Alice Green...

People just like the word extreme

They did show a little clue in the pilot because Alice disliked how the southern troops were being ignored by the hospital staff.
I'm not sure if she'll become extreme in the idea of politics,
but I can see her getting involved for healthcare rights for the southern side.

The Green family, the stuck-up rich family that owned the hotel, were real. Mary Phinney, the new head nurse? Real, although since she was born in 1818, not nearly as cute as in the show. Dix, the senior administrator who sent her? Also real

The real historical Emma Green was engaged to the real historical Frank Stringfellow. He was a Confederate spy. He surreptitiously entered Union territory to gain intelligence -- dangerous, but his mission. On those missions he took time to visit, and court, young Emma -- dangerous, and not his mission, and if I were his spymaster and learned of this I would have fired him from the spy department, and sent him back to some other military duty.

Espionage and counter-espionage worked differently, in the 19th Century. I strongly suspect the Union had no established counter-intelligence establishment, no trained spy-catchers.

Some decades ago, I started reading Bernard Cornwell's novels about Richard Sharpe, in the Peninsular war. (Later made into a miniseries starring a young Sean Bean.) Sharpe's superiors send him behind French lines, to gather intelligence, on many occasions. Well, I was so interested I went to the library, and read about Sharpe's unit, the 95th Rifles. I learned that an officer from that Regiment did, routinely, go on long missions behind French lines, to gather intelligence. Colquohon (pronounced as Calhoun), was his name, a full Colonel, but not a mustang, like Sharpe.

He went alone, wearing his green 95th's Rifle uniform. Since everyone knew the British wore red uniforms, French officers he met didn't suspect he was an enemy.

Although the so-called "customs of war" were less well-established in the early 1800s, someone carrying out hostile acts, outside of uniform, could expect a summary battlefield execution. But since Colquohon wore his uniform, he should not have been subject to that.

Late in the war his wanderings through French territory took him all the way to Paris -- where he represented himself as an American officer -- one of those unofficial observers you sometimes read about.

Reflective of the lack of professionalism at the time, it seemed to me, as I read his biography, that much of his courage was squandered -- because he did not speak French.

Yes, I know, that was fifty years earlier. But, as Herbert O. Yardley explained, in his memoirs "The American Black Chamber", even by World War 1, the USA's intelligence establishment was so primitive that it lacked any signals intelligence whatsoever. There was no equivalent to the NSA.

Yardley, who was a hard-drinking, poker-playing, scoundrel, was then employed as a morse-code clerk for the State Department. Sometimes he would be assigned to transmit a telegram to a distant embassy that had been put in what he called a "school-boy code", which he would spend the next hour or to breaking.

He approached the Army, and he found himself heading up the entire US signals intelligence effort. At least that is how he represents it in his memoirs.

His candid and fantastic memoirs were a bestseller, when he published them, in 1933 or 1934 -- and a great embarrassment. His biggest coup was leading an effort in 1921 to read the Japanese codes prior to the Washington Naval Treaty of 1921. The Naval Treaty was one of the first International Arms Control Treaties. The Great Powers wanted to agree not to bankrupt one another by entering an Arms Race to re-equip their navies with super-Dreadnaughts -- Battleships bigger than those they already had, that would make their old ships obsolete.

Because Yardley's agency were secretely reading the Japanese codes the American negotiators knew that the Japanese cabinet had instructed their negotiators that they did not have to insist on one to one parity with the USA and UK, but that they could be pushed only to a ratio of six Japanese battleships for every ten American battleships. Negotiations were tense, as the Americans aggressively pushed to six.

When Yardley published his memoirs it sold five times as many copies in Japan as it had in the USA. The Japanese felt humiliated and furious, and some commentators assert this rage was one of the triggers for the militarism that lead to ww2.

Decades later in James Bamford's "The Puzzle Palace", a book about the NSA, I learned that the Japanese military were doubly furious. After Henry Stimson fired Yardley, and shut down his agency, thundering "gentlemen don't read each other's mail!" Yardley went and sold the Japanese the secret of how he lead he US codebreaking attempt in 1921.

They paid him a fortune, and expected him to keep their humiliation a secret. Then he published their previously secret humiliation for the whole world to see.

OK, I've strayed from the Greens. My point is that, during the Civil War there will be no-one with experience in catching spies, assassins or saboteurs.