by Karen Abbott
She held it out, waiting for him to come to her, but she had no intention of relinquishing it. If necessary, she planned to follow the example set by Harvey Birch in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy, or, more recently, Rose Greenhow, and swallow it whole. But the colonel, still clutching the Maryland New Sheet, redirected his wrath back to the seemingly traitorous Union lieutenant—“from the guilty to the guiltless,” Belle thought—and she and Eliza were dismissed. (Another Union officer, after hearing of the incident, remarked incredulously that “with her usual adroitness and assumed innocence she got clear of any charge of treachery.”)
Back in Front Royal, behind the closed doors of her chamber in the cottage, Belle pulled the note from her corset and memorized its contents, an update on the information she’d overheard during the Union war council: General John Kenly had only a thousand men at Front Royal. Irvin McDowell’s troops had not yet arrived, and General Banks, with four thousand men, was northwest at Strasburg. Generals Shields and Geary were a short distance southeast of Front Royal, with John Frémont farther west, just beyond the Valley.
Battle map of Front Royal, May 1862.
(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
Belle understood that while Front Royal itself was not well protected, all of these separate Union forces could unite against Stonewall Jackson, who was driving his sixteen thousand troops—her father among them—rapidly down the Valley.
She didn’t have much time to warn them.
Something was imminent; everyone in Front Royal could sense it. The Union troops had enforced martial law and no citizen was allowed to leave, not even to fetch fuel or provisions. The morning of May 23 was oppressively warm, but everyone gathered outside to gossip and search for news. A Yankee soldier wandered through the crowd, asking if he could “buy some pies and pigs,” the word “pigs” followed by sudden, sharp reports of a rifle in rapid succession.
At that moment Belle heard Eliza’s familiar voice: “Oh, Miss Belle, I t’inks de rebels am a-coming, for de Yankees are a-makin orful fuss in de street.”
Belle jumped from her seat. The streets in every direction were filled with a roving crush of blue. She rushed outside and clutched the sleeve of a passing Federal officer, pressing him for details. He replied that the Confederates were approaching the town in force under Jackson and Ewell. They had surprised and captured the outside pickets and had managed to advance within a mile of the town without the attack even being suspected. “Now,” he added, “we are endeavoring to get the ordnance and the quartermaster’s stores out of their reach.”
“But what will you do with the stores in the large depot?” Belle asked.
“Burn them, of course!”
“But suppose the rebels come upon you too quickly?”
“Then we will fight as long as we can by any possibility show a front,” the officer said, “and in the event of defeat make good our retreat upon Winchester, burning the bridges as soon as we cross them, and finally effect a junction with General Banks’s force.”
Belle thanked him and returned to the Fishback Hotel, bumping into A. W. Clarke, a correspondent for the New York Herald, on the stairs. Since he began boarding at the Fishback, Clarke had, in Belle’s words, made several attempts to “intrude his society” upon her, and she’d found his attentions “extremely distasteful”; once she was even forced to bolt her bedroom door after slamming it in his face. He seemed to think, Belle wrote, that to “insult an innocent young girl was to prove [his] manhood.”
“Great heavens! What is the matter?” Clarke asked as she pushed past him.
“Nothing to speak of,” she replied. “Only the rebels are coming, and you had best prepare yourself for a visit to Libby Prison.”
He turned around and hurried to his room. In her own chamber Belle found her opera glasses and the dispatch she’d retrieved in Winchester the previous day. As she passed Clarke’s room, she spotted him packing his clippings and files. Poking her head in, she asked, “Where are you going, Mr. Clarke?”
Without looking up, he replied, “I’m going to skedaddle.”
His room key was on the outside of the door. She couldn’t resist: quietly she closed the door, turned the key in the lock, and dropped it into her pocket.
From the balcony she could see the Southern advance guard about three quarters of a mile away. Back downstairs, she rushed to the street and found a group of men she knew to be devoted to the cause.
Was there one among them, she asked, who would be willing to carry her information to General Jackson? She gave a quick summary: the Confederates were advancing, but Stonewall might be uncertain as to enemy strength and holding back on the main attack. He could strike against Front Royal, and perhaps other isolated Federal units, provided he knew where all the Union forces were and could avoid being trapped if they converged.
“No, no. You go!” one said, and with those words she understood that her next action would be the most consequential of her life, that the sum of those few moments would forever exceed the whole of all her years.
Belle began to run. She wore Yankee colors, ironically, a white bonnet and a royal blue dress, her heart lurching behind its buttons, her perfect size-two-and-half feet hot in her lace-up boots. Through the streets of Front Royal, bodies falling out of her way, and then the fields opening up to her, unblemished and immaculate, the quick slap of gunfire coaxing her faster. The Federal pickets took aim. Minié balls struck the ground at her feet, kicked dust up into her eyes. She was acutely aware of her own mechanics, the hoarse foghorn croak of each breath, the dig of nails inside tightly fisted hands. Her message looped through her mind, knowledge she carried with a keen and lovely pride.
The fire came from both sides now, bullets whispering past her ears, each one bearing a message meant only for her. She felt strange pulls of pressure at her skirt and glanced down long enough to see that shots had sheared the hem. “I shall never run again as I ran on that, to me memorable day,” Belle wrote. “Hope, fear, the love of life, and the determination to serve my country to the last, conspired to fill my heart with more than feminine courage, and to lend preternatural strength and swiftness to my limbs. I often marvel, and even shudder, when I reflect how I cleared the fields, and bounded over the fences with the agility of a deer.” She began waving her bonnet in grandiose loops, a signal for the rebels to continue to press forward. Many of the men recognized her and cheered as they dashed by: “Their shouts of approbation and triumph rang in my ears for many a day afterwards, and I still hear them not infrequently in my dreams.” There she was: Belle Boyd, the famous rebel spy, her most fantastic act of espionage performed for all the world to see.
A private with the 2nd Virginia Infantry named Henry Kyd Douglas was shocked to see the figure of a girl gliding up a ravine, heeding neither weeds nor fences, whipping the air with a bonnet. He motioned to Stonewall Jackson, and the general sent him to see what she wanted. Douglas readily agreed: “That was just to my taste and it took only a few minutes for my horse to carry me to meet the romantic maiden whose tall, supple, and graceful figure struck me as soon as I came in sight of her.” He was twenty-one, just a few years older than Belle, and had known her since childhood. She called his name and he ran to her, marveling that “she was just the girl to dare to do this thing.”
Her breath was coming in raspy gusts, one hand pushing against her heart.
“Good God, Belle, you here!” Douglas said. “What is it?”
She produced the dispatch and spoke in gasps: “I knew it must be Stonewall when I heard the first gun. Go back quick and tell him that the Yankee force is very small—one regiment of Maryland infantry, several pieces of artillery and several companies of cavalry. Tell him I know, for I went through the camps and got it out of an officer. Tell him to charge right down and he will catch them all.” She took another breath, and urged that the cavalry must rush to seize the bridges before the Union could destroy them. “I must hurry back. Goodbye. My love to all the dear
boys—and remember if you meet me in town you haven’t seen me today.”
Douglas raised his cap and Belle blew him a kiss. He watched her sprint back through the weeds and ravines, waving her bonnet all the way, finally disappearing in a dip in the land. Belle would have been gratified to know what happened next: Stonewall Jackson rode up on Little Sorrel to ask who that “young lady” was. With a smile, he suggested that Douglas rush to the front of the line and into town to see if he could find her again.
The conflict raged. Turner Ashby’s Confederate cavalry made a brave charge in which two of his best captains were killed. The Confederate 1st Maryland met the Federal 1st Maryland, with disastrous results for the latter. In the end about 85 Union soldiers were killed or injured and 700 captured, with the Federals retreating so quickly that they left all of their casualties behind.
Henry Kyd Douglas found Belle in front of the Fishback Hotel, holding court with a group of Union soldiers (now prisoners), her cheeks “rosy with excitement and recent exercise and her eyes all aflame.” He stooped from his saddle to let Belle pin a crimson rose to his uniform.
“Remember,” she said, “it is blood red, and it is my color.”
The finale of Belle’s big day came when a courier arrived at the hotel and dropped a crumpled slip of paper into her hand:
Miss Belle Boyd,
I thank you, for myself and for the army, for the immense service that you have rendered your country to-day.
Hastily, I am your friend,
T.J. Jackson, C.S.A.
Seventy miles east, at the Old Capitol Prison in Washington, DC, Rose Greenhow was walking in the yard with Little Rose when an inmate from Virginia tossed a piece of paper at her feet. Its contents made her heart “leap with joy”: Stonewall Jackson had soundly defeated Union forces at the Battle of Front Royal in the Shenandoah Valley. “All honor to the brave Jackson,” she thought, “who is now the special terror of the Yankees!”
The news was especially encouraging in the wake of recent events. Her plan to help two inmates escape had gone badly awry. One, a suspected Confederate spy, was shot as he rappelled down the prison wall and later died from his wounds; the other backed out of the plan at the last minute. When guards visited Rose’s cell to interrogate her, she admitted she would consider it a “point of honor” to aid the escape of any Confederate prisoner. As punishment they reduced the size of her and Little Rose’s meals. “My child is so nervous from a repetition of these dreadful scenes that she starts and cries out in her sleep,” Rose wrote. “I am nearly starved. I had a fowl served up to me to-day (or rather a small piece of one), which must have been the cock which crowed thrice to wake Peter; we could not get our teeth through it.”
She’d also been distressed by the Confederate defeat at Shiloh, Tennessee, which made the Mississippi River Valley vulnerable to a Union advance, and she wept “tears of blood” over the fall of New Orleans. The final blow had been a visit from her old friend and alleged lover, Senator Henry Wilson, who cheerfully boasted that the rebellion was crumbling and Richmond about to fall. Despite her involvement in the escape plan, and despite one Union general’s warning that she was a “dangerous, skillful spy,” she and Little Rose would soon be freed and exiled to the South, a decision she attributed to the Yankee government’s desire to finally be rid of her. She expected to be in the Confederate capital if and when the end came.
ONE GRAIN OF MANHOOD
OUTSIDE OF RICHMOND
Six days after the Battle of Front Royal, on May 29, McClellan sent General Heintzelman’s corps, which included Emma’s regiment, across the Chickahominy River to join the other troops on the outskirts of Richmond. Emma dared to hope that the Confederate capital would fall imminently, but the following evening a violent thunderstorm swept the Peninsula. For hours the rain fell, heaved in all directions by great gusts of wind, accompanied by thunder one rebel soldier described as “hell’s artillery.” Lightning bleached the sky, one strike instantly killing four men of the 4th Alabama. “Had it not been for McClellan’s faith in the Bible and in God’s covenant with Noah,” Emma wrote, “he would no doubt have seriously contemplated building an ark in order to save himself and his army from destruction. The Rebels seemed to think this flood was sent as a judgment from the Almighty upon their hated enemies.”
Confederate general Joe Johnston did view the storm as a godsend. The Army of the Potomac was now divided by the Chickahominy, and the rising floodwaters would make it nearly impossible for McClellan to reinforce his troops across the river during battle. Two days later, around noon, Johnston ordered his men to attack, hoping to surprise the most advanced Union regiments and drive them back toward the river. The general then moved his headquarters to a small house nearby and waited for the sounds of battle. The fighting raged around him—cannon thundering, shells shrieking, rifle balls stuttering t-h-t! t-h-t—but he heard none of it. The newspapers called such strange mirages of noise “silent battles.” The sounds were most often absorbed by woods and hills or deflected by wind currents, bounced away to a distant location, even hundreds of miles away. Johnston had no idea his men were fighting until several hours later.
Emma, dressed in Frank Thompson’s full uniform and mounted on “Reb,” the horse she’d acquired during her last undercover assignment, acted as orderly for General Philip Kearny. The general had lost his left arm in the Mexican War and compensated by gripping his reins in his teeth and brandishing a sword in his right hand. She rode alongside him on the battlefield, delivering messages and dodging shots and shells, watching her comrades march across the one remaining rickety bridge, held together by a single stringer. She was about to ride off with another message when a ball struck and shattered the arm of General Oliver Howard, standing nearby. She hitched Reb and rushed to the general, pouring water on the wound and down his mouth. His arm was limp, sandbag-heavy and awash in blood. As she rummaged for bandages in her saddlebag Reb sank his teeth into her arm, stripping flesh from her bone, then turned and kicked her in the gut with his hind feet, hurling her through the air.
All of the breath rushed out of her and she felt turned inside out, whipped like laundry on the line. She gasped violently, greedily gobbling at the air, ordering herself to her knees, to her feet, wobbling back over to General Howard. Her own arm was so swollen she couldn’t lift it above her head, but she wrapped the general’s wound and reported to an old sawmill that had been converted to a field hospital. It was crowded with injured men who had crawled in from the battlefield, dragging themselves forward inch by inch using nothing but elbows and chins.
At the moment she was the only nurse there. She bound her arm into a sling and went to work removing the soldiers’ clothing. She had neither scissors nor a knife and so bit through the soaked, stiffened garments, blood seeping into her mouth and staining her teeth. When she ran out of bandages she started off in the direction of two houses, about a mile away. She hoped the rebel folk inside would notice her condition and show some mercy.
The occupants of the first house refused to let her in, and she limped along to the next. A man came to the door, holding it open just a crack, and told her he had nothing she could use for bandages. Emma snapped, her patience and strength both exhausted. She drew two pistols from her belt and aimed them at the man, the hand of her injured arm shaking under the weight of the metal.
The man looked into the guns’ shiny gaze and that was all the convincing he needed. He called to his wife, who brought an old sheet, a pair of pillowcases, and three yards of cotton cloth, for which she demanded five dollars. Emma gave her three.
On the way back to the sawmill she felt a strange whirling in her head. She removed her sling and saw that she’d grazed her arm with her pistol, reopening the wound, fresh blood blooming across her skin. Her breath thinned, and she stopped to rest by the side of the road.
An hour passed, and she heard the distant sound of hooves drawing closer. She looked up to see a Union chaplain. His eyes flickered down,
taking her in, but he continued without offering her a ride. She assumed he was hurrying to help the wounded at the sawmill, but after she staggered back she found him wrapped in a blanket, sleeping on a pile of hay.
She considered asking the chaplain if he would be so kind as to bring her horse—just for the sake of having the vicious “Reb” give him “a little shaking up”—but instead she stood over him in quiet disgust. She muttered that he was “not the possessor of one grain of manhood,” hoping he was awake enough to hear the words. Slumping down beside him, she began to cry, for once not caring if she looked like a girl.
The night brought respite, Yankees and rebels lying on their arms within speaking distance of each other. Fighting resumed at seven thirty in the morning. Emma spotted McClellan riding along the battlefront, the men cheering as he passed, all of them comforted by the sight of their commander. The rebel army was falling back toward Richmond and dealing with an unexpected emergency: General Joe Johnston had been struck in the chest by a heavy fragment of shell, knocked off his horse, and carried off the field on a stretcher. President Davis asked General Robert E. Lee, his chief military adviser, to assume command of the Army of Northern Virginia, the Confederacy’s main fighting force in the eastern theater of the war. Recognizing the precarious state of his troops, Lee continued the withdrawal toward Richmond.
By noon the Battle of Fair Oaks (known as Seven Pines to the South) was over, a Union victory at immense cost: 790 killed, 3,594 wounded, and 647 missing; the Confederate casualties numbered 1,000 more. It was the worst battle yet in the eastern theater, and Emma, standing by the surgeon’s tree, could do little more than survey the horrific scene. “The ground around that tree for several acres in extent was literally drenched with human blood,” she observed, “and the men were laid so close together that there was no such thing as passing between them.” For the next two days she helped load the wounded onto railroad cars bound for White House Landing, where they were transferred to hospital ships for the trip north. Men died along the way, their bodies crammed in close boxcars along with the living, maggots burrowing into their wounds.