by Karen Abbott
The ladies gathered for afternoon tea and spoke of slaughtering all Richmond residents who had been born up North, a thinly veiled threat against Elizabeth’s mother. They wondered why her brother John hadn’t volunteered for the Confederate army along with other men of his stature and class; having to run the family business was hardly a legitimate excuse. They coveted “Mr. Lincoln’s head or a piece of his ear.” During one recent visit, when the discussion turned to secession and slavery, a neighbor named Mrs. Watt became so “offended and disgusted” by Elizabeth’s “obnoxious” opinions that she left immediately, exiting in a swirl of silk and a stomp of high-button boots. Even Elizabeth’s own sister-in-law, Mary, who lived with her in the Church Hill mansion, would not hesitate to report the Van Lews for any disloyal activity, either real or perceived. The women issued Elizabeth one final invitation, asking her to help sew clothing for the rebel army. She refused—an act of defiance that only confirmed suspicions among people who never quite considered her one of their own.
Elizabeth made one public concession to her new reality, removing the family’s American flag from its pole on the chimney, visible from Grace Street on the right side of the mansion. It was uncommonly large for a private flag, eleven by twenty feet, and she had first raised it in 1850, more than a decade before. With the addition of each new state to the Union she sewed a representative star, taking particular pride in Oregon and Kansas, which joined as secession began sweeping the land. With the flag down and packed away, she wrote in her diary of her “calm determination and high resolve” to aid the Union, aware that her family’s position would be crucial to her success. Only a member of Southern society would know how to turn its prejudices into weapons, and have the opportunity and access to defeat it from within.
She recalled the phrase she’d doodled over and over again as a child, practicing her penmanship in her notebook: “Keep your mouth shut, your eyes and ears open.”
When the war broke out, Lieutenant Todd was working as the overseer of a plantation, managing and disciplining slaves with a particularly brutal hand, a tactic he carried over into his work with the prisoners. One inmate accused him of entering the prison with his sword drawn and striking men with the flat of its blade, and others alleged that he ordered seven Union prisoners to be shot just for innocently leaning against the windows. He sat behind his desk, gray wool jacket fully buttoned, lips barely visible behind a thicket of black beard. Elizabeth thought he had a “violent appearance.”
“Lieutenant,” she began, “I would like to be made hospital nurse for the prisoners.”
It was the truth, and her inquiry wouldn’t seem unorthodox; every Southern woman had opened the doors of her home to the Confederate sick and wounded, rolling cloth bandages and collecting lint for packing wounds. She needed to begin somewhere, and this was a practical and inconspicuous first step.
Todd asked Elizabeth for her name and wrote it down. He realized who she was and looked up at her, surprised. “You are the first and only lady to make any such application,” he said, meaning no one had yet volunteered to minister to the Yankees. He refused to grant her request. Perhaps, he suggested, she could appeal to Mr. Christopher Memminger, secretary of the treasury for the Confederacy.
She did, that same afternoon, taking her family’s carriage, an exquisite barouche drawn by four snow-white horses, fourteen blocks west. Traffic was maddeningly obstructive—the influx of Confederate volunteers had more than doubled the city’s population since the outbreak of the war—and she shared the dusty roads with convoys of wagons, some piled high with the dead, their rigid feet splayed in all directions, the occasional stiffened arm raised in an eternal salute to the sky.
The War Department Building was housed in the Mechanics Hall at Ninth and Bank Streets, a venue that in peacetime hosted concerts by the Richmond Philharmonic Association and a farming contest called the “Trial of the Ploughs.” Sitting across from Memminger, Elizabeth summoned skills she had last used twenty years ago, back when she was considered one of Richmond’s most eligible belles and had her pick of suitors. Only one of them had been worthy, but he’d died before they could marry, succumbing to the yellow fever epidemic in 1841 when she was twenty-three; she still kept the cameo brooch he’d given her. Subsequent prospects failed to appreciate her candor and obstinacy and unorthodox convictions, her willingness to subvert social codes if she believed they were wrong.
“Please sir,” she said, and smiled. “Let me see the prisoners.”
Memminger shook his head. “I could not think of such a thing. Such a set and such a class—they could not be worthy of or fit for a lady to visit.”
Elizabeth let her eyes dampen and clasped her hands. “Once I heard you at a convention, in peace times, speaking beautifully on the subject of religion,” she said, sotto voce. “Love was the fulfilling of the law, and if we wish our cause to succeed, we must begin with charity to the thankless and unworthy.”
At the words “our cause,” his face relaxed. He wrote a note instructing her to see General John Winder, the commanding officer of the prison system. For the third time that day Elizabeth found herself in the office of a Confederate authority—in this case, one who would become an important figure in her plans.
Winder was sixty-one, eighteen years Elizabeth’s senior, and had been inspector general of the Richmond area camps for a month. Every related job that did not automatically fall to another office—chasing deserters, issuing passes, enforcing curfews, housing prisoners—became his responsibility. His official photograph, which for a century would serve as the only image of him as a Confederate general, showed a menacing figure with hooded eyes and a thin, taut mouth who looked well capable of committing all of the crimes eventually laid at his feet, including the deaths of nearly thirteen thousand Union prisoners at Andersonville in Georgia. Adding to the effect was a scar along one cheek, the remnant of a wound acquired during the Mexican-American War, when a projectile struck a nearby soldier and caused his brains to spatter across Winder’s face, a piece of skull slashing his skin. He had ended his forty-year career with the US Army with great regret, ultimately deciding that attempting to restore the Union by force was unconstitutional. Elizabeth knew that he, like so many Southerners, had divided loyalties within his family; Winder’s oldest son, William, was around the same age as her brother and serving as a captain in the Union army.
General John Winder, provost marshal of Richmond.
(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
She knew, too, that he had already earned the enmity of Richmonders by recruiting a force of civilian detectives—men so boorish and violent they were nicknamed the “plug-uglies” (or, occasionally, the “alien plug-uglies,” a reference to members who hailed from the foreign and unsavory cities of New York and Philadelphia). In addition to raiding gambling dens and brothels and confiscating citizens’ guns and swords, the plug-uglies conducted counterintelligence operations, identifying and intercepting Union spies.
The general motioned for Elizabeth to sit down. Silently she studied his hair, the white tufts swelling and peaking like miniature waves. Her own hair, once swinging golden and thick down the length of her back, was now faded and clipped. She no longer expected flattery but still recognized its worth, the power in elevating the ephemeral.
“Your hair would adorn the temple of Janus,” she told him. “It looks out of place here.”
Winder’s lips stretched into a smile, and for a moment she couldn’t tell if he felt patronized or pleased.
“I should be glad to visit the prisoners,” she added, “and I’d like to send them something.”
Her approach worked. Winder wrote a note and pressed it into her palm: “Miss Van Lew has permission to visit the prisoners and to send them books, luxuries, delicacies, and what she may please.” Elizabeth thanked him, surprised by how greedily he accepted her praise. “I can flatter almost anything out of old Winder,” she boasted to one Unionist friend. “His personal vanity is
so great.”
She was aware, though, that the general might be motivated not by vanity but by his own brand of deception—a desire to know exactly what she brought into the prisons, and if she began taking anything out.
Elizabeth gathered fresh fruit, cake, books, and clothing for the Union prisoners, her carriage heavy with provisions as it pulled up to the gate. Her ministrations soon caught the attention of the press. Without naming names—although the implication was clear—the Richmond Examiner printed the following item:
“Two ladies, a mother and a daughter, living on Church Hill, have lately attracted public notice by their assiduous attentions for the Yankee prisoners confined in this City. Whilst every true woman in this community has been busy making articles of comfort or necessity for our troops, these two women have been expending their opulent means in aiding and giving comfort to the miscreants who have invaded our sacred soil, bent on raping and murder, the desolation of our homes and sacred places, and the ruin and dishonor of our families.”
The Richmond Dispatch ran a follow-up: “They are Yankee offshoots, who had succeeded by stinginess, double-dealing and cuteness to amass out of the credulity of Virginians a good, substantial pile of the root of all evil.” If these women weren’t careful, the paper concluded, they would be “exposed and dealt with as alien enemies to the country.”
It was one thing for Elizabeth to feel threatened by her neighbors and sister-in-law but quite another to see such language in print, tacit permission for both government officials and private citizens to enact any manner of revenge. At this point, early in the war, being “dealt with” was a nebulous but nonetheless terrifying prospect: it could mean permanent exile from the South, away from family and friends; it could mean prison, with all of its attendant horrors; it could mean public execution at the gallows. Given her gender it could also mean nothing at all, since Jefferson Davis’s newly composed Alien Enemies Act referred only to the deportation of male citizens unwilling to take an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy. Union soldiers suspected of spying were languishing in Richmond prisons, but no action had yet been taken against any woman—let alone one of Elizabeth’s prominence and wealth—suspected of disloyalty. For now, at least, her social position and gender served as her most convincing disguise. No one would believe that a frail, pampered spinster was capable of plotting treasonous acts, let alone carrying them out right under the government’s nose.
Elizabeth clipped the article and scrawled in the margin: “These ladies were my mother and myself. God knows it was little we could do.”
What she did do, a few weeks later, was offer to care for a dying Union prisoner inside her own home. Calvin Huson, who was married to the niece of US secretary of state William Seward, had been captured at Manassas and sent to Ligon’s, where he contracted typhoid fever. Huson, it was rumored, came to Manassas hoping to be made governor of Virginia after a Union victory ended the war, and the Southern press reported his current predicament with glee. “Poor Calvin Huson,” wrote the Charleston Daily Courier, “who came out to Manassas to ‘see the fun’ and who fell into the hands of the funny rebels.” Again Winder granted Elizabeth’s request, and when the closed carriage rumbled up Grace Street her neighbors all knew a Yankee was inside. But if any of them followed Elizabeth’s patient to the door, they would spy an oversize Confederate flag, hanging boldly on her entry parlor wall.
LITTLE REBEL HEART ON FIRE
THE SHENANDOAH VALLEY, VIRGINIA
Belle shut her eyes, arms still outstretched, waiting for the click of a musket. Instead, beneath her mother’s soft whimper and Eliza’s prolonged and piercing wail, she heard short, jagged intakes of breath. She opened her eyes. The Union soldier was still alive at her feet, blood bubbling from his neck, and she was no longer the focal point of the room. His comrades fashioned a stretcher with their arms and carried him to the surgeon’s tent, where he died later that day.
Soon after the burial of twenty-five-year-old Private Frederick Martin, Company K, 7th Pennsylvania Volunteers, General Patterson and several of his staff paid a visit to Belle’s home. She watched them approach the door, her breath quickening. They could throw her into prison or try to kill or rape her, a violation that would degrade and declass even a so-called fast girl. Her mother allowed them in, positioning herself close to the door. Once again Eliza had hidden Belle’s collection of rebel flags. Belle kept her purse nearby, her pistol stashed inside.
The men questioned Mary Boyd, Eliza, and Belle, all of whom recounted the deceased private’s coarse language and threatening gestures and insisted that Belle had no choice but to shoot him. As they interrogated her, Belle confessed—silently, to herself—that she had not “one shadow of remorse” for killing the Yankee, that the blood she’d shed “left no stain” on her soul. She had saved her mother from “insult and outrage,” perhaps even from death.
Fortunately for Belle, Washington was still practicing appeasement; Lincoln was intent on keeping the border states of Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, and Kentucky in the Union and didn’t want to stir up a revolt among their secessionist citizens. Knowing that the Shenandoah Valley (which offered a potential backdoor route to Richmond) was strategic territory, and reluctant to turn this teenager into a Confederate martyr, Patterson declined to take any action and declared the case closed. Belle would recall a more exuberant exchange, with the general deeming her a “plucky girl” and advising her to “do it again if any more such brutal fellows came around.” Hoping to avoid further trouble, he stationed Federal sentries around the Boyd home and ordered them to keep close watch on her.
Belle welcomed the increased attention, waving to the Yankees from her balcony, piquing their interest and horrifying the neighbors. She noticed that the town was growing accustomed to Union control, easing back into routine. Patterson had even issued strict orders to shoot the first man caught stealing private property, and announced that any soldier who insulted a lady on the street would be confined in the guard house. The Union blockade, which stretched along 3,500 miles of Confederate coastline, was intended to deprive the rebel army of goods and supplies but had a direct impact on civilians as well. Coffee and sugar were suddenly scarce, and housewives complained of shortages and rising prices. Publicly, though, Southerners dismissed the blockade as ineffective. “The old ass,” one Charleston resident said of Lincoln, “thinks he can starve us out, but he never made a greater mistake.” Merchants reopened for business and appreciated the Union army payment in gold and silver instead of shinplasters, the only currency of the rebel troops. A Federal flag hung in the public square unmolested, and women and children, according to one Northern report, “thronged the streets in perfect security with joyous hilarity.”
Belle sensed an opportunity in the newly relaxed atmosphere. The war seemed to have a place for any prospective spy, even one more concerned with recognition for her deeds than with the deeds themselves. There was ceaseless movement and confusion, armies scattered across miles, the border between North and South riddled with holes. Even accents couldn’t betray allegiances. Rebel spies lurked in the pro-Union counties in western Virginia, and Union spies in the staunchly Confederate counties farther south. They operated on varying levels of importance and authenticity: “walk-in” friends with potentially useful information; couriers who traveled their routes with eyes open; and trusted individuals actually tasked to go and procure information.
Most of the spies Belle knew were of the first, informal variety, women who considered spying as much a part of their patriotic duty as making bandages and stitching uniforms. Some merely stood on front porches, counting Federal troops as they marched (one regimental historian wryly noted that the ladies of Winchester, Virginia, “did a little spying in which they were almost always perfectly safe”). Others, like Belle herself, vied to uncover something that mattered, a piece of the war that would remain wholly theirs even after they passed it along.
At night, as the 21st Pennsylvania’s regiment
al band gallantly honored requests for “Dixie,” Belle chatted with her guards, slipping questions between the pauses in the music, etching flattery around the edges of her words. What a relief to see that the Union boys truly meant Martinsburg no harm! Were they all very lonesome, so far away from their sweethearts and wives? How were the Union troops faring over at Rich Mountain? How many thousands were camped there? And was it true that General George McClellan was reorganizing his scouts, having decided that his current ones were careless and useless? She ran her hand along the sleeve of a frock coat, touched a fingertip to a gleaming brass button, retracting all traces of the bold, hard girl who had shot their Yankee comrade dead—although she kept the pistol that killed him with her at all times.
Alone in her room, long after her mother was asleep, Belle lit a candle and transcribed everything she’d been told or gleaned from eavesdropping: Union troop movements, troop numbers, the state of troop morale. There was no sure way to ascertain the value of her information, so it would be up to the generals to sift through the scraps. She gave the notes (or lettres de cachet, as she preferred) to Eliza and instructed her to walk to Stonewall Jackson’s camp seven miles away, reasoning that no one would suspect mischief from a Negro servant running an errand. Sometimes she enlisted the help of a teenage neighbor, a “lovely girl” named Sophia B., who seemed thrilled to do Belle’s bidding. Belle congratulated herself on her cunning and deceit until, one mid-July afternoon, Captain James Gwyn, the third assistant provost marshal of the Federal army, appeared on her doorstep and demanded she accompany him to headquarters.
Belle’s initial trepidation dissolved once she reminded herself that she’d been in trouble with Union officials before—and literally gotten away with murder. On West King Street, with Captain Gwyn at her side, she smiled at every soldier she passed (“large teeth,” one noted, “and a loud, coarse laugh”) and took her time walking along the aisle inside the Berkeley County Courthouse, stopping to pause beneath the stained glass dome, framing herself in a brilliant halo of light. The captain led her to the office of a colonel. Belle missed his name but noticed a piece of paper on the center of his desk. The door shut behind her and the colonel stood, trapping the paper beneath his hand.