Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

North Carolina and Virginia, 1861–1864 327
Libby Prison in Richmond housed captured Union officers.
to North Carolina would leave a force of barely thirty-five hundred to defend the
Confederate capital. Five days after Pickett received Lee’s order and began gathering
his brigades, a Union secret agent in Richmond sent Butler word that the
Confederates intended to move the Union prisoners of war there to other sites.
The agent urged an attack on the city by a force of at least forty thousand federal
troops. Butler, with fewer than half that number scattered in five garrisons between
Norfolk and Yorktown, decided to act anyway. “Now, or never, is the time
to strike,” he told Stanton. 59
General Wistar’s sixty-five hundred troops at Yorktown would carry out the
raid. Butler began to beg for cavalry reinforcements the day after he heard from
the agent in Richmond. While he waited for them, he sought to protect the secrecy
of the operation by sending a coded message to an officer in Baltimore, asking
him to buy a map of Richmond. “My sending to buy one would cause remark,”
he explained. Secrecy was important to Butler, for the proposed expedition had
acquired more objectives since late November. Besides freeing the prisoners,
the raiders intended to torch “public buildings, arsenals, Tredegar Iron Works,
depots, railroad equipage, and commissary stores of the rebels,” and, if possible,
capture Jefferson Davis and members of his cabinet. Wistar did not share
Butler’s hopes for secrecy. “It will be impossible to disguise the significance of
the subject of your telegram any longer,” he wrote on 27 January when Butler
59 OR, ser. 1, 33: 482, 519–20 (“Now, or never,” p. 519), 1076, 1102–03. The estimate of the
strength of Pickett’s force is derived from statistics on pp. 1165, 1201, 1207, and 1247. Butler
Correspondence, 3: 228–29, 319, 331–32, 381–83, 564.