Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy

by Karen Abbott

  He said a letter of hers had been intercepted.

  Her mind spun with theories about how that happened. Perhaps Eliza lost a dispatch on the way to Stonewall’s headquarters and was afraid to tell her. Or Sophia B. grew jealous of Belle’s popularity among the soldiers and betrayed her.

  It occurred to Belle, too, that she had crafted every one of her notes in her own handwriting. Several of her neighbors were familiar with her light, looping script, and the ones who sympathized with the North would be all too willing to identify her. The colonel insisted that her offense was very serious and recited a condensed version of the fifty-sixth and fifty-seventh Articles of War, dealing with espionage and treason:

  “Whosoever shall give food, ammunition, information to, or aid and abet the enemies of the United States Government in any manner whatever, shall suffer death, or whatever penalty the honorable members of the court-martial shall see fit to inflict.”

  If Miss Boyd repeated this behavior, the colonel concluded, she would suffer the punishment prescribed.

  Belle sat silently, studying the pressed tin ceiling while the colonel read his script. She summoned the bravery and spirit of her Revolutionary War ancestors, telling herself she wasn’t frightened. She did not know that Ward Hill Lamon, a bodyguard of Lincoln’s who also happened to be an old friend of the Boyd family, had intervened on her behalf, asking Union officials to treat her with leniency.

  When it was clear that the colonel had finished, Belle stood, lifted the sides of her hoop skirt, and bowed as if overcome with reverence and awe.

  She said, “Thank you, gentlemen of the jury,” and showed herself out.

  “My little ‘rebel’ heart was on fire,” she wrote, “and I indulged in thoughts and plans of vengeance.”

  When Patterson’s troops departed Martinsburg, leaving behind only the 1st Pennsylvania Regiment to maintain order, Belle and her mother packed up their carriage to visit relatives at Front Royal, about forty miles south. They rejoiced when the Confederates won the crucial engagement of Manassas, thwarting the Union plan to push forward and capture Richmond. There were rumors, whispered by the ladies of Martinsburg with either pride or disgust, that a rebel woman, Rose Greenhow, had contributed to the victory. Belle was familiar with Rose’s name and reputation as a prominent Washington hostess—her parties during the winter of 1860–61, when Belle made her formal debut, were the most coveted invitations in town—and she knew personally of Rose’s emissary, Bettie Duvall: “Miss D. was a lovely, fragile-looking girl . . . remarkable for the sweetness of her temper and the gentleness of her disposition. . . . [She] had passed through the whole of the Federal army.” Belle admired the girl’s “intrepidity and devotion,” and saw no reason why she, too, couldn’t facilitate a major victory for the rebels. She yearned for grander, more official involvement than Eliza’s occasional run to Stonewall’s camp, and determined to find herself a place with the Confederate secret service.

  Ignoring her mother’s tearful protests, Belle visited her uncle, a lieutenant in Stonewall Jackson’s 12th Virginia, and told him that she wanted to be a courier and spy for the rebel army. Her first cousin, William Boyd Compton of the 31st Virginia Militia, was a spy himself; he would keep an eye on her and, she hoped, use her for missions. She believed she had the requisite skills for the job, having been, she said, “at home on a horse’s back from my earliest girlhood” and “a good deal of boy myself,” spending her days galloping far and away over miles of rough country, chasing foxes with the neighborhood boys. She knew her way around the Valley, from the Blue Ridge to the Appalachian Mountains and all of the gaps in between, every spot where turnpikes or railroads sliced through, every stream and rocky ridge, every broken range and scattered spur. She had hidden inside the Grand Caverns, where Confederate soldiers engraved their names beneath the stalactites. She even trained her beloved horse Fleeter to kneel on command, so that she might evade detection by Union patrols—the only instance in her life when she wished to remain unseen.

  Belle’s uncle mentioned her name and ambition to Turner Ashby, Stonewall Jackson’s cavalry commander and head of Confederate military scouts, and she began riding as a courier between Generals Jackson, Beauregard, and J. E. B. Stuart, carrying commands for the movements of the army back and forth, charging alone through country infested by Yankee scouts and guerrillas. Sometimes the commands were written, either in plain text or in a substitution cipher, not unlike the one used by Rose’s ring; on other occasions she was told the gist of the message and expected to deliver it orally. During these excursions she allowed but one thought to possess her mind: “that I was doing all a woman could do in her country’s cause.”

  Her Confederate relatives taught her the signs and countersigns required to pass through the lines. These changed frequently and constituted simple word exchanges—the challenge being “Stonewall” and the response “Jackson,” for example—or a series of intricate physical maneuvers requiring not only memory but coordination. “We have the same old signal,” wrote a private in the 5th Virginia Infantry. “Halt anyone, throw up the left arm. He whom you halt must then take off his hat or cap and pass it down below his face. If he fails to do this, fire. This is the day signal. The night signal is the sentinel strikes his leg two or three times with his hand. The person whom he halts has to cough two or three times or clear his throat. If he fails to do this, fire at him.” Belle proved equally adept at coaxing Union sentinels into revealing their own secret signals.

  She was thrilled by the danger of the job, by the reports in the papers—daily, it seemed—of “bearers of dispatches” being arrested; one, a boy exactly her age, had been caught with papers outlining a plan to capture Union steamships in California, and his fate was yet uncertain. She waited for something to happen, willed it to happen, and one night, after she’d leaped over a gloomy and precipitous ravine, it did.

  Seven Union men stood facing her in the road, fanning out and blocking her path. The captain ordered her to dismount. She obeyed without protest, and reminded herself that she had prepared for such an encounter.

  “Where are you going?” he asked. “Do you have papers?”

  She did, hidden inside her bodice—exchanges detailing a coordinated effort among the Confederates to repair nine miles of railroad track above Martinsburg on the route to Richmond, and to remove a considerable portion of the Union telegraph wires in the same vicinity.

  “I have no papers,” she answered, “and I’m going home.”

  “Then we will search you.” He started toward her.

  She spoke her line softly, as if sharing a shameful secret: “Captain, I’ve but one little paper that my father told me never to give up except to save myself from death in dishonor.”

  She handed him a chamois bag. He opened it and found a Knights Templar cross wrapped in paper, which stated she was a Knight’s daughter. Belle waited while he read the message, turning her eyes skyward to study the moon, silently praying he was a Mason.

  He looked up at Belle, down at the paper, and back at Belle. He nodded once and said, “Don’t let me ever see you again around here.”

  She went out again the very next night with new lines memorized, a new lie to tell.

  ADMIRABLE SELF-DENIAL

  WASHINGTON, DC

  The memories of Bull Run implanted themselves in Emma’s mind, a slide show of carnage without pause. She couldn’t unsee the heaps of severed limbs, all those wizened palms turned upward in supplication, or dispel the taste of the bloodied bandages clenched between her teeth. “One case I can never forget,” she wrote. “It was that of a poor fellow whose legs were both broken above the knees, and from the knees to the thighs they were literally smashed to fragments. He was dying; but oh, what a death that was. He was insane, perfectly wild, and required two persons to hold him.” She learned quickly to let her body overtake her mind, becoming “simply eyes, ears, hands, and feet.” She sent locks of hair to grieving mothers and wives and hauled corpses to the
dead house for storage before burial. “I was not in the habit of going among the patients with a long, doleful face,” she said. “Cheerfulness was my motto.”

  In truth, she had not felt so hopeless or helpless since her days of living at home, subject to her father’s stern orders, to his capricious and terrifying moods. Washington presented a picture of military life in its most depressing form, she thought, with every saloon and gambling house overrun with officers, and the army—her army, which she had risked everything to join—a shambles, undisciplined and uninspired. Drills were forgotten, camps in disarray, men unaccounted for and deserting left and right. New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley removed the “Forward to Richmond!” banner from the masthead of his newspaper and sent a private note to Lincoln: “On every brow sits sullen, scorching, black despair. If it is best for the country and for mankind that we make peace with the rebels at once and on their own terms, do not shrink even from that.” Lincoln ignored this advice and instead pushed the blockade, strengthened forces in the Shenandoah Valley, called for the enlistment of a hundred thousand additional troops, and recruited a new man to lead his army in Washington.

  Emma loved Major General George B. McClellan as soon as he took command, finding him young and gallant and imbued with “grace and dignity.” She was eager to do whatever he asked—an unexpected reaction, she realized, for someone whose love of independence was equaled only by her “hatred of male tyranny.”

  General George McClellan, circa 1861.

  (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

  McClellan—“Little Mac,” as the soldiers called him—was a thirty-four-year-old military wunderkind: second in his class at West Point, hero of the Mexican War, author of manuals on military tactics, brilliant strategist, skilled engineer. Just before Bull Run, he won a minor battle at Rich Mountain in western Virginia, a victory that established him as a national hero. Everything about him seemed painstaking and spit-polished, a physical presentation that implied supreme internal order and control. His fiercely parted dark hair revealed a shining strip of scalp. The bones of his face connected in perfect and pleasing symmetry. His voice was stentorian and his speech unmarred by skips or pauses, each word sounding like the surest ever spoken. He was, according to lore, able to bend a quarter between his thumb and forefinger and lift a 250-pound man above his head. He believed that God himself had elected him to save the Union. “By some strange operation of magic I seem to have become the power of the land,” he wrote to his wife. “I almost think that were I to win some small success now I could become Dictator or anything else that might please me—but nothing of that kind would please me—therefore I won’t be Dictator. Admirable self denial!” When posing for portraits, he slipped his right hand inside his frock coat in perfect imitation of Napoléon.

  Emma noticed a change among the troops right away, the sense of foreboding and gloom loosening its grip, a tentative uptick in morale. “The army under McClellan began to assume a warlike aspect,” she observed, “perfect order and military discipline.” Little Mac believed, if not in them, in how he could change them; here was an entire army waiting to be remade in his likeness and to his liking. He anointed them with a new name, the “Army of the Potomac,” and examined each camp from atop his glossy black stallion, hollering about “perfect pandemonium” and restoring order from chaos. Emma was especially pleased that the general’s morals matched her own. He declared that unless the enemy attacked, all work would be suspended on the Sabbath, and on that day his troops were expected to conduct themselves with “the utmost decorum and quiety.” Anytime he discovered soldiers with liquor, he ordered them to spill it on the ground.

  For the first time since basic training Emma looked forward to the drills, totaling eight hours per day: squad drills before breakfast, regimental drills before lunch, and constant artillery practice, the big guns booming from every entrenchment, the sound oddly soothing to her ears. She reveled in how splendid they looked during McClellan’s “Grand Reviews,” ostentatious parades down Pennsylvania Avenue, with each regiment vying to outdo the others—beating drums louder, waving flags higher, marching with crisper steps. Sometimes she spotted Lincoln, his wife, and their two youngest sons, Willie and Tad, watching the festivities from a carriage. Nathaniel Hawthorne, on assignment for the Atlantic Monthly, witnessed the soldiers’ admiration for their new commander. “They received him with loud shouts,” he wrote, “by the eager uproar of which—now near, now in the center, now on the outskirts of the division—we could trace his progress through the ranks . . . they believed in him, and so did I.”

  Rose Greenhow, too, stood amid the throngs on Pennsylvania Avenue, fanning herself in the heat, jotting down impressions of the new Union commander. “Under the auspices of the ‘Young General’ the military are put in motion,” she wrote of McClellan. “Hither and thither they are marched and counter-marched, mysterious movement being his forte. He, however, set himself energetically to the task of reorganizing and disciplining the demoralized rabble he was called upon to command.”

  She didn’t yet know that Union officials were also watching her.

  As much as Emma enjoyed the drills and parades, she was growing impatient. Every morning she awakened to the sight of the rebel flag flying high over Munson’s Hill, just ten miles away across the Potomac, a reminder that they had not yet avenged the loss at Bull Run. The ignorant recruits, herself included, were soldiers now, and she feared battle less than she feared discovery. Every night, eating rations of salt pork and hardtack (often infested by maggots and weevils), they all debated when they might advance on the enemy.

  On paper, at least, McClellan’s strategy seemed foolproof. Union forces would attack the rebels on three fronts: one army would march into Virginia and take Richmond; another would drive into Tennessee and the border state of Kentucky, and then push into Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia; and the navy would reinforce its positions along the Southern ports and starve the Confederacy of supplies.

  Republicans in Congress grew equally anxious for McClellan to implement his plan. Missouri, another key border state, was in upheaval after Major General John Charles Frémont—without consulting Washington, and overstepping the bounds of his own authority—declared martial law and issued a proclamation freeing all slaves owned by Missouri secessionists. Lincoln was enraged. Such a mandate would also threaten the precarious situation in Kentucky and generally embolden the rebels. Southern newspapers editorialized that the true reason for the war had been unmasked; the president was less interested in preserving the Union than in abolishing the institution of slavery. The incident could also have international repercussions. If the North appeared disorganized and vulnerable, Europe might be persuaded to recognize the Confederacy.

  Lincoln strove to remain patient with his new commander, but his cabinet and Congress pressured McClellan to act at once. Instead, the general griped to his wife that “the President is nothing more than a well-meaning baboon” and continued to do nothing.

  The members of the 2nd Michigan passed the time in ways both dutiful and debauched. On Sundays the more pious recruits, Emma included, attended church services, while others took a day pass in search of the city’s hedonistic offerings. “If the men pursue the enemy as vigorously as they do the whores,” one private said, “they will make very efficient soldiers.” Despite her best efforts and fervent prayers Emma struggled to separate the sinner from the sin, knowing that if her own sex was discovered she could be arrested for prostitution—a default reaction to finding a woman within the ranks. (Emma had already heard of one instance. A woman named Nellie Williams, serving as a private with the 2nd Iowa Infantry, was arrested in Louisville; afterward, her commanding officer dismissed her as “one of the inmates of a disreputable house on Seventh Street.”)

  After all, Emma slept next to these men, was privy to their every laugh and tear and exhalation of breath. They subsisted on the same stale bread and bacteria-ridden water, smelled each other’s skin
beneath uniforms that were never washed, awakened each morning knowing these faces might be the last they’d ever see. She’d grown up thinking of men as “the implacable enemy” of her sex, believing that the only way to escape their treachery was to become one of them. But yet she had come, bit by reluctant bit, to respect her comrades and the curious, bedraggled family they’d made.

  How disappointing, then, to witness their excitement at “going down the line,” as the soldiers called a trip to the whorehouse, and to hear the details about each establishment: Fort Sumter, the Ironclad, Headquarters, U.S.A., the Devil’s Own, the Wolf’s Den (managed by Mrs. Wolf), the Haystack (managed by Mrs. Hay), the Blue Goose, Madam Russel’s Bake Oven, Madam Wilton’s Private Residence for Ladies, and an establishment kept by the Light family—a mother and father who procured clients for their three prostitute daughters. An estimated fifteen thousand white, black, and mulatto streetwalkers also strolled Pennsylvania Avenue, beckoning troops on the picket lines or loitering outside Willard’s Hotel.

  The men didn’t even have to leave camp to indulge their baser urges: “camp followers,” women who attached themselves to regiments without having any obvious affiliation to a soldier, were always available. The majority of these women cooked and cleaned and tended to the wounded, but some made it clear they were willing to “handle a gun,” military slang for a man’s genitals. A portion of this last group desired to wed and worked to cultivate respectable facades, acting, as one journalist wrote, “truly wife-like in their tented seclusion,” while others held no such high-minded goal. “Almost all the women are given to whoredom,” a private named Orville C. Bumpass complained to his wife, “& are the ugliest, sallowfaced, shaggy headed, bare footed dirty wenches you ever saw.”