by Karen Abbott
She signed off with “Always Yours, R.G.,” an incendiary choice of words in an era when “Ever your friend” was a customary closing among the betrothed.
She was certain, now, that the strange men were Yankee detectives. “I was slow to credit,” she confessed, “that even a fragment of a once glorious government could give to the world such a proof of craven fear and weakness as to turn the arms, which the blind confidence of a deluded people had placed in their hands, for the achievement of other ends, against the breasts of helpless defenseless women and children.”
She began urging secessionist friends, couriers, and sources—including John C. Breckinridge, the former US vice president, and William Preston, former minister to Spain—to leave the city before the Yankees could apprehend them. She wasn’t going anywhere, at least not yet; there was still much work to do and fewer people to do it. She now had to undertake missions herself, meeting her spies on selected street corners to deliver information, which they would then pass on to Beauregard. But she took new precautions, practicing how to hide information in places she hoped the Yankees wouldn’t dare look. She spent hours at her Singer “Grasshopper” sewing machine, fastening a pearl-and-ivory tablet on a silver chain and other contraband for Confederate soldiers into the voluminous quilted underskirt of her gown. She stitched maps of fortifications into the lining and cuffs, and slipped the latest about General McClellan behind the laces of her corset, pulling the notes tight against her body. She sat before her mirror and shook loose her hair, hiding secrets inside the twists and folds. The words from the message she’d received just before Manassas played inside her mind: Let them come.
She was ready for them.
THE SECRET ROOM
RICHMOND
Elizabeth could hardly conceal the fact that a prominent Union prisoner was dying in her home, but she assured her neighbors and sister-in-law that she was motivated by Christian benevolence, as any proper Southern lady would be. Calvin Huson was only thirty-nine years old, a married father of five. His wife would be widowed at age thirty-six, with dismal chances of remarrying, and his children, ranging in age from ten to one, would never see him again—how could she refuse to extend charity in such a case? They would wish for the same should, God forbid, one of their sons, brothers, or husbands be captured by the Yankees. Still, Elizabeth feared they remained unconvinced, and heard furious whispers about her shameless “aid and comfort” to a “Black Republican enemy,” a slur against white supporters of Lincoln.
She focused on her patient, consulting medical books and summoning the prison physician. They tried everything: iodide of potassium every six to eight hours; anal injections of cold water, helped along by swigs of laudanum; enemas consisting of oil of turpentine and the yolk of an egg. She talked him through prolonged periods of agitation, violent ravings, frightening delusions. His fever soared above 100 degrees and his tongue grew a strange brown fur. When his breathing turned hard and raspy she hurried in her carriage to the prison. In tears, she told Congressman Alfred Ely that his colleague was near death, and he should come visit at once. Twenty minutes later, as a guard prepared to escort the congressman to Elizabeth’s mansion, a messenger approached and said that it was too late.
She urged Ely to be cautious and hold a small, quiet service at the Church Hill cemetery. Ely agreed, but the neighbors still witnessed pallbearers carrying a walnut-wood coffin past Elizabeth’s front door, and the slow procession of the hearse and four carriages down Grace Street. They heard that Elizabeth placed a bouquet of roses upon the Yankee’s grave. Soon afterward, during a walk, she sensed someone following her, keeping pace as she quickened her steps. He trailed her past Franklin and Main and Cary Streets to the sludgy bank of the James, and westward to the Tredegar Iron Works, where slaves and poor immigrants worked seven days a week making warships and cannonballs for the rebel army. She stopped to catch her breath and heard a gruff, low voice by her ear: “You dare to show sympathy for any of those prisoners. I would shoot them as I would blackbirds. And there is something on foot up against you now!”
She waited until his footsteps receded to turn around and head home, checking over her shoulder all the way.
The Van Lew mansion, Church Hill, Richmond.
(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
Elizabeth hoped the neighbors were watching just as closely when Confederate captain George Gibbs, the new head of the tobacco prison complex, moved into her home with his wife and three children. As soon as she’d heard that the Gibbs family, who came to Richmond from their plantation in St. Augustine, Florida, needed temporary lodgings, she offered rooms at the mansion, reasoning that no one could accuse her of disloyal activity while she had a rebel officer eating at her table and sleeping under her roof. She planned an elaborate Southern welcome, asking her cook, Caroline, to prepare a feast: duck soup, French chicken pie, veal olives (slices of seasoned veal rolled up and cooked on skewers), sweetbreads with cauliflower, fried artichokes, scalloped tomatoes, pineapple pudding, whiskey, and champagne. The menu was especially extravagant, considering the blockade’s steady effect on prices. Salt, which used to sell for 80 cents a bushel, was now $1.25, and bacon, normally 12 cents a pound, had risen to 30 cents. In some parts of the South people decided meat was too expensive to buy, and placed ads seeking hunting dogs so they could kill their own.
The servants helped Captain Gibbs and his family to their rooms and prepared the table, setting out the Van Lews’ finest china and silver, the antique spoons all stamped with figures of lions and panthers. Elizabeth tried to keep an open mind about the captain’s wife and children but found Gibbs himself abhorrent, “not a man of much intellect and untidy,” and cringed at his declarations of devotion to the Confederacy. “I would give my right arm,” he told her, jabbing his fork in the air for emphasis, “for one word of commendation from Jeff Davis.”
Elizabeth smiled and nodded, hoping her silence didn’t betray her disgust. Meanwhile Mary, her brother John’s wife, offered the captain more explicit support. As she agreed with and toasted nearly everything he said, John caught Elizabeth’s eye across the table. She worried about her younger brother, whose marriage had never been an ideal match; Mary was a blue-blooded Virginian, a first cousin of Thomas Jefferson, while the Van Lews were a nouveau riche family with Yankee blood. It soon became clear, though, that their problems were rooted in cultural, not class, differences.
John Van Lew.
(Courtesy of Bart Hall)
Shortly after the couple married, in 1854, they moved north to Philadelphia. Mary felt uncomfortable in the big city, especially without her longtime personal slave. Margaret was loyal and devoted and, above all, knew her place, and Mary didn’t want to risk introducing her to the radical abolitionist ideas of the North. Three years later they moved back to Richmond, one daughter in tow and another on the way. Once they settled in the Church Hill mansion, every old, latent tension crept to the surface. When John insisted, per Van Lew family tradition, that Margaret be put on the payroll so she could earn her freedom, the tension developed into a power struggle that poisoned everything and everyone around them.
Mary began calling all the Van Lew servants “niggers,” whether or not John was there to hear it. Whenever he returned from a business trip to Petersburg or Fredericksburg, the servants reported Miss Mary’s crude language and poor manners. John would confront her with Elizabeth by his side, both of them reminding her that the Van Lew servants were not slaves and would not be mistreated in their own home. “The Negroes have black faces, but white hearts,” Elizabeth told her, hoping she might relent, but Mary’s behavior only worsened.
She was especially cruel to Mary Jane Richards, a twenty-one-year-old whom Elizabeth treated like a member of the family, even taking the unusual step of having her baptized in St. John’s Episcopal Church, the city’s preeminent (and primarily white) place of worship, which had been built by Mary’s great-great-great-grandfather. A few months prior, in April, as Virgi
nia debated secession and Fort Sumter fell, Mary Jane had married another Van Lew servant, Wilson Bowser, in the same church, an event that further insulted Mary’s sense of tradition and gave Elizabeth a keen and secret pleasure.
Mary and John argued constantly, long, rancorous battles that escalated after the onset of the war. He did not want their daughters—Annie, now seven, and Eliza, four—witnessing her mistreatment of the servants or internalizing her secessionist opinions. She accused him of deferring to Elizabeth, always choosing his sister over his wife. They began sleeping in separate chambers, a decision that, while not uncommon for the time, broke a long-standing Van Lew family custom of couples sharing a marital bed.
Now, at the dinner table, Mary insulted the servants with impunity, confident that the Van Lews wouldn’t chastise her about such matters in front of a Confederate officer. Elizabeth knew that her sister-in-law was a potentially dangerous foe, even more so than the neighbors. Mary might find her diary, filled with disparaging entries about rebel officials and the Confederacy in general. She could report every so-called traitorous conversation held within her home. She could even say that Elizabeth’s disloyal thoughts had evolved into disloyal activity, which—at this point, at least—would be a blatant, and possibly deadly, lie.
Captain Gibbs began regaling the table with tales from the tobacco prisons, a topic that seized Elizabeth’s attention. Recently, he said, he had to contend with the escape of eleven prisoners, a catastrophe he blamed on drunken guards. It seemed they all hit the saloons before reporting for duty, and drank whiskey from their canteens on the job. He petitioned General Winder to close every grogshop by the prisons and supply him with balls and chains, since handcuffs alone failed to deter recaptured inmates from attempting another escape.
Elizabeth feigned sympathy, but an idea had entered her mind and lodged there.
As long as Captain Gibbs boarded at the mansion, Elizabeth enjoyed unfettered access to the prisoners. Sometimes she sent a servant, as in the case of a private from the 14th New York who was wounded at Bull Run, stabbed with a bayonet more than fourteen times even after he lay motionless on the ground. Elizabeth had heard about the prisoners’ pitiful rations—scanty servings of moldy bread and meat, usually horse or mule meat—and she packed baskets of fresh vegetables from her family farm, located a quarter mile below the city near the James River. “I should have perished for want,” the private said, “but a lady named Van Lew sent her slave every other day with food.”
Occasionally the guards refused her entry, even with permission from Captain Gibbs and General Winder. On one such occasion she appealed to Colonel A. G. Bledsoe, the Confederacy’s assistant secretary of war, sending her request and some custard that she hoped he might deliver to the prisoners. Instead Bledsoe ate the custard himself and wrote a thank-you note to Elizabeth: “The custard was very nice, & many thanks to you. I borrowed some cups from an eating house nearby, & bought some crackers, so that it was eaten in fine style.”
On the back of the note Elizabeth scrawled, “God help us.”
She kept track of every escape and attempted escape: two volunteers, one from Michigan and one from Rhode Island, somehow slipped past their guards and made it to Washington; several soldiers from New York conspired to overpower their guards and were separated when the plot was discovered; and, most dramatically, a pair of recruits from Kentucky and Ohio crossed the Potomac by boat into Union territory, and shared their adventure with the press.
They’d noticed that the prison surgeons, distinguished by a bit of red ribbon pinned to their sleeves, were permitted to pass in and out as they pleased, and that the sentinels changed shifts every two hours. The first prisoner tore a bit of red flannel from one of his shirts, affixed it to his coat, and passed without incident. The second prisoner, red ribbon in place, escaped during the next shift change and found his partner at a designated corner a few blocks away. By a previous and unspecified arrangement they acquired a pocket compass and map of Virginia. They set out, following the Union turnpike, narrowly avoiding a tollgate guarded by rebel soldiers, hiking through miles and miles of fields, sleeping during the day and moving at night, eating corn and potatoes they found along the way. They crossed the Chickahominy on a milldam, the Pamunkey on a homemade raft, and the Rappahannock on a small boat; waded through a swamp; and at the mouth of the Potomac told a party of Negroes they were Confederate officers with dispatches and needed a ride across the river.
One evening, after returning from a trip to the prison, Elizabeth climbed the stairs to the top floor of her mansion and walked the length of the eighty-foot hall. There it was: the secret room, five feet high and extending the entire length of the house, its roof tilting to the south, its entrance only two feet square. She estimated it could hold fifty to seventy-five men at a time. Its door was made to fit flush against the wall and fastened on the inside. If she had a servant apply a coat of whitewash and place an old dresser against it, no one would ever detect what lay beyond.
She wanted to nudge things along beneath the surface of this mad and maddening city, where seemingly respectable women collected the bones of Union corpses and taught their daughters to “dread and fear the Yankee above all tame or wild animals.” She had no vote, no public forum, no way to make McClellan advance and attack, and she longed to grasp a bit of control. She would be the antithesis of Rose Greenhow, discreet and cautious, as courteous to the enemy as the rebel spy was disdainful. But the risks were considerable. Unlike Rose, she wasn’t a widowed mother; the Confederate government would sooner hang her, an old spinster, than someone raising a young girl. She needed to expand her network, to find every last Unionist in the city. A widespread underground movement was ripe to happen, disparate forces ready to rise and converge.
Elizabeth knew what she had to do, even if her sister-in-law was watching.
Mary became even more intolerable after Captain Gibbs and his family moved out of the mansion. The servants could do nothing right: laundered clothes were still dirty and wrinkled, furniture was still dusty, food was not fetched quickly enough, bathwater was too cold. Mary Jane’s husband could no longer tolerate the abuse, and Elizabeth offered a solution: he could leave Church Hill and work on the family farm, where they would certainly need extra hands during the coming fall harvest.
Which left the question of what to do about Mary Jane. The answer came in the form of an ad in the Richmond Dispatch, mentioning that the Confederate First Lady, Varina Davis, was seeking qualified servants. She reportedly felt the strain of keeping up appearances, and found it difficult to “get suitable servants, everything double the price.” Elizabeth would pay her a social call and offer Mary Jane for the position. It was the customary thing to do among the city’s better placed, an overture that conveyed status as much as it did decorum, and would give Elizabeth the chance to ingratiate herself with another Confederate official. The situation could prove beneficial in other ways, as well. No one, not even sister-in-law Mary, knew that Mary Jane was highly educated and gifted with an eidetic memory, capable of memorizing images in a glance and recalling entire conversations word for word.
The entrance to the secret room.
(Valentine Richmond History Center)
STAKEOUT
WASHINGTON, DC
On the evening of August 21, Allan Pinkerton set out for Lafayette Square with three of his best detectives. No one stirred at the house of Secretary of State Seward on the east side of the square, and the doors were locked at St. John’s Episcopal Church, where every president since Madison had worshipped. At the nearby residence of General George McClellan, the private upstairs rooms were dark but the lower parlors, which housed the telegraph office, hummed with activity, dozens of staffers writing and reading the papers and smoking Cuban cigars. A storm skulked between the clouds and the wind picked off leaves one by one, with sniper precision. It began to drizzle as the group arrived at the corner of Sixteenth and K Streets, just north of the square, stopping at Rose
Greenhow’s home.
Pinkerton strolled its perimeter, noting the structure and style: three-story brick building with basement, parlors elevated high off the ground, a flight of stairs sweeping up to the main entrance. Venetian blinds adorned two large rectangular windows to the right of the front door. He concluded that no one was home but decided to wait. The rain began falling in sleek silver sheets, soaking through the detectives’ clothes. Pedestrians hurried to their destinations, guided by the feeble glow of gas lamps. No one paid attention to the four men standing idly in the downpour.
Pinkerton had compiled a dossier on Rose and her rise to power in Washington, determining that she was a woman of “pronounced rebel proclivities” who considered the Union flag a “symbol of murder, plunder, oppression and shame.” He cataloged her reported political paramours, focusing especially on Senator Wilson, and noted that she was “using her talents in procuring information” and communicating it to the rebel government at Richmond. “Mrs. Greenhow,” he concluded, “had occupied a prominent position in the social circles of the capital, and was personally acquainted with all of the leading men of the country, many of whom had partaken of her hospitality and had enjoyed a social intercourse that was both pleasurable and fascinating.”
One of the ground-floor windows was suddenly etched in light. Someone was home. Pinkerton lifted himself on tiptoe, but the parlor windows were too high. He waited until the street was empty and summoned two of his detectives. Feeling ludicrous, he kicked off his boots. His stockinged feet sank in the mud. The men bent and cupped their palms and hoisted Pinkerton up, adjusting their positions until he had one foot on a shoulder of each man. Rain spilled over the brim of his hat. His red beard dampened into a point. Gently he flipped the slats of the blinds until the parlor slowly revealed itself. He noted the plush damask settee, the rosewood piano, oil paintings of famous statesmen dispersed along the wall, the gilded figurines standing guard by the staircase—but no Rose Greenhow. He was about to complain to his detectives when one of them whispered, “Sh!”