by Karen Abbott
She turned, stopping them. After all that time watching her, they now seemed surprised to stand mere inches away, eye to eye. One wore an untidy red beard and introduced himself as “Major E. J. Allen,” but she knew him as Allan Pinkerton. She had started her own dossier, describing Pinkerton, the epitome of a dour Scotsman, as “a German Jew, possessed [of] all the national instincts of his race.” His partner had a mass of curly brown hair leading to whiskers shaped like wooden spoons. She recognized him as part of the group that had followed her around Washington.
“Is this Mrs. Greenhow?” Pinkerton asked.
“Yes,” she replied, and decided to play coy. “Who are you, and what do you want?”
“I have come to arrest you.”
“By what authority?”
“By sufficient authority.”
“Let me see your warrant,” Rose demanded. She reached into her drawstring purse for a handkerchief and patted her cheek. Glancing back at the street, she confirmed that her signal had been understood. The entire city—the entire country, both North and South—would soon know of her arrest. The men each clutched an elbow and escorted her inside. She yanked herself free, turned to them and rasped, “I have no power to resist you, but had I been inside of my house, I would have killed one of you before I had submitted to this illegal process.”
Pinkerton seemed taken aback. “That would have been wrong,” he responded, “as we only obey orders and both have families.”
“What are you going to do?” she asked him.
“To search.”
“I will facilitate your labors.” She reached for a vase on the mantel and extracted a fragment of an old letter—the one that she had suspected was an attempt to entrap her; it had come from the city post office, a route her sources knew better than to use.
Tossing the note at Pinkerton, she said, “You would like to finish this job, I suppose?” He pocketed the note but discarded the city envelope in which it had arrived. Silently Rose congratulated herself on her “cool and indifferent manner,” her refusal to commit “some womanly indiscretion by which they could profit,” and in the very next moment she heard Little Rose scream. Fear struck and kindled inside her chest. Another scream and the words: “Mother has been arrested! Mother has been arrested!” She picked up her skirts and ran toward her daughter’s voice. From the back door she spotted Little Rose dangling from a tree, her body folded in half over a branch. Two men—more Pinkerton detectives—reached up, clutching at her spindly little calves, and the girl kicked at their heads, pinwheeling her feet. She was crying now, long, reverberating wails that seemed to come from someone three times her age and size, the worst sound Rose had ever heard. She lurched forward to save her but her arms wouldn’t move. Someone had trapped her, twining her wrists at the small of her back. She heard Pinkerton say, “Take charge of this lady, detain her in the parlor.”
There was an army of them now, uniformed men and women spreading to every corner, filing upstairs to invade Gertrude’s room. Rose had not touched the room since her daughter’s death—the toiletries were still aligned on her shelf, the dresses still hung in her wardrobe—and she watched as detectives confiscated every last thing the girl had owned. Even the bed where Gertrude had died and lay in her winding-sheet was desecrated by Pinkerton’s men.
They invaded Rose’s room next, rummaging through her hamper, shaking out soiled crinolines, corsets, stockings, and underpinnings to see what might fall from the pockets and folds. They even seized Little Rose’s unlettered scribblings, suspecting correspondence with the enemy. They tunneled their hands into vases, smashed picture frames to check behind photos. They uncovered Henry Wilson’s thirteen love letters to Rose and several others from Oregon senator Joseph Lane, concerning his “feebleness” and desire to visit as soon as possible. Pinkerton made a notation on the last missive: “Wants to see Mrs. G very much—but is engaged with Committee on Military Affairs. He is mostly sick because he can’t see her.” Each item was classified and filed into a parcel marked “Highly Important,” “Legal,” or “Political.”
As instructed, one of Pinkerton’s detectives—the one with the spoon-shaped whiskers—sat in the parlor with Rose while guards searched the house. Rose sat next to him on the settee, fanning herself. Wisps of hair escaped from her braided bun and swung with each flutter. She assumed that the detective, like all men, was his own favorite subject of conversation, and she would let him think she was enthralled with every revelation. After saying that his name was Pryce Lewis, and that he had immigrated to the United States from England five years earlier, to her surprise he asked questions in turn. She was incapable of censoring herself. He found Rose “a beautiful woman . . . careless and sarcastic and, I know, tantalizing in the extreme.” He was young enough to be her son.
Rose tilted her head and let her voice go soft and Southern, stretching syllables like taffy. “May I go upstairs for a few minutes?” she asked. The parlor had gotten so unbearably hot, she explained, and she wished to change her dress.
Lewis, charmed by the “winning way” of her manner, agreed.
He followed her upstairs, one step behind. She shut the door in his face and began sifting through dresser drawers, searching for evidence not yet found: notes on McClellan’s army, copies of maps she’d drawn or acquired from sources, drafts of her dispatches to Beauregard, her cipher and its key. She tore them to pieces and sprinkled the remains in her iron stove, hoping the detective couldn’t hear the sound of the paper shredding, the clank of the metal. She unbuttoned her dress, kicked off her crinoline. There was a shuffling outside her door.
“Madam, madam,” a voice called, and without further warning Pryce Lewis barged inside.
He stared, stunned, at a half-naked Rose. She took advantage of his embarrassment, grabbing her revolver from the mantelpiece and aiming it directly at his head.
“If I had known who you were when you came in,” she said, “I would have shot you dead!”
For a moment they stared at one another, waiting. Finally Lewis smiled and said, politely, “The revolver has to be cocked before it will go off.”
Rose glared at him as he peeled it from her hands.
Lewis excused himself when a female detective entered the room, introducing herself as “Ellen.” Rose sized her up, noting that she resembled “one of those India rubber dolls, whose expression is made by squeezing it,” and that her weak gray eyes seemed perpetually on the verge of tears. She ordered Rose to finish undressing in preparation for a strip search.
Rose handed her garments to “this pseudo-woman” until she wore only her stockings, linen, and shoes. Ellen examined each piece, skimming her fingers across the silk, and then allowed Rose to dress herself. They were halfway down the stairs when Rose heard a smothered scream—the voice of a former servant’s sister, who had been taken prisoner because she happened to pass the house. “I began to realize,” Rose wrote, “the dark and gloomy perils which environed me.”
As Ellen brought her back downstairs to the parlor, the front door swung open. Rose’s friend and scout, twenty-two-year-old Lily Mackall, pushed her way past two guards, and the women embraced.
“I did not know what they had done with you,” Lily whispered.
Rose pressed her mouth against her ear and replied, “Oh, be courageous, we must whip these fiends.”
Pryce Lewis lowered an arm between them, breaking them up, and told Lily that she, too, was under house arrest.
Pinkerton strode into the parlor and barked orders to his men: remain inside the house, prevent anyone from leaving, arrest all visitors. He was heading out for the evening to report to the War Department.
As soon as he left, his men began helping themselves to Rose’s brandy. She let them imbibe without protest or comment. They began stumbling about the parlor and slurring their words. She followed them into her dining room, where they dropped heavily into chairs. She adopted a scolding tone, telling them to take a good look at themselves—their hyg
iene was deplorable, their manners were atrocious; didn’t they know better than to sit in shirtsleeves at the table? When was the last time they’d washed their hands? They were all mindless “slaves of Lincoln,” at the mercy of that “Abolition despot.” They were lucky to be in the same room with her, a lady on a par with Marie Antoinette or Mary Queen of Scots, and they should muster any scrap of propriety they had and treat her with respect.
The men received her monologue without comment. One, an Irishman, took a long swallow of brandy and landed his logy eyes on her bodice. He was looking forward, he said, to the “nice times” they’d all have with her later. The others laughed and raised their glasses to the thought.
While they drank, Rose crept upstairs to her library and reached for a folio slipped deep between Robert’s books, another hiding spot that had so far eluded the detectives. The pages fluttered to the floor, and she began tucking them into the deep folds of her dress. She found another folio, and another. There were more documents than she remembered; disposing of them alone would be difficult. She recalled that during her strip search the detective had neglected to check her stockings and boots. If Rose gave the papers to Lily Mackall, her friend could easily conceal them. She tiptoed back downstairs, checked on the drunken guards, and Lily agreed to her plan. Should the detectives discover the papers, they vowed to set the house on fire. Around 4:00 a.m. the detectives, still inebriated, ignored Pinkerton’s orders and permitted Lily to leave. She took the papers with her, but detectives brought her back the next day.
Throughout the week the detectives continued to search Rose’s home. She watched them haul out boxes of fine china and crystal, dismantle her Duncan Phyfe tables to check the sockets of the legs, plunge their hands beneath her mattress. They panicked when a sprig of jasmine tumbled from one of Rose’s undergarments, certain it had been smuggled to her as a hidden message. They finally uncovered the message fragments stashed in her stove, partially singed scraps of treasonous origami they spread across her tables and studied for hours at a time. Rose delighted in their confusion. “One by one,” she gloated, “they had allowed the clue to escape them.”
The guards began treating her with a fawning and suspicious kindness. The Irishman who had threatened to rape her sat across from her in the parlor and chatted as if they were old friends; he shared her Catholic faith, he told her, and he did not fathom how “so noble a lady should be treated as a common malefactor.” He seduced her maid, Lizzie, sneaking her to an upstairs chamber, no doubt seeking incriminating evidence against Rose. Lizzie willingly went along—“I led Pat a dance,” as she told Rose—and said she would continue the dalliance to see what she could learn.
A Scottish guard tried to engage Rose as she ate, speaking somberly of the “sublime fortitude” she had shown throughout the ordeal. He riffled through his coat pocket and produced a document, lowering it next to her plate. This belonged to General McClellan, he said, and he would be most honored by her autograph.
“Madam,” he said, “there is no telling what may happen, and I would like to look at your name and know that you had forgiven me.”
Rose found his manner “touchingly pathetic” and ignored him. He tried again: Would she like him to sneak letters out of the house for her? He promised they would safely reach their destination, and he would not tell a soul. It was the least he could do, after the suffering she’d endured. Rose spooned her beef stew and declined.
Instead, after dinner, she went to the room she shared with Lily and Little Rose. She knelt by her daughter’s bed, and clasped her hands as if in prayer. She considered what she was about to ask of her eight-year-old child, her namesake, her last connection to her husband. Little Rose had always been her child—she had never known her father—and she worshipped her mother, internalizing Rose’s opinions, mimicking her words. She talked about how she “hated” the Yankees and memorized a repertoire of rebel songs: “The Bonnie Blue Flag,” “God Save the South,” “Old Abe’s Lament.” She was a precocious girl, more accustomed to the company and habits of adults than children, and Rose hoped she was up to the task. She told herself her daughter would be in greater danger if she gave up entirely, if she stood idly by and let the North win the war.
She lowered her mouth to Little Rose’s ear and whispered it like a story: Friends would be coming to visit soon. She would be outside playing, and she would see them approach. They would bring candy, maybe peppermint sticks or Necco wafers, wrapped inside a very important note. She, too, would have a very important note, written by Mother and hidden in her pocket. She would trade, taking the candy and giving the note. She would say nothing but “Thank you.” She would hide the friend’s note in her pocket and bring it to Mother as soon as she could. The Yankees would be watching and listening. She would be her mother’s “Little Bird,” carrying news just like the homing pigeons. This was their secret, the most important secret they would ever share, and she had to promise to keep it.
Little Rose promised, her eyes peeking over the hem of her blanket, the Yankee guard just outside the door.
A few days after Rose’s arrest Pinkerton brought in a detachment of Sturgis Rifles, the same company that served as bodyguards for General McClellan. Rose was left alone only when bathing or using the chamber pot. When she slept, a guard sat on a chair inches from her bed. When she changed her dress, she was ordered to leave the door open, the lewd guard invariably peering inside.
Even under constant surveillance Rose continued her espionage. Little Rose understood exactly what was expected of her when she went out to play in front of the house, making quick and surreptitious exchanges with scouts, reporting back to her mother with candy in her palm and a note in her pantalettes. In this way Rose learned of Union general Ambrose Burnside’s plan to send an armada and twenty thousand men to ports in North Carolina—part of the Union’s overarching “Anaconda Plan” to surround the Confederacy and cut off supplies. She told her guard she had to use the chamber pot and prepared an enciphered dispatch, to be delivered by Little Rose, warning Confederate officials to fortify the South’s coastal defenses; at the moment, only eight modified workboats known derisively as the Mosquito Fleet patrolled the waters. She devised a system of communicating by needlework, knitting tapestries in specific patterns based on the Morse code, a precise vocabulary of stitches and colors. Another opportunity came on Sunday mornings, when Lizzie took Little Rose to Mass at St. Patrick’s Church. Although a guard sat nearby, certain parishioners managed to whisper information about troop numbers and military plans during the sign of peace. If Little Rose was napping, or if Rose sensed a guard was suspicious, she communicated with the outside by writing letters with hidden meanings, all of them scrutinized before they were mailed.
“Tell Aunt Sally that I have some old shoes for the children,” one read, “and I wish her to send someone down town to take them, and to let me know whether she has found any charitable person to help her to take care of them.” Only the intended recipient would understand the translation: “I have some important information to send across the river, and wish a messenger immediately. Have you any means of getting reliable information?” The detectives, Rose quipped, came to the conclusion that, “for a clever woman, Mrs. Greenhow wrote the greatest pack of trash that was ever read.”
Once, and only once, did Rose bribe a guard to deliver a message intended for Thomas Jordan. She told him that “artillery is constant and severe,” with about sixty thousand troops surrounding the city, and that they were badly equipped, asking for private contributions of blankets. She reported that her scouts were still in place and enclosed a list of forts. “I have signals,” she said. “Take care that the cipher does not fall into their hands. I destroyed it and every paper of consequence, but oh my God, with what danger, with twenty detectives following every step . . . spies are employed in every class, and more is spent in the secret service by McClellan than ever before.”
She slipped the note to Lieutenant Sheldon, the only guard
who had showed her any kindness, and hoped he wouldn’t betray her.
One afternoon Rose heard a rustling and familiar voices at the front door. She looked up to see members of her spy ring: Eugenia Phillips, the wife of former Alabama congressman Philip Phillips; her sister; two of her daughters (whom Eugenia had trained to spit on Union officers); and Bettie Hasler, the courier who had delivered messages entirely unaware of their content. They had each been arrested and charged with corresponding with the enemy. Rose nodded at them in silent greeting and tried to catch Bettie’s eye, but the woman was weeping into her handkerchief, tattered points of lace sprouting between her fingers.
Forbidden to talk with her fellow captives, Rose passed the time knitting, seemingly absorbed in the stab and click of her needles as she eavesdropped on the guards. One mentioned that the government was offering a handsome sum for the key to her cipher. Another reported that President Lincoln and General McClellan had convened a Cabinet Council, summoning Senator Wilson and other Republican officials to explain themselves after they’d been implicated in her intercepted correspondence. She heard that her enciphered dispatches containing drawings of Union fortifications were, in her words, “complimented as being equal to those of their best engineers—as well they might.” She learned that Union officials had arrested several suspected accomplices: a former minister to Brazil; the current minister to France; a clerk in the post office; a lawyer named Charles Winder, who happened to be the brother of General John Winder, provost marshal of Richmond; and even Washington, DC, mayor James G. Berret, who, although a Democrat and suspected Southern sympathizer, had never been involved in Rose’s spy ring. Berret was sent to Fort Lafayette and released after taking an oath of allegiance.
She was gratified to learn her arrest had made immediate national news. Newspapers across the country dubbed her home “Fort Greenhow” and pondered how to contend with female traitors, a situation that had seemed unthinkable before the war began. War, like politics, was men’s work, and women were supposed to be among its victims, not its perpetrators. Women’s loyalty was assumed, regarded as a prime attribute of femininity itself, but now there was a question—one that would persist throughout the war—of what to do with what one Lincoln official called “fashionable women spies.” Their gender provided them with both a psychological and a physical disguise; while hiding behind social mores about women’s proper roles, they could hide evidence of their treason on their very person, tucked beneath hoop skirts or tied up in their hair. Women, it seemed, were capable not only of significant acts of treason, but of executing them more deftly than men.