by Karen Abbott
REBEL VIXENS OF THE SLAVE STATES
WASHINGTON, DC, AND ON THE MARCH
In March, Colonel Orlando Poe, the commander of the 2nd Michigan, relieved Emma of her nursing duties and appointed her regimental mail carrier; soon she would be promoted to postmaster for the entire brigade. Poe would later say he chose her for the job because, “as a soldier, Frank Thompson was effeminate looking,” and he wanted to “avoid taking an efficient soldier from the ranks.” She got a new horse and privately named him Frank, as if to reinforce her own secret identity, an extension of herself over which she had complete control.
Emma relished her new role, riding Frank from camp to camp to Washington and back, knowing hers was the face everyone most wished to see. “The mail was even more heartily received than other things,” she wrote. “It was nothing short of a calamity for a heavy mail to be captured by the enemy.” Occasionally she encountered Jerome Robbins along her route but they maintained a cool distance, avoiding all talk of the past, and he receded further from her mind when word came that they were finally to advance on the Confederates.
On March 14, General McClellan issued an announcement to be read to all troops at roll call. “I will bring you now face to face with the rebels,” he told them. “Ever bear in mind that my fate is linked with yours. . . . I am to watch over you as a parent over his children; and you know that your General loves you from the depths of his heart.” Instead of marching through northern Virginia, where he feared a massive Confederate force lay waiting, the Union commander planned to ship his Army of the Potomac to the southern tip of the Virginia Peninsula by sea, and then fight his way west to Richmond.
McClellan’s strategy for his Peninsula Campaign required one of the most ambitious maritime movements in American military history. It would take three weeks and four hundred vessels—steamers, barges, sloops, and canal boats—to ferry the Army of the Potomac to Fort Monroe: 121,500 men, 14,594 horses and mules, 1,150 wagons, 44 batteries of artillery, 74 ambulances, pontoon bridges, tons of provisions, tents, telegraph wire. One British observer likened the feat to the “stride of a giant.” Emma’s regiment boarded a steamer called the Vanderbilt, a process that took several hours. Company after company clustered together on board until every foot of space was occupied. They disembarked three days later during a ferocious rainstorm, marching twenty-three miles in what Emma called “a fair specimen of Virginia mud,” sinking, in some spots, all the way to their knees.
They set up camp, bivouacking on the marshy ground, short on provisions, horses starving. The rebels found them soon enough, lobbing shells and thirty-two-pound cannonballs that burst over their heads or fell within feet of their tents. A party of fugitive slaves—“contrabands,” they were called—also made their way to camp, having escaped from rebel territory where they worked on fortifications at the James River. They arrived late one night in the midst of a relentless rain, falling to their knees and shouting, “Glory! Glory to God!”
The commotion awakened Emma, and she emerged from her tent to investigate. “There they were,” she wrote, “black as midnight, all huddled together in a little group, some praying, some singing.” She watched as Jerome rushed to help the regimental surgeon tend to one man, who had been shot by the rebels as he fled. Her heart clenched at the sight of her old friend, lost in his work, winding a bandage with delicate precision.
Other soldiers built a fire and served hot coffee and bread. Emma sat down with the contrabands, and was struck by how intelligently they could converse about Christ. “Why should blue eyes and golden hair,” she wrote, “be the distinction between bond and free?” The issue of slavery became real to her in a way it hadn’t been before; she understood, to a lesser degree, what it meant to feel vulnerable inside your own skin.
Emma was often sent to procure supplies for the hospitals and food, seeking local citizens willing to exchange butter, eggs, milk, and chicken for Federal greenbacks. The area of the Peninsula around Fort Monroe remained under Federal control, but between the fort and Richmond sprawled sixty miles of strange and hostile territory, the land a swampy patchwork of gullies, creeks, and ravines. Emma kept watch for both rebel pickets and “rebel vixens of the slave states,” whom she compared to Parisian women during the Reign of Terror. She carried her Moore seven-shooter revolver at all times.
One morning she set out for a five-mile ride to an isolated farmhouse and was surprised to find it in good condition—a rarity for any home in the Peninsula—with the fences still standing and cornfields thriving as if there were no war at all. She rode up to the house and dismounted, hitching her horse and ringing the bell. A tall woman, about thirty years old, invited Emma inside with a gracious sweep of her arm. Within the past three weeks she had lost her father, husband, and two brothers in the rebel army and was now in “deep mourning,” which lasted up to two and a half years and required an all-black ensemble: dress, veil, bonnet, cape, and jewelry made of polished coal, containing small photos of the deceased and locks of their hair.
The woman spoke in a languorous murmur, unfurling each vowel: “To what fortunate circumstance am I to attribute the pleasure of this unexpected call?”
Emma said she was a Union soldier and willing to pay for food. She noticed agitation creep across the woman’s face, a nervous shift of expression. The woman directed her to sit in another room while she prepared the items, but Emma declined, wanting to remain in a position where she could watch every movement. Her hostess seemed to be stalling, walking around in her stately way without clear purpose, and Emma feared “her ladyship” was contemplating the best mode of attack.
Emma stood and asked if her things were ready.
The woman smiled. “Oh,” she replied, “I did not know that you were in a hurry. I was waiting for the boys to come and catch some chickens for you.”
“And pray, madam, where are the boys?”
She paused, glanced toward her door. “Not far from here.”
Emma took a step backward. “Well,” she said, “I have decided not to wait; you will please not detain me any longer.”
The woman nodded and began packing eggs and butter into a basket. She was “trembling violently,” Emma saw, “and pale as death.” With shaking hands she gave Emma the basket and refused to accept a greenback, insisting it was “no consequence about the pay.”
Emma thanked her and started for the door. The woman followed a pace behind. Emma unhitched Frank, climbed into the saddle, and set off. She had ridden just a few yards when she heard the snap of a gunshot behind her, the ball hurtling just above her head.
She whipped back around as the woman fired again. The bullet veered wide, missing her by inches. She found her seven-shooter and considered where to aim: “I didn’t want to kill the wretch, but I did intend to wound her.” The woman dropped her gun, raising her arms in a tentative surrender, and Emma sent a bullet through the meat of her left palm.
The rebel woman dropped to the ground, keening, transfixed by the hole in her hand. Emma took the rebel’s pistol, cinched a halter strap tight around her wrist, and tied her to her saddle. Remounting her horse, she dragged the woman fifty feet along the road, her black dress grinding against the dirt, her legs flailing under a froth of crinoline. Over the pounding of hooves Emma heard her begging for release, and worried that she might draw the attention of any rebels nearby.
Emma halted, turned around in the saddle, and raised her revolver.
“If you utter another word or scream,” she said, “you are a dead woman.”
Emma hoisted her captive into the saddle, fashioned a tourniquet from her handkerchief, and took her to the hospital. She was unnerved at the ease with which she’d pulled the trigger, especially since her target was a woman.
In order to advance to Richmond via the York River, McClellan had to drive the Confederates from Yorktown—no easy feat, as the rebels had built earthworks on top of positions abandoned eighty years before, when the British surrendered to George Washington
and ended the American Revolution. He also had no idea how many enemy troops had dug in at Yorktown, a lapse in intelligence that Confederate general John Magruder rushed to exploit. A flamboyant, dramatic Virginian (during the Mexican War he had staged a performance of Othello in which a young Ulysses S. Grant, dressed in crinolines, tried out for Desdemona), Magruder executed a masterly display of special effects, frantically shifting his eight thousand soldiers around from one part of the line to the next, parading them in an endless circle. As an added touch, he kept up a sporadic barrage of artillery and ordered his bandsmen to play well into the night.
The charade worked. McClellan believed that Magruder’s force numbered one hundred thousand, an overestimation supported by both Allan Pinkerton and Dr. Thaddeus Lowe, an aeronautical expert who pioneered the use of hydrogen balloons to gather intelligence. Emma watched the professor in action, “making balloon reconnaissances, and transmitting the results of his observations to General McClellan by telegraph from his castle in the air, which seemed suspended from the clouds.” McClellan in turn telegraphed President Lincoln: “It seems clear I have the whole force of the enemy on my hands.” He asked for reinforcements and proposed to embark on “the more tedious but sure operations of siege.”
Lincoln implored him to advance: “I think you had better break the enemy’s line. . . . The country will not fail to note—is now noting—that the present hesitation to move upon an entrenched enemy is but the story of Manassas repeated . . . you must act.”
Once again McClellan ignored him. “The President very coolly telegraphed me yesterday that he thought I had better break the enemy’s lines at once,” he wrote to his wife. “I was much tempted to reply that he had better come and do it himself.” Instead the general oversaw the construction of ever more imposing earthworks and sent Thaddeus Lowe back up in his balloon. Confederate general Joseph Johnston took advantage of the lull, moving his army from Richmond down to the Peninsula. “No one but McClellan,” he said, “could have hesitated to attack.”
Pinkerton began reassessing the Confederate forces when he received tragic news: three of his top detectives in Richmond, including Pryce Lewis, who had helped apprehend Rose Greenhow, had been captured and sentenced to death. Another, Timothy Webster, would be hanged imminently, the first American to be executed as a spy since Nathan Hale in 1776. Still, Pinkerton inexplicably failed to recruit Union sympathizers already living in Richmond, people who were intimately familiar with its politics and personalities, people who might have connections in the nascent Confederate government—or the wherewithal to recruit and place such connections.
As word of the spies’ fate spread throughout the camp, Emma received a visit from the 2nd Michigan’s chaplain.
“I know of a situation I could get for you,” he said, “if you have sufficient moral courage to undertake its duties. It is a situation of great danger and of vast responsibility.”
She understood that she was being asked to take Webster’s place, and contemplated the reasons why she, above all other men, had been chosen. Aside from Jerome, the chaplain knew her better than anyone else in her regiment. He had stood with her on the field at Bull Run, prayed with her at hospital beds, accompanied her to watch the skirmishing pickets, helped her dig graves for the dead. He knew she had the admiration and respect of her regiment, that her fellow soldiers considered her “brave, willing and cheerful” and a person of good moral character. He knew, too, that Colonel Poe wished to keep his most efficient soldiers in the ranks to prepare for battle, and that her particular brand of valor could be used in other ways. Her lack of experience wasn’t a disadvantage; Pinkerton had a history of hiring detectives and spies who had never worked in law enforcement, including the men who had guarded Rose.
Emma figured that Poe—who had done secret service work for McClellan earlier in the war, outside of Pinkerton’s auspices—had approved the idea and recommended Frank Thompson for the job. She told the chaplain she would have to give it some thought. “The subject of life and death was not weighted in the balance,” she wrote. “I left that in the hands of my Creator, feeling assured that I was just as safe in passing the picket lines of the enemy, if it was God’s will that I should go there, as I would be in the Federal camp. And if not, then His will be done.”
She accepted, and reported to Washington for an examination.
WISE AS SERPENTS AND HARMLESS AS DOVES
RICHMOND
The Confederates executed Timothy Webster at Camp Lee, three miles from Elizabeth’s home, using a defective cotton rope that slid up his neck. He fell on his back to the ground, half hanged, and spoke his final words after they hoisted him again: “I suffer a double death. Oh, you are going to choke me this time.” They did.
That afternoon Elizabeth took her carriage to Castle Godwin, a former “Negro Jail” that now housed anyone suspected of disloyalty. The number of inmates had surged since early March, when Jefferson Davis, acting on a tip that there were “designing men in this City plotting treason against our Government,” declared martial law in Richmond and ordered the arrest of thirty suspected Northern sympathizers, including Franklin Stearns, her friend and fellow Unionist. Stearns owned a distillery on Fifteenth Street that was doing such robust business with Confederate soldiers—$5,000 per day, by one account—that Richmond newspapers called for his execution. “It is the universal conviction,” ranted the Examiner, “that Franklin Stearns, by means of his whiskey, has killed more of our men and done more to disorganize our army than all the balance of the Yankee nation put together.”
As Stearns was led to his cell, Elizabeth heard, he’d thrown his guards a contemptuous look and said, “If you are going to imprison all the Union men you will have to provide a much larger jail than this.” In any event, the authorities, lacking evidence, released him after several weeks.
She was equally unnerved by the imprisonment of several women, all charged with disloyalty and giving aid to the United States government. Elizabeth didn’t know any of them personally, but she took their arrests as a sign that the Confederates now intended to make examples of female traitors.
She decided, nevertheless, to keep to her plans.
Her carriage stopped before the prison, a new brick building along Lumpkin’s Alley. She told the guard she wished to visit Timothy Webster’s widow, who had been found guilty of complicity, a lesser offense, and was housed on the second floor. If only Confederate authorities knew the truth: the presumed widow was actually Hattie Lawton, also a Pinkerton operative, one of the female detectives who had guarded Rose Greenhow and subsequently worked undercover in Richmond. Disguised as “Mrs. Webster,” she insisted she was a Southern woman who wished only to return to her native Maryland. Elizabeth, also unaware of Lawton’s true identity, hoped to convince prison officials to permit her to serve her yearlong sentence at the Van Lew mansion.
Lawton wept real tears over the execution of her partner, whom she had exhorted to “die like a man.” Elizabeth sat with the “poor agonized creature,” offering her prayers and a handkerchief, and was about to look for the prison’s commander, Captain George W. Alexander, when he appeared at the cell door.
Elizabeth forced herself to smile at the “desperate brigand looking villain.” He was dressed all in black: black trousers buckling at the knees, loose black shirt relieved only by a white collar, black whiskers bending into a frown atop his lips. His dog, a black Bavarian boarhound named Nero, snarled by his side. Nero had been imported as a pup and trained to fight, winning three matches against full-grown bears. Rumor had it that he’d been trained to attack anyone wearing blue.
“The body of Webster has been brought back to the prison,” Captain Alexander said. His obsidian eyes shifted to Elizabeth, and he asked, pleasantly, if Miss Van Lew would like to view it.
Hattie Lawton sobbed. Nero let a thick thread of spit fall from his jowls. Captain Alexander watched her, waiting.
The question disturbed Elizabeth, as much for Alexande
r’s oddly polite tone as for the implication beneath his words: there was a reason, he seemed to be saying, that she should witness what happens to traitors.
Just as politely, she declined, and asked if his widow might be permitted to stay with her.
Alexander refused, and suggested that Elizabeth had visited long enough.
It was probably just as well, she thought on the ride home, what with the ongoing strain between her brother and his wife, exacerbated of late by John’s interest in her work with Union prisoners. While aiding Elizabeth, he, too, maintained a facade of loyalty to the Confederacy, and was even picked as a juror in the murder trial of one rebel guard accused of killing another. And Mary was still abusing the family servants to such a degree that they had begun quitting the household; the Van Lews’ cook left just after the New Year, with others—a washer and ironer and a seamstress—soon to follow.
She thought of Mary Jane Bowser, still adjusting to life without her husband and to her role as a servant for the Confederate first family, her eidetic memory cataloging everything the president said. It was not yet time for Elizabeth to take the next step . . . but it would be soon. She did not want to risk her beloved servant’s life until she had no other choice.
Elizabeth turned her attention to Libby Prison, the city’s newest, converted from a tobacco warehouse on the waterfront. Since the prison occupied its own city block and was separated from the other buildings, Confederate authorities believed it would be relatively easy to guard. In an attempt to secure it further, they’d whitewashed the dark exterior brick wall so that any prisoner trying to escape would make a clear target for the armed sentries roaming below.
Elizabeth heard daily about the horrid conditions within its walls. Inmates were forbidden to go outside for fresh air or exercise and so spent every hour of every day in the prison’s six upper rooms, each one 105 feet long, 44 feet wide, and 8 feet high, and holding more than a hundred men at a time. Every floor had one water closet—literally a closet with a trough used as a toilet. The place was overrun with vermin, which scurried over prisoners’ feet and faces and hands. One man awakened during the night to find a large rat perched on his head. In a desperate attempt at extermination, the men began trapping and cooking the rodents for dinner. Guards would take any opportunity to shoot prisoners, a pastime they called “sporting for Yankees,” killing them for such minor infractions as leaning too close to the windows. “To ‘lose prisoners’ was an expression very much in vogue,” Elizabeth wrote, “and we all understood that it meant cold blooded murder.”