Language of Orders/Telegrams/Communiques/etc

To my noble friend Sir Ralph Hopton at Wells...

That's a great letter - who would have thought there was history outside of the U.S.? :smile:

I lived about 60 miles outside of Oxford many years ago (in metric, I think 60 miles is around 40 cubic milliliters) and we loved to wander around the moors and look at the remains of history. Old train bridges, remains of Iron Age forts, etc. I'm not trying to get off topic, but thanks for sharing that apropos language!
 

I've identified 104 citizen prisoners who died at Andersonville and 179 who survived. I'm working on a book of stories from Andersonville that don't generally get told, and there's a chapter in their on the non-military prisoners who were held there. Most of them were teamsters, who were contracted by the military to move supplies. The sad part is, if these guys died at Andersonville, there was "no provision" for their families, and they were not entitled to any pension or compensation because they were technically not in the military.

My GGG, Private Helm was captured near Cumberland, MD., August 1, 1864; imprisoned Salisbury, Rowan, North Carolina and died Jan 12, 1865 (starvation.)
 
This question has been discussed here earlier and you will find these threads both entertaining and enlightening:


 
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During my officer training (British Army) we spent just a little time being taught "Service Writing", the main aim of which is to achieve clarity and consistency. In the main the rules were straightforward, but there was a bit of space given over to the Formal Personal Letter. These were usually written longhand, and started with the superscription, "Sir, I have the honour . . . . blah blah . . ." and finished with the subscription, "I have the honour to be, Sir, your obedient servant, David Herbert Llewellyn, Second Lieutenant."

It was merely a style, a convention, a formality, and getting it right was a courtesy. Nobody took it literally, it was just a hangover from earlier times when spoken and written English was more elegant.

The only times I used the style was when I was when I received advance notice of posting from one unit to another, and I would send such a personal formal letter to my new Commanding Officer.
 
The usage of "your obedient servant" in this communique from Gen Judson Kilpatrick to Gen Joseph Wheeler during the Carolinas Campaign verges on the bizarre, given the content:


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(Source: OR Vol. 47 Chapter 59. Part I: Reports. Page 860.)

PS: Kilpatrick is not one of my favorite CW officers.

Roy B.
 
My GGG, Private Helm was captured near Cumberland, MD., August 1, 1864; imprisoned Salisbury, Rowan, North Carolina and died Jan 12, 1865 (starvation.)

I'm not quite as good at Salisbury Prison as I am at Andersonville, but I know more than most people. Ed and Sue Curtis, founders of the Salisbury Confederate Prison Association (of which I am a card carrying member) are the undisputed experts, and most Aprils they hold a symposium on the prison.

As you said, if he died in January, 1865, he would have been buried in a trench grave. Unlike Andersonville, most of the men who died are buried anonymously in trenches, and there are no indication as to who might be buried where. The end of each trench is marked with a gravestone like the one in the picture. No one is exactly sure how many men lie buried there, but I think there are something like 17 markers at the end of the rows.

Since he was there in November, of 1864, your grandfather would have been there during a prison uprising. It was a plan for the prisoners to overtake the guards during a shift change and stage a mass break out, but it was poorly planned and executed. Most prisoners were not even aware of the plan, and close to 200 of them were killed. Some of the other prisoners even helped to stop the riot, because as soon as it started, the prison guards turned their cannons on the prisoners, but luckily the order to fire was not given, and so the affair ended.

The one thing that does stick out in my mind is that, although there were some building inside the prison, most had no shelter, and would dig holes in the ground to try to get shelter from the elements. One scholar described these holes as being shaped like "inverted light bulbs." Not terribly effective, but they did the best they could.

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The usage of "your obedient servant" in this communique from Gen Judson Kilpatrick to Gen Joseph Wheeler during the Carolinas Campaign verges on the bizarre, given the content...

Roy B.

The practice of designating hostages and threatening to execute them as a retaliatory action against the other side was not as unique as you might think. The best source on this is Webb Garrison's book. Usually, but not always, the lives of the hostages were spared. I strongly suspect, but cannot positively prove, that one of the Andersonville Raiders "Curtis" (aka Ritson, Rickson/Wrixon) was part of a group of 17 sailors designated as hostages for John Yates Beall and his crew, and the 15 enlisted sailors were moved to Salisbury to make them more readily accessible should the Confederates have needed to hang them.
 
I have run across information from the Official Records in 1864 concerning Telegraph Operators in Johnsonville, Tenn. that delayed transmission of messages purposely. There are a few instances which actually permitted the confederates to gain an advantage.
Lubliner.
 
I have run across information from the Official Records in 1864 concerning Telegraph Operators in Johnsonville, Tenn. that delayed transmission of messages purposely. There are a few instances which actually permitted the confederates to gain an advantage.
Lubliner.

Interesting that they would use civilian operators - I probably would have guessed they would just install their own people for things like that to avoid precisely that kind of problem.
 
Interesting that they would use civilian operators - I probably would have guessed they would just install their own people for things like that to avoid precisely that kind of problem.
I am thinking that telegraph operators were a select crew like the Mail service or railroad administrators, but I cannot be sure right this moment. There has been mention of Provost Guard details being used to oversee civilian responsibilities when 'turncoats' were prevalent. I am believing this to be the case. I request anyone that can give good citing and reference for an authoritative answer to respond. Thanks,
Lubliner.
 
I am thinking that telegraph operators were a select crew like the Mail service or railroad administrators, but I cannot be sure right this moment.
Lubliner.

Fwiw, there were also citizen railroad employees held at Andersonville, although I don't have any details beyond their names, my source, and whether they lived or died.

The vast majority of citizen prisoners at Andersonville were teamsters, although there is a sutler or two held there as well.
 
Polite formality in official communication was the Achilles’ heel of Confederate signal security. For high level coms, Jefferson Davis & the CSA hierarchy used the Court Cypher, which was hundreds of years old.

The coding system involved using a phrase as the key for encoding & decoding the message. Cracking the code was done by ferreting out the key phrase.

The coded message is a thoroughly garbled collection of seemingly random letters. On the face of it, unscrambling it is an impossible task. That is true, unless you have a key phrase of your own. Like Harry Potter’s magic spells, with that phrase you can open any of the Confederacy’s most secret coms.

Jefferson Davis & other members of the leadership began their communications with virtually the same greeting. I am not where I can lay hands on the exact phraseology, but it went something like this:

My esteemed General Hardee, it is with great pleasure that I greet you & hope you are well, etc.

That isn’t it, but you get the idea. Because of the formal language, it was like having Vana White turn over the ‘E’s on Wheel of Fortune. You know what many of the important letters are right off the bat. It is a pretty straight forward business to reconstruct the key phrase & decode the messages. Surely, you say, Jefferson Davis knew this & changed to a new system. Surely you would be wrong. The Court Cypher was used right up until the end.

I know this because a CSA telegrapher gave a lecture to a veteran’s group in SC after the war. He explained that the scrambled letters of the encoded messages were almost impossible to send & receive without garbling them. Like a game of telephone, as each telegraph station along the way passed along the message, it became more & more incoherent.

The telegraphers were aware of this. Messages that traveled any distance often arrived hopelessly mangled. The telegrapher’s solution was to crack the message, correct any errors, recode it & tap it down the line. The method was tedious, but effective in assuring that a decidable message arrived at its destination.

Needless to say, telegraphers on both sides habitually listened in on each other’s messages. They even talked to each other in friendly way.On several occasions, Jefferson Davis read the text of an incoming message that arrived to scrambled to crack in the New York Times. He did not read Abraham Lincoln’s telegrams because the cypher they used was unbreakable at that time.

so, to return to the theme of this thread, the Confederacy paid a very high price for using the courtly language & Court Code to send their messages.
 
The coding system involved using a phrase as the key for encoding & decoding the message. Cracking the code was done by ferreting out the key phrase.

Jefferson Davis & other members of the leadership began their communications with virtually the same greeting. I am not where I can lay hands on the exact phraseology, but it went something like this:

My esteemed General Hardee, it is with great pleasure that I greet you & hope you are well, etc.

That isn’t it, but you get the idea. Because of the formal language, it was like having Vana White turn over the ‘E’s on Wheel of Fortune. You know what many of the important letters are right off the bat. It is a pretty straight forward business to reconstruct the key phrase & decode the messages. Surely, you say, Jefferson Davis knew this & changed to a new system. Surely you would be wrong. The Court Cypher was used right up until the end.

As someone with a bit of a background in both intelligence and cryptography, wow - that's exactly what you don't want to do. :smile: Known ciphertext attacks, combined with a hint of what amounts to frequency analysis would be a fairly effective way of attacking those messages. I haven't seen more than a few words of study on communication security during the war, but it would be an interesting study to see how that pattern of greeting would reduce the entropy of the ciphertext. Any particular book or author you recommend for reading more about it?
 
Known ciphertext attacks, combined with a hint of what amounts to frequency analysis would be a fairly effective way of attacking those messages. I haven't seen more than a few words of study on communication security during the war

I believe I've read that such phrases helped Allied intelligence to crack German codes during WW2 (well, along with the Bletchley Park operation and a captured Enigma machine, I think). But it would be interesting to learn about where things stood on this issue during the CW.

Roy B.
 
As someone with a bit of a background in both intelligence and cryptography, wow - that's exactly what you don't want to do. :smile: Known ciphertext attacks, combined with a hint of what amounts to frequency analysis would be a fairly effective way of attacking those messages. I haven't seen more than a few words of study on communication security during the war, but it would be an interesting study to see how that pattern of greeting would reduce the entropy of the ciphertext. Any particular book or author you recommend for reading more about it?
First thing you need to know is that code & cypher were used interchangeably during the CW. The modern distinction does not apply. I tried to translate into modern usages, but gave in... it was a distinction without a difference Cypher, code, potato-patatoe...

The other thing that modern minds have a very hard time wrapping their brains around is that signal & com security was almost nonexistent.

I have posted on this topic here.
I believe I've read that such phrases helped Allied intelligence to crack German codes during WW2 (well, along with the Bletchley Park operation and a captured Enigma machine, I think). But it would be interesting to learn about where things stood on this issue during the CW.

Roy B.
it was a Luftwaffe signaler that sent out regular weather reports using his lady friend’s name as a key word that facilitated breaking the Enigma Code.
 

One thing that would potentially help is the ability to use common memories to communicate since many of them knew each other to varying degrees. For example, if you and I went to a bar all the time called "Mike's" for an after work drink years ago I could say "Need some of Mike's" to indicate that I was low on water, etc. Obviously, if you don't have a shared memory that can't be done.

I've heard that there was also "encryption" done on semaphore that the Confederates were never able to break (and that in fact flags were used to get signals from Little Round Top back to Maryland via a mountain 12 miles to the west). I suppose if the techniques used to defeat crypto aren't terribly sophisticated you don't need sophisticated methods to encode it. I'll check out that thread you posted, thanks!
 
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