Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy

by Karen Abbott

  She panicked and fumbled for a response. “Well,” she said, “gem’in I’se allers ’spected to come white some time; my mudder’s a white woman.” While they laughed she backed away, one foot behind the other, until she scuttled out of sight.

  Early that evening she was among a group of slaves sent to deliver dinner to the rebel pickets. She walked down the line, dropping salted beef on tin plates, ducking minié balls shot by Yankee pickets half a mile away. The other slaves returned to camp but she hung back as long as she could, taking a seat on the ground. No one paid her any mind until two boots stomped into view and a faint shadow arched over her, accompanied by a booming order: “You come along with me.”

  Emma obeyed, following the Confederate sergeant to a gap along the line where a picket lay wounded. Another rebel officer squatted over him, hoisting a canteen to his lips. The sergeant pointed at Emma and said, “Put this fellow on the post where that man was shot until I return.”

  The officer nodded, and the sergeant turned back to Emma, thrusting a rifle against her chest and advising her to use it “freely.” Without warning his hands rose and encircled her neck. He gave her a hard shake, thumbs pressing at her throat.

  “Now, you black rascal,” he said, “if you sleep on your post I’ll shoot you like a dog.”

  “Oh no, Massa,” she croaked, “I’se too feerd to sleep.”

  There was a new moon that night and the sky was lightless. The air turned dense and gave way to rain, drizzle becoming a downpour. Her color washed away, feature by feature, layer by layer. She heard a rustling noise, the rebel pickets taking cover behind the trees. Now.

  Gripping her rifle—she was not going to lose that prize—she sprinted toward the thick forest dividing the two lines. As she neared Union territory, she pulled back, recognizing the absurdity of her situation: she was now in more danger of being shot by her own pickets than by the enemy. She waited for hours until a speck of sun appeared, flashed the Union sign, and stumbled back to where she belonged.

  She gave McClellan her sketches and told him that the Confederate troops numbered 150,000, a third more than even the general had believed, and five times as many as there actually were. Such an inflated estimate was common among novice spies; even Pinkerton, for all of his success in foiling assassination plots and arresting traitors, knew little of war or warfare or how to gauge enemy strength, and sent out agents as untrained as he, even relying on observations from escaped slaves. The cautious McClellan was always eager to accept estimates of Confederate strength that confirmed or exceeded his own calculations.

  Emma also relayed the most vital piece of intelligence: the rumor that the Confederates planned to evacuate Yorktown to defend the entrenchments around Richmond. Although others (including a slave who escaped at the same time as Emma) reiterated this claim, both the general and Pinkerton were dismissive, believing that the enemy intended to hold Yorktown at any cost.

  But on this point she was right. Three days after she returned to camp, at two thirty in the morning, General Magruder and his rebel force fled, heading northwest toward Williamsburg. They had spent a week preparing for their departure, dismounting their guns, filling wagons with ammunition and provisions, and transporting 2,500 of their sick and wounded to hospitals in Richmond. When Union troops moved through, several men were killed by sub-terra explosive shells—an early version of land mines—hidden in the ground. Tents were left standing, with caricatures of Yankee soldiers scribbled on the canvas. They discovered several letters lying unfolded on a table. One was addressed to Abraham Lincoln, another to “The First Yankee Who Comes,” and the last to General McClellan:

  You will be surprised to hear of our departure at this stage of the game, leaving you in possession of this worthless town. But the fact is, McClellan, we have other engagements to attend to, and we can’t wait any longer. Our boys are getting sick of this damned place . . . so goodbye for a little while.

  The Union army was exhilarated by the news, which, Emma wrote, “spread throughout the Federal army like lightning; from right to left and from center to circumference the entire encampment was one wild scene of joy.” Jerome Robbins also noted the “unequalled excitement.” In a letter to Washington, McClellan characterized the retreat as a Union victory, declaring that “our success is brilliant & you may rest assured that its effects will be of the greatest importance. There shall be no delay in following up the rebels.” Despite McClellan’s bravado, he had no strategy for an organized advance. He improvised a pursuit with his cavalry and five divisions of infantry, including the 2nd Michigan, ordering them to “leave, not to return.”

  Emma and her comrades were at the end of the force chasing Magruder’s rebels, marching through endless rain, the roads a perfect sea of sludge. They were encased in mud to the waist, tripping and tumbling headlong. With each step the battle roared louder, the crash of musketry reverberating through the woods, horses rearing, trees plunging. Rebels sent spray after spray of bullets into the advancing ranks, but still they charged forward through ditch and mire, loading and firing as they went, bodies dropping at Emma’s feet: “There was plenty of work for me to do here, as the ghastly faces of the wounded and dying testified.”

  Orders came at her from all directions: Go to the front with a musket in your hands. Mount your horse and take an order to this general. Grab a stretcher and help carry the wounded from the field. At one point she saw a colonel fall and rushed over to him. Another “poor little stripling of a soldier” followed to assist. Together they carried him through a hail of bullets and set him down by the surgeon’s feet, lingering long enough to see if the wound was fatal. The surgeon opened the colonel’s shirt and found no holes, no blood. He examined him piece by piece—not even a scratch to be seen, and yet the patient seemed in too much pain to speak.

  The surgeon stood and said, “Colonel, you are not wounded at all. You had better let these boys carry you back again.”

  The colonel sprang to his feet, indignant. “Doctor, if I live to get out of this battle I’ll call you to account for those words.”

  The surgeon leaned in close. “Sir,” he said, “if you are not with your regiment in fifteen minutes I shall report you.”

  Emma backed away in disgust, “mentally regretting that the lead or steel of the enemy had not entered the breast of one who seemed so ambitious of the honor without the effect.” In the future she would determine whether a man was wounded before she moved to help him.

  The hours passed and the rain came harder, drenching the living and the dead. Some lay on the ground, fully alive but helpless, their legs and arms too chilled and cramped to move. Emma made countless rounds from the front of the lines to the surgeon’s tent and back again, sinking under the weight of her stretcher, the mud suctioning her boots. Watching a young surgeon perform an amputation reminded her of unskilled hands preparing a turkey: “It was his first attempt at carving and the way in which he disjointed those limbs I shall never forget.” It had been a bloody day for the 2nd Michigan, with 17 killed, 38 wounded, and 4 missing, and even bloodier for the 5th Michigan, which lost 170 men. Both sides claimed victory in the Battle of Williamsburg, General McClellan calling it “brilliant” and the Confederates believing they had delayed the Federals, allowing their own army to retreat toward Richmond.

  All told, more than 2,200 Union troops and 1,600 rebels lay scattered in heaps, the wounded and dead from both sides entangled in ravines. The dead lay in all postures, but mostly on their backs, heads tilted, mouths slightly open, one hand placed over the wound. One man remained on his hands and knees, with his head shot off. Two men lay face-to-face, each with his bayonet through the other’s body. An endless chorus of moans drifted across the field. During the darkness of the night soldiers fetched water from the ditch, plunging canteens amid the piles of corpses. A captain from the 5th Michigan emptied out the balance of his canteen to discover that it was “quite red.”

  The enemies called for a temporary truce t
o collect their soldiers. “It was indescribably sad,” Emma thought, “to see our weary, exhausted men, with torches, wading through mud to their knees piloting ambulances over the field, lest they should trample upon the bodies of their fallen comrades.” A friend from Michigan was among the seriously wounded, shot clear through the thigh. She spent the next two weeks in a makeshift hospital in Williamsburg, tending to Union and Confederate soldiers alike and contemplating her next visit to rebel territory—this time with yet another layer of disguise, a woman impersonating a man impersonating a woman.

  PERFECTLY INSANE ON THE SUBJECT OF MEN

  THE SHENANDOAH VALLEY, VIRGINIA

  Belle’s mother worried about her safety in Martinsburg—the village was once again in Union hands—and in mid-May sent her, along with Belle’s servant, Eliza, farther south to stay with relatives in Front Royal. On the way Belle was detained briefly on suspicion of being a spy, but John Adams Dix, the commissioner who had presided over Rose’s hearing, determined that there was no “clear evidence of guilt” and ordered her release. Belle didn’t let the unpleasant incident ruin her trip. She attended every party, whether or not she’d been invited, and boasted indiscriminately of her exploits to acquaintances new and old.

  Women, Belle soon learned, made for a surly audience, their lack of interest in her stories directly proportionate to her insistence on telling them. One Front Royal neighbor, Lucy Buck, found Belle “all surface, vain, and hollow” and complained of being carried “captive into the parlor.” Another, a teenager named Kate Sperry, was dismayed when Belle knocked on her door. “Of all fools I ever saw of the womankind she certainly beats all,” Kate wrote. “Perfectly insane on the subject of men . . . she is entirely crazy.” Even when Belle told them they could “write the boys by me” and offered to deliver the letters beyond the lines, the girls were not impressed (“Poor boys!” quipped Lucy Buck).

  Front Royal, at the northern reaches of the Shenandoah Valley, spanned 9.5 square miles and had only five hundred residents, but its strategic importance belied its size. This town, too, changed hands often, and it fell under Federal control around the time that Belle and Eliza arrived. Belle’s aunt, Mrs. Fanny Stewart, was proprietor of the Fishback Hotel, a tidy, three-story structure with balconies jutting irregularly from windows, its cheerful yellow facade out of place amid clusters of homes wrecked by warfare. In the rear, tucked away from the bawdy noise of High Street, a winding brick path lined with violets and quaker-ladies led to a private cottage, where Belle stayed during her visits. “It is here,” warned the Philadelphia Inquirer, “that some of the most accomplished women in the valley assemble, with purpose and design to pump from our young lieutenants, who know little of the stern realities of war, the name and number of their regiments—how many effective men their particular regiment can muster, and what their state of efficiency is.”

  At that moment Belle was focused on Union general James Shields, who had claimed the Fishback Hotel as his headquarters. One night, after dining with her family in the cottage, she left her calling card for the fifty-one-year-old general, and he came promptly to pay his respects. Unsavory gossip seemed to follow Shields; his men reportedly thought him “disloyal or insane.” He defied the urgent protest of the medical director of his division by attending the examination of a young rape victim, and then insisted upon examining her himself. Nevertheless Belle found him charming: “He was an Irishman, and endowed with all those graces of manner for which the better class of his countrymen are justly famous; nor was he devoid of the humor for which they are no less notorious.”

  She chatted casually, asking him how he found the town and his accommodations at the hotel, and inquired if he might be so kind as to grant her a pass to Richmond. Shields laughed and replied that Stonewall Jackson’s army was so demoralized that he dared not entrust her to their “tender mercies.” But, he confided, the rebels would be annihilated in a few days, after which she could wander as she pleased.

  Belle smiled and said nothing, giddy because the general had inadvertently tipped his hand. His joking tone betrayed his confidence about a swift and decisive Union victory. “He was completely off his guard,” she thought, “and forgot that a woman can sometimes listen and remember.”

  During the next few days Belle socialized with the general and his staff, sharing her stash of cigars, memorizing all their names, and showing off her latest pet, a crow with a split tongue, which she was training to talk; so far its vocabulary included “Miss Belle,” “Stonewall,” and “General Lee.” Harper’s author and illustrator David Hunter Strother, working as a civilian topographer for Shields, found her “looking well and deporting herself in a lady-like manner. I daresay she has been much slandered by reports. She sported a bunch of buttons despoiled from General Shields and our officers and seemed ready to increase her trophies”—tokens she had been given or had taken from Union soldiers she seduced into providing her with information. She managed all of this, one admirer mused, “without being beautiful.”

  Another Yankee visitor, a correspondent for the New York Tribune, observed Belle in a different mood, seducing General Shields so thoroughly that she remained “closeted four hours” with him and subsequently wrapped a rebel flag around his head. Next she moved on to Shields’s aide-de-camp, Captain Daniel Keily, who courted her with flowers and love poems. To “Captain K,” as Belle called him, she was “indebted for some very remarkable effusions, some withered flowers, and last, not least, for a great deal of very important information”—most notably the time and location of a Union council of war.

  On the specified night Belle crossed the brick path to the Fishback Hotel and crept upstairs. A certain chamber was positioned directly above the drawing room, where the officers planned to gather, and she shut herself in a closet to lie prone on the floor. She knew that someone, sometime, had bored a hole in the wood (for purposes of espionage, she liked to think), and now she pressed her ear tightly against it, pleased to discover she could hear everything unfolding below: the scrape of moving chairs, papers rattling, a closed fist pounding the table.

  The men discussed their army’s positions and plans. General McClellan was advancing toward Richmond, and General Irvin McDowell would support his drive. Shields and General John Geary would move to reinforce McDowell, leaving General Nathaniel Banks, currently fifteen miles west of Front Royal, stripped of much of his force. McDowell had wired Shields to say that Stonewall Jackson was on the line toward Richmond, “so in coming east you will be following him.” The men detailed the route they’d take to join McDowell and how, exactly, they could trap Jackson.

  Belle had what she wanted. More important, she had what Jackson wanted; the information from this war council was the most important intelligence she’d gleaned thus far. The men finally disbanded at one in the morning. She heard the general lumber upstairs and down the hall to his chamber, yawning and clearing his throat. At the click of his door she tiptoed outside, the flicker of gaslight guiding her back to the cottage. She needed to deliver the information at once to Turner Ashby, Stonewall’s cavalry commander and a friend to her many relatives in the Confederate army.

  She transcribed the conversation and gathered a couple of passes, acquired through “various circumstances” from paroled rebel officers returning south. Passes customarily required a specific name, but some Union staff officers used vague wording, making them out to “bearer” or leaving them blank altogether. At this hour of the night, Belle hoped the Union sentinels would be too drunk or too tired to question her. If she carried a pass from divisional headquarters or higher, they would assume she was a Federal agent. For added insurance, she unlaced her corset, kicked off her crinoline, and dressed in the garb of a boy: trousers, shirt, a worn cotton kepi.

  She slipped out to the stables, saddled a horse, and headed for the mountains, estimating the route to be about fifteen miles. Twice Federal guards stopped her, and twice they let her through after a quick glimpse at her pass. The path
was rough, with hard climbs up the stony beds of brooks and leaps over deep gorges and ravines, and it was around 3:00 a.m. when she arrived at Ashby’s temporary residence, the home of someone she knew as “Mr. M.”

  She sprang from her horse and sprinted up the steps. The house was still and dark, and she rapped at the door with tight fists.

  “Who is there?” a voice called from a second-story window.

  Belle took a step back, lifted her head, and shouted, “It is I!”

  “But who are you? What is your name?”

  She removed the kepi from her head and called, “Belle Boyd. I have important intelligence to communicate to Colonel Ashby. Is he here?”

  “No, but wait a minute. I will come down.”

  Mr. M opened the door and pulled her inside. “My dear, where did you come from? And how on earth did you get here?”

  “Oh, I forced the sentries, and here I am. But I have no time to tell you the how, and the why, and the wherefore. I must see Colonel Ashby without the loss of a minute. Tell me where he is to be found.”

  Ashby himself then appeared at the door.

  “Good God!” he exclaimed. “Miss Belle, is this you? Where did you come from? Have you been dropped from the clouds? Or am I dreaming?”

  Belle rested a hand on his arm and insisted that, yes, he was wide awake, and that her “presence was substantial and of the earth—not a visionary emanation from the world of spirits.” Quickly she explained the contents of her note, detailing how Union forces intended to trap Stonewall Jackson, and then handed it over.

  As she went back to the cottage it began to rain, ragged hot wires of lightning crackling all around her. Belle kept on, soaked to the skin, her horse kicking up divots of mud. As she approached Union lines, a flash of lightning illuminated the figure of a guard, rifle poised.