Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy

by Karen Abbott

  She found Jerome and said she was much improved, and suggested they go for another walk to the city. It was a cool, clear night, the moon showing only half of itself, and midway along the bridge she stopped him. She forgot about the possible repercussions, both legal and personal, of what she was about to do. Frank Thompson began to speak, unloading each of her lies until only Emma Edmondson was left.

  CRINOLINE AND QUININE

  ON THE CONFEDERATE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

  As a rebel courier and spy, Belle rode Fleeter throughout the Valley and to Richmond and Washington, carrying dispatches between Confederate generals and their subordinates, often traveling through the night, a bright moon carving her path. She was now part of the Confederacy’s own Underground Railroad, the same route traveled by spies in Rose Greenhow’s ring. She used her home in Martinsburg as her personal headquarters, with occasional stays at her aunt’s hotel in nearby Front Royal. Mary Boyd had resigned herself to her daughter’s choice of career, knowing that Belle would not stand still long enough to listen to her concerns. She waved from the front door and wept after it closed, praying her daughter would find all the safe houses along her route, private establishments—many operated by women—where rebel operatives could exchange information and rest for the night.

  The Confederate Secret Service was constantly evolving, attracting new recruits and inventing ways to outwit the enemy. The want-ad columns in newspapers had become a regular medium for the exchange of underground information, with agents announcing arrivals and departures by advertising under previously determined aliases. The Underground Railroad would soon be renamed the Secret Line and expand its scope. A Doctor Line in Southern Maryland and Washington employed real and bogus physicians, carrying leather bags concealing dispatches instead of instruments, able to travel at all hours without arousing suspicion. A Postmaster Line in the same territory employed mailmen sympathetic to the Confederacy, many of whom were arrested and then replaced by their wives. In Louisville, Kentucky, members of the Knights of the Golden Circle, a precursor of the Ku Klux Klan, met at the home of a Mrs. Jack Taylor on First Street, where they created anti-Lincoln propaganda, identified safe houses for Union deserters, and plotted ways to spy for the South. (The proprietor of a local boardinghouse, Mrs. Long, went a step further, serving Union soldiers fresh coffee seasoned with a dash of poison.) Even Union spies had a grudging respect for their rebel counterparts; one officer with the 6th New York Cavalry admired how Confederate agents “could take hints quickly, adapt themselves to circumstances with readiness, and had their hearts in their business.”

  Belle vied to distinguish herself from the growing field of operatives, and began acting in oddly conspicuous ways for a girl purporting to be a spy. One rebel officer noticed a little black lapdog scurrying alongside her wherever she went. When she thought no one was looking, she reached into her purse and produced a white dog skin cut to fit precisely over her pet’s body. She placed messages atop the dog’s back, wrapped him tightly in the false hide, and smiled sweetly at the Union pickets. “Some of the old and ugly ladies make a great fuss about being searched,” one guard wrote to his wife, “but the young and good looking ones are a great deal more civil.”

  She told stories, to anyone who would listen, about killing a Yankee on the Fourth of July, a boast received with some skepticism by Union officers. “Some of the boys met the woman Belle Boyd, a violent rebel,” wrote a captain with the 5th Connecticut. “She claims to have shot a Union soldier who insulted her. It is not believed by the boys. . . . She appears to be the only witness.” None of the boys, Yankee or Confederate, knew quite what to make of her. One day she’d show up at camp with her face scrubbed free of powder and dressed as a man, donning the gray wool frock coat and butternut kepi of a Confederate private. At other times she wore a rebel soldier’s belt cinched around her waist, a velvet headband emblazoned with the seven original stars of the Confederacy, and a gold palmetto tree pin, in homage to South Carolina, affixed beneath her chin. She tried on different personas, playing the part of a demure Southern maiden one moment and an able warrior the next.

  Belle Boyd in Confederate attire.

  (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

  Once in enemy territory Belle wondered aloud about troop movements and numbers, disguising her intentions as curiosity, tying bows around all of her sentences. She had studied politics in school, she explained, and longed to know more. If prodded, she could recite the names of every general in the rebel army, every member of Congress and the district he represented, and the details about every battle since Fort Sumter. She never once prevaricated about her allegiance to the South, and this brazenness became a vital part of her costume: After all, she asked, how dangerous could such an open foe possibly be?

  While the boys contemplated their answer, Belle flashed the bowie knife she carried on her belt.

  The Shenandoah Valley witnessed a few minor skirmishes during the fall—one after the Yankees seized twenty-one thousand bushels of wheat in a mill near Harpers Ferry—but the war seemed to be on hold until General McClellan made a move. The lull in activity bred a spirit of playfulness among some of the opposing troops, particularly those who had been friends before secession. Belle occasionally delivered messages between Union lieutenant Orlando M. Poe, the new commander of Emma’s regiment, and Confederate general J. E. B. Stuart, his old West Point classmate. “My dear Beauty,” Poe wrote, using the derisive nickname Stuart had earned at the academy for his “personal comeliness in inverse ratio” to the word. “I’m sorry that circumstances are such that I can’t have the pleasure of seeing you although so near you.” She copied Poe’s note verbatim and filed it in her growing collection of war mementos.

  At night, after the last snap of snare drum and game of cards, she crept about Union camps gathering unattended sabers and pistols, and depositing them at a temporary hiding place in the woods, just far enough from the enemy pickets. A network of rebel ladies joined her, weaving arsenals through the steel coils of their hoop skirts, passing each other balls of string to secure the weapons tight. One day the 28th Pennsylvania Regiment, encamped near Harpers Ferry, discovered a cache of 200 sabers, 400 pistols, cavalry equipment for 200 men, and 1,400 muskets, all stashed inside barns and outhouses and buried underground, awaiting transfer to Southern lines. “I had been confiscating and concealing their swords and pistols on every possible occasion,” Belle confessed, “and many an officer, looking about everywhere for his missing weapons, little dreamed who it was that had taken them, or that they had been smuggled away to the Confederate camp, and were actually in the hands of their enemies to be used against themselves.”

  The South was suffering from more than a shortage of arms. Lincoln’s blockade kept tightening, interrupting business and choking off the Confederacy’s supplies. No one could receive checks or access funds held in Northern banks. Some merchants accepted sewing pins as currency. Palmetto hats and raccoon-skin shoes came into vogue. Atlanta jewelers set coffee beans instead of diamonds in breast pins. Coffee was becoming a luxury good, and newspapers printed suggestions for ersatz brews: take the common garden beet, wash it clean, dice into small pieces, roast in the oven, grind, boil with a gallon of water, and settle with an egg. Above all, medicine was scarce and prohibitively expensive—especially quinine, derived from the bark of a South American tree and used to combat frequent outbreaks of malaria among the troops.

  But England, which remained neutral, allowed Southern agents to buy at will, and a blockade-running business flourished abroad. Low, sleek ships like the Sumter and the Robert E. Lee set sail from Liverpool for the Caribbean, arriving in Havana or Nassau with a million-dollar cargo: cannon, rifles, cartridges, gunpowder, shoes, blankets, morphine, and the ever-valuable quinine. From there, smaller blockade runners called sprinters picked up the goods and broke the cordon, slipping into the port at Savannah or Wilmington. Domestically, two Philadelphia-based, politically connected chemical manufacturing comp
anies, Powers Weightman and Rosengarten Sons, supplied quinine to Union troops, but employees who valued profit over patriotism or sympathized with the South were always eager to make a deal.

  Belle began running the inland blockade, smuggling quinine and other necessities. Despite constant patrolling by the Federal navy, she and hundreds of other rebels crossed the Potomac River at Popes Creek, where the water separating Virginia and Maryland was less than two miles wide. A farmer named Thomas A. Jones—who would aid John Wilkes Booth’s escape in 1865—lived on the Maryland side. He had calculated a sliver of time, just before dusk, when the sun grazed the high bluffs above Popes Creek and threw a shadow across the river, enabling small rowboats to land and hide without detection.

  Jones cooperated closely with Benjamin Grimes, a fellow farmer on the Virginia side, and together they orchestrated at least two crossings a night—some of them conducted by nine-year-old Robert Fitzgerald, who would become the father of the future writer. Boats set sail from Grimes’s property, deposited packages in the fork of a dead tree on Jones’s shore, and collected packages from the same spot. When it wasn’t safe for a boat to cross from Virginia, a Miss Mary Watson, the twenty-four-year-old daughter of a Confederate major, sent a signal by draping a black shawl from a certain window, right over the heads of the troops stationed there.

  Confederate operatives used acorn-shaped contraptions to smuggle quinine and other goods across the lines.

  (American Civil War Museum [formerly Museum of the Confederacy])

  The blockade runners devised ingenious ways to conceal their contraband. Some male agents used an acorn-shaped brass contraption, just large enough to hold a message or a bit of quinine powder, and hid it in the place least likely to be searched: their rectums. One woman managed to conceal inside her hoop skirt a roll of army cloth, several pairs of cavalry boots, a roll of crimson flannel, packages of gilt braid and sewing silk, cans of preserved meats, and a bag of coffee—the contraband tally for a single crossing. Another found a functioning pistol on a battlefield, took it apart, and dared to smuggle the pieces to a rebel soldier. She hid the two halves of the wooden butt between soft ginger cookies, pushed the barrel into a loaf of bread, and buried the screws in a jar of potted shrimp, also filched from a Union officer. Mothers packed quinine in sacks of oiled silk and tucked them inside the hollowed papier-mâché heads of dolls, instructing their daughters to hold the toys tight and not say a word.

  Throughout the summer and fall Belle visited Confederate camps, bearing smuggled quinine and stolen Union guns, offering to deliver letters to Richmond for $3 each. At the new headquarters of General Stuart, a farmhouse near Centreville, Virginia, she cornered her latest love interest, Major John Pelham. He was twenty-three and blond and thin as a banister, six feet tall and 150 pounds, and, according to his fellow soldiers, “as grand a flirt as ever lived.” Belle pressed a Bible into his hands and told him to read her inscription:

  To John S. Pelham

  From Belle

  With the sincere hope he will read carefully and attentively

  For his own if not for her sake.

  A few days later, perhaps because Pelham had rebuffed her, Belle was in a less generous mood. She wandered from Stuart’s headquarters to those of General Beauregard, situated nearby, between Fairfax and Centreville. The scene struck her as chaotic and unruly, with pieces of artillery indifferently manned, the cannoneers undisciplined, and the Quartermasters Department deficient in wagons. Many troops wore burlap tied around their feet in lieu of boots or went barefoot altogether. The army was experiencing daily desertions; eleven men had recently fled one company in a single night. It felt like a place where anything could happen, where she could make anything happen.

  Her chance came when a Confederate soldier approached and asked her for whiskey. Alcohol was at times rationed out as a reward or a stimulant before battles or marches, but in general enlisted men were not allowed to keep supplies of liquor and suffered swift punishment for drunkenness on duty (meanwhile, Beauregard served special guests, like French prince Jérôme Bonaparte, juleps of dark cognac made by his aides in large buckets filled with ice and mint). Belle considered the soldier’s request, and decided she wasn’t in the mood to give anything away.

  Two dollars for a pint, she told him.

  The soldier countered, offering one. Belle refused. The man thrust his hand beneath Belle’s skirt. He tore a bottle from the hoop, took a long drink, and raised it in victory.

  Belle reached into her belt, brandished her knife, and demanded the bottle. The soldier dropped it to the ground, the liquid pooling at Belle’s feet. He unsheathed his own knife. About a hundred of his comrades gathered, waiting for what would come next. Belle charged, bellowing and swinging her knife.

  Men from Wise Artillery rallied behind Belle, and men from Borden’s Guard Artillery, behind the soldier. The melee continued long after she removed herself from its vortex, slipping out to the sidelines. She watched the knives gleam and the blood spill; some of the men defending her hailed from Martinsburg and had known her since childhood. She read newspaper reports calling it a “bloody fracas” and a “fierce conflict” between “rivals for her stimulating donations and sweet smiles.” It was the first time her name made national news. Thirty of her beloved rebels were badly wounded, more than twice the number of casualties incurred during a recent skirmish with the enemy.

  DARK AND GLOOMY PERILS

  WASHINGTON, DC

  Massachusetts senator Henry Wilson would be arriving any moment, but Rose’s mind was on another paramour and source, Union captain John Elwood. She’d heard what happened to him that rainy night after he left her home and arrested Allan Pinkerton. The detective brought him to assistant secretary of war Thomas Scott, who confiscated his sword and sent him to Fort McHenry, where he would slit his throat with a penknife. Rose felt sympathy for the poor, dim captain, described in his obituary as “by no means a person of sharp and quick intellect,” and for his two young children and widow, especially since, according to the press, the widow shared Rose’s secessionist sympathies. Had Rose known earlier, she might have spent as much effort recruiting Mrs. Elwood as she had seducing her husband.

  At the sound of the doorbell Rose’s maid, Lizzie, jumped to admit her visitor. The hall lamp briefly lit Senator Wilson’s stern face, its jowls spilling over the rim of his collar. Lizzie disappeared on the other side of the red curtain, leaving them alone in the parlor. Rose let Wilson kiss her cheek and poured him a tumbler of brandy. Settling beside him on the settee, she directed the conversation, nudging him with pointed questions, murmuring her encouragement during every pause. He spoke of Union troops being sent to fortify Maryland and new batteries being erected around Washington. He mentioned McClellan’s apprehension about rebel activity in the Shenandoah Valley. And he confided that he himself planned to join the general’s staff as an aide and adviser, a development Rose hoped might work in her favor. At least, she thought, she would enjoy even greater access to the secrets of Lincoln’s cabinet and War Office.

  She walked Wilson to the door, lingering until his carriage turned the corner. For once she failed to spy the pair of strange men under the streetlamp, revolvers peeking from belts. Allan Pinkerton watched her retreat into her home and made a notation in his file: “A number of prominent gentlemen were received by the fascinating widow, and among the number were several earnest and sincere Senators and Representatives, whose loyalty was above question, and who were, perhaps, in entire ignorance of the lady’s true character.”

  He had seen enough. It was time to apprehend her.

  Two days later Rose encrypted a message to Beauregard, including the details of her conversation with Wilson and ending with a plea: “Tell me what to send you, as I know nothing from you of your wishes, and I may be wasting means in sending you what is of no use.” She checked on Little Rose in the garden, playing hopscotch, stomping inside squares etched roughly into the ground. The child’s bonnet had sl
ipped from her head and bounced against her back with the force of each jump. Lizzie would keep an eye on her while Rose made her delivery; one of her scouts was scheduled to find her. She tucked the dispatch into the pocket of her mourning dress and started on her walk.

  Crossing Sixteenth Street, she noticed two men, one in a Federal army uniform and one in civilian clothes, angling themselves in her direction. She rushed over to a neighbor and made casual conversation, asking about the health of her children, shifting her eyes left and right, keeping the men in view. The air was blurry with heat. Sweat coursed down the length of her silk sleeves, and her lace collar scratched at her neck. Her scout—“a distinguished member of the diplomatic corps”—approached, right on time, but it would be impossible to slip him the note.

  As he passed, she whispered: “Those men will probably arrest me. Wait at Corcoran’s Corner, and see. If I raise my handkerchief to my face, give information of it.” The scout didn’t break stride, whistling as he walked—confirmation that he had heard her. Without any explanation to her neighbor, Rose crumpled the note, crammed it into her mouth, and swallowed it.

  Ignoring her neighbor’s puzzled expression, Rose bade her good-bye and strolled back home. She felt her heartbeat in her throat, heard its echo in her ears. She told herself: “The fate of some of the best and bravest belonging to our cause hangs upon my own coolness and courage.” She forced her steps to stay light and slow. Her face composed itself. She heard them coming behind her, panting at her back.