The Confederate Dirty War by Jane Singer

[Jane Singer]

Thanks so much for your interest in the Confederate Dirty War, Susan. And greetings to all the fine scholars on this forum who've been so complimentary. Sorry to have been so long away. I've been buried in work on Lincoln's Secret Spy and the second book in my YA Civil War spy trilogy.

My research into the thicket of Civil War sabotage took a turn a few years after 9-11 when I began to read about terror plots proposed and enacted by Confederate exiles in Canada during the last two years of the war. They were disturbingly redolent of terrorism in our own troubled time. All were aimed at innocent noncombatants: A bio-terror attack, a plot to burn New York, the proposed mining of the Lincoln White House, a chemical weapon and a plot to destroy the Union from within.

I knew I had to find primary source material, never exaggerate or connect unrealistic, unproven dots and agonized over how disturbing all this would be.

The Confederate Dirty War grew out of a numbing sense of "nothing changes," that desperate measures by a dying Confederacy, a few radicals, extremists who were willing to fight a different kind of war by any means necessary.

Thanks to the support of James O. Hall, David Gaddy, Laurie Verge, Ed Steers, Surratt Society members, and finally , the History Channel who produced Civil War Terror based in large part on my book, I was able to tell the story of the dark underbelly of the war-within-a-war.

Confederate Senator Williamson Simpson Oldham wrote to President Davis on February 11, 1865 that the chemical weapon created by Professor Richard Sears McCulloh would bring "terror and consternation" to the North. Had the war not ended, it would have been used.

I'd be glad to further illuminate. It disturbs me to this day.