forces.

With this in mind, on Dec. 12, 1863, Col. Sharpe sent a letter to Brig. Gen. John H. Martindale, the military governor of Washington, proposing that the Federal government adopt a policy of preferential treatment to Confederate deserters or prisoners who wished to stay in the North.

The solution

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