*The title is written in the cipher of the Confederate Signal Corps; key-word, "Manchester Bluff."
One of the most popular pastimes is puzzling over puzzles. The picture of the tree with the smiling features of an old gentleman awaiting discovery among the spreading branches holds a challenge for the worldly wise as well as for the young. Even the business man, after a trying day, may be counted on with some degree of certainty to turn from the first page war news to figure out the name of an important American city with the picture of an overflowing laundry basket and a cart load of coal as clues. But there are puzzles and puzzles. Some, like the old man in the tree, are made to be solved. Upon the ingenuity of the constructor of another kind of puzzle may hinge today the success of an army, the safety of a fleet, the destiny of a nation even.
2In Series I, Volume 16, Part I, page 780, War of the Rebellion Official Records may be found the following dispatch:
SOMERSET, KY., July 22, 1862.
General J. T. Boyle, Louisville, Ky.:
Good morning, Jerry! This telegraph is a great institution. You should destroy it, as it keeps me too well posted. My friend Elsworth has all your dispatches since July 10 on file. Do you wish copies?
JOHN H. MORGAN,
Commanding Brigade.
When a nation goes to war the matter of safeguarding all information concerning military plans and operations becomes at once of vast importance. The censorship, with which every one is familiar, is one step in this direction. A step, with which the public generally is less familiar, concerns information that must pass between members of the nation's official family. Even the most trustworthy of dispatch-bearers is liable to capture, mails may be looted by sudden raiding parties, and telegraph lines may be tapped. After his "first Kentucky raid," Gen. John H. Morgan, the Confederate cavalryman, boasted that he had copies of every dispatch sent by the Federal commander at Louisville from July 10 to July 22, 1862!2 In time of war therefore, where such contingencies are apt to arise, ciphers must be resorted to for conveying messages containing military secrets. Such ciphers usually take the form of some cryptic arrangement of letters or figures calculated to escape solution by the enemy's intelligence department.
The average reader's ideas concerning messages in cipher are probably based upon his recollections of Edgar Allan Poe's story, "The Gold Bug," in which the hero discovers vast buried treasure through his ingenious interpretation of a cryptograph. In his explanation of the method of interpretation followed by his hero, it will be remembered that Poe lays down this rule:
In English, the letter which most frequently occurs is E. Afterwards the succession runs thus: A O I D H N R S T U Y C F G L M W B K P Q X Z. E predominates so remarkably that an individual sentence of any length is rarely seen in which it is not the prevailing character.
Poe's hero located the character representing E in the cipher and quickly constructed the sentence directing him to the location of the treasure. The same method might prove effective in solving any such message where the characters used to represent the letters are stable. In a message, in which the letter Z represents A in one sentence and S or D in the next, it would be altogether ineffective.
The War of the Rebellion Official Records contain many references to devices adopted by the Confederate officers to conceal the meaning of messages from the enemy.
When Lieut. John N. Maffitt, commander of the C. S. cruiser Florida, was in Mobile preparing to make a dash through the blockade for the high seas, Stephen R. Mallory, Secretary of the Confederate Navy, sent him the following instructions:
For the purpose of communicating with your government you will proceed as follows: Obtain at Mobile two uniform copies of any small English lexicon or dictionary, one to be retained by you and the other to be sent to the Department. Whenever in your letters or dispatches a word is used which may betray what you desire to conceal, instead of using that word write the numbers, in figures within brackets, of the page where it is to be found, and also the number of the word on the page, counting from the top. Thus, if you desire to indicate the word "prisoner" and should find this word on the hundredth page of the book and the tenth word from the top of the page, you would indicate it thus: (100) 10. In this manner you can use a cipher without the possibility of its detection.3
3Series I, Volume 1, page 762, Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion.
Making such a use of the dictionary seems to have been a favorite method of correspondence with the Confederate naval authorities, in the earlier years of the war at least. When Raphael Semmes, then commander but later rear admiral, was preparing for his cruise in the Sumter he was unable to locate in the New Orleans book shops a dictionary of the desired kind, that is, one having but a single column of words to the page. He therefore purchased copies of Reid's English Dictionary which had two columns. This necessitated an enlargement of the cipher scheme. In a letter to Secretary Mallory he proposed to designate the first column as "A," and the second column as "B" "Thus," he says, "if I wish to use the word ‘prisoner,' my reference to it would be thus: ‘323, B, 15,' the first number referring to the page, the letter to the column, and the second number to the number of the word from the top of the column."4
A short time before the battle of Shiloh, Gens. Albert Sidney Johnston and G. T. Beauregard adopted a cipher that was quite simple, but probably effective for ordinary purposes. In this the significance of the letters of the alphabet changed from day to day. Johnston, in a letter from Decatur, Ala., on March 11, 1862, gave it to Beauregard thus:5
The day of the month on which it is written will indicate the letter of the alphabet corresponding with A. Yesterday, 10th, J— A. . . . . On the 27th of the month A will correspond to C.
Suppose one desired to write the American slogan of the present war—“To make the World safe for Democracy," in this cipher Written on Washington's birthday, V (the twenty-second letter) would represent A, W would represent B, and so on, and the slogan would look like this—
O J H V F Z O C Z R J M G Y N V A Z A J M Y Z H J X M V X T.
On the other hand, if the slogan were written on July 4, an entirely different group of letters would be the result, viz.,
W R P D N H W K H Z R U O G V D I H I R U G H P R F U D F B.
4Series 1, Volume 1, pages 615-616, Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion.
5Series t, Volume to, Part 2, page 31o, War of the Rebellion Official Records.
While he was commanding the Confederate Department of South Carolina, Georgia and Florida, with headquarters at Charleston, General Beauregard sent Maj. Gen. Patton Anderson at Baldwin, Fla., on April 7, 1864, a simple form of cipher to be used in the transmission of important telegrams passing between the two. This was nothing more than an arbitrary switching of the letters of the alphabet, the various letters being represented as follows:6
The burden of a song made very familiar since the world war began, expressed in this cipher, would appear as follows:
S Z' E M X U L W D M B Z U Z S I I N Y M Y B,7
K F Z P B R N M Y Z' E Y S W R Z Z R N Y N.
The weakness in both the Johnston-Beauregard cipher and the Beauregard-Anderson cipher lies in the fact that a clever student of Poe might find them comparatively easy of solution.
6Series I, Volume 35, Part 2, pages 406-407, War of the Rebellion Official Records.
7"It's a long way to Tipperary, But my heart's right there."
The cipher in use in the Confederate Signal Corps was an entirely different matter from these simpler combinations. It was entirely beyond solution by any rule of frequency such as Poe applied, for the reason that no letter represented the same letter in two different words or in a single word. Early in the year 1865 Acting Master J. B. Devoe, U. S. Navy, sent a description of it to G. V. Fox, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, with an explanation of its use.8 The following was the arrangement of the letters of the alphabet:
8Series I, Volume 22, pages 9-10, Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion.
Devoe's note of explanation of the cipher read:
The new key is not known.
The new key-word is "Complete Victory."
The old key was "Manchester Bluff," to be used as follows:
Write under each letter of the message to be sent the letter of the keyword, repeating it as often as the number of letters in each sentence of the message requires and always commencing a new sentence with the first letter of the key word.9 Find in the table the first of the message perpendicularly under the letter A. Then find the first letter of the keyword horizontally opposite A. The letter at the intersection of the horizontal and perpendicular columns starting from the two letters thus found will be the cipher letter to be written in place of the true letter. The same process is required for each letter when the message becomes complete.
9In saying that the first letter of the key-word should be used with the beginning of each new sentence of a message, Devoe must have been in error. The writer referred this question to Charles W. Stewart, Superintendent of Naval Records and Library, who replied: "I am fairly certain that Devoe made a slip in describing the use of the key-word and that the letters of the key-word are used without regard to sentences or paragraphs, inasmuch as this method has been used with two key-words, making a double cipher."
To interpret such a cipher the process must be reversed. Write as before the letters of the key-word under those of the cipher. Take the first letter of the key-word in the table opposite A and trace down that column till the first letter of' the cipher is found. The letter opposite this and perpendicularly under A will be the first of the Message. So on till the message is completed.
While in front of Vicksburg, Miss., General Grant's troops captured a small party of Confederates who were attempting to carry percussion caps into the beleaguered city. On one of them was found the following message:10
JACKSON (MISS.), May 25, 1863.
This message was written in the cipher of the Confederate Signal Corps with "Manchester Bluff" as the key-word. The intricacies of it are manifest in a glance at the last word of the message "R O E E L." The first "E" in this word represented "R" and the succeeding "E" represented "C," the word itself being "force."
General Grant sent the cipher message to the adjutant general's office at Washington in hopes that some one at the capital might be able to interpret the dispatch. The War Department made the following translation:
My. . . . . . . . was captured by the picket. Two hundred thousand caps have been sent. It will be continued as they arrive. Bragg is sending a division. When it joins I will come to you. Which do you think the best route? How and where is the enemy operating? What is your force?
10Series I, Volume 24, Part I, pages 39-40, War of the Rebellion Official Records.
11The letter in parenthesis is the correct cipher letter; the letter preceding was an error of the Confederate dispatch writer or of Grant's headquarters in making a copy.
The translation in the essential features of the message was remarkably accurate, considering that the deciphering was done by the enemy and considering the fact that a careless dispatch writer or copyist had made three errors in transcribing the message. The important military points brought out in the message were that Bragg was sending a division and when it arrived Johnston would advance to Pemberton's relief. In the War Department translation these facts were stated. In some of the immaterial parts of the message the translator's work was not so good, as will be seen by comparing it with the following translation of the War Records Publication Board:
My last note was returned by the bearer. Two hundred thousand caps have been sent. It will be continued as they arrive. Bragg is sending a division. When it comes I will move to you. Which do you think the best route? How and where is the enemy encamped? What is your force?
To demonstrate the manner of translating the cipher—
Over the cipher letters of the message write the letters of the key-word "Manchester Bluff," as follows:
In the top row of letters in the table find the first letter of the key-word, "M"; then run down the column of letters under "M" until the first cipher letter of the message "X," underneath it is reached. The "X" locates the horizontal row of letters in which is to be found the real letter in the column of letters headed by the letter "A." In this message the real letter as will be seen is "L."
In arriving at the second real letter, it will be seen that the key letter is "A" and the cipher letter is “A," which fact establishes the real letter to be the "A" at the beginning of the table of letters.
"N" of the key-word fixes the vertical column in which to seek the cipher letter "F," and the latter is found in the nineteenth horizontal row of letters. The row ends in the letter "S" of the first vertical column, which is the real letter. And so on. The full sentence translated letter by letter would look thus:
The cipher is easily grasped, and possibly one of the commendable features of it was the simplicity of it when understood. Any staff officer with a drum-head for a writing desk could sit down on a log in the woods and have his cipher table ready for business in the time that it takes to tell of it, and be prepared to transcribe an important message into the secret cipher, or to translate a cipher message into plain English. It must be confessed, however, either transcribing or translating is a little tedious. With shells shrieking about one's quarters, or exploding over one's shoulder, transcribing or translating such messages would no doubt become rather irksome, but doing such things with a clear head and a steady hand even under the most trying circumstances was then and is now the task of a soldier.
The ciphers of the Confederacy herewith described are not likely to be used or be encountered by the American soldiers of today in the course of their tour of duty. It is not improbable however that the information conveyed may be of service to some one of them, somewhere, sometime; that is, the basic idea involved may be of value. This is especially true of the dictionary code employed by the Confederate Naval Department. According to Lincoln's "Revelations of an International Spy" (1916), the dictionary code is still in use on the continent pretty much as Commander Semmes of the C. S. S. Sumter proposed to use it—the first number representing the page, the second number the column, and the third the word's place in the column. A more recent writer on the subject of German plots, John R. Rathom, has by the way had the Kaiser's government substituting for a dictionary the New York World Almanac.
So far as the general reader is concerned, this modest lesson in cipher dispatches may serve to heighten his appreciation of the next story he reads in which a crafty spy is cast as the heavy villain.