by Karen Abbott
He said them to himself later that night, alone in his own tent. “I passed most of the day with Frank, who has been and is unwell,” he wrote. He pressed the pencil harder, as if the force of his hand could redirect her attention from James Reid back to him, and what he thought they’d had: “How strange are some of the incidents of life. . . . It is unpleasant to awaken to the conviction that one dear as a friend can forget, in their selfish interest, that others may not be void of the finer sensibilities of the human heart. It is a sad reality to which we awaken when we learn that others are receiving the devotion of one from whom we only claim friendship’s attention.”
She had kept other thoughts from Jerome, as well. She was despondent about the imminent departure of General Poe, her friend and mentor, who was also leaving the regiment. Without Poe she might lose her position as mail carrier, and with it, the freedom—those long, solitary rides—that gave Frank Thompson respite and helped him keep his secret. Many of the men who had enlisted with her in Michigan back in the spring of ’61 were gone, too, transferred to other regiments or wounded or killed. And she privately mourned the loss of someone she’d never met, a woman whose fate warranted one line in the Louisville Daily Democrat: “A young woman wearing soldier’s apparel, and belonging to the Fourteenth Iowa regiment, shot herself in Cairo on Sunday night because her sex was discovered.”
The story made Emma feel a sudden absence, a distancing from herself, as if she were living in the third person instead of the first, caught between pronouns. She had to decide which one of her selves to kill.
Once she made her choice she did so in a manner befitting Frank Thompson, who would not want her to weep or waver or pine. Three weeks after her last mission, on or around the night of April 17, she defied her fever and dressed in full uniform, slipping out of her tent and away from camp, slashing her way through the woods, saying good-bye to no one, each step as liberating as it was lonely. In the morning, at roll call, they would be looking for Frank Thompson and determine that he had deserted, a crime punishable by death. They would be ready to hang someone who had only briefly existed, a man she could make vanish just as easily as she conjured him.
A DREADFUL BLOW
VIRGINIA AND WASHINGTON, DC
On May 2, after the Battle of Chancellorsville in northeastern Virginia—a Confederate victory against all odds, as Lee’s army was half the size of Hooker’s—Stonewall Jackson was struck by three balls: one passed through his right hand; another through his left arm between elbow and wrist; and the last two inches below the left shoulder, shattering the bone and serving the brachial artery. He fell from Little Sorrel and was caught by a Confederate captain, to whom he remarked, “All my wounds are by my own men.” Field surgeons amputated the arm and were about to toss it onto a pile of limbs, but Jackson’s chaplain saved it, giving it a proper Christian burial in a nearby cemetery. “If it was in my power to replace my arm,” Jackson told the chaplain, “I would not dare do it unless I could know it was the will of my Heavenly Father.” One of the general’s staff officers would mark the area with a tombstone inscribed:
ARM OF STONEWALL JACKSON MAY 3, 1863
A week later pneumonia had set in, and Jackson was in critical condition. At the Confederate White House, Mary Jane watched Jefferson Davis wait for the inevitable, rubbing his temples with bony fingers, pacing with the tick of the clock. He did no work, confessing that he was “unable to think of anything but the impending calamity.” Two of Mary Jane’s fellow servants were dispatched to wait for news, one to the telegraph office and the other to the Richmond depot, where hundreds of people gathered for each arriving train, shouting up to the engineer, “How is he? Is he better?”
Stonewall Jackson died on a Sunday, just as he’d always wanted. His body arrived in Richmond the following morning, where it would lie in state before being buried in Lexington, Virginia, more than a hundred miles away from his arm. Mary Jane was there that evening when the president told a visitor, “You must excuse me. I am still staggering from a dreadful blow. I cannot think.” A week later, General Lee came to Richmond to confer with Davis about his next move: he would embark on his Gettysburg campaign, striking across the Potomac to invade the North for a second time, putting himself in a position to threaten Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington.
Belle was visiting family friends in Alabama when she learned of the tragic news. As a public sign of mourning she wrapped a black crepe band around the sleeve of her riding habit, directly over the scar on her arm. She would wear the band for thirty days, the time allotted for the outward sign of a soldier’s sorrow, but privately she mourned the general longer, invoking him in her dreams and drafting a brief elegy: “It is not for me to trace the career and paint the virtues of ‘Stonewall’ Jackson,” she wrote. “That task is reserved for an abler pen; but I may be permitted to record my poignant grief. . . . The sorrow of the South is unmitigated and inextinguishable. . . . [His glory] had neither dawn nor twilight. It rose and set in meridian splendor.”
She had enjoyed her five-month tour though the South, although the memories were now bittersweet, since Stonewall had been the one to advise her to go. In Culpeper, Virginia, she spent a night at a hotel popular with blockade runners and impressed her fellow boarders by using perfume instead of water for her bath. “She was a brilliant talker,” said one, “and soon everybody in the room was attracted to her, especially the men. She talked chiefly to the men—indeed, I am afraid she did not care particularly for the women.” In Knoxville, Tennessee, while she was visiting with Confederate general Joseph Johnston, the Florida Brass Band serenaded her and a crowd exhorted her to make a speech. Belle urged the general to appear in her stead, but when he refused she poked her head through the window: “Gentlemen!” she called. “Like General Johnston, I can fight but I cannot make speeches. You have my heartfelt thanks for the compliment.”
In Montgomery, Alabama, she heard a rumor that Stonewall had been shot, but that the wound was minor. She was not prepared for the reality, delivered shortly thereafter via telegram from the office of Governor John Gill Shorter. She quickly sent a wire to Virginia governor John Letcher for confirmation: “Please telegh if Gen. Jackson is dead. If so save me a lock of his hair. Yours truly, Belle Boyd.”
Wearing her mourning armband, she made one last stop in Charleston, South Carolina, where she dined with General Beauregard and his staff officers. Beauregard, the once-rising military star of First Manassas, had since clashed with Jefferson Davis and been banished to the Palmetto City. One of the general’s officers presented Belle with fruit and a parrot, both fresh from Nassau via a blockade runner. Belle conspired to take the parrot with her as she headed home, and planned to teach it to say Stonewall’s name. The press traced her journey back to the Shenandoah Valley, reporting, strangely, a pit stop in Philadelphia, where she allegedly stayed in a brothel on Twelfth Street, dressing in male attire. The story prompted Union authorities to pursue her for entering Northern territory, a violation of the conditions of her parole.
By the time Belle arrived in Martinsburg in mid-June, she found that home had changed irrecoverably. At a convention in Wheeling, Virginia, the northwest portion of the state had seceded to become its own state, West Virginia, the thirty-fifth in the Union. Berkeley County, which included Martinsburg, voted in favor of annexation into the Union 645 to 7. Confederate soldiers who had missed the vote refused to recognize West Virginia’s legitimacy, as did Jefferson Davis and the editorial boards of Southern newspapers. “The last scene in a stupid farce was played at Wheeling,” scoffed the Richmond Whig, “in the pretended inauguration of ‘West Virginia’ as a State. We put the account on record for the present amusement of our readers, but more especially for the future instruction of prosecuting attorneys, when they come to try some of these smart fellows for treason.” The new West Virginia constitution freed all slaves born after July 4, 1863, and freed all others on their twenty-fifth birthdays. Belle would no longer own Eliza, but the
former slave would always remain loyal to her; decades later, the headline for her obituary read: “Was Property of Belle Boyd.”
As vexing as Belle found the concept of “West Virginia,” she had more immediate concerns. Her mother, now thirty-seven, was about to give birth to another child, and her father was once again on sick leave from the army, having suffered from exhaustion since Stonewall’s final campaign. General Lee’s Gettysburg Campaign had ended with staggering Confederate losses, and cars traveling southward along the newly repaired Baltimore & Ohio Railroad carried thousands of wounded men. All private homes, including Belle’s, served as makeshift hospitals, with the men on cots scattered throughout parlors and studies and hallways. Whenever Belle wasn’t tending to her parents she acted as nurse, boiling linens, changing bandages, and offering sips from her private stash of whiskey.
Fear of another arrest clawed at the back of Belle’s mind. The Confederates had once again retreated from Martinsburg, leaving it vulnerable to Union occupation. Even if she hadn’t gone to Philadelphia, West Virginia was now a Union state, and a visit home was a clear violation of her parole. She hoped, amid the aftermath of the battle, that she could remain inconspicuous, but certain adversaries in the Shenandoah Valley had snidely noted her return. “’Tis said Belle Boyd is in town tonight,” wrote Lucy Buck. “What next?”
Belle’s baby sister was just three days old when, as she sat in her mother’s room, she heard Eliza exclaim, “Oh, here comes de Yankees!” She crept to the window, peering out with one cautious eye. An entire brigade looped around the front of her home. There were the familiar hard raps on the door; she dreaded descending the stairs. Major Nathan Goff, future West Virginia congressman, secretary of the US navy, and Federal judge, stood in her drawing room, on the very spot where, two years earlier, she’d shot the Yankee soldier dead. Belle took note of his blandly earnest expression and arranged her features to match it.
“Miss Boyd,” he said, “General Kelly commanded me to call and see if you really had remained home, such a report having reached headquarters. But he did not credit it, so I have come to ascertain the truth.”
She tilted her head and replied, “Major Goff, what is there so peculiarly strange in my remaining in my own home with my parents?”
Goff looked stumped. “But do you not think it rather dangerous? Are you then not really afraid of being arrested?”
“Oh no,” Belle gasped, “for I don’t know why they should do so. I am no criminal!”
“Yes, true,” Goff conceded, “but you are a rebel and will do more harm to our cause than half the men could do.”
“But there are other rebels besides myself.”
“Yes, but then not so dangerous as yourself.”
Belle took the words as a compliment and couldn’t bring herself to challenge them. They stared wordlessly at each other, Belle’s baby sister wailing in the background. “Good morning,” the major said finally, tipping his hat. He showed himself out and led his brigade in a slow march down South Queen Street.
For the next few days the view outside the Boyd home was free of Yankee officers, and Belle hoped she would not be bothered again. Her mother had fallen ill, unable to sit up or eat solid food, her only nourishment broth sipped through a china feeding cup. Her midsection was tightly swathed in a damp warm towel, a practice known as “abdominal binding” that would mold her figure back into shape. Belle spent hours massaging her mother’s stomach, trying to rid her body of any remaining placenta or blood. The July heat smothered the room. Belle was terrified that Mary might have puerperal fever, a bacterial infection for which there was no cure, often caused by attending doctors who didn’t bother to wash their hands. As one prominent obstetrician put it, “Doctors are gentlemen, and gentlemen’s hands are clean.”
But one of Captain Goff’s men soon returned, bearing an order for Belle’s arrest. Benjamin Boyd met him in the drawing room. His wife was poorly, he explained, and if they took her daughter now, it might literally kill her. Would they consider letting Belle stay at home, at least until his wife’s condition wasn’t so dire? The officer acquiesced, stationing a chain of guards around her house, and Belle made the most of her confinement. At night she kept her window open to listen to their conversations, and during the day she chatted with them on the porch, asking about the bloody draft riots in New York, her eyes peering above the wooden slats of her fan. One soldier proved particularly attentive until his comrade came along and said, with an air of prophetic warning, “Know who that is? Why, that’s Belle Boyd. First thing you know she will chloroform you; better keep a watch out for her.” Another feared she might “send a dagger through their hearts.”
Her reprieve was short-lived. A few weeks later Captain Horace Kellogg of the 123rd Ohio rang the bell of the Boyd home, announcing that Secretary of War Edwin Stanton wanted Belle in Washington by eleven o’clock the following morning. At the news Mary Boyd suffered a nervous relapse, surely thinking of her nephew, William Boyd Compton, who four months earlier had been captured by Union officials and sentenced to be hanged.
Belle wiped her mother’s brow and told her not to worry; she could take care of herself. A year before, her prison sentence had seemed romantic and brave, but the prospect now struck her as “dreary.” Her mother was ill, her father was injured, her little siblings were frightened and helpless. She had no desire to burnish or expand her reputation as the Secesh Cleopatra, at least not at the moment.
Her father accompanied her on the train, and for a hundred miles she wept into the sleeve of his muslin shirt, fearing she would never see her family again. At the prison gates he leaned to kiss the crown of her head and told her good-bye.
Inside Carroll Prison, a row of town houses alongside the Old Capitol Prison, guards led her past cells crammed with rebels, prisoners of state, hostages, blockade runners, smugglers, spies, and numerous Federal officers convicted of defrauding the government. She was given what was colloquially known as the “room for distinguished guests,” a small honor that failed to elevate her mood. Despite the lofty moniker, her cell resembled all the others: ten by twelve feet, its single window streaked with grime. A broken chair and splintered table perched at the foot of a rusty iron bed. The table held a chipped washbowl and pitcher set, and she checked her reflection in jagged shards of mirror set inside a wooden frame.
She took an instant dislike to one of her guards, perceiving an insult behind his every word and expression. In retaliation she loosened a brick from her windowsill and hid it beneath her dress, waiting. The next time he paced beneath her cell, she pushed her hands through the bars and aimed it squarely at his head.
A few days into her imprisonment Belle got new neighbors, including a “Miss Ida P.,” charged with being a rebel mail carrier. Superintendent Wood, hoping Belle and Ida might discuss methods, routes, and members of the Confederate mail service, allowed them to visit each other’s cells, always under the close watch of Private Lyons Wakeman of the 153rd New York. When Belle blew kisses to the blue-eyed, five-foot-tall soldier she was unwittingly flirting with a woman: twenty-year-old Sarah Rosetta Wakeman, who had left her home in upstate New York a year earlier and reinvented herself as a man. She signed many of her letters home “Rosetta,” confident that her true identity would remain secret as long as she needed it to be.
After fleeing her camp in Kentucky, Emma took the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad to a random destination: Oberlin, Ohio, where she checked into a boardinghouse, ridden with chills and fever, still dressed and living as Frank Thompson. For the first time Frank felt like a disguise, an identity she hid inside rather than owned, and she needed to summon the energy to shed him for good. Over the next few weeks, as her fever abated, she did, boarding a train for Washington, DC, where she traded her frock coat and trousers for a corset and petticoats and let her curls grow out.
“I never for a moment considered myself a deserter,” she wrote. “I left because I could hold out no longer”—words that applied both t
o leaving the army and to leaving her old identity behind. She took solace in the knowledge that she retained the best of Frank Thompson: his daring, his cunning, his seamless adaptability—the parts that had been hers all along. How strange, she thought, that she’d allowed two men, a species she once considered the enemy, to know both sides of her equally, and even stranger that they’d kept her revelations to themselves.
She had no idea what happened at camp after she’d deserted, that James Reid, before leaving himself, had paid a visit to Jerome Robbins’s tent. The men exchanged words about Emma, words that, either directly or obliquely, confirmed what Jerome didn’t want to believe—Reid and Emma, his “Frank,” were lovers. Enraged, Jerome reached for his diary: “Do you know I have learned another lesson in the great book of human nature?” He paused for a moment, and decided to protect his friend even as he disparaged her. “Frank,” he continued, “has deserted for which I do not blame him. . . . He prepared me for his departure in part. . . . Yet he did not prepare me for his ingratitude and utter disregard for the finer sensibilities of others. Of all others whom I trusted as friends he was the last I deemed capable of the petty baseness which was betrayed by his friend R at the last moment.”
He felt powerless to record the details, the tangents of his spinning thoughts. He had concealed Emma’s identity for nearly three years, proved his willingness to both see her for what she was and look discreetly away. Had she ever acknowledged his sacrifice? Did she realize the perfidy of her actions, the hypocrisy of her prayers? Jerome had been complicit, a blind and eager fool, and now the burden of her secret wasn’t his alone. Everyone had heard about the confrontation between him and James and now his comrades were gossiping in their tents, snickering around their fires, mocking a confidence for which he had risked his life. “We are having quite a time at the expense of our brigade postmaster,” wrote William Boston, a soldier with the 20th Michigan. “He turns out to be a girl, and has deserted when his lover, Inspector Read [sic], and General Poe, resigned. She went by the name Frank and was a pretty girl.”