Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy

by Karen Abbott

  Rose’s acquaintance, Mary Chesnut, viewed the shift in public perspective as a titillating game, quipping, “It is so delightful to be of enough consequence to be arrested,” but men were unnerved by this flagrant violation of social mores. “The ‘heavy business’ in the war of spying is carried on by women!” declared the Albany Evening Journal. “Is it not about time that an example were set which will prove a terror to these artful Jezebels? Is it not time to impress them with the conviction that they may presume too much upon the privileges of their sex and the gallantry of those in authority?”

  There was talk of trying Rose for treason, along with calls to condemn her to the ducking stool for the remainder of the war. She ran the possibility of such punishments through her mind and decided that the authorities wouldn’t dare. Persecuting a widowed mother, especially one of her political and social stature, would only establish her as a Confederate martyr.

  “Let it come,” she challenged one guard. “I will claim the right to defend myself, and there will be rich revelations.”

  During the next few months, into the fall and winter, Pinkerton and his detectives tried to break Rose, employing the cruelest methods possible under the circumstances. They sought to isolate her by releasing all of her fellow prisoners. “I felt now that I was alone,” Rose wrote. “The wall of separation from my friends was each hour growing more formidable.” They refused to allow her any fresh air or exercise. They brought in another prisoner, a Chicago prostitute turned spy by the name of Mary E. Onderdunk, and insulted Rose by placing Mary in Gertrude’s bedroom. They sent away Catholic priests who tried to visit and debated nailing boards across her windows to deprive her of sunlight. They replaced catered meals with meager servings of cheese and crackers; many nights Little Rose cried herself to sleep from hunger. They refused to let the family physician treat Little Rose when she got sick, offering instead to send an army doctor. Rose declined, preferring instead to “trust her life to the good Providence which had so often befriended me.”

  They let Rose read select letters from Lily Mackall. Rose’s friend was gravely ill and wanted desperately to see her, unsuccessfully imploring every member of Lincoln’s cabinet before trying the president himself. Lincoln, according to Rose, told Lily that “she had had too much of my teachings already—that I had done more to damage, and bring his Government into disrepute, than all the rest of the darned rebels together; and by God she should never see me again, if he could help it.” Lily died on December 12.

  Every day Pinkerton’s team interrogated Rose for hours: Who were her sources? Who were her accomplices? Who in the rebel government was still plotting treasonous activity? They contacted her suspected informants and hinted that she had accepted a bribe to reveal their identities; the informants might as well confess to save themselves. When this ruse failed, the interrogators suggested to Rose that a “graceful concession” on her part would secure her release. “Your whole bankrupt treasury,” she retorted, “could not tempt me to betray the meanest agent of our cause.”

  “Do you know your life is in danger?” one detective asked. “Probably, to save your neck, you might answer differently.”

  Rose replied, “The life of anyone is in danger when in the power of lawless scoundrels.”

  The detectives gave up for the moment, but Rose was emboldened, sending a letter to US secretary of state Seward that was as duplicitous as it was defiant: “In the careful analysis of my papers I deny the existence of a line that I had not a perfect right to have written or to have received . . . you have held me, sir, to a man’s accountability, and I therefore claim the right to speak on subjects usually considered beyond a woman’s ken.”

  A Southern sympathizer leaked the letter to the Richmond Whig, which deplored the “cruel and dastardly tyranny of the Yankee Government” and the “incarceration and torture of helpless women.” Newspapers throughout the North and South picked up the story. Rose reveled in the attention (and in imagining the great embarrassment she caused Seward), but Pinkerton was at a loss. Rose Greenhow was his highest-profile case to date, and he worried that Federal officials would bow to public pressure and release her. In a report to the provost marshal, he argued that Rose was a serious threat to the Union, using her “almost irresistible seductive powers” to aid the rebels. “She has not used her powers in vain among the officers of the Army,” he stressed, “not a few of whom she has robbed of patriotic hearts and transformed them into sympathizers with the enemies of the country which had made them all they were.”

  Rose, meanwhile, received a visit from an officer of the army—Thomas M. Key, an aide-de-camp to General McClellan. Key offered to negotiate her release, asking what conditions she would accept.

  She was conflicted. She thought of Little Rose, her stomach growling, crying in the dark. But she didn’t quite trust the messenger: “I crushed down the impulse, for I saw that he was watching me very narrowly.”

  She responded, “None, sir. I demand my unconditional release, indemnity for my losses, and restoration of my papers and effects.”

  Key left without offering a conclusive response, but Rose believed that the Union had finally tired of her antics and was prepared to exile her to the South for good. If not, she had another idea. One of her scouts—“a party well known to the government”—was preparing to send a Christmas gift: a cake with several Confederate bills baked into the batter and an escape plan hidden between the layers.

  UNMASKED

  WASHINGTON, DC

  Standing on the Long Bridge, under the weakening light of the moon, Emma told Jerome about everything: the “severity” of her father; the impending arranged marriage to a vulgar old neighbor; the night she looked in a mirror, hacked off her long dark hair, dressed in a man’s suit, and became Frank Thompson—Jerome’s good friend, his best friend, the person he knew better than anyone else. She tried to persuade him even as she watched his thoughts register, his features contracting in confusion and expanding in shock, and settling, finally, into understanding, his face closing like a fist, looking as though he had never known her at all.

  Separately they walked back to the same place, retreating to their tents, where Emma hid under her blanket and Jerome opened his journal. At the top of the page, in his bold, tidy script, he wrote, “Please allow these leaves to be closed until the author’s permission is given for their opening.” For once he didn’t care about conserving paper, and filled the next several pages with thoughts he could never say aloud.

  “My friend Frank is a female,” he wrote, the underscore thick from the pressure of his hand. “I won’t say that it is not strange to me. . . . How sad is the reaction which often occurs when we think we have friendship in exchange for friendship and find that friend differing so widely from our own natures. . . . I learned that in friends we may be deceived. This have I been with the one here mentioned as he possesses a nature too willful to be pleasant, too jealous to be happy.” He switched pronouns and rendered his verdict: “God knows my heart that towards her I entertain the kindest feelings, but it really seems a great change has taken place in her or that the real her has been unmasked. It may be that I am partial to another.” He decided to keep her secret, although it was dangerous information to know; he could be court-martialed for helping Emma hide her sex.

  Emma did her best to avoid Jerome at the hospital. She couldn’t bear the pitying cadence of his greetings and the vaguely smug tilt of his smile. (If only she were privy to journal entries in which he skimmed past the cause of their estrangement: “I fear I have been somewhat deceived by his disposition yet as before intimated the fault may be mine, but certain it is there is not so warm friendship existing between us as there formerly has been.”) She hurled herself into work and completed tasks with willful—yes, she was willful—efficiency: prepare the injection, dig the graves, tell the soldier that he was dying. She went out of her way to indulge every inconvenient request. One Dutch soldier, suffering from typhoid fever, declared he could
eat nothing unless he first had some fresh fish.

  “But,” Emma objected, “the doctor must be consulted. Perhaps he will not think it best for you to have any fish yet, until you are stronger.”

  “He dusn’t know vat mine appetite ish—the feesh I must have . . . I must have some feesh!”

  So Emma acquired a bamboo rod and fashioned a line out of horsehair and walked to Hunter’s Creek, a mile and a half from camp. Soon after she cast her rod a monstrous eel struck. She fought it, pulling and leaning, her rod bending in jerks, the eel bucking against the current. She planted her foot, digging in. She would not lose this one. It twisted and danced, the point of its tail skimming the water’s surface, relenting in stages. She carried it back to camp like a baby, lying slack across her arms.

  “Dhat ish coot,” the Dutchman said when she returned, rubbing his hands together. “Dhat ish coot.”

  For once, camp life was as hectic as work. It was clear that General McClellan had no immediate intention of invading Virginia, and so the entire Army of the Potomac began establishing winter quarters, constructing log cabins, complete with fireplaces and chimneys, to insulate against the coming cold and snow. The most significant military development of the past five months had happened not in the eastern theater but out at sea, when the USS San Jacinto intercepted what it believed to be a Confederate man-of-war cruising in the Old Bahama Channel. Instead it was the British mail packet Trent, en route to Europe and carrying two Confederate envoys, James Mason and John Slidell. Union authorities took the men into custody, an act that England considered an insult and a violation of its neutral rights. The Confederacy grew giddy with hope that the two countries would go to war over the Trent Affair and that England would recognize its legitimacy.

  Closer to home there had been scouting excursions and brief clashes, and one humiliating Union defeat at Ball’s Bluff, near Leesburg, Virginia, but McClellan had let the fine fall weather slip by. The once reassuring bulletin “All quiet on the Potomac” had become a mockery. Even optimistic Unionists felt what Walt Whitman described as “a mixture of awful consternation, uncertainty, rage, shame, helplessness and stupefying disappointment.” Distracted by discussions about the Trent Affair, President Lincoln urged patience, but the more radical Republicans griped that McClellan had done nothing but stage his grand reviews (the latest of which involved sixty-five thousand men in a spectacle that Harper’s Weekly called “brilliant beyond description”). They even hinted that McClellan, a Democrat, kept his army idle out of sympathy for the Southern cause.

  Politics aside, transporting just one regiment of a thousand men along with horses, artillery, and supplies was a laborious process even under ideal weather conditions, requiring some eighty wagons, fifty passenger cars, and nine locomotives. The government furnished no mittens, and stiffened fingers and numbed hands made it impossible to load and fire a musket with any rapidity.

  But Confederate generals remained wary of an attack, especially after receiving Rose Greenhow’s latest enciphered dispatch, based on news gleaned from an exchange between Little Rose and one of her scouts in the yard. She warned that Union forces aimed to cut off railroad and other communications and attack from the front. “For God’s sake heed this,” she concluded. “They are obliged to move or give up.” Thomas Jordan forwarded Rose’s message to Beauregard along with a note of his own: “No living man ever made such a desperate effort as McClellan will make. Nevertheless I believe he is a coward and is afraid to meet you.”

  Even if McClellan did order an advance, his army was too sick to comply. Entire regiments suffered fits of coughing, short, barking rasps coming from every tent. McClellan himself contracted typhoid fever, a diagnosis that brought three homeopathic physicians rushing from New York to tend to him. The rival armies would not meet again until spring.

  Still, Union troops celebrated Christmas, decorating evergreen arbors with pinecones, singing “Silent Night” and “Deck the Halls,” opening boxes from women’s relief groups filled with homemade clothes and dried fruit, eating a lavish dinner of chicken, turkey, and cider. Some of the men raised small trees inside their tents and decked them with hardtack and pork. Emma missed all of it. Hoping to avoid Jerome, she had requested a transfer; her new appointment, as a nurse at Mansion House Hospital in Alexandria, began that morning. The women volunteers bustled about trying to create a festive atmosphere, carrying platters of plum pudding topped with sprigs of holly, or sitting cross-legged on the floor bending pine branches into wreaths. Mary Todd Lincoln had donated all unsolicited gifts of liquor that came to the White House, and a pyramid of whiskey bottles towered in one corner. Emma thought, ruefully, about how Jerome would disapprove, and then pushed the image of his face from her mind. She went from bed to bed, reading Bible verses and taking dictation for letters home. She expected to remain there indefinitely, but the command of the Army of the Potomac had other plans.

  THE DEFENSELESS SEX

  RICHMOND

  Elizabeth, like all of Richmond, followed the exploits of Rose Greenhow, but she alone noted the hypocrisy of the city’s reaction. The same newspapers that had threatened Elizabeth for visiting Union prisoners now excoriated the Northern government for punishing a “true woman” like Rose. “Nothing,” roared the Richmond Dispatch, “is so hideous in the tyranny inaugurated at Washington as its treatment of helpless women. . . . None but savages and brutes make war upon the defenseless sex.” Richmond’s outrage over Rose’s predicament was exceeded only by a cold and constant fear: If the Union capital could be infiltrated so easily, might the Confederacy’s be just as vulnerable?

  That thought gripped Elizabeth’s mind as she summoned one of her family’s former slaves, Mary Jane Bowser, to discuss potential employment in the Confederate White House. They sat in the parlor of the Van Lew mansion, where Edgar Allan Poe once conducted static electricity experiments and read The Raven to terrified Richmond belles, and in view of the Confederate flag now dangling from the wall.

  At the moment Elizabeth’s sister-in-law, Mary, was out, meeting with other Confederate women to sew winter uniforms for the troops, all of them so devoted to the task that they even knitted in their carriages on the way there and back. Brother John was away on business. His girls, Annie and Eliza, were with their tutor; John and Elizabeth refused to entrust their education to Southern schools, whose lessons now had a decidedly local flavor. (One arithmetic book posed the problem: “If one Confederate soldier kills 90 Yankees, how many Yankees can 10 Confederate soldiers kill?”) Aside from the bustle of other servants in the kitchen, Elizabeth and Mary Jane were alone.

  Mary Jane had always been special to Elizabeth, more like a daughter than a servant. After Elizabeth’s father died in 1843, the rest of the Van Lews had given the slave, then three years old, her freedom. Elizabeth recognized Mary Jane’s quick and cunning mind, and on one of her trips North to visit friends she brought the girl with her, enrolling her in a Quaker school in Princeton, New Jersey. When Mary Jane turned fifteen, Elizabeth sent her to Liberia to serve as a missionary and fretted during the four years she was away, routinely mailing money and boxes of necessities, and praying she wouldn’t fall victim to illness or warfare. “I will try to do the best I can by her—as I would be done by,” Elizabeth wrote. “I do love the poor creature—she was born a slave in our family—& that has always made me feel an awful responsibility.” During Mary Jane’s journey back to the United States on the ship Caroline Stevens, Elizabeth insisted that she travel in a first-class cabin instead of steerage.

  When Elizabeth brought Mary Jane home she did so in violation of the law, since a Negro who had left Virginia to be educated in the free states was not permitted to return. In 1860, back in Richmond for five months, Mary Jane was arrested for “perambulating the streets and claiming to be a free person of color, without having the usual certificate of freedom in her possession.” It was a serious charge; a free Negro caught without a pass risked being auctioned back into slavery. To prote
ct Mary Jane, Elizabeth’s mother paid a $10 fine and lied to the judge, insisting that the woman was indeed her slave and should be returned to her possession.

  Mary Jane initially told her captors she was named Mary Jane Henley and then Mary Jones, displaying a talent for subterfuge that would serve her well inside the Confederate White House. She would spend some time getting acquainted with the Davis family and earning their trust. Whenever the First Lady’s gowns needed mending, she would bring them to a seamstress across the street, who worked for a family friend; that way Elizabeth could easily arrange a meeting. Mary Jane would be a sleeper agent, waiting to be activated at just the right moment, and many months might pass before they had any contact at all.

  Elizabeth considered the risks of engaging her servant in such a mission. Mary Jane, unlike Elizabeth herself or Rose Greenhow, didn’t have the protection of race or class or social status. If caught, she might become a public and deadly example, hanged on the gallows at Camp Lee, or she might report Elizabeth for solicitation of espionage in an attempt to save herself. Elizabeth believed that the affection between herself and her servant was mutual, but one could never gauge what might happen under pressure, let alone under threat of death.