Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy

by Karen Abbott

  Emma Edmondson, as herself.

  (Library and Archives, Canada)

  In Washington, Emma took a room at a boardinghouse, paying rent with what was left of her soldier’s salary. She delighted in having female friends once again and planned to become a missionary. She dropped the last syllable of her family surname and sat for photographs, her first as a woman in five years. She thought often of James Reid, recalling in particular his words that Jerome had been her “only friend” in camp. On one Sunday afternoon, after church, she sat down in the parlor and composed a letter to her friend:

  Dear Jerome,

  This is Sabbath afternoon . . . anxious to drop you a line before going to visit some of the hospitals where so many of Hooker’s poor wounded soldiers are. . . . I intend to start on Wednesday for New York City. . . . I dare not write you the particulars of anything more until I hear from you and know where you are for fear it might fall into other hands. . . .

  Oh Jerome, I do miss you so much. There is no person living whose presence would be so agreeable to me this afternoon as yours.

  How is “Anna”? I hope you have received a favorable answer to your letter sent just before I came away. I always remember you, and sometimes her, at the Throne of Grace. May God bless you both and make you faithful to him and to each other. . . . I will write you from New York as soon as I make arrangements there. . . .

  Goodbye my dear boy.

  E. Edmonds

  Jerome took a brief furlough home to Michigan to see Anna and then rejoined the army in eastern Tennessee, where he received Emma’s letter. He was still recovering from his trip, during which Anna had told him she intended to marry someone else. To his surprise Emma’s words somehow cheered him, distracting him from his heartache, and once again he opened his diary. “I received a letter from my friend ‘Emma,’” he wrote, “whose history . . . is stranger than fiction.” He forgave her, finally, for sharing it with him.

  NO ONE IGNORANT OF THE DANGER

  RICHMOND AND EN ROUTE TO EUROPE

  Rose met with Jefferson Davis often during her year in Richmond, taking a carriage from her hotel to the Confederate White House, bringing Little Rose to play with the president’s daughter, Maggie. Normally Davis preferred to discuss the war only in written correspondence and steered visitors toward more frivolous banter. Over wine and juleps, he would reminisce about his days on the frontier, about meeting Andrew Jackson as a boy, about planting cotton, about anything he did when he was younger and free from this awful responsibility. During dinner with a Confederate colonel he mused for hours about “the instincts of cows, and calves, and horses and dogs and sheep and pigs.” The colonel politely excused himself around ten o’clock, fearing that by midnight the conversation would have evolved into a monologue on cats.

  But that summer’s events forced Davis to broach weightier topics. During the Battle of Gettysburg the Confederate army lost twenty-three thousand men, nearly a third of its numbers killed, wounded, or missing. Lee fell back toward Virginia with his caravan of casualties stretching fourteen miles. The simultaneous fall of Vicksburg was equally disastrous, yielding control of the Mississippi River to Union forces. Southern newspapers and politicians criticized Lee’s performance in Pennsylvania, calling the campaign “foolish and disastrous” and opining about his “utter want of generalship.” The losses also affected the Confederacy’s position abroad, as Davis and Lee had long dreamed of earning international recognition for their country through prowess on the battlefield. With each defeat that hope diminished, but the president had a last-ditch idea: he would send Rose Greenhow as his emissary to court the French and British elite, in the hope she might rally support for the Confederacy.

  It would be an unconventional, even unprecedented, move. The wives of US officials had occasionally joined their husbands on foreign assignments, but never before had an American president sent a woman abroad to represent her government. Davis considered Rose ideally suited for the job: she was, as his secretary of the navy said, “a clever woman . . . equally at home with Ministers of state or their doorkeepers, with leaders and the led,” and, just as important, “very slender—beautiful.” She was articulate, fairly fluent in French, and as imperious as any royal. And her imprisonment in a Union “Bastille” had stirred sympathy among Europe’s leading citizens, who considered it an example of Yankee vulgarity and oppression.

  Davis, Rose wrote, “affords me every facility in carrying out my mischief.”

  In her room at the Ballard House, Rose set her travel trunk atop her bed and filled it with necessities: pantalettes, corsets, hoop slips, crinolines, button-up boots, white kid gloves that barely hid the bones of her wrists. She had lost all her finery during her imprisonment and planned to shop in London and Paris, trading her mourning attire for silk ball gowns with Grecian corsages and double puff sleeves and cascading, knife-pleated skirts. She packed Little Rose’s favorite papier-mâché doll and her best gingham and wool dresses, intending to enroll her daughter in a Paris convent. She tucked a fresh leather journal in alongside her completed memoir, My Imprisonment and the First Year of Abolition Rule, and filled her gold-plated case with calling cards. She mustn’t forget two items for James Mason, the Confederate envoy in London: a box of fine Southern tobacco and a letter from Jefferson Davis, explaining why his services were no longer necessary in England.

  Rose knew the mission would be difficult, despite her considerable and deftly honed charms. Mason and his counterpart in Paris, John Slidell, had been lobbying for the Confederacy overseas since the beginning of 1862, hoping that the dearth of Southern cotton would compel Europe to confront the United States over its blockade and sympathize with the Confederacy. Although England and France fretted over the blockade they found ways to circumvent it, buying “white gold” from India, Egypt, and Brazil. Most of all, neither country wanted to support a loser, and they had both decided to wait and see whether the South proved its might on the battlefield (the bloody defeats at Antietam and, more recently, Gettysburg seemed to answer that question, at least for the moment). But Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation constituted Rose’s greatest challenge. The war was no longer about opposing ideologies or the oppressive Yankee government, but about ending slavery. As soon as word of the proclamation reached England, the masses held hundreds of meetings across the country to hail Lincoln’s action, a reaction that dissuaded the British cabinet from making any radical move benefiting the Confederacy.

  To pay for her trip, the Confederate government gave her 540 bales of cotton to be converted for a premium price in England. Before leaving Richmond she met with General Lee, who despite the recent losses impressed her with his calm, confident tone. She originally planned to go straight to Wilmington, North Carolina, where she and Little Rose would catch a blockade runner leaving for Bermuda, but instead took an impromptu detour to Charleston, currently under siege. She did not even stop to wash her face. Traveling south along the coast, she passed train cars loaded with cotton and even carriages and horses, all heading inland away from the surging Union troops, many of them regiments composed entirely of Negroes—a sight that made her recoil. Porters passed handbills warning about the imminent peril of the city and calling for three thousand slaves to work on the defenses. Nearing the city she heard the leaden boom of the guns.

  She stayed in Charleston long enough to meet with her old contact General Beauregard, who asked her to pass on a message to the president. Rose complied, sketching a diagram of rebel forces and composing a seventeen-page letter to Davis that underscored the gravity of the situation: Beauregard needed heavy guns and mortars to combat Union troops around Morris Island in the harbor; without them, Charleston would fall. “Be assured that every body is wide awake just now,” she wrote, “and no one ignorant of the danger to the Palmetto City.” She promised to send another update soon.

  Davis read the letter at his desk in his home office. He had been working there exclusively lately, his health so poor that rumors
in the War Department countenanced even the possibility of his death. Much of the cause may have been anxiety, fed both by his army’s precarious situation and by the suspicion that there was a mole in his midst, someone relating Confederate concerns and plans to the enemy as soon as they materialized. One month earlier he had expressed this fear to Confederate brigadier general G.J. Rains, insisting that “no printed paper could be kept secret.”

  Outside, just behind the door, Mary Jane gathered the children’s toys to return them to the nursery, making sure to leave nothing behind.

  On August 5, Rose and Little Rose set sail from Wilmington on the Phantom, a sharp, slim needle of a steamship, 193 feet long and only 22 feet wide, painted light gray to render her invisible on moonless nights. Every element of her design maximized her ability to slip past the Union blockade. She had two engines for speed and two hinged masts that could be dropped on deck to lower her profile. Her seven-foot draft allowed her to coast over the shallow bar at New Inlet, which presented a problem for bulkier Union warships. She burned hard, smokeless anthracite coal. Sailors wrapped her paddles with tarps to muffle the sound of the churning water. No one was permitted to smoke or speak on her deck. She normally didn’t take passengers, but Rose, on official government business, was an exception. Captain Stephen Porter, a furloughed naval officer, escorted her and Little Rose onboard and oversaw the loading of Rose’s bales of cotton, weighing from 500 to 700 pounds apiece. He had nine hours until the sky was wholly black and the tide high; then he could make a run for it. It was still light enough to glimpse the Yankee ships offshore, nosed in their direction, and many more were out there, drifting unseen.

  With pocket watch in hand, the captain counted the minutes. Two other blockade runners, the Pet and the Hebe, pushed off first. “There they go ahead of me,” he said, and Rose sighed at his “rather piteous” tone. “Oh never mind,” she snapped, “wait ’til the full tide is in.” She hid her own anxiety beneath a steadfastly serene expression, and busied herself putting Little Rose to bed in their stateroom. The girl was exhausted from the adventure and nearly asleep, the rise and fall of her chest matching the soft sways of the ship.

  And then the Phantom was off, whooshing past the Pet and the Hebe, slinking through a shallow channel, picking her way toward New Inlet. At half past midnight a Union blockader spotted her and launched a signal rocket, the descending flare’s imprint lingering on spots of sky. Four other Yankee ships took note and swarmed in, guns manned, firing rocket after rocket to mark the Phantom’s course.

  Rose watched from the deck, gripping the railing, narrowing her body as if it were one with the ship. The crew fueled the Phantom’s furnace with sides of bacon and turpentine-soaked cotton. They picked up speed, reaching sixteen knots, tearing through the V of blockaders, pushing and pushing and extending the distance until the enemy was no longer in sight. As soon as Rose was alone again, far out in the rocking sea, she ran to her room and vomited. When she recovered she penned an entry in her journal: “How my blood boils to think that even in the wide ocean we are not free from the despicable foe who seeks by numerical strength to crush us. . . . Yet God is just, so can this thing continue?”

  Little Rose awakened and insisted on accompanying her back to the deck. The crew spread a mattress between the cotton bales. Rose lowered herself onto it, fixing her eyes on the waning moon. Little Rose wobbled over, hands clasped against her temples. “Mama,” she cried, “I can’t stand to have my head bumped from side to side.” Rose locked the girl in the crook of her arm and twined her fingers in the bagging of the cotton bales, wishing for everything to be quiet and still. She kept a bucket by her side for the entire trip.

  By the end of their fourth day at sea they reached Bermuda, a British colony and neutral port. Confederate agents were allowed to transfer goods from blockade runners to larger ships bound for England, and Union vessels were forbidden to fire at rebel ships in Bermuda waters. Captain Porter escorted Rose and Little Rose to Mrs. Haywood’s, the lone lodging house on the island, where most guests were fellow Confederate expats waiting out the war. They all assembled in the parlor to welcome Rose and thank her for her service and sacrifice. She heard church bells ringing and considered attending Mass, but, feeling another wave of nausea, instead went straight to her room.

  During the next few weeks Rose took her daughter for long walks, admiring the whitewashed homes and riotous gardens, excursions marred only by encounters with the island’s black population. “The negroes are lazy, vicious, and insubordinate,” she complained to her journal. “The negro in this as other English Islands were emancipated in 1834, since which time the material wealth and prosperity of the Island has been constantly diminishing. . . . Few negro women reach the age of puberty without becoming mothers and it is an established etiquette that the first child shall be white in order to make indisputable the claim of the mother to good society. After this it does not damage her position should her succeeding progeny be black.” She dined often with Major Norman S. Walker, the Confederate agent in charge of military shipments, and discussed how he might send her coded dispatches from Richmond.

  They left for England at the end of August, arriving in mid-September, Rose having clung to her bucket all the way. Her first stop was Liverpool, where she planned to sell her cotton, and then it was on to London to meet various politicians and dignitaries. Despite the recent disappointments back home, she was confident about her chances. In all of her fifty years so few had dared to disagree with her, and the ones who had seldom failed to regret it.

  On a September afternoon back in Richmond, one of Elizabeth’s servants opened the door of the mansion to admit a pair of Confederate officers into the parlor. They identified themselves as detectives for General John Winder, provost marshal of Richmond, and requested Elizabeth’s permission to search the premises. Her brain whirred and clicked, deciding on a strategy. She smiled, inviting them inside as if they were old friends. Of course, she said, she knew General Winder well—what a decent and kind man, a true Christian, who had facilitated her efforts to aid the prisoners.

  If she mentioned the prisoners directly, perhaps the officers would be less likely to suspect that she was, at that very moment, hiding several Union escapees inside her secret room.

  She turned, motioning for the men to follow her, and saw her nieces at the foot of the stairs. A year had passed since her brother John had taken the girls away from their mother, and they hadn’t seen or heard from her since, a silence both comforting and disquieting. John was in the North now, delivering dispatches about Confederate strategy after the profound disappointment at Gettysburg. When there were disruptions on the RF&P railroad, Union raiding parties tearing up the lines, he made the hundred-mile journey on horseback.

  “These good men are tired of the war and would like to see our house,” she said, directing her words at Annie. “Please take your sister to your room and play until I bring you cookies.”

  Annie took Eliza by the hand and led her out of sight.

  Another Van Lew servant named Hannah appeared, and Elizabeth asked for some applesauce cookies and sweetened tea for the soldiers. Hannah returned to the parlor with tea and said she would start the cookies right away.

  Elizabeth suggested they begin their tour; there were fourteen rooms and the detectives were welcome to all of them. They strolled through the dining room and the parlor and descended into the basement kitchen, where Hannah was mixing sugar and eggs, keeping her eyes on the bowl. The detectives peered into cupboards, the fireplace, the windows granting a vista of the cascading back gardens, sloping down to the bank of the James. They lingered in the study, perusing newspapers stacked on the desk, taking books from shelves, flipping through pages. Elizabeth watched silently from the doorway, praying that the detectives would miss the pinpricked letters, that she and John hadn’t left any evidence behind.

  She was as annoyed by the intrusion as she was afraid of its possible consequences. Her brother often returne
d from his trips north bearing gifts for Winder: angle braces, metal strapping, carriage bolts, screws, nails, hinges—items useful in repairing battered freight wagons for the rebel army. This search seemed a violation of her unspoken deal with the Confederate general: she would continue to supply him with such goods (along with the occasional basket of fresh vegetables from her farm), and he would refrain from prying too deeply into her life.

  The detectives sipped their tea, taking their time; they hadn’t enjoyed many sweets since the war began. She glanced at the mantel. The second hand on the clock moved with agonizing lethargy. The silk of her chemise clung to her damp back.

  They came toward her and she stepped backward, letting them out of the study. She exhaled silently behind their backs.

  Two more stories to go.

  Elizabeth walked ahead of the detectives up the stairs, her breath thick in her throat. The men’s boots landed heavily on the wood. They reached the top of the stairs and started down the hall, working as a unit, pushing aside dresses in armoires, checking under walnut beds. They peeked into Annie’s room and returned her cheerful wave. At the end of the hall another set of stairs led to the top floor, and at the end of that hall, behind the coat of whitewash and the splintering old dresser, was the door to the secret room.

  Four Union soldiers huddled inside there now, having escaped from the prison on Belle Isle, where inmates were sheltered only by tents, exposed to the elements. One prisoner reported that fifteen to twenty-five men died there every day and were buried on the grounds, tucked inside thin sheets of canvas instead of coffins. After Elizabeth secured Confederate uniforms for the men, and when she deemed it safe, she would lead them to a wagon and tell them to lie on the bed, facedown. A servant would cover them with a tarp and pile horse manure on top, just enough to make a credible load. The men would breathe through strategically placed holes in the bottom, settling in for the ride to the Van Lew farm.