Confederate “Come Retribution” Gold From Stafford?

The Confederacy spent $500,000 in gold for “Secret Service” and “Necessities and Exigencies” between 1861 and 1863. It spent $1,500,000 in gold in 1864 and the first four months of 1865. That gold could have been mined covertly in Stafford during periods when Confederate troops occupied and when Federal troops were not deployed in southern Stafford near the mines (e.g., April 1861-April 1862; and September to mid-November 1862; June-August 1863; September 1863-May 1864; and June 1864-April 1865).

The likely agency of government responsible for such operations was the Nitre and Mining Bureau of the Confederate War Department. Evidence of that connection is the consulting work done for the Bureau by the South’s leading expert on gold ore refining, Richard Sears McCulloh. He also simultaneously worked on chemical weapons for the Confederate Secret Service.

The picture is of the Confederate Signal Corps and Secret Service Cipher Wheel used to encode and decode messages.