ABSTRACT
In a war, information is gold. Both the Union and Confederate armies used a variety of codes. Some of them were more successful than others. The Stager Cipher was the most important code for the Union. It was never broken by the Confederacy and was used to transmit telegrams. Immediately after the Civil War started, the governor of Ohio hired Anson Stager to invent a code that could be used on the telegraph. The Confederacy got so desperate to crach the Stager Cipher that they published Union messages in Southern newspapers ashing the public to help breah the code. It was easy to memorize and simple to use, but it was also easy to crack the code. It wasn’t a great code for top secret information. Spies often used cipher wheels to exchange messages.
