by Karen Abbott
Libby Prison.
(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
She found out what she could about the men in charge of the prison: commander Thomas Pratt Turner, twenty-one, whose “utter depravity,” according to one prisoner, “gained a full and complete expression in every lineament of his countenance”; Dick Turner (no relation), twenty-three years old and second in command, infamous for kicking dying prisoners just for lying on the floor; George Emack, twenty-five, who’d once held a gun to the head of a sick prisoner and threatened to shoot if he didn’t get up; and Erasmus Ross, the twenty-one-year-old clerk, well known for swinging his bowie knife and terrorizing his charges, and known not at all as the Northern-sympathizing nephew of Elizabeth’s friend Franklin Stearns.
The inmates called the clerk “Little Ross,” a nod to his diminutive stature. His main responsibility was keeping track of the prisoners through daily roll calls. “He never called the rolls without swearing at us and abusing us and calling us Yankees,” said Captain William Lounsbury of the 74th New York. “We all hated him.” One evening at roll call Ross struck Lounsbury in the stomach and hissed, “You blue-bellied Yankee, come down to my office. I have a matter to settle with you.”
Lounsbury took note of Ross’s two revolvers, the gleam of his omnipresent bowie knife. He could hear his comrades whisper, “Don’t go—you don’t have to,” and they reminded him that others whom Ross had called out had never returned. But Lounsbury followed the clerk down to his office in the corner of the prison. Ross held the door open for his prisoner and checked up and down the hallway before pulling it shut.
“See here,” Ross said, “I have concluded to try you and see if you can do cooking.” He pointed behind a counter, lifting his eyebrows and speaking his next words in italics: “Go in there and look around. See what you can find.”
Lounsbury backed up to the counter, keeping his eyes on the clerk, and when he looked down he was shocked to see a Confederate uniform. It was a size too small, but he tugged it on, hopping from one leg to another and pulling on the jacket, re-creating himself as the enemy. He walked out of the prison, looking to his right and left and back, wondering if Ross had set him up and was preparing to shoot him for sport. The clerk followed a few steps behind, his rifle down by his side. Only a slim orange peel of sun remained in the sky.
Lounsbury quickened his pace, half skipping. Ross was still behind him, now accompanied by a sentry, both men keeping close watch. He broke into a full run, cutting through a vacant lot clotted with weeds. Out of nowhere a Negro appeared, stepping into his path.
“Come wit me, sah, I know who you is,” the man said.
Lounsbury followed him into the dusk, walking a half dozen blocks and stopping beneath the soaring columns of the Van Lew mansion. The Negro pointed to the front door and without another word scurried around to the back, leaving Lounsbury alone.
Elizabeth answered on the first knock. She had been expecting someone—not Lounsbury in particular, but any prisoner randomly picked by Ross. Franklin Stearns had assured her that his nephew was trustworthy and loyal to the Union, but the operation remained rife with risks: Ross could defect to the Confederacy or, more likely, be discovered and tortured until he named his accomplices. She pushed such fears from her mind and studied the prisoner, out of breath, doubled over in his butternut shell jacket and gray trousers. If sister-in-law Mary happened to rise from bed, the uniform would provide a perfect cover; Elizabeth could say she was merely offering a weary rebel soldier something to eat and a place to rest.
She pulled Lounsbury inside and escorted him upstairs to the secret room, hoping to evade her nieces. In the morning she brought him corn bread and gave him detailed instructions, mapping out the safest route to the James River, the precise path through the woods that would circumvent the rebel pickets; by nightfall he should be safely with Union troops. From her parlor window she watched him leave, dressed in that shabby Confederate coat that stretched tight across his shoulders and ended high above his wrists, swiveling his head like a periscope, making sure no one guessed what he really was. Small, smaller, gone.
She stationed two more of her bravest, brightest servants on the perimeter of Libby Prison. They sent word to employees on the inside, Negro men and women, to take notice of the older white lady who often strolled by, and tell the prisoners that a safe refuge awaited them should they escape. It was dangerous to trust that such knowledge wouldn’t fall on the wrong ears, but her servants were discreet and knew which prison employees stood on the Union’s side. Her next goal was to secure more allies in Confederate uniforms, men with a tenuous devotion to the cause, men who could be paid to ignore her activities or bribed if they threatened to reveal her.
Despite several visits to General Winder, during which Elizabeth rolled out her usual roster of compliments—his generosity, his intelligence, his glorious mane of hair—he refused to allow her into Libby Prison, explaining that such privileges were, at the moment, reserved for ministers and others whose motives seemed unimpeachable. He stressed that last word, letting it rise into a question.
Elizabeth smiled, and replied that there were inmates at several other institutions in need of charity; surely the general, as a fellow Christian, would understand her urgency.
She had ideas about how to circumvent Winder’s rule and gain access to Libby, but in the meantime she increased her visits to Castle Godwin, always cradling an antique French plate warmer in her arms. The device had a double bottom in which she had crammed wads of Federal greenbacks, hundreds of dollars with which soldiers might buy decent food and clothing on the prison black market, or bribe guards to look the other way. Most escapees had cut their blankets into thirds and fashioned them into ropes, lowering them from windows in the middle of the night, the sentry below keeping lackadaisical watch. Others tracked down a fellow soldier who was up for exchange and bribed him to swap identities. During one visit she heard a guard comment to another, “I think I’ll have a look at that the next time she comes in.”
So the next time, before leaving home, Elizabeth filled the double bottom with boiling water and slipped it inside a cloth holder. When he demanded to see the warmer, she handed it over, removing it from its covering. As soon as his skin touched the scalding metal the guard yelped in pain, sucking on his fingers while Elizabeth apologized—how thoughtless and clumsy of her; he should see a nurse at once. Her plate warmer was not inspected again, but the guards kept a hard eye on her, following her as she wandered from cell to cell. Once, as she prepared to leave, she heard two sets of footsteps behind her, one heavy and one light. She turned to see Captain George Alexander and Nero the boarhound, a low growl rumbling in his throat.
The captain bared his teeth when he spoke: “You have been reported several times.”
She looked at him blankly and left without a word.
A few days later she was reading the Richmond papers in her library when a servant led a young man into the room. He wore torn trousers and muddy boots, and nervously kneaded his wool cap.
“I wish to tell you something that will interest you greatly,” he began, “and the government also.”
Her mouth went dry. She felt a twist of dread. Surely this was one of General Winder’s “plug-ugly” detectives sent to entrap her. Maybe her sister-in-law knew this visitor; maybe Mary was the one who had reported her to Captain Alexander.
Elizabeth kept her voice even: “Nothing of that sort would be of any interest to me.”
“Let me board here,” he said—no, insisted. “Let me sleep anywhere. In the library, on the floor . . .”
She demurred, but asked a servant to make tea for the visitor. She was calm and polite, chatting about everything but the war. Afterward she watched him shuffle down Grace Street, hands still working his cap, not once looking back.
“We have to be watchful and circumspect,” she wrote that night in her journal, “wise as serpents and harmless as doves, for truly the lions are seeking to devour us
.”
A few days later she saw the same man, marching in a Confederate uniform.
A WOMAN USUALLY TELLS ALL SHE KNOWS
WASHINGTON, DC
The door of the black carriage shut, locking Rose inside, and it set off westward along Pennsylvania Avenue, bouncing over the rough, sinking cobblestones, wheels churning up patches of mud. It was unseasonably cold for springtime. Fat snowflakes dotted the sky, and the sun, she observed, “was obscured by clouds as dark as Yankee deeds.” She pressed her forehead against the window and watched the city blur past: carriages carrying officers in full uniform, laughing with their gaudy courtesans; newspaper correspondents dashing into and out of Western Union; the office of Dr. Von Moschzisker, whose “ethereal ear inhalator” promised to cure deafness caused by cannon fire. It was her first trip outside the prison in more than three months. The carriage stopped at a once-elegant mansion, where the two-man US Commission Relating to State Prisoners waited to try her case.
As Rose approached the building, she realized it represented another piece of her past; it was the former home of William Gwin, erstwhile Democratic senator from California and gold rush millionaire, who had been arrested a few months earlier on suspicion of trying to flee south to join the Confederacy. At the height of his power the senator and his wife had spent $75,000 annually to run their household; a significant portion of this amount had funded lavish costume balls, described by one witness as “the most magnificent entertainments of the kind ever given in this country.” Rose had attended the final soiree, held before the outbreak of the war, uncharacteristically disguised as an old plantation housekeeper, complete with a bishop-sleeved housedress made of spotted dark chintz, its white linen collar stiffly cinching her neck. She entered the now dingy hallway where Mrs. Mary Gwin, dressed as a “Marquise of the Court of Louis XIV,” had once greeted her with a curtsy and a glass of champagne. With a guard close behind, Rose pushed past swarms of soldiers and spectators—all of them there to see her—and climbed the stairs to the third floor, where she was left to wait alone in a freezing, fireless room. At least the solitude would give her time to strategize.
The commission was charged with resolving the cases of thousands of civilian prisoners being held on suspicion of disloyalty. Lincoln hoped to alleviate overcrowding by freeing prisoners who were willing to either take an oath of allegiance to the Union or sign a “parole of honor” pledging to refrain from aiding the rebels. Rose had one distinct advantage: the head commissioner, John Adams Dix, was an old family friend, both a former colleague of her husband’s and a cabinet officer in the Buchanan administration when she’d been close with the president. Major General Dix was, in Rose’s view, “one of the few Northern politicians in whose integrity I entertained any confidence, or for whom I felt any respect,” and she was grateful he hadn’t recused himself. She was not required to answer any questions, and she would not be speaking under oath. She would obfuscate, deny, put her interrogators on the defensive, shame them for torturing a poor woman and her child. She would make them doubt the validity of the case even as they proved her guilt.
An hour had passed, the room seeming to grow smaller and colder. She might have stood in this same spot years earlier, listening to the clear, sad notes of violins, watching liveried servants bustle and bow. The guard outside the door rattled his musket as a reminder of his presence. She watched her breath appear and vanish, appear and vanish. Her fingers fought her attempts to bend them; she couldn’t feel her toes inside her shoes. Without warning the door swung open, admitting a gust of warm air. Prison superintendent William Wood appeared and cleared a path for her, Union soldiers parting like blue walls of water on either side. As she came to the hearing room, she heard a voice boom her name. She had been announced; she was on.
Dix and his co-commissioner, former New York superior court judge Edwards Pierrepont, stood, appearing awkward and ill at ease. She could not have scripted their mood better herself.
“Gentlemen,” she ordered, “resume your seats.”
They obeyed.
What had once been a chamber in the Gwin mansion now resembled a makeshift courtroom. A large table occupied the center, with Dix at one end and Pierrepont at the other. A reporter hunched over a small desk in the rear, his pen nib poised in the air, prepared to transcribe the session verbatim. Rose’s own seat was midway between the commissioners, in full view of everyone. She glanced at Dix, now sifting through a towering pile of papers and looking uncertain what to do.
She pounced: “I recognize the embarrassment of your positions; it was a mistake for your government to have selected gentlemen for this mission. You have, however, shown me but scant courtesy in having kept me waiting your pleasure for nearly an hour in the cold.”
Both men apologized, insisting they hadn’t been notified of her arrival. She craned her neck, aiming for a better look at Dix’s pile of papers, and recognized several half-charred scraps Pinkerton and his men had retrieved from her stove. Her mind mulled over potential responses to questions not yet asked.
Judge Pierrepont took the lead. He was a few years younger than she, Rose surmised, with a sparse sprig of hair on top of his head balanced by a full dark beard. “The charge that is brought against you,” he began, “is for aiding the enemy to military information.”
“I am a Southern woman, with Southern sentiments,” she replied. “I have a right to aid my cause in any manner that lies in my power.” She stood abruptly. “You look upon me as having committed treason, and all because of the view I entertain. Is it not so?”
“You can say whatever you think best,” Pierrepont said evenly. “You need not answer any questions which you do not want to.”
“Go on with your questions. Is this a kind of mimic court?” She gave a short bark of a laugh. “Of course I am not obliged to commit myself. In fact, I have been cheated so much by this Government that I have no respect for it.”
She watched Pierrepont struggle to remain calm. “You can make any reply you please to the charges.”
“Charges! How many have you? Now isn’t this a farce! Isn’t it solemn! It’s a perfect farce.”
Pierrepont’s mouth twisted beneath his beard. He tried again, stating that she was accused of corresponding with the enemy and providing information about Union troops.
“Where is your proof?” Rose demanded. “This is a charge without any proof. I have corresponded on many occasions with my friends. This much is true. Cannot I write what I please? Must my private letters be torn open and laughed over, and my sentiments restricted? Besides, I am not in a position to get important information. None of those connected with the Government will give me any. All that has been good and glorious in this Government, I believe to have come from those who are now in the Confederate Government.” She paused to sit down again, exhaling theatrically. “I have no doubt you will charge me with counseling Mr. Davis how to lead his armies.”
So far, so good, Rose thought. A careless listener would have imagined that the judge was endeavoring to defend the Government rather than incriminate her. She glanced at Dix, still fingering his stack of papers.
“You are charged with corresponding with the rebels,” Pierrepont reminded her, “and particularly with giving them information of our army in relation to the battle of Bull Run.”
“I am not aware of that. It is certain that if I had the information, I should have given it. I should consider that I was performing a holy duty to my friends.”
Exasperated, Pierrepont got to the point. “How would you like to go to the other side of the lines?” he asked.
Rose was cagey. “That would be a question.”
“Suppose the government should conclude to let you go. Would you consider that you owed allegiance to it; and would you be willing to be bound by the rules of war?”
Rose stiffened; she would never pledge allegiance to the North. Her preference, at the moment, was to stay where she was, agitating the Yankee government and cementing her s
tatus as a Confederate martyr and heroine. She would leave Washington only on her own terms, and Little Rose would have to stay strong until Federal officials acquiesced. “This is my home,” she said. “I have been taken from my home and carried to a prison, to be insulted and subjected to a treatment of the most outrageous kind. Every association of my home has been broken up and destroyed. If the government deigns to send me across the lines as an exile, I have no alternative but to go as such.”
Pierrepont intimated that he was speaking on behalf of President Lincoln: “It has been proposed that we make this suggestion to you and to see if you would like to accept it.”
Rose let the judge wait for her answer. The quick scratch of the hearing reporter’s pen was the only sound in the room.
“With the privilege of aiding and abetting my cause?” she finally asked.
Pierrepont didn’t hesitate: “Yes, if that is your desire.”
“In other words, you mean to tell me that if I do not accept it, I will be forcibly exiled.”
“Would it be exiling you to send you South among your friends?”