Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy

by Karen Abbott

  He was dark-haired and imposing, with a long, loping gait and a mustache that spiraled like the shell of a snail. He introduced himself as Captain Logan, a recruiting officer for the rebel army, and asked what business she had in the village.

  Just collecting supplies for the soldiers, she replied.

  The captain nodded, raised his glass to his lips. She congratulated him, apologized for interrupting the festivities, and turned to leave.

  A hand curled around her shoulder and turned her back.

  “See here, my lad,” he said. “I think the best thing you can do is enlist and join a company which is just forming here in the village, and will leave in the morning. We are giving a bounty to all who freely enlist, and are conscripting those who refuse. Which do you propose to do? Enlist and get the bounty, or refuse and be obliged to go without anything?”

  His gaze meandered down her body. It occurred to her that she would rather be discovered as a woman than as a Union spy.

  “I think I shall wait for a few days before I decide,” she said.

  “But we can’t wait for you to decide. The Yankees may be upon us any moment, for we are not far from their lines, and we will leave here either tonight or in the morning early. I will give you two hours to decide this question, and in the meantime you must be put under guard.”

  He clenched Emma’s arm and pulled her to a corner of the room. Two soldiers positioned themselves on either side, closing her in. Her head reached only as high as their shoulders. She talked up at them, presenting herself as a simple, honest Kentuckian, worried, like anyone else, about the Yankees invading the town. She wondered how many rebel troops were currently in the area; where were they heading next? With every sip of whiskey her guards let slip another scrap of information; the rebel forces at Danville comprised 3,500 cavalry, three regiments of infantry, and six pieces of artillery. The revelers rose from the table and formed a grand chain, clasping shoulders and sliding hands, keeping time to the plink of the banjo and the clank of spoons, spinning in tight concentric circles like the works of a watch. Minutes tumbled into hours and the circles merged into one, halfhearted and teetering, voices garbling the words to “God Save the South,” whiskey sloshing over glass rims. At a pause in the music Captain Logan lumbered toward Emma, and asked if she’d made her decision.

  “I’ve concluded to wait until I’m conscripted,” Emma said.

  “Well, you will not have to wait long for that, so you may consider yourself a soldier of the Confederacy from this hour, and subject to military discipline.” He added that he was forming a company of cavalry, and would be ready to set off in the morning.

  The captain returned to the circle, leaving her to consider his words. She knew he was serious, especially as she would be required to take the oath of allegiance to the Confederate government, but she trusted in God and her own ingenuity to escape the dilemma. She would have to flee before being forced to declare her loyalty to the rebel cause; if she refused to be sworn in at the service after conscription, Logan and his soldiers would suspect her true intentions and execute her on the spot. All night long she stood, foot throbbing, her guards watching her as she watched the captain, twirling and kissing his bride.

  At daylight Captain Logan reappeared. He led her to a group of waiting soldiers and pointed out her horse. Within moments they were trotting briskly over the country, the captain complimenting her riding skills. You will be grateful, he said, when the war is over and the South has gained her independence. You will be proud to have been a Confederate soldier, to have driven the vandals from their soil and steeped your saber in Yankee blood. “Then,” he added, “you will thank me for the interest I have taken in you, and for the gentle persuasion which I made use of to stir up your patriotism and remind you of your duty to your country.” As he finished this speech a Union reconnoitering party rose in sight atop a hill and galloped toward them, cavalry in advance and infantry in the rear.

  The Confederate captain ordered Emma and his men to charge forward, weapons drawn. A chorus of rebel yells roared fiercely in her ears. They were upon each other then, thrashing and rearing, and she found herself on the Federal side of the line. The Union captain recognized her and signaled for her to fall in next to him, a position that put her directly across from Captain Logan, the man to whom she owed “such a debt of gratitude.” This was her chance, she realized, “to cancel all obligations in that direction.”

  Her brain directed her arm to rise and her arm obeyed, aiming her revolver at his head. She wanted not to kill him, but merely to spoil the “graceful curve of his mustache,” to render him, permanently, a lesser version of himself.

  She pulled the trigger.

  BREAD OR BLOOD

  Illustration of the Richmond bread riot, April 1863.

  (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

  RICHMOND

  On March 27 Jefferson Davis declared one of his numerous “fast days,” in which he called upon the citizens of the Confederacy to attend church and abstain from food and drink. On such occasions Elizabeth and her family instead enjoyed a better dinner than usual and even sweet tea and dessert; brother John frequently returned from his trips north with sugar, a rare delicacy in these long, lean days of the blockade. Guilt always accompanied this act of defiance, as Elizabeth heard stories and witnessed firsthand how Southerners were starving. In Atlanta a dozen women held up a butcher shop, brandishing guns and escaping with armfuls of meat. In Richmond a war clerk complained that he had lost twenty pounds, and his wife and children were emaciated. In Vicksburg, Mississippi, people turned to eating rats, dogs, and cats, and a local newspaper wrote of “the luxury of mule meat and fricasseed kitten.” One mother fed her daughter soup containing the remains of the girl’s pet bird.

  “Alas for the suffering of the very poor!” Elizabeth wrote in her journal. “Women are begging with tears in their eyes, and a different class from ordinary beggars . . . There is a starvation panic on the people.”

  Such circumstances, to her thinking, had but one positive effect: declining morale among the populace aggravated declining morale among the entire Confederate army.

  The events of April 2, less than a week after the last fast day, unfolded as if Elizabeth had choreographed every moment, starting with a young girl waiting on a bench in Richmond’s Capitol Square, her body a rigid structure of stark angles and jutting bones. She turned to an old lady sitting next to her, said she was too weak to stand, and raised a skeletal arm to adjust her bonnet. The old lady gasped, fluttering a hand over her mouth, and the girl gave a hard laugh. “That’s all there’s left of me!” she said.

  People started filing into the square, hundreds and hundreds of them, taking their places amid the blooming forget-me-nots and sweetly trilling birds. They wielded axes, hatchets, clubs, knives, hammers, guns, stones. A black maid hurried to the square to collect her wandering charge, worried that the child might “catch something from them poor white folks.” A chorus of voices shouted “Bread or blood! Bread or blood!” a rolling drumbeat that matched the pace of their steps.

  More rioters joined in, thousands of them now, punching their fists toward the sky, funneling through the alleys, charging into stores and grabbing everything they found, bread and turnips and hams and shoes, hoisting them into carts and wagons lined along the curb, where female getaway drivers waited in stern complicity. They smashed locked doors with their hatchets and hammers and stones, working with a terrible earnestness, looting both necessities and luxuries: bonnets, tools, cornmeal, piles of bacon, barrels of flour, strings of glinting jewels. One merchant rolled up his sleeves and stood guard at the door of his shop, waving a six-shooter, vowing to defend his property at the risk of his life. Another tossed out boxes of needles, hoping that would be enough to placate the crowd.

  Within the hour the Public Guard filed up Seventeenth Street, Jefferson Davis close behind. The president clambered into a cart and looked out over the crowd, which fell instantly and utterly si
lent. In a mournful tone he urged the people to “abstain from their lawless acts” and wondered why they had stolen jewelry and finery when they claimed to be starving. No response. The president turned out his pockets and gathered a thin roll of Confederate graybacks in his fists.

  “You say you are hungry and have no money,” he said. “Here is all I have; it is not much, but take it.”

  “The Union!” the mob screamed. “No more starvation!”

  He tossed the money and watched the people dive to catch it. “We do not desire to injure anyone, but this lawlessness must stop. I will give you five minutes to disperse. Otherwise you will be fired upon.”

  The crowd murmured and rustled but stayed rooted in place.

  “Captain Gay,” Davis intoned, “order your men to load with ball cartridges.”

  “Load!” the captain shouted.

  There was a swift clattering of ramrods as the soldiers obeyed, stuffing powder and balls down the muzzles of their muskets.

  “Captain Gay,” he said again, “if this street is not cleared within five minutes, order your men to fire down the street until it is cleared.”

  The president lifted his pocket watch into the air to count the tick of the hands.

  All at once the rioters gave up. They broke off in pairs and threes, hatchets and clubs dangling by their sides, stones dropping to the ground, loot lying forgotten in the carts and strewn across sidewalks, broken glass crunching under their plain brown work shoes. Police tracked down and arrested forty-seven of them.

  By nightfall all of Richmond seethed with suspicion, convinced that the “bread riot” was the work of Yankee spies. “This demonstration was made use of by the disaffected in our midst,” one resident declared, “for the misrepresentation and exaggeration of our real condition.” The city council ruled that whoever planned the riot had “devilish and secret motives,” and the War Department ordered newspapers to stifle coverage so that the Confederacy would not be further humiliated. The Richmond Examiner nevertheless condemned the rioters as “emissaries of the Federal Government” and found it “glaringly incongruous” that so many of the supposedly impoverished suspects were able to post bail and retain expensive counsel, paying as much as $500 cash—money supplied by Elizabeth and a few wealthy Unionist friends.

  The Richmond Underground made sure news of the bread riot reached the Union army and the Northern press, along with personal updates about the Confederate president. The current year, in the words of Varina Davis, had opened “drearily” for her husband. He was still morose over the fall of numerous Southern cities in the western theater: Donelson, Tennessee (the battle that earned Ulysses S. Grant the nickname “Unconditional Surrender”); Nashville (whose citizens, the Northern press reported, were all “hard up”); and Memphis, where, said one correspondent, “secession had made havoc of all female charms and graces,” infecting women like a “contagious disease.” Davis’s health, always poor, was worsening by the day. He suffered from gastric distress, bouts of malaria, and constant inflammation in his left eye, which Varina treated with mercury drops. Chronic neuralgia left even his face in constant agony. Often he was too sick to walk the half mile to his official office near Capitol Square and instead worked at home, Mary Jane lingering with her duster, cleaning the adjacent children’s nursery until she could get to his desk. She was there after he penned a response to the bread riot, reprinted in the Yankee press, in which he appealed to Southerners to “respond to the call of patriotism” with continued sacrifice and prayer.

  Most of Richmond’s prominent families responded, stripping their beds of blankets, sheets, and pillows; packing up the contents of their pantries; gathering coats and shoes; and sending everything off to Confederate soldiers. Some even offered their horses to replenish the army’s dwindling supply; thousands of mounts, on both sides, were lost to convalescent camps, where they recovered from battle fatigue and the equine equivalent of “soldier’s heart,” an early term for post-traumatic stress disorder. General Lee, in an April 16 letter to Davis, confided his anxiety over “the present immobility of the army, owing to the condition of our horses and the scarcity of forage and provisions.” Civilians who didn’t willingly contribute risked a visit from rebel “impressment agents,” charged with confiscating food, fuel, slaves, horses, and anything else the army might need. Elizabeth witnessed the agents seize horses from bread carts and unsuspecting peddlers arriving at the market. Most of the livery stables on Franklin and other streets had been completely swept of their steeds. Some residents, in anticipation of the coming agents, mounted diminutive slaves on their horses and sent them, under whip and spur, in the opposite direction.

  The agents already had come to Elizabeth’s door three times, shaking papers from the War Department in her face and claiming they had the right to her horses. They did not pay her on the spot as they had been instructed to do. Three of her brilliant white horses were gone, never to be seen again, and she stashed her last remaining horse in the smokehouse. There she considered him safe until agents again made the rounds in her neighborhood, creeping behind the mansions and peering inside stables. One night, when all was clear, she rolled up her Oriental rugs and led her horse inside her home. She wrapped his hooves with rags and spread straw across the floor of her study.

  She implored the horse to stay quiet, scratching his withers and sending her nieces with baskets of fresh apples to keep him company. To her amazement he stayed in the study for days at a time, until the officers gave up, never neighing or stomping loud enough to be heard. It was, she marveled, as though he “thoroughly understood matters”—that in the South’s “dear young Government” there was no safety for anyone, not even an innocent beast.

  A WEAN THAT’S BORN TO BE HUNG

  LEBANON, KENTUCKY

  When the last bullet had been fired and the smoke cleared Emma could see what she had done to Captain Logan, now writhing on the ground. There was a hole where the right side of his nose used to be, his once fine face caving in on itself. A pink ribbon of lip clung to his mouth by the thinnest thread of skin. She thought of his new bride, and how she would no longer “rejoice in the beauty of that manly face.” He was alive, at least for now, but “sadly spoiled.” She had one second to brace herself for a counterattack.

  The rebels rushed at her at once, each of them wanting the pleasure of killing her. They swiped their sabers at her neck, nicked a shallow gash across her horse’s throat. The Union men hurled themselves in the middle, protecting her, driving the enemy back, pouring volley after volley until half of the rebels lay dead. They gathered their prisoners and their wounded and returned to camp, where her commanding officers commended her “coolness.” They also told her she could not go undercover again as long as her regiment remained in Lebanon. “I would not be permitted to go out again in that vicinity, in the capacity of spy,” she wrote, “as I would most assuredly meet with some of those who had seen me desert their ranks, and I would consequently be hung up to the nearest tree.”

  Her disappointment about the end of her espionage career was soon eclipsed by news about James Reid. He had resigned his commission, planning to take his children and wife, who had suddenly become gravely ill, back to Scotland. At night Emma grew aware of an intensifying internal heat, her brain burning beneath her skull. Her body couldn’t settle on a temperature and a sheen of sweat formed along her goosebumped arms. She allowed herself to admit what was happening: a recurrence of the malaria she’d contracted nearly a year before, on the banks of the Chickahominy River near Richmond.

  She dreamed of her mother, who’d once confessed to a Scottish clergyman her fear that her youngest daughter would meet with a violent death; the clergyman had advised her mother not to worry. “It is an auld saying,” he replied, “an’ I believe a true one. A wean that’s born to be hung will never be drooned.” And now here she was, having survived her childhood, the bloodiest battles of the war, and several narrow escapes from the enemy, prepared to die in a mos
t anonymous and unspectacular manner, shivering on a cot in a tent. She yearned for the touch of her mother’s cool hand. She applied for a medical furlough and was denied, with no reason given. Discovery, she thought, was “far worse than death.” She refused to go to the hospital for reasons only James Reid and Jerome Robbins knew. The latter sat next to her now, feeding her sips of whiskey spiked with quinine sulfate, somewhat ambivalent about the job; he alone understood that Emma’s malaise was partly due to matters of the heart.

  Outside her tent, there was a short ripping sound followed by a boom. Then screaming, moaning, heavy huffs of breath. Jerome took her outstretched hand and lifted her. She willed her legs to support her weight and leaned against him, shuffle-dragging her way to the opening of the tent. A shell had exploded randomly, accidentally, near a group of soldiers sitting together. Through swirls of smoke and dust she saw fingers dangling from hands, hands torn from wrists, faces half missing, cubes of unidentifiable flesh, blood leaking from ears. A deck of cards was strewn about the ground, hands half played.

  As soon as she felt herself falling she felt herself caught. Jerome led her back to her tent, to her cot, and lowered her down. He stayed a moment, sitting next to her. The carnage was nothing she hadn’t seen before, but yet she felt a sinking inside, a collapse of every last reserve.

  She recognized the immediate and acute loss of her “soldierly qualities,” and loathed what she had become: “a poor, cowardly, nervous, whining woman, and as if to make up for lost time, and to give vent to my long-pent-up feelings, I could do nothing but weep hour after hour, until it would seem that my head was literally a fountain of tears and my heart was one great burden of sorrow.” Jerome hurried to tend to the wounded, leaving her alone, both of them aware of words left unsaid.