by Karen Abbott
TRUST BEARER
Rose nodded, the messenger stepped inside, and they closed the city out.
She hurried to her library, sat down at her desk, and conjured the proper symbols for her next enciphered message, confirmation of the intelligence she’d sent a week earlier:
“Order issued for McDowell to march upon Manassas tonight. The enemy is 55,000 strong.”
Donnellan stuffed the message into the hollowed-out heel of his boot and scuttled out the door. Once he disappeared around the corner of Sixteenth Street, Rose pictured the rest of his route: a few miles by buggy, a few more on horseback, down the eastern shore of the Potomac to a ferry in Charles County, Maryland, where he crossed into Virginia and handed the message to a Confederate cavalry officer, along with these fervent instructions: “This must go thro’ by a lightning express to Beauregard.” Confederate troops stationed along the Potomac included fifty-eight cavalrymen ready to participate in a relay system designed for maximum efficiency. Stations were ten to twelve miles apart, with fresh horses available at each, and by 8:00 p.m. Beauregard was studying Rose’s deciphered note. Within a half hour the general telegraphed the information to President Jefferson Davis. The Southern army had a few days to prepare before the enemy arrived.
The following morning, Donnellan returned to Rose’s home with Jordan’s reply: “Let them come. We are ready for them.”
AS IF THEY WERE CHASED BY DEMONS
The Battle of Bull Run, 1861.
(Courtesy of the Florida Center for Instructional Technology, fcit.usf.edu)
MANASSAS, VIRGINIA
And so they came. Thousands of Union soldiers crossed the Long Bridge from the capital into Virginia, regiment after regiment after regiment, looking, said one witness, like “a bristling monster lifting himself by a slow, wavy motion up the laborious ascent.” They took their time, marching only twenty-five miles in two and a half days, wandering off to pick blackberries (considered the best cure for diarrhea) and wrestle beehives from stands, devouring the honey and half the bees at once. Thick woolen stockings chafed their skin raw. They wore boots that didn’t distinguish right from left and had to break them into being one or the other. Infantrymen stumbled and wilted in the sun, carrying on their backs fifty pounds of equipment, including luxury items like breastplates. Several emptied cartridge boxes to lighten their load. They waved to the Washington civilians who rode out in carriages and barouches, hoping to see a real battle—hundreds of men and women and children peering through opera glasses, digging into picnic baskets, and sipping champagne, waiting to toast a Union victory.
Beauregard dispersed his troops along the south bank of Bull Run Creek, forming an eight-mile line that guarded the river crossings, perfectly positioned.
General Irvin McDowell’s Federal troops began crossing the creek at 9:00 a.m. on July 21. They reached a clearing and were greeted by a volley of musketry, bullets whirring and whining above their heads. “By the left flank, march!” a colonel ordered. The bullets descended and began hitting their targets. Cannonballs plowed up the ground around them. Shells exploded, tossing men ten feet into the air and tearing off their limbs. Rifle-muskets launched minié balls that flattened upon contact with human flesh, scything a swath through muscle and bone. Union cavalrymen, waiting to be ordered to the front, tried to avert their eyes as the first wounded men were carried past them to a surgeon’s tent. They glimpsed bones sprouting through skin, faces without features. Many vomited from their saddles.
Emma’s division swung northward to try to enclose the rebels’ left flank, near the bridge. She took position on the field next to the chaplain’s wife, waiting to attend to the wounded. A shell burst nearby and struck three men and two horses. She ran toward the battery and knelt by a gunner who had been shot in the chest. He lay facedown in the dirt, inhaling his own blood. As she cupped and lifted his head, she recognized the boy who had led a prayer meeting the night before. He took his last breath in her arms.
Uniforms were inconsistent on both sides—some Union regiments in gray, some Confederates in blue—and dozens of men fell from friendly fire. Yet the battle seemed to be going as McDowell had planned, his boys tearing at the Confederate left flank, driving the rebels back, crying out, “We’ve whipped them!” “We’ll hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree!” “They are running!” “The war is over!” Two miles from the fighting, the civilian spectators twirled hats and raised glasses, straining to see through the smoke, breathing in the scorched-metal scent of gunpowder.
But the Confederates were not yet ready to surrender. Standing guard at the center of the Southern line were Brigadier General Thomas Jackson and his men (Belle’s father, Benjamin Boyd, was currently detailed as a clerk, although she would later claim he took a bullet in the shoulder). A South Carolina general, trying to rally his own troops, pointed and yelled, “Look, there is Jackson with his Virginians, standing like a stone wall!” For the next several hours the fighting oscillated, bullets crisscrossing over the hillside. One private from the 4th South Carolina Infantry was spared death when a bullet pierced the Bible tucked inside his left coat pocket, slowing its progress through his body until it exited out his right side. Between the armies stood a farmhouse, the home of an elderly widow too ill to move. Union shells tore through the wall of her bedroom and severed her foot. She died later that day, the first civilian casualty of the war.
There were rebels all around them now and reserves to back them up, arriving first on horseback and then by train, waving Union flags to add to the confusion, a furious vortex streaming in from nowhere and everywhere. And that sound, that rebel battle cry—the inhuman yelp of something unidentifiable, something nearly dead and already halfway to hell: “There is nothing like it this side of the infernal region,” one Union officer said. “The particular corkscrew sensation that it sends down your backbone under these circumstances can never be told. You have to feel it, and if you say you did not feel it, and heard the yell, you have never been there.” It closed in around them, overpowering their own mannered cry of “Hoo-ray! Hoo-ray!”
The Union troops fumbled backward and the Confederates rammed forward, a brutal and uneven dance, with soldiers felled like rotting trees. Some hadn’t drunk water in nearly twenty-four hours. Their lips were cracked, tongues coated black with gunpowder. “In reckless disorder the enemy fled in frantic confusion,” witnessed one Southerner, “as if they were chased by demons rather than men.” The spectators abandoned their sideline posts and charged into the creek, leaving behind fringed shawls and dainty parasols and shattered champagne flutes, many of them drowning along the way.
Every angle, every viewpoint, offered a fresh horror. The rebels slashed throats from ear to ear. They sliced off heads and dropkicked them across the field. They carved off noses and ears and testicles and kept them as souvenirs. They propped the limp bodies of wounded soldiers against trees and practiced aiming for the heart. They wrested muskets and swords from the clenched hands of corpses. They plunged bayonets deep into the backsides of the maimed and the dead. They burned the bodies, collecting “Yankee shin-bones” to whittle into drumsticks, and skulls to use as steins.
Corpses were strewn for miles, faces blackening in the sun. The braided jackets and crimson fezzes of the New York Fire Zouaves dotted the battlefield, festive even in death. A Union surgeon found shelter beneath a tree, tying a green sash around its girth to mark the space. Within fifteen minutes he cared for thirty men, wounds hideously open, flaps of flesh blooming outward. His coat was adorned with blood and stringy ligaments and jagged flecks of bone. He amputated four legs, three arms, a hand, and a foot, each procedure taking no longer than ten minutes, the pieces tangling together in the grass. When rebels discovered the space, they hacked off each patient’s remaining limbs. Horses galloped about riderless or lay writhing on the ground hitched to guns, blood leaking from nostrils and ears, gnawing wildly at their flanks.
The “great skedaddle,” as the Union army ruefully
called it, was in full force by 6:00 p.m., with no hope of persuading the soldiers to turn around and fight; the plan to advance to Richmond and end the war had failed. In their haste they overturned wagons and left behind a cache of ammunition. The 2nd Michigan was called to guard the retreat from a potential Confederate counterattack. The Michigan men stood watch well into the night, drenched by a sudden storm, while the rest of the army fled back to Washington. Emma was stunned by the Union army’s cowardice. “Many that day who turned their backs upon the enemy and sought refuge in the woods some two miles distant,” she wrote, “were found torn to pieces by shell, mangled by cannon ball—a proper reward for those who, insensible to shame, duty, or patriotism, desert their cause and comrades in the trying hour of battle, and skulk away cringing under the fear of death.”
Rose was not among the Washington spectators at the battle, having picked up her middle daughter, Leila, at her Maryland boarding school and escorted her to New York. From there Leila would take two steamships and a train to San Francisco to stay with her older sister Florence until it was safe to come back. When Rose returned to Washington, she found a message awaiting her from Thomas Jordan: “Our President and our General direct me to thank you. We rely upon you for further information. The Confederacy owes you a debt.” She heard that her Union contact Henry Wilson had been among the spectators, carrying a picnic basket of sandwiches. He fled back to Washington with strangers after a Confederate soldier disabled his carriage with a shotgun blast.
In the end more than 4,500 men on both sides were killed, wounded, or captured, one of the last being New York congressman Alfred Ely, whom the rebels discovered hiding behind a tree. “The Yankee Congressman came down to see the fun,” said one rebel soldier, “came out for wool and got shorn.” Ely was one of a thousand Union captives delivered to Richmond, where rebel officials had converted a series of tobacco warehouses into military prisons, and where a wealthy Richmond woman named Elizabeth Van Lew waited for them.
NEVER AS PRETTY AS HER PORTRAIT SHOWS
Elizabeth Van Lew, circa 1861.
(Library of Virginia)
RICHMOND
Two days after the First Battle of Bull Run (or First Manassas, as Southerners would come to call it), Elizabeth Van Lew left her Grace Street mansion and set out for Ligon’s Prison, a converted tobacco warehouse four blocks away on the corner of Twenty-Fifth and Main. The city was in a “palpable state of war,” she observed, the somber notes of Handel’s “Dead March” accompanying an endless procession of military funerals, warhorses with empty saddles walking toward Capitol Square. Every arriving train carried the same ghastly freight: plain pine boxes filled with the dead and hundreds of the wounded, who staggered along with powder-stained faces and bandaged heads, using muskets as crutches while searching for hospitals with empty beds. She walked among them, incongruous in her finest day attire: a silk dress trimmed with ribbon and a matching scalloped parasol, armor for a battle of her own.
A curious crowd gathered around the perimeter of the prison and stared up at the grated windows. “Whenever they caught a glimpse of a Federal officer,” said one witness, “[they] hooted at and insulted him . . . men, women, and even little children scarcely old enough to walk, united in heaping scurrilous abuse upon them.” They called this practice “stirring up the animals.” One lady shook her parasol at the prisoners and shouted, “What did you come here for? We will have you know that if you kill all of the men, the women will make more soldiers.” The bystanders misinterpreted her remark and began snickering, laughing even harder when she tried to clarify: she meant the women would take up arms when all the men were killed—nothing so bawdy as what they had in mind.
Elizabeth followed a guard to the office of Confederate lieutenant David H. Todd, the prison’s commander and a brother-in-law of President Lincoln. She silently rehearsed what to say, her heart hammering inside her ears. It was possible the rebel officer would recognize her; everyone in Richmond knew the Van Lew name. Richmond society had always tolerated her, partly because of her father’s legacy as a prominent businessman and slave owner and partly because she was perceived as a benign oddity, an eccentric old spinster destined to die alone in her house on the hill. She was forty-three, had never married, and still lived with her mother. She had a frail, knobby frame and blue eyes set deep within the sharp angles of her face, a face that once passed as beautiful. She was invariably described as “nervous” and “birdlike,” and, according to one contemporary, was “never as pretty as her portrait shows.”
Elizabeth had to be careful how she presented herself at this meeting, as her neighbors—not to mention her sister-in-law, an ardent Confederate sympathizer—would surely hear of it by day’s end. Although a native of Richmond and one of its wealthiest citizens, she had Yankee roots, a pedigree that prevented her from achieving the standing that came with birth into the right families. Her father, John, hailed from Jamaica, Long Island, and her mother, Eliza, from Philadelphia, where her own father, Hilary Baker, served three terms as mayor and was an early member of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, a pioneering and influential antislavery organization. In the early 1830s they sent Elizabeth to school in that city under the care of an abolitionist governess, and by the time she returned home to Richmond, her world had irrevocably changed. “It was my sad privilege to differ in many things from the perceived opinions and principles in my locality,” she wrote in her diary. “This has made my life intensely sad and earnest.”
Nearly every day she walked past Odd Fellows’ Hall, just a few steps away from the Capitol, where dozens of slave owners conducted business, and the nearby Lumpkin’s Alley, with its auction blocks and “Negro jails.” She scanned the notices in the Richmond Dispatch about runaways: “Left the Tredegar Iron Works about three weeks ago,” read one. “A NEGRO MAN, calling himself ‘CHARLES BLACKFORD,’ the property of Mrs. F. G. Skinner . . . about 5 feet 6 inches high, well built, very dark skin, looks confused when spoken to.” Slavery, she believed, “is arrogant—is jealous and intrusive—is cruel—is despotic—not only over the slave, but over the community, the State.” She once gave a tour of the city to the renowned Swedish author Frederika Bremer, including a stop at a tobacco factory. Bremer was horrified by the conditions of the slaves, toiling ceaselessly amid the dirt and “murderous” smells, and saw that “Good Miss Van L. could not refrain from weeping.”
Elizabeth came to understand the importance of appearances, and the intricate subterfuge required to maintain them. Despite their Northern connections her family had achieved the social respect that comes with prosperity, and her father aggressively vied for his place in Richmond society. As the proprietor of a hardware business whose clients included Thomas Jefferson and the University of Virginia, he amassed enough of a fortune to purchase a three-story mansion in the prestigious neighborhood of Church Hill, a property that became a showpiece of the city and a stage for elaborate parties; Chief Justice John Marshall, Swedish opera star Jenny Lind, and Edgar Allan Poe all mingled in the parlors and wandered through the exquisite gardens. Her mother expertly played the part of the gracious Southern hostess and Christian lady, bringing her three children—Elizabeth and younger siblings Anna and John—to the venerable St. John’s Episcopal Church, where Patrick Henry gave his “liberty or death” speech standing in the Van Lew family pew. They understood that slaveholding was a prerequisite for wielding any political or financial influence in the South, and by 1843, the year of John’s death, they had a staff of fifteen. He bequeathed them all to his wife with the stipulation that she was not to sell or free any of them, a provision she decided not to honor.
Eliza, Elizabeth, and Elizabeth’s brother John (her sister Anna had moved north to Philadelphia) participated in the system of “hiring out,” in which slaves could find their own employers and keep a percentage of their wages, eventually earning enough to purchase their own freedom. Elizabeth also began spending her $10,000 inheritance (about $300,000 today), buying slaves
for the express purpose of freeing them. Many of them chose to stay and work for her—in the Van Lew house, “servant” did not mean “slave”—and Elizabeth’s humane treatment of her staff did not go unnoticed. “From what I have seen of the management of the Negroes of the place,” said one neighbor, “the family of Van Lews are, I am satisfied, genuine abolitionists.”
Elizabeth never made a secret of her loyalty to the Union; after all, two thirds of the Virginia convention had voted the same way until after the Battle of Fort Sumter, and more than a third stood firm even then. But after Virginia seceded and Richmond became the Confederate capital, such opinions had potentially dangerous consequences. Richmond society’s polite tolerance of Elizabeth’s background and eccentric behavior degenerated into open hostility. “Loyalty was called treason, and now cursed,” Elizabeth wrote. “Surely madness was upon the people.”
The Dispatch warned of marauding Yankees intent on “butchery, rape, theft, and arson.” Young girls carried daggers and pistols in their crochet purses and fired at marks in the street. Dr. George Rogers Clark Todd, another brother-in-law of Lincoln’s and a devoted Confederate, was arrested for merely declaring in a bar that President Davis had treated him “damned rascally.” Her moneyed neighbors visited the troops encamped at the Old Fair Ground and beseeched the men to “kill as many Yankees as you can for me.” Elizabeth once accompanied them and spoke at length with the soldiers. “I longed to say to them, ‘be not like dumb driven cattle’. . . . They kindly informed me that Mr. Lincoln had said he was coming down to take all our negroes and set them free, and they were going to protect us women.”