Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy

by Karen Abbott

  The general convened a meeting at his headquarters to announce his decision: the engineers would lay the pontoons across the Rappahannock under the cover of darkness, supported by heavy artillery on the near side of the river. The army would then cross in force and attack the Confederates head-on. Burnside’s staff unanimously objected; the rebels occupied the high ground, and it was unconscionable to send troops charging across an open field and up a heavily fortified hill where the enemy would be waiting. Even if the men, by sheer luck, made it across the field, they would then have to climb a stone wall while under constant Confederate fire. “If you make the attack as contemplated it will be the greatest slaughter of the war,” one colonel told Burnside. Another agreed, adding, “The carrying out of your plan will be murder, not warfare.” But they succeeded only in annoying Burnside, who argued that his plan would work simply because it would take Lee by surprise. With that, at least, his staff agreed, if only because Lee wouldn’t expect so foolish a move.

  Belle made an appearance at Fredericksburg, encouraging the rebel soldiers and snooping around the enemy, making note of their positions. She noticed a barefoot young Confederate private and offered her own pair of fine cloth gaiters laced at the side and trimmed with patent leather. “If it rests his poor feet only a little while, I am repaid,” she explained to another soldier. “He is not old enough to be away from his mother.” Bewildered, the private held up Belle’s size-two-and-a-half boots, wondering how he might make them fit.

  She decided to take a chance and write to Stonewall Jackson at his headquarters, asking the general if it was safe enough for her to return to Martinsburg, which was still in and out of Union hands. To Belle’s surprise and relief he replied promptly, proof he was now convinced of her loyalty. He advised her to avoid her hometown and the risk of another imprisonment and suggested she instead visit relatives in Tennessee. “Truly your friend,” he signed off, “T. J. Jackson.” She would do as the general said.

  Lee, meanwhile, felt confident about the positions and morale of his troops. He had urged the people of Fredericksburg to flee their town before Union troops attacked it. Six thousand citizens were suddenly homeless, trudging through the grimy snow, little girls dragging their dolls behind them, slaves tugging picked chickens and bags of flour. Every move Burnside made was monitored by Confederate spies. One rebel agent, posing as a Union telegraph operator, set up his paraphernalia in the basement of a sutler’s store, located conveniently near the Rappahannock. The sutler, a fellow rebel spy, sold goods to the unsuspecting men of Burnside’s army and reported their conversations to the telegraph operator.

  Only one thing seemed amiss. Although Lee had a direct route from Richmond for his supplies, via the Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac Railroad, shipments were slow and late in coming, if they ever came at all, prompting the general to send written protests against the lack of “zeal and energy” in the management of the RF&P. What Lee did not know was that Samuel Ruth, the railroad’s superintendent, was a member of Elizabeth’s Richmond Underground.

  Emma spent her days delivering messages to and from Union commanders. Riding along the bank of the river, she saw the rebel batteries frowning on the heights beyond the city of Fredericksburg, and the Confederate and Federal pickets within patrolling the grounds, close enough to smell each other. She watched as Union engineers began assembling six pontoon bridges, rushing to finish before dawn.

  On December 11, as a church tower in the distance struck five, the dense morning fog began to break up, exposing the engineers. Emma glimpsed hundreds of Confederate guns poised on the opposite banks. There was a flash of musketry, the hissing of shot, a terrible cacophony of screams. Bodies dropped into the frigid waters of the Rappahannock. Batteries of Union cannon overlooking the river opened on the town and riverbanks, a roar that could be heard for miles. The surviving engineers hurried to finish the bridges. “The work went steadily on,” Emma observed, “not withstanding that two out of every three who were engaged in laying the bridges were either killed or wounded. But as fast as one fell another took his place.” Members of the 7th Michigan climbed into boats and crossed the river under a relentless barrage of fire. Those who made it to the other side stormed into Fredericksburg and began driving the rebels out of town, back toward the heights where Lee’s main forces were entrenched. By nightfall the bridges were finished but the city was destroyed—shells crashing and bursting, houses crushed, smoke swirling, and flames leaping. Union soldiers looted everything in sight: books, petticoats, hats, bonnets, musical instruments, pillows, bedclothes, furniture. Dead rebels lay strewn about the streets.

  Two days later, after both sides had regrouped and tended to their wounded, the armies prepared for battle. Emma learned that her old friend, Colonel Poe, had lost his orderly, and she volunteered to take the orderly’s place in the coming battle. She rose before dawn and dressed in her uniform, now embellished with buff epaulets trimmed in gold braid, signifying her position as aide-de-camp. She celebrated with an entry in her journal. “I wish my friends could see me in my present uniform!” she wrote. “This division will probably charge on the enemy’s works this afternoon. God grant them success! While I write the roar of cannon and musketry is almost deafening. This may be my last entry in this journal. God’s will be done. I commit myself to Him, soul and body. I must close. [Poe] has mounted his horse and says Come!”

  Low-lying clouds rolled in, enshrouding the field in fog. Fifes shrieked and bugles called. Burnside kept to his plan, even though, as one Confederate colonel joked, “A chicken could not live in that field when we open upon it.” The general ordered Emma’s division to attack. With a fierce yell three brigades, one after another, charged across the field that lay between the town and the heights. They ran with heads down, as if they could not bear to glimpse what awaited them. As soon as they came within range of the Confederate guns they began to drop, one witness said, like “grass before the scythe.” All day long, brigade after brigade charged out, each one having witnessed the fate of the one before.

  No one got within fifty yards of the stone wall. Many soldiers stayed on the field, crouched behind the dead or dying, trying to ignore the sound of bullets slapping the corpses of their friends. Within the first hour the Union had lost nearly three thousand men, both dead and wounded, and still they kept coming. By the end of the battle they would lose ten thousand more. General Lee watched it all from the hills above. “It is well that war is so terrible,” he said, “we should grow too fond of it.” Emma watched, too, mourning the “thousands of noble lives which fell upon that disastrous field,” and wishing that General McClellan were still in charge.

  All day long she rode up and down the lines, carrying messages and relaying orders, close enough to feel the heat of fire, to hear the cries for help and pleas for water, the dreamy, delirious voices murmuring loved ones’ names. One comrade marveled at “Frank’s” bravery, his riding “with a fearlessness that attracted the attention and secured the commendation of field and general officers.” She witnessed a man fatally shoot himself with his own pistol and another taking aim through his side, rendering himself unfit for duty. Only once in twelve hours did she get out of the saddle, stopping to assist an officer who lay writhing in agony on the field.

  Emma realized she knew him: James Reid of the 79th New York, the lieutenant she’d met while collecting the mail at headquarters, the one who was nothing like Jerome. He clutched her arm and begged for help, pinning her with his pale blue eyes. She determined he was suffering from cramps and spasms and pulled him off the field. She pried open his mouth and pushed opium pills onto his tongue, assuring him they’d help with the pain. She poured a stream of whiskey down his throat, wiped the residue from his chin. Within the hour he impressed her once again by getting back on his horse and galloping onto the battlefield.

  Emma didn’t want to face the truth: for the second time during the war, she was falling for a man.

  [ PART THREE ]

&
nbsp; 1863

  WHEN YOU THINK HE MAY BE KILLED TOMORROW

  FREDERICKSBURG, VIRGINIA, AND KENTUCKY

  After the Battle of Fredericksburg James Reid moved into Emma’s tent, where she revealed more of herself than she ever had to Jerome.

  Jerome, finally released from Camp Parole, noted in his journal that his “friend Frank” had grown “extremely fond” of the married soldier, that they seemed to be “particular friends.” He never inquired about the nature or extent of their relationship—he was, after all, still courting Anna Corey—but questions and suspicions crept through his mind. It was all he thought about when he walked with Emma to get the mail at headquarters, or when she stopped by his tent to show him a new novel, Pauline of the Potomac, about a female spy for General McClellan, or when she left camp for a few days, picking up messages at Alexandria. “Have not had a very long chat with Frank and I feel quite lonely without him,” Jerome wrote, “but I suppose he enjoys his tentmate. . . . Reid seems a fine fellow & is very fond of Frank.” He began referring to Emma as Reid’s “pet.”

  He told himself that there was nothing untoward about Emma and Reid’s relationship, that they were simply “individuals who repose in the pleasantest arbor of friendship.” He did not want to suspect the worst of Reid, whom he called “one of nature’s noblemen,” nor of Emma, his fellow devout Christian and confidante. He thought about them bunking together, working to weatherize their tent, collecting stones and bricks to build a hearth and chimney, sharing stories by their fire. He wondered if Emma had recounted the night she sheared her hair and bound her breasts and renamed herself Frank Thompson, if he was no longer the only one who knew her truth. He made sure to share the news of each love letter from Anna Corey, searching Emma’s face for the impact of his words.

  While away collecting mail Emma sent Jerome a letter, signing her real name for the first time since she was a girl back on the farm in Canada, doodling in her Bible:

  Jan. 16/63

  Dear Jerome,

  In the first place, I will say that I am happy to know that you are prospering so well in matters of the heart. In spite of the ridicule which sentiment meets with everywhere, I am free to state that upon the success of our love schemes depends very much of our happiness in this world. . . . Dear Jerome, I am in earnest in my congratulations & daily realize that had I met you some years ago I might have been much happier now. But Providence has ordered it otherwise & I must be content. I would not change now if I could—if my life’s happiness depended on it. I do not love you less because you love another, but rather more, for your nobleness of character displayed in your love for her—God make her worthy of so good a husband.

  Your loving friend,

  Emma

  Perhaps signing her name let her reclaim some small vestige of truth, lost not because of Frank Thompson—he had always been an authentic part of her—but because she coveted a man who wasn’t hers to have. She had allowed herself to imagine an honest life with Jerome, but this “love scheme” with Reid was a dead-end sin, bringing her equal measures of joy and misery, leaving both her and Frank with nowhere to go. For now, her lies and her lives were intertwined, two strands of a twisting double helix, but she knew the structure could not be sustained. It could unravel at any time, from either within or without.

  Her comrades spread stories about women being exposed in the ranks, and such stories seemed to grow more numerous by the day. Most inadvertently divulged their sex in the course of regular army life, as was the case with “Charles Norton,” a private with the 141st Pennsylvania Infantry who stole a fellow officer’s boots. The resulting investigation revealed this “general favorite” to be a she, who was “speedily mustered out of the service.” Two more women, serving under Union general Philip Sheridan, had been discovered just a few weeks earlier. “While out on the foraging expedition these Amazons had secured a supply of ‘apple jack’ by some means, got very drunk, and on the return had fallen into Stone River and had been nearly drowned,” the general wrote. “After they had been fished from the water, in the process of resuscitation their sex was disclosed, though up to this time it appeared to be known only to each other.”

  A careless few betrayed themselves through stereotypical feminine behavior. Two women serving with the 95th Illinois Infantry were outed when an officer threw apples to them. They were dressed in full military uniform, but instinctively made a grab for the hem of their nonexistent aprons in order to catch the fruit. They were discharged immediately. Another woman who’d recently tried to enlist was suspected when a commander witnessed her giving “a quick jerk of her head that only a woman could give.” A recruit in Rochester, New York, forgot how to don pants, and tried to put hers on by pulling them over her head.

  In the most dramatic discovery, a member of the Army of the Potomac—a corporal from New Jersey—had recently given birth to a baby boy in a camp not far from Emma’s own. She had concealed her sex and her pregnancy beneath an oversize coat, and went into labor on picket duty. The soldier, said another picket, “complained of feeling unwell, but little notice was given his complaints at first. His pain and other symptoms of severe indisposition increased, becoming so evident that his officers had him carried to a nearby farmhouse. There the worthy corporal was safely delivered of a fine, fat little recruit.”

  The rank and file of the Union army seemed thrilled by news of the birth, an affirmation of life in the midst of relentless destruction and death, and to Emma’s surprise the men admired rather than condemned the new mother, even taking up a collection for her. Yet despite their generous reaction, Emma was unnerved. Her comrades might take a harder look at her smooth face and diminutive feet, listen for tones lurking just beneath her practiced voice. They might turn “Our Woman” from an affectionate nickname into an accusation. Despite her bravery on the battlefield and her work behind the lines, she could still be dismissed or arrested, depending on the whims of her superiors. She had worked too hard for too long to create Frank Thompson, and she wanted his demise to be her decision alone.

  After the bloody defeat at Fredericksburg, President Lincoln replaced Ambrose Burnside with General Joseph Hooker, whose headquarters—a combination, it was said, “of barroom and brothel”—were so infamously wicked that his name would become synonymous with the world’s oldest profession. “Beware of rashness,” the president warned his new commander, “but with energy and sleepless vigilance go forward and give us victories.” In mid-March “Fighting Joe” sent Emma, James Reid, Jerome Robbins, and the rest of the Ninth Corps to Kentucky as part of the Army of the Cumberland, preparing to support General Ulysses S. Grant’s renewed attempt to capture Vicksburg, a fortified city that held the Mississippi River for the Confederacy. Emma reached for her journal and penned her last entry as a member of the Army of the Potomac: “The weather department is in perfect keeping with the War Department, its policy being to make as many changes as possible, and every one worse than the last. May God bless the old Army, and save it from total annihilation.”

  She took the train to Louisville and then continued on southeast to Lebanon, where she received orders to infiltrate enemy lines. Confederate forces under General John Pegram, said to be the advance of General Longstreet’s division, had crossed the Cumberland River and were circling Union troops at nearby Danville. Emma was to gather any information she could about numbers of cavalry, infantry, and artillery.

  Before her arrival Union troops had skirmished with a group of Confederate cavalry, taking five rebels prisoner, and one of them unwittingly donated his uniform for her mission. Noncommissioned officers of the cavalry had no standard uniform, the only requirement being that the cloth was butternut in color, and she decided to pose as a Southern civilian traveling from farmhouse to farmhouse, seeking butter and eggs for the rebel army. As always, she carried her seven-shooter revolver.

  Emma wandered past the lines and into a village, knocking at the first door she came to, and was surprised to find herself
in the midst of a wedding party, a group of soldiers and sundry relatives gathered around a long mahogany table piled with ham, biscuits, horehound candy sticks, and a traditional wedding fruit cake, sliced open and spilling flecks of apples and raisins. Her mouth watered; her last decent meal had consisted of hardtack and beef soup at Christmas. The bride, Emma learned, was a young widow whose husband had been killed in combat a few months ago, and she’d been eager to remarry ever since, fearful that the war was fast depleting her pick of eligible men.

  It was a valid concern; the war was on its way to claiming one in five Southern white men of military age, a situation that prompted frantic letters to the editor. “Having made up my mind not to be an old maid, and having only a moderate fortune and less beauty, I fear I shall find it rather difficult to accomplish my wishes,” an eighteen-year-old Virginian named Hattie wrote to the Southern Literary Messenger. “Do you think I will be overlooked amidst this wreck of matter and crush of men and horses?” Fear of spinsterhood led to a breakdown in mores—“the blockade don’t keep out babies,” one South Carolina woman quipped—and to unconventional liaisons; many girls settled for marrying amputees, or even Yankees. Another captured the attitude of Southern belles as the war progressed: “One looks at a man so differently when you think he may be killed tomorrow.”

  Emma noticed that this bride had forgone “widow’s weeds” in favor of a more festive costume: frills of lace at her wrists, pearl buttons trailing down her spine, a single spray of orange blossoms encircling her head, purple fabric in honor of the dead. Her new husband spotted Emma loitering on the periphery of the party and broke away from the crowd.