Cryptographers cracked the code used by Confederate officer James Malbone in his diary, expecting to find military secrets. What they found instead was a whole bunch of juicy Civil War-era gossip.
Malbone apparently spent his down-time during the war chronicling the unsavory lives of other soldiers, like who was sleeping with whose wife.
He also wrote about Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s wife, who was rumored to be mixed race.
According to the Associated Press report, Malbone’s code involved symbols that corresponded to the alphabet, like dollars signs and punctuation marks.
Although the diary has been held at the New York State Military Museum for some time, it was only a few years ago that someone noticed parts of it were encrypted.
Jerrie Hinchman, the museum volunteer who first noticed the strange symbols in the diary, told Popular Military she did not become a fan of Malbone while reading all his dirty secrets: “He was a horrible person.”
Read the full story at the AP.
