by Karen Abbott
Publicly McClellan swaggered, boasting about the “great victory” and issuing an optimistic address to his troops: “Soldiers of the Army of the Potomac! I have fulfilled at least a part of my promise to you. You are now face to face with the rebels, who are held at bay in front of their Capital. The final and decisive battle is at hand. . . . The enemy has staked his all on the issue of the coming battle. Let us meet him, crush him here, in the very center of the rebellion.” But in letters to his wife the general confessed a distaste for the realities of warfare. “I am tired of the sickening sight of the battlefield,” he wrote, “with its mangled corpses & poor suffering wounded! Victory has no charms for me when purchased at such cost.” In perfect position to advance on the Confederate capital and possibly end the rebellion, McClellan instead blamed the poor weather for his inaction and badgered Lincoln for more men.
While the general waited for his bridges to be rebuilt and for reinforcements to arrive, an odd lull ensued. Union and Confederate pickets lined the swampy lowlands on the south side of the Chickahominy River, in some spots separated by a mere hundred yards, trading newspapers and telling stories and hoping the enemy would honor the informal agreement not to shoot. Emma temporarily resumed her duties as postmaster and mail carrier, riding Frank from the front lines to Fort Monroe and back again, a nearly sixty-mile route that took her through areas heavily populated with rebel sympathizers; she had heard reports of another mail carrier being robbed and murdered by bushwhackers on the very same path. It was always late when she passed over that “most lonely spot” of the road, so dark she knew it only by the rustle of paper under her horse’s feet, and she prayed that God would keep her safe until that dreadful noise was gone.
THE MADAM LOOKS MUCH CHANGED
RICHMOND
Rose arrived in Richmond—the capital of her country—on June 5, just after the Battle of Seven Pines, along with railcars, wagons, and hacks carrying thousands of Confederate casualties bound for the city’s forty-two hospitals or Oakwood Cemetery. Coffins piled up faster than gravediggers could bury them, and the heat caused dozens of bodies to swell and burst the wood. The finest stores on Main Street had been transformed into hospitals, with cots of wounded men pressed up to the entrances, a macabre stretch of window displays. “The weather was very warm, the doors were open and no curtain or screen shielded them from the gaze of passersby,” Elizabeth wrote. “So sickeningly fetid was the atmosphere that we could not sit in our grounds.”
Union officials released Rose under two conditions: she had to sign an oath vowing not to “return north of the Potomac River during the present hostilities,” and also promise to use her influence to secure the release of two Pinkerton detectives, Pryce Lewis and John Scully, both of whom had guarded her at her home and who were now languishing in Castle Godwin. The Richmond newspapers celebrated her arrival, declaring her name had been “rendered historic” by her work for the Confederacy, and by her defiance of “the monsters” at Washington.
A carriage dropped Rose and Little Rose off at the Exchange and Ballard Hotel at Franklin and Fourteenth Streets, two buildings—one a four-story Greek Revival, the other a five-story Italianate—joined by a cast-iron pedestrian bridge. The hotel was the city’s most prestigious, with a guest book signed by Charles Dickens in 1842, when he sat perspiring in his room and longing to return to cooler climes. Edgar Allan Poe, during his last visit to Richmond in 1849, lectured on “The Poetic Principle” and “Philosophy of Composition” in the hotel’s parlor and spent his nights at the nearby Swan Tavern. A few months earlier, in January, John Tyler, the former president and Rose’s cousin by marriage, had died of a stroke in his room. A bellboy took Rose’s valise up to her quarters and delivered letters from the Pinkerton detectives, both of them imploring her to intervene. Rose ignored these and other pleas to come.
Instead she began working on her memoir, focusing on her imprisonment and the horrors of the Lincoln administration, and took Little Rose for walks, shielding the girl’s eyes and nose from the sights and smells of the wounded soldiers. She noted approvingly that “all was warlike preparation and stern defiance and resistance to the invader.” McClellan’s campaign had stalled but the city was still on edge, expecting an attack at any moment. In anticipation, Jefferson Davis sent his wife and children temporarily to Raleigh, North Carolina, a day’s journey by train and still in Confederate hands. “I belong to the country but my heart is ever with you,” he told Varina, and taught her how to load and shoot a pistol. Elizabeth, too, was so certain the Union would take Richmond that she prepared a “charming chamber” for McClellan in her home, fixing it with “new matting and pretty curtains” and calling it “General McClellan’s room.”
Despite her efforts on behalf of the Confederacy, Rose knew she wouldn’t be accepted by the proper ladies of Richmond, all of whom had heard the gossip about her late-night callers; “She must not come handicapped with her old life,” Mary Chesnut admonished. But the city’s leading men had no such judgment. General John Winder, the provost marshal, and Jefferson Davis both came to her suite at the Ballard to pay their respects. Rose gave the Confederate president a gift of jelly and three oranges, one of which he promised to give to the wounded general Joe Johnston. Little Rose inquired about Davis’s seven-year-old daughter, Maggie, and wondered “if there were any Yankees where she was.”
The Confederate president was struck by Rose’s appearance, the lovely face that was now deeply lined and sallow. “The Madam looks much changed,” he confided to his wife, “and has the air of one whose nerves were shaken by mental torture.” He avoided talk of her time in prison and thanked her for her service, telling her, “But for you, there would have been no Battle of Bull Run.” For Rose, hearing such praise from the Confederate president was “the proudest moment of my whole life.” Davis would soon have another assignment for her, one that would prove vital to the Confederacy’s attempts to gain legitimacy, and one that would cost her more than she could have ever imagined.
THE SECESH CLEOPATRA
THE SHENANDOAH VALLEY, VIRGINIA
In the hope of disrupting McClellan’s forces around Richmond, Robert E. Lee ordered Stonewall Jackson to vacate the Shenandoah Valley and march down to the Virginia Peninsula. With the Confederates gone, Belle watched the Union troops spill across High Street in Front Royal, once again taking control of the town. They captured 160 prisoners, including Belle, escorting her to the cottage behind the Fishback Hotel and stationing a squadron of guards outside her door. She knew her recent dash across the battlefield had made her known throughout the country, with Southern papers anointing her the “Secesh Cleopatra” and Northern papers denouncing her as a “camp cyprian” and “accomplished prostitute” who has “passed the first freshness of youth.” She remained so imprisoned for several days until her old Union contact and rumored paramour, General Shields, arrived in town and released her.
General Nathaniel Banks followed, establishing headquarters at the Fishback, and Belle called on him right away, hoping to make another high-ranking friend among the enemy. For the occasion she donned a dark green riding dress, her gold palmetto breast pin, and a hat festooned with Confederate brass buttons and topped with a piece of palmetto frond, rising like an antenna from her head. The finishing touch: a pair of shoulder straps bearing what she claimed as her new insignia of rank: “Lieutenant Colonel, 5th Virginia Regiment, Confederate Army.”
She welcomed General Banks to Front Royal, and said she hoped he was enjoying the accommodations at her aunt’s hotel. She had one minor favor to ask: Would the general mind granting her a pass to travel farther south?
“Where do you wish to go?” Banks asked.
“To Louisiana, where my aunt resides.”
“But what will Virginia do without you?” he said, and laughed. Belle was surprised, and leaned closer.
“What do you mean, General?” she asked.
“We always miss our bravest and most illustrious,” he replied. �
�And how can your native state do without you?” The general proceeded to speak “with the utmost good-nature and pleasantry” about her daring dash across the battlefield and her role in his own army’s defeat, but refused to let her leave the state.
Belle headed back to her cottage, the palmetto frond on her hat listing to starboard, and mentally replayed the exchange. She sensed an edge lurking beneath the general’s light tone, a stiffness in his demeanor, as if the enemy at last understood the nature of her power and the force of her intent, the very things she’d known all along.
It was about time.
Belle filled her days with flirting and spying, the two being interdependent in her mind, focusing on a Major Dick Long of the 73rd Ohio, who possessed “a killing set of whiskers” and boasted of his conquests with the “rosy-cheeked rogue.” Another Yankee private said he admired her courage in defending her home and presented her with a pistol, which Belle planned to regift to Stonewall Jackson. She paid a visit to General Shields’s aide-de-camp, Captain Keily, the officer who had written her love poems and given her information about the war council. He had been shot in the face recently but still Belle managed to question him, interspersing her interrogation with comforting words about his recovery. She was “the sensation of the village,” acknowledged one Union man, and had a “large following of Federal officers who were ready to do her homage.”
She was vigilant about Union spies—they still roamed everywhere in the Valley—and began noticing a man with a brusque accent trailing her wherever she went. She confronted him one day when both were loitering in the office of the Union provost marshal.
“I suppose you came to report me again,” she said, and spun back around, denouncing “Southern Union men” so loudly the entire office could hear.
The informant, a German immigrant named Eugene Blockley, reported to Allan Pinkerton, who started a file on Belle. “She gets around considerably, is very shrewd, and is probably acting as a spy,” the detective wrote. “She is an open, earnest, and undisguised secessionist, and talks secession on all practicable occasions. . . . Informant considers her more efficient in carrying news to the rebels of our operations than any three men in the valley.”
Belle didn’t let the incident interfere with her next mission, the seduction of Dr. George Rex, medical director of the First Army Corps. She courted him with tactical precision, assessing his strengths and exploiting his weaknesses, calculating when to advance and when to retreat. In her more fanciful moments, she imagined that this wealthy, influential doctor would one day propose marriage and sail off with her to Europe.
Her efforts caught the attention of a brigade surgeon, Dr. Washington Duffee, who sent a wry letter to Secretary of War Stanton in Washington:
“I communicate to you a fact,” he wrote, “that the celebrated Belle Boyd the ‘Rebel Spy’ now at Front Royal has apparently fallen in love or is anscious [sic] to make a victim of the Medical Director of the 1 Army Corps. Where [sic] that used by higher authority at the War Department Jackson and all the Rebel officers with whom she is in direct communication might be trapped. Where a skillful ‘Detective’ placed by the Government easily could these rascals be led into captivity.”
This was the second notice Stanton had received about Miss Belle Boyd, after Allan Pinkerton’s report about her activities in the Valley, and he was already on the case. It seemed the girl was willing to engage with any man in uniform, so long as he told her what she wanted to hear.
One June morning, sitting in the drawing room of her cottage, Belle noticed a Confederate soldier standing by a flag-tent in the courtyard, where the Union provost marshal granted or refused all passes. She had never seen him before, and wanted to do him the favor of introducing herself. Tying on her lucky white bonnet, she wandered into the courtyard and asked for his name.
“C. W. D. Smitley,” came the reply. He looked to Belle like a younger version of General George McClellan, whom she’d seen in cartes de visite, sold in packets of eight for a dollar. Smitley was taller and leaner than the general, but had the same sharply parted brown hair and tidy beard. He told her he was a parolee hoping to head south to Richmond.
She wished him luck, joking about how one couldn’t “travel the slightest distance without a pass signed by some official.” In fact, she added, there was once a picket stationed between her family farm and the dairy, and the dairymaid wasn’t allowed to milk the cows without a pass signed by the officer of the day. This protocol became such a nuisance that Belle devised a way around it, filling out a pass to read: “These cows have permission to pass to and from the yard and dairy for the purpose of being milked twice a day, until further orders.” She secured the proper signature and pasted the pass between the horns of one of the cows.
The boy laughed, and Belle asked if he might dine with her that evening at the home of a good Confederate neighbor.
“With pleasure,” he said, and Belle excused herself to get ready.
To Smitley’s surprise, he found her to be “a lady of culture” and “a brilliant conversationalist.” During the course of the evening a number of young ladies called, all accompanied by Federal officers, and they hovered around Belle like moths, coming and going with their demands: Would she talk about her work as a courier, about smuggling quinine, about her mad dash across the battlefield at Front Royal, her only protection a bonnet and crinoline? She had perfect recall, each anecdote as bright and polished as one of her souvenir buttons, and when they no longer wished to hear her talk, she offered to perform. Settling on the piano bench, nestled in her swirl of a dress—no frock coat or shoulder straps tonight—she plucked out the notes of “Bonnie Blue Flag” and began to sing:
And here’s to old Virginia
The Old Dominion State
Who with the young Confederacy
At length has linked her fate . . .
She commanded Smitley to join her and he obeyed, his voice cracking on the words “Davis, our loved president.” In between verses Belle peeked at him and smiled.
The following day Smitley told her he had to leave Front Royal shortly—he’d finally secured a pass—and would be gone before supper. Belle let the corners of her lips sink, but said, “I am glad that you will soon be free.” She studied him a moment, his face half-shadowed beneath a musty slouch hat, and decided he was who he claimed to be.
“Won’t you take a letter from me to General Jackson?” she asked.
He agreed, and Belle left him in the drawing room to write a note to Stonewall, beginning with pleasantries and compliments and concluding with information about Union general John Pope’s forces, totaling about thirty-five thousand men and heading toward the Shenandoah Valley. When she returned, Smitley stood and held out his hand.
“Will you promise me faithfully, upon the honor of a soldier, to take the utmost care of this, and deliver it safe to General Jackson?” she asked.
He vowed “by all the host of heaven” that he would, and that was the last she saw of him.
That evening she went to another party, and was about to take her place at the piano when a Union officer approached. Belle knew him. He had proved useful in the past but turned cool once he realized she wanted nothing from him but information. He slapped his hand against the wall, trapping her, and remarked that she’d been seeing quite a bit of Officer Smitley lately, hadn’t she?
Belle didn’t see how it was any of his business.
It was his business, the officer countered, because Smitley was actually a Federal spy.
She felt a hot brick of dread in her gut. She denied it, and said she was insulted on the good Confederate’s behalf.
It was true, the officer insisted. He himself had sent Smitley to entrap her. He smiled again, and Belle began to cry, as distressed by the romantic betrayal as by what might happen next.
THE BRIGHT RUSH OF LIFE, THE HURRY OF DEATH
RICHMOND
Just as McClellan was about to order the first “decisive step” of the f
inal advance on Richmond, he received another ominous report from Pinkerton. Under interrogation, a deserter from Stonewall Jackson’s command had revealed that Jackson’s entire force, still en route from the Shenandoah Valley, would attack Union general Fitz John Porter’s corps on the north side of the Chickahominy River. McClellan nevertheless kept to his plan, ordering two divisions to advance just twelve hundred yards, taking a dense oak grove that sprawled between the Union and Confederate front lines.
Emma’s regiment was held in reserve, but she could feel the heat of the gunfire and see the men in the rifle pits, muddy water up to their knees, looking like “fit subjects for the hospital or lunatic asylum.” By late afternoon she heard voices rise high and clear, the ringing cheers of the Union laid over the sharp, wild yip of the rebels, a malevolent refrain on endless repeat. When it finally stopped, Union troops had given McClellan half of what he wanted—six hundred yards, gained at a cost of one casualty per yard.
The general declared that his men had “behaved splendidly” at Oak Grove, the first of what would become known as the Seven Days Battles, but two hours later found himself in a panic. A fugitive slave, newly escaped from Richmond, reported that rebel officers boasted of two hundred thousand troops ready for the “big fight,” prompting McClellan to telegraph Washington: “I regret my great inferiority in numbers, but feel that I am in no way responsible for it. . . . I will do all that a general can do with the splendid army I have the honor to command, and, if it is destroyed by overwhelming numbers, can at least die with it and share its fate.”