Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy

by Karen Abbott

  A figure strode up Sixteenth Street and turned toward the house. Pinkerton dismounted from his perch and hid under the stoop. His men flanked him, lying prone, chins half planted in the sodden ground. They heard ascending footsteps, the faint chime of a bell, the creaking and closing of a door. Pinkerton resumed his position atop the detectives’ shoulders and peered into the parlor.

  The visitor, he saw, was a “tall, handsome man of a commanding figure and about forty years of age.” Upon closer inspection Pinkerton recognized him as Captain John Elwood, an officer in the Union army who commanded one of the stations of the provost marshal, charged with preserving order and, ironically, identifying rebel spies. The captain removed his cloak, revealing a blue uniform. He appeared nervous, fidgeting in his chair and shifting his eyes, and relaxed only when Rose descended the stairs, wearing a mourning dress, her hair coiled into a knot. He stood and bowed deeply, and his face “lighted up with pleasure as he gazed upon her.”

  Pinkerton watched their lips move, straining to discern their words; he heard “disposition” and “troops.” After a few moments Captain Elwood reached into his pocket and unfolded a large square of paper, holding it up to the light. Pinkerton realized it was a map—a map of the fortifications in and around Washington, no less. The captain pointed to certain spots, his finger pausing over them. Rose leaned in close, her shoulder touching his, nodding as he spoke.

  The detective was enraged: “My blood boiled with indignation as I witnessed this scene, and I longed to rush into the room and strangle the miscreant where he sat, but I dared not utter a word, and was compelled to stand by, with the rain pouring down upon me, and silently witness this traitorous proceeding.” Voices and laughter drifted up from the street and Pinkerton quickly dismounted, hiding again with his men under the stoop. Once the pedestrians passed, he climbed back up but saw that the “delectable couple” had disappeared.

  For more than an hour he stood as still as he could, knees locked, his detectives’ hands clasped around his calves, waiting for Rose and Captain Elwood to return to the parlor. They did, around half past midnight, slipping through red curtains, walking arm in arm. When the captain reached for his cloak, Pinkerton made one last retreat under the stoop. He heard the couple say good night and then “something that sounded very much like a kiss.”

  Elwood descended the steps, and Rose shut the door behind him. Pinkerton waited for a count of ten and then set off in pursuit, still bootless, swiping rain from his eyes. At the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Fifteenth Street the captain ducked into a nondescript building. Pinkerton followed. He heard a shuffling and felt several points of sharp, fixed pressure on his chest. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust and see the tips of four bayonets, wielded by as many Union sentries.

  One of them shouted, “Halt, or I fire!”

  Pinkerton rummaged for an explanation. He was unfamiliar with the area, he said, and had lost his way. The sentries took him to Elwood’s office, where the captain glared at him for several silent moments. Pinkerton knew he looked a fright, with his drenched clothing clinging to his skin and his socks slathered in mud, and he struggled to suppress a laugh. “One might more readily imagine that I had been fished out of the Potomac,” he thought, “than that I was the chief of the secret service of the government.”

  Keeping his eyes fixed on Pinkerton, the captain pulled two revolvers from a drawer and set them on his desk. He stroked the barrels, one with each hand.

  “What is your name?” Elwood asked.

  Pinkerton used his alias: “E. J. Allen.”

  “What is your business?”

  “I have nothing further to say,” Pinkerton replied, “and I decline to answer any further questions.”

  “Ah! So you are not going to speak. Very well, sir, we will see what time will bring forth.” Elwood called for a sentry. “Take this man to the guard house,” he ordered, pointing at Pinkerton, “but allow no one whatever to converse with him.”

  Pinkerton bowed in the same courtly manner in which the captain had bowed to Rose. He was tossed into a small pen with a few dozen men, most of them drunk, singing slurred refrains or passed out cold on the floor. But the guard was surprisingly friendly, so Pinkerton took a risk and asked a favor: when he went off duty, would he mind delivering a note?

  The guard agreed, and Pinkerton found a pencil and a damp scrap of paper in his pocket. He scrawled a few lines to assistant secretary of war Thomas A. Scott, informing him of his imprisonment and requesting that he secure his release as soon as possible—but in a manner that wouldn’t arouse the suspicions of Captain Elwood. The guard left at 6:00 a.m. and returned an hour later.

  Pinkerton waved him over. “How is the weather outside?” he asked.

  “All right, sir!” came the reply, confirmation that the message had reached its destination. A few moments later, the guard’s sergeant escorted Pinkerton back to Captain Elwood’s office. He had put his guns away.

  “The secretary of war has been informed of your arrest,” he told Pinkerton, “and you will be conducted to him at once, and then we shall see whether you will remain silent any longer.”

  Pinkerton nodded and tried to look solemn, privately scoffing at the captain’s imperious manner. Still shoeless, he followed the captain to Scott’s residence. The assistant secretary of war mocked Pinkerton’s appearance as soon as the men were alone, and the detective “joined in his merriment, for a more realistic picture of a ‘drowned rat’ I never beheld.”

  Pinkerton detailed the meeting between Rose and Captain Elwood. Scott began pacing around the room, stopping long enough to tap a bell on his desk, summoning the traitorous officer.

  “Mrs. Greenhow must be attended to,” he whispered to Pinkerton. “She is becoming a dangerous character. You will therefore maintain your watch on her, and should she be detected in attempting to convey any information outside of the lines, she must be arrested at once.”

  HARD TO NAME

  WASHINGTON, DC

  When not on the trail of Rose Greenhow, Allan Pinkerton assessed the Confederate forces around the capital, emerging with conclusions that only underscored McClellan’s own caution. He told the general that 150,000 rebel forces surrounded the city, armed with a great arsenal of cannon. In reality the Confederate troops numbered around 45,000, and the cannon pointed at the capital were merely mammoth logs painted black to look like artillery, a ruse the Northern public immediately mocked as “Quaker guns.” A reporter for the New York Tribune likened the situation to the Chinese trick of scaring enemies “by the sound of gongs and the wearing of devils’ masks.” The revelation embarrassed McClellan but failed to bolster his confidence, and he remained convinced that the rebels intended to invade Washington. Rose took note and sent a message to General Beauregard, stressing that “the panic is great and the attack is hourly expected.”

  In the absence of marching orders Emma continued her shifts at the regiment hospital, just south of Alexandria. Her patient roster now included a growing number of officers afflicted with venereal disease: syphilis, gonorrhea, and lymphogranuloma venerum, the last of which was manifested in plum-sized swellings in the lymph glands of the groin. Treatment differed from doctor to doctor, and depending on the severity of the disease, Emma assisted in urethral injections of nitrate of silver and sugar of lead; administered pills containing balsam of copaiba, powdered cubebs, and magnesia; and gave mercury vapor baths followed by the continuous application of a “black wash,” a mixture of calomel and lime water.

  It was grueling but satisfying work. She felt that Frank Thompson was safe there, one small part of a bloody and boundless machine; no one had time for talk that didn’t pertain to the task at hand. So it was by chance that she fell into conversation one evening with a fellow private from the 2nd Michigan.

  Emma had seen him before and said hello in passing, forbidding her gaze to linger on his dark eyes and razor cheekbones, his arms like sculpture beneath his sleeves. He had come now to v
isit a friend who was a patient, and she let her eyes cut to him as she wandered from cot to cot, re-dressing wounds and preparing to give sponge baths, working alongside female volunteers. Their supervisor gave strict instructions on bathing etiquette: “Wash as fast as you can. Tell them to take off socks, coats and shirts, scrub them well, and put on clean shirts.” When the nurses “finished them off”—code for washing the most intimate parts of the body—it could be awkward for both patient and nurse, a necessary but flagrant violation of Victorian conventions.

  One volunteer confessed that if she’d been asked to “shave them all, or dance a hornpipe on the stove funnel, I should have been less staggered; but to scrub some dozen lords of creation at a moment’s notice was really—really—.” But she took a deep breath, “drowned my scruples in a washbowl,” and “made a dab at the first dirty specimen I saw.” The new superintendent of the Department of Female Nurses, Dorothea Dix, would begin recruiting only women over thirty who were “plain-looking” and modestly dressed—no bows, curls, jewelry, or hoop skirts—to reduce the chances of impropriety. Emma noticed her own patients’ comfort in her presence, their calm submission to her touch, and took it as further proof that she was doing right both by her adopted country and by God. Her secret protected her patients; her deception was a kindness, not an abomination or a sin.

  When the man—no mere boy, he—finished visiting with his friend, he approached Emma and introduced himself as Jerome Robbins. He told her that he was a member of Company I, and that they had been mustered into service on the same day. He was twenty, a year older than Emma, and seemed impervious to the chaos around him, a sluice of calm channeling through the rows of weary men. He had been in college when the war broke out and considered himself to be more of a scholar than a soldier. They both admired McClellan and abhorred the sinful temptations of camp life; he exalted “blissful celibacy” and ranted against trips down the line. “To me,” Jerome wrote, “nothing in the whole of human actions is so despicable, degrading, and devoid of all respectability as a man wearing the garb of humanity who visits the city brothels.” He kept a journal chronicling his ongoing efforts to perfect his relationship with God.

  Jerome Robbins, 1861.

  (Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan)

  Emma, sponge in hand, blood on her coat, listened to him, rapt, but each revelation, each connection, reeled her back years and miles away, settling on a singular moment that had cleaved her life in two. In a corner of her mind it was 1850 and she was nine years old, living on the farm in New Brunswick, cleaning up after supper. A knock at the door interrupted her work. An old peddler stood on the porch, listing under the weight of his cracked leather bag. Emma’s mother took pity on him and offered him a bed for the night.

  Before leaving the following morning, he pulled Emma aside and pressed a book into her hands. She drifted a fingertip across the title: Fanny Campbell, the Female Pirate Captain: A Tale of the Revolution! She had never read any book but the Bible. It meant something, she decided, that the peddler gave the novel to her instead of to one of her sisters. That afternoon she shirked her chores, leaving the potatoes unplanted and the cows unmilked, and lay facedown in the soil to read. “I felt,” Emma said, “as if an angel had touched me with a live coal from off the altar.”

  The story imprinted itself on her mind. When Fanny’s lover, a sea captain, was captured during a mutiny in the Caribbean, she hacked off her curls and hid her figure beneath breeches and a blue coat. Fanny broke wild horses and tangled with panthers and transformed herself into a pirate, eventually finding her lover and rescuing him. In Emma’s view, the lone flaw was that the heroine “had no higher ambition than running after a man.” At night, by candlelight, Emma reread the book and began planning her escape.

  This idea burrowed deeper as her father married off her sisters, one by one. Emma watched them settle into lives where each day seemed longer and plainer than the last: every moment preordained, every thought pragmatic, every chore chafing at the same raw spot on their bones. “In our family the women were not sheltered but enslaved,” she wrote. “If occasionally I met [a man] who seemed a little better than others, I set him down in my mind as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and probably less worthy of trust than the rest.” After Emma turned fifteen, her father announced she would marry next, promising her to a lecherous neighbor, a farmer dozens of years her senior. When the time came she would invert Fanny’s plan, becoming a man in order to avoid one.

  And yet here she was, taken by a man’s conversation and manner, answering his questions without suspecting any secret motives behind them. She watched his eyes, too, noting their careful scan of her features, the quick and subtle trip down her frame, and a part of her wondered what she’d failed to hide.

  Jerome recorded their meeting that evening in his diary. “I had a very pleasant conversation with Frank Thompson on the subject of religion,” he wrote. “He is an assistant in the hospital and I think well able to win and repair the hearts of those about him.” And yet something—Jerome wasn’t sure what—was strange. “A mystery seems to be connected with him,” he added. “Hard to name.”

  Emma looked for Jerome each night and he always showed up, talking with her longer than he did his sick friend. She told him about her childhood in the Anglican church, her belief that a thing had to be right “if there were instances of it in the Bible,” and her faith that “God was there,” no matter what happened. She shared stories of her time as a Bible salesman, going from door to door in Canada and eventually crossing the border into America, where everyone was talking about John Brown’s raid and the looming crisis. She said that she, as a disciple of Christ, could not abide the institution of slavery.

  “I visited my friend Thompson this evening,” Jerome wrote, “and was highly entertained for the evening in conversing about the subject of religion and human nature . . . he is a good noble-hearted fellow as far as limited acquaintance will allow.”

  She was thrilled when Jerome announced his appointment as a steward in the hospital, responsible for dispensing medicine and applying bandages and leeches. That afternoon they napped side by side. With his eyes shut she felt invisible, safe to study the planes and ridges of his face. She could have shifted her hand and felt the rise and fall of his chest. She recalled her dates with women back in Canada, excursions meant to assure her friends she wasn’t “queer,” involving nothing more than witty banter and the kiss of a hand. They all expected her to marry one companion, “a pretty little girl who was bound that I should not leave Nova Scotia without her,” but leave, of course, she did. She let her mind wander to a dangerous place, wondering what might happen if she told Jerome the truth, the prospect—both thrilling and petrifying—gnawing at her heart.

  Jerome duly recorded the encounter: “I arose greatly refreshed after a good sound sleep on a couch with my friend Frank Thompson.”

  The next day they strolled together across the Long Bridge into Washington, taking their time. Without Emma’s explicit consent her body tweaked the way it moved, finding vestigial traces of the girl she had been. The truth bubbled up inside her, catching in her throat.

  “I revere as a blessing the society of a friend so pleasant as Frank,” Jerome wrote, “though foolish as it may seem, a mystery appears to be connected with him which it is impossible for me to fathom. Yet these may be false surmises—would that I be free of them for not for worlds would I wrong a friend who so sincerely appreciates confiding friendship.”

  Later that evening they returned to Washington to watch a fireworks display honoring General McClellan, who had convinced high-ranking Federal officials that the army’s seventy-five-year-old general-in-chief, Winfield Scott, was the greatest obstacle to Union advancement. Scott was forced into retirement, and Lincoln named McClellan his successor, so that the young general was now in command of both the Army of the Potomac and the entire US Army. The president voiced concern over the challenges of the dual role, but McClellan
had a ready response: “I can do it all.”

  Emma and Jerome took strolls along the hospital grounds during the day and enjoyed hushed, fervent discussions at night, heads nearly touching. Together they attended prayer meetings, which Jerome called “a delicious morsel for our thirsty souls.” He needed her, she thought—no one else understood the quirks and turns of his mind, or could distract it so easily when he was desperate to go home. She needed him just as much; he reinforced her sense of her own virtue and goodness, defusing the persistent, subconscious fear that nothing about her was real.

  “My time is greatly eased by conversations with Frank,” Jerome wrote, “which to me bind his friendship more firmly.”

  One day Jerome received a letter from Anna Corey, his sweetheart back in Michigan. She was, he said, “the only young lady correspondent I have had since I enlisted, and well worthy of the highest esteem of any who appreciates virtue and true nobility.” He shared his excitement with Emma. With each word his voice seemed to grow smaller and farther away, receding to a place where she couldn’t hear him at all.

  The next day she told Jerome she didn’t feel well—would he mind covering for her at the hospital? He agreed, and she retreated to her tent and stretched out on her bunk, leaving her boots on. She remembered the tale of Fanny Campbell, and how the heroine did not reveal herself immediately to her lover once she rescued him. Instead she worked alongside him for several weeks, impressing him with her strength and savvy, entrenching herself in his life. Only then did she tell him the truth. Emma had followed the same sure course, earning Jerome’s respect and affection, making herself indispensable during these long, taut days of waiting for war. The time had come to tell him.