(Photo)
Blacks washing clothes in army camp
A short time later Dabney's wife, who had accompanied him to the Union camp, asked permission to cross the river and work. She was allowed to go, and landed a job as a laundress at the headquarters of a prominent Confederate general. Soon after, Dabney seemed to know all the Rebels' movements, and relayed the information to Union General Joseph Hooker within an hour after they were discussed among the Rebel generals.
One Union officer finally persuaded Dabney to reveal how he came by his information. Dabney took the officer to where they could view a cabin on the other side of the river and pointed out the clothes hanging on a line. He explained how his wife moved the clothes on the line according to the information she had gleaned from working around the Rebel officers at Lee's headquarters.
"That there gray shirt is Longstreet; and when she takes it off, it means he's gone down about Richmond. That white shirt means Hill; and when she moves it up to the west end of the line...[Hill] has moved upstream. That red one is Stonewall. He's down on the right now, and if he moves, she will move that red shirt." As long as the armies were camped across the river from each other, Dabney and his wife remained reliable sources of information.
One morning Dabney reported movements on the Rebel side, but said they were just a ruse. When asked how he knew, Dabney said his wife had pinned the bottom of two blankets together on the line, her way of symbolizing a fish trap into which Lee was trying to lure the Union soldiers.
While the Union used many devious methods of spying during the Civil War, the clothesline telegraph was one of the most ingenious for relaying information about the Confederates' movements. When the Union army was camped along the banks of the Rappahannock River in Virginia in early 1863, a black man named Dabney left a farm across the river and got a job as a cook and body servant at the Union headquarters. Becoming fascinated with the army's system of telegraphs, he got the operators to explain the signs to him, and he immediately grasped and remembered them.