by Karen Abbott
DEDICATION
FOR CHUCK, FROM HIS UNEQUAL HALF
CONTENTS
DEDICATION
SPLENDID AND SILENT SUNS (A NOTE)
PART ONE: 1861
THE FASTEST GIRL IN VIRGINIA (OR ANYWHERE ELSE FOR THAT MATTER)
OUR WOMAN
A SHAFT IN HER QUIVER
AS IF THEY WERE CHASED BY DEMONS
NEVER AS PRETTY AS HER PORTRAIT SHOWS
LITTLE REBEL HEART ON FIRE
ADMIRABLE SELF-DENIAL
THE BIRDS OF THE AIR
THE SECRET ROOM
STAKEOUT
HARD TO NAME
CRINOLINE AND QUININE
DARK AND GLOOMY PERILS
UNMASKED
THE DEFENSELESS SEX
PART TWO: 1862
NOT YOUR IDEAL OF A BEAUTIFUL SOLDIER
SHE WILL FOOL YOU OUT OF YOUR EYES
REBEL VIXENS OF THE SLAVE STATES
WISE AS SERPENTS AND HARMLESS AS DOVES
A WOMAN USUALLY TELLS ALL SHE KNOWS
A SLAVE CALLED “NED”
PERFECTLY INSANE ON THE SUBJECT OF MEN
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE RIVER
MY LOVE TO ALL THE DEAR BOYS
ONE GRAIN OF MANHOOD
THE MADAM LOOKS MUCH CHANGED
THE SECESH CLEOPATRA
THE BRIGHT RUSH OF LIFE, THE HURRY OF DEATH
SHE BREATHES, SHE BURNS
THE STILL, SMALL VOICE
RICHMOND UNDERGROUND
PLAYING DEAD
PART THREE: 1863
WHEN YOU THINK HE MAY BE KILLED TOMORROW
BREAD OR BLOOD
A WEAN THAT’S BORN TO BE HUNG
A DREADFUL BLOW
NO ONE IGNORANT OF THE DANGER
LA BELLE REBELLE
WOMEN MAKE WAR UPON EACH OTHER
PLEASE GIVE US SOME OF YOUR BLOOD
PART FOUR: 1864
THAT UNHAPPY COUNTRY
DESPICABLE REMEDIES
THE SANCTUARY OF A MODEST GIRL
YOU ARE VERY POOR COMPANY
BE PRUDENT AND NEVER COME AGAIN
GOOD-BYE, MRS. GREENHOW
THIS VERDICT OF LUNACY
THE DELICACY OF THE SITUATION
NOT AT ALL CHANGED BY DEATH
THE SWEET LITTLE MAN
LIKE MOST OF HER SEX
PART FIVE: 1865
THE WAY A CHILD LOVES ITS MOTHER
AS THIS MIGHTY WORK WAS DONE
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY KAREN ABBOTT
BACK AD
CREDITS
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
SPLENDID AND SILENT SUNS (A NOTE)
For a period of thirty-three hours, from just before dawn on April 12, 1861, to mid-afternoon the following day, sleep was hard to come by, in both North and South. In Manhattan, Walt Whitman left the Academy of Music and strolled down Broadway, where he heard the hoarse cries of the newsboys: “Extry—a Herald! Got the bombardment of Fort Sumter!”
Passersby broke into small groups under the brightly blazing lamps, each huddled around a paper, unable to wait until they got home to read. So it was true: the Confederates had opened fire on Fort Sumter, a federal fort in South Carolina, the first shots of the first battle of the American Civil War.
In Charleston, so close to the awful roar in the harbor, ladies solaced themselves with tea and a firm faith that God “hates the Yankees” and was clearly on their side. In Washington, DC, President Lincoln, in office barely six weeks, prepared to call 75,000 volunteers to quell this “domestic insurrection.” One hundred miles away, across the rolling Virginia countryside, the citizens of Richmond celebrated and cried, “Down with the Old Flag!” Within the week they got their wish: Virginia became the eighth state to join the Confederacy, with vessels in the James River flying not the Stars and Stripes but the Stars and Bars. By early June the South had added three more: Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee.
The new enemy countries settled into a war that many predicted would be over in ninety days. The twenty-three Northern states had 22.3 million people to the South’s 9.1, nearly four million of them slaves whom their masters dared not arm. Jefferson Davis, former U.S. senator from Mississippi and new leader of the South, moved his pregnant wife and three children to the Confederate capital of Richmond. He was more prescient than most, expecting “many a bitter experience” before all was said and done.
Troops poured into the two rival capitals and began making themselves into armies. Morning brought the reveille of the drum; night, the mournful notes of taps. Nothing was seen, nor spoken of, nor thought of but the war. There was work for everyone to do, even the women—especially the women. They had to adjust quickly to the sudden absence of fathers and husbands and sons, to the idea that things would never be as they had been. They had no vote, no straightforward access to political discourse, no influence in how the battles were waged. Instead they took control of homes, businesses, plantations. They managed their slaves in the fields, sometimes backing up orders with violence. They formed aid societies, gathering to darn socks and underwear for the soldiers. To raise money for supplies they hosted raffles and bazaars, despite widespread resistance from the very men they aimed to help (protested one general, “It merely looks unbecoming for a lady to stand behind a table to sell things”). They even served as informal recruiting officers, urging men to enlist and humiliating those who demurred, sending a skirt and crinoline with a note attached: “Wear these, or volunteer.”
Some—privately or publicly, with shrewd caution or gleeful abandon—chafed at the limitations society set for them and determined to change the course of the war. In the pages that follow I tell the stories of four such women: a rebellious teenager with a dangerous temper; a Canadian expat on the run from her past; a widow and mother with nothing left to lose; and a wealthy society matron who endured death threats for years, and lost as much as she won. Each, in her own way, was a liar, a temptress, a soldier, and a spy, often all at once.
This is a work of nonfiction, with no invented dialogue. Anything that appears between quotation marks comes from a book, diary, letter, archival note, or transcript, or, in the case of Elizabeth Van Lew, from stories passed down by her descendants—details about her incredible operation that have never before appeared in print. Characters’ thoughts are gleaned or extrapolated from these same sources. In any instance where the women may have engaged in the time-honored Civil War tradition of self-mythology, rendering the events too fantastic, I make note of it in the endnotes or in the narrative itself.
Beneath the gore of battle and the daring escapades on and off the fields, this book is about the war’s unsung heroes—the people whose “determin’d voice,” as Whitman wrote, “launch’d forth again and again,” until at last they were heard.
Karen Abbott
New York City
Shenandoah Valley, 1861.
(Courtesy of the Florida Center for Instructional Technology, fcit.usf.edu)
[ PART ONE ]
1861
THE FASTEST GIRL IN VIRGINIA (OR ANYWHERE ELSE FOR THAT MATTER)
Belle Boyd, circa 1861.
(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
THE SHENANDOAH VALLEY, VIRGINIA
In the town of Martinsburg on the lower tip of the Valley, a seventeen-year-old rebel named Belle Boyd sat by the windows of her wood-frame home, waiting for the war to come to her. It was July 4 and the war was still new, only two and a half months old, but Belle—known by one young rival as “the fastest girl in Virginia or anywh
ere else for that matter”—had long been accustomed to things operating on her schedule, and at her whim.
She tracked the progress of Union forces as they stormed down from the North, all those boys sweating and filthy under blue wool coats, lean as the rifles slung at their sides—nearly fifteen thousand of them, a few as young as thirteen, away from their mothers for the very first time. She felt they had no respect at all, waving American flags with the stars of thirty-four states when eleven no longer belonged. Two days prior, on July 2, about thirty-five hundred of them crossed the Potomac, slipped through a gap in the Blue Ridge mountains, and trampled across the lush sprawl of the Shenandoah Valley to face the Southern army at Falling Waters—a “romantic spot,” in Belle’s opinion, eight miles from her home. There Confederate colonel Thomas Jackson was waiting with four cannon and 380 boys of his own. When the rebels retreated, they left the field scattered over with blankets and canteens and, most regrettably to Belle, only twenty-one Yankee wounded and three Yankee dead.
She took the loss at Falling Waters personally. She had family in this war, uncles and cousins and even her forty-five-year-old father, a wealthy shopkeeper and tobacco farmer who depended on a team of slaves to grow and harvest his crop. Despite his age and social prominence he’d enlisted as a private in Company D, 2nd Virginia Infantry, part of Colonel Jackson’s brigade. The mood in her home shifted overnight, with Belle noticing a general sadness and depression in her mother and younger siblings, all of them too consumed by worry even to sleep. The entire town seemed unsettled. Berkeley County (of which Martinsburg was the county seat) had voted three to one against secession, the only locale in the Shenandoah Valley to do so. Seven companies of soldiers were recruited from the county, five for the Confederacy and two for the Union, and now neighbor fought against neighbor, friend against friend. No one dared trust anyone else. Citizens formed a volunteer Home Guard, sitting up all night and arresting anyone prowling about, an enterprise that lasted until one member was fatally shot by a stranger passing through town.
The women of the Valley got to work supporting the war effort, gathering to sew clothing and raise money for supplies. At first Belle joined them, wielding her needle and laundering sheets, but she soon found such activities “too tame and monotonous.” Instead she scandalized the ladies of Martinsburg by openly waving to soldiers on the street, and organized trips to the Confederate camp at nearby Harpers Ferry, where all of them temporarily escaped the gloomy atmosphere of their homes. They danced the Virginia reel and sang “Dixie” and forgot about the prospect of impending battle. Belle herself exchanged “fond vows” with several young soldiers, even as she wondered how many of them would soon be dead. “War will exact its victims of both sexes,” she mused, “and claims the hearts of women no less than the bodies of men.”
Occasionally she wandered around camp, handing out religious tracts denouncing everything from profanity to gambling to procrastination (soldiers, one cautioned, must avoid the “sin of being surprised” by either the enemy or the devil), not because she objected to such vices but because she longed to be useful. Any unfamiliar man might be a Yankee spy, and she believed it was her duty to entrap him.
“Be very careful what you say,” she warned one trespasser dressed as a photographer. “I was born at the North, but have lived among these people seven years. My sympathies are all with the Northern people. I am trying now to get a pass from General Beauregard that I may visit my sister in New York, who is a teacher in one of the public schools. I will gladly take any message you may want to send to your friends.”
The stranger declined her offer, but she would have other opportunities to dupe Yankee men.
This respite at camp was interrupted by reports that the enemy was marching down the Shenandoah Valley; the men went to fight at Falling Waters on July 2 and the women went home. After the Confederates retreated, the Union continued on south toward Martinsburg, scheduled to arrive in time for a victory parade on the Fourth of July. Belle recognized that this day now belonged only to the Yankees—the eighty-fifth birthday of a nation that had amputated a third of itself, split into uneven halves.
Staring out her window onto South Queen Street, she heard the soldiers before she saw them. They announced their presence with laughter and song, hollering about that damned Yankee Doodle riding on his pony, booted feet stomping to the burst of bugle and the grumble of drums. The beat thrummed in the air, keeping time with the tap of her heart against her ribs. It was late afternoon, the sun shedding its heat layer by layer, hunkering down toward the baked dirt roads. The soldiers’ song grew louder, their laughter more brazen. They slashed bayonets at the pale Virginia sky, marching closer and closer still.
House “servants,” a common euphemism for slaves, rounded up children in the public square and hustled them to safety. John O’Neal locked the doors of his saddle and harness shop. The church bells sat untolled, the hour unmarked. The Baltimore & Ohio railroad depot stood deserted; rebel troops had destroyed forty-eight locomotives and three hundred cars, wrapping one of the engines in an American flag before setting it afire, all to prevent Union supplies from arriving by train. Field hands hid in their quarters instead of harvesting wheat or quarrying native limestone. Clusters of homes sat darkened and deserted, the owners having packed up their silverware and their help and fled farther south. A few bold spectators arrived on horseback from neighboring towns, waiting for whatever came next.
General Robert Patterson’s Yankees were everywhere, winding through the cemetery and around the jail, pausing to shatter the windows of a church, pillage the offices of the local newspaper, claim the county courthouse as Union headquarters, and raid the distillery of a Confederate captain to guzzle his whiskey. There were thousands and thousands of them, an endlessly advancing blue line, a menacing horizon almost upon her.
To Belle’s side, within reach, lay a Colt 1849 pocket pistol.
Since the abolitionist John Brown’s attempt to start an armed slave rebellion, Belle had been terrified of “an uprising of the negroes,” and believed that “Northerners were coming down to murder us.” She told herself she would not hesitate to use the pistol; she had never hesitated at anything. All her life she had been blissfully unburdened by doubt or introspection. She believed her plain face was striking, her defiance charming, her wit precocious, her every thought clever and significant. “I am tall,” she once boasted to her cousin, lobbying him to find her a husband. “I weigh 106½ pounds. My form is beautiful. My eyes are of a dark blue and so expressive. My hair of a rich brown and I think I tie it up nicely. My neck and arms are beautiful & my foot is perfect. Only wear [size] two and a half shoes. My teeth the same pearly whiteness, I think perhaps a little whiter. Nose quite as large as ever, neither Grecian nor Roman but beautifully shaped and indeed I am decidedly the most beautiful of all your cousins.”
She had the quickest answers in class at Mount Washington Female College (where, using a diamond ring, she carved her name in a window of the Octagonal Room); the most graceful curtsy at her debutante ball in Washington, DC; and a distinguished lineage comprising politicians and Revolutionary War heroes. When Belle was eleven, her parents declared she was too young to attend their dinner party, given for a group of Virginia officials. Instead of pleading or protesting, she went to the stable, saddled up her horse, Fleeter, and rode him into the dining room, interrupting the second course. Fleeter whinnied and sidestepped. A startled servant dropped a tray. Sweetbreads skittered across the floor, and pigeon soup splattered across the walls.
Belle looked down on everyone, watching her mother’s mouth gape, her hand rising to cover it. She yanked at the reins and cleared her throat.
“Well,” she said, “my horse is old enough, isn’t he?”
In a dry, tight voice her mother ordered her to return the horse to the stable and head directly to her room. But a guest intervened.
“Surely so high a spirit should not be thoughtlessly quelled by severe punishment!”
he exclaimed, and turned to Mrs. Boyd. “Mary, won’t you tell me more about your little rebel?”
And for the rest of the evening Belle seized the spotlight, redirecting its focus anytime she sensed it veering away. She scarcely knew herself without it, neither then nor now.
Her Negro maid, whom she called “Mauma Eliza,” now stood poised at the bottom of the parlor stairs, holding Belle’s Confederate flag in her arms, properly and respectfully folded. Belle would love Eliza even if she didn’t own her; at night, in secret, she defied the law and taught her to read and write. “Slavery, like all other imperfect forms of society, will have its day,” Belle believed, “but the time for its final extinction in the Confederate States of America has not yet arrived.” Eliza was thirty-three and had raised Belle from birth, protecting her and soothing her and tolerating her nonsense. Without being asked, she hurried up to Belle’s room and hid the flag under her bed before returning to her mistress’s side. In an adjacent chamber five other slaves huddled with Belle’s three younger siblings; Belle had urged them to lock the doors. From the corner of her eye she spotted her mother sitting tense and alert on a velvet settee, and Belle could trace the course of her thoughts: four of her eight children had died within the span of five years, from 1846 to 1851, and she was terrified of losing another. She always told Belle she was too “saucy” for her own good.
The air hung thick and unstirred. The wooden floors were warped from the heat. Belle wore nine items of clothing, all assembled by Eliza every morning—chemise, pantalettes, corset, corset cover, crinoline, petticoat, a two-piece dress, silk stockings, and side-button boots—and drops of sweat crept down her back, soaking through the layers. She tried to hold her body still. She heard the clatter of gun carriages, the fervent thud of drums. Fine china quivered behind the doors of a rococo hutch. And here they came, a massive serpent of blue and steel. There were gunshots and splintering glass, doors being hacked off hinges. Chairs and tables soared into the street. The warbled refrain of “John Brown’s Body” mingled with the sound of children’s screams. They were just one door away.