Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy

by Karen Abbott

  Rose curtsied deeply, holding the pose as Napoléon approached and extended his hand.

  “Vous parlez français, madame?” he asked.

  In nearly flawless French, which she’d learned from her late husband, Rose responded, “Non sire, je ne parle pas assez pour me faire comprendre, mais je sais que Votre Majesté parle parfaitement anglais [No sir, I do not speak well enough to make myself understood, but I know Your Majesty speaks English perfectly].”

  He smiled, his mustache tips slicing upward, and held Rose’s hand as he led her to a chair. He sat opposite her and leaned forward, intertwining long fingers.

  “You are from the South,” he said.

  “Yes sir, from that unhappy country.”

  She wasted no time making her case, urging the question of recognition. The Confederacy was entitled to it, she argued, and the moral strength it would provide.

  Napoléon was inclined to agree, for various reasons. He was a nationalist who sympathized with the aspirations of people for national self-determination. The Union blockade had disrupted the French economy, crashing the cotton textile industry and hindering the export of such luxury goods as wine, silks, clothes, and perfumes, and influential Parisian merchants were demanding that the government relieve their distress. Above all he wished to expand his empire overseas in Mexico, where he had troops stationed for two years, a plan the Lincoln administration vehemently opposed. And on a personal note, Napoléon shared Rose’s view of the American first family as boorish and unsophisticated. In August 1861 his cousin and close adviser, Prince Napoléon Joseph Charles Paul Bonaparte, “Plon-Plon” for short, attended a state dinner at the White House, disdainfully noting the president’s “large, hairy hands” and Mary Todd Lincoln’s attempt to speak French in an atrocious Kentucky accent. “Mrs. Lincoln,” the guest of honor reported, “was dressed in the French mode without any taste; she has the manner of a petit bourgeois and wears tin jewelry.”

  Now Napoléon hedged his bets, telling Rose he had hoped to support the South but could not do so alone. He had, in fact, made frequent overtures to England on the subject, which the country consistently “evaded or rejected.” Please, he urged, assure President Davis of his sympathy and his untiring efforts.

  Rose opened her mouth to respond, but the emperor wasn’t finished.

  “Tell the President that I have thoughts on his military plans,” he added. “He has not concentrated enough. The Yankees have also made true blunders. If instead of throwing all your strength upon Vicksburg, you could have left that to its fate, and strengthened Lee so as to have taken Washington, the war would have ended. England would have been obliged to recognize you, as I should, of course.”

  Rose felt her throat pulse against her neck. It didn’t matter that he was the emperor of France, or that she was a guest in the royal palace; no one would get away with criticizing the Confederacy in her presence.

  “The President is fully convinced of the wisdom of such a movement,” she said, the words hot in her mouth. “But there were grave political reasons for pursuing the course we have pursued in order to prevent the alienation of our own territory.” She raised an eyebrow and lowered her voice, adding, “Besides, you can have no just conception of the war and of our military operations. The State of Virginia is as great as this mighty Empire, and to show disregard to any portion of the country would excite feelings injurious in a crisis like this.”

  Napoléon conceded the point and changed the subject, asking about General Lee, and she took the opportunity to boast: “Sir, he is worthy to be one of your marshals.”

  With that she was finished and stood to go. The emperor again reached for her hand.

  “I wish you would remain in France,” he said.

  She allowed his hand to linger over hers and replied, “Even the attractions of your mighty capital cannot keep me.”

  “I know your history. The women of the South have excited the admiration of the world.” They walked toward the door, still touching. “I wish you a prosperous voyage, and tell President Davis that my admiration and my sympathy are with him and his people.”

  She turned to face him and tried one last time. “Ah, Sire,” she said, “I wish you would bid me tell him that you would recognize us as one.”

  “I wish to God I could. But I cannot do it without England. . . . But you may assure the president that I will make renewed efforts to serve him.”

  They said good-bye and Rose returned to her hotel, where she recorded the meeting in her diary—“So much for my interview with this ruler of the destiny of Europe”—and drafted letters to both Jefferson Davis and her friend Alexander Boteler. “I had the honor of an audience with the Emperor,” she wrote. “The French people are brutal ignorant and depraved to a degree beyond description and have no appreciation of our struggle.”

  Despite Rose’s disdain for the French she accepted every social invitation she received, taking particular delight in returning to the Tuileries Palace for a masked ball, where Napoléon III greeted her wearing a plain dark suit festooned with a broad red sash (a subdued choice of attire for the emperor, who usually dressed for such events as a seventeenth-century Venetian noble). She pinned red roses in her hair and jewels at her breast and felt, for the first time in nearly a decade, that her mourning had passed, that she had permission to separate her business from her pleasure, that not every glance or word or touch was a piece of currency waiting to be exchanged.

  The evening was like a scene from Arabian Nights, which she had just seen with Little Rose at the Théâtre Impérial, with armed guards lining the grand stairs “like so many petrified steel clad warriors” and the salon a wild blur of pomp and color: sword-wielding gentlemen in embroidered court dress; diplomats swathed in sashes and medals; ladies in gowns with exaggerated volume only at the back thanks to a modified crinoline called the crinolette, the precursor to the bustle. At midnight sharp the doors to the dining room swung open, but only the foreign ambassadors were invited to dine with the royal family. One ambassador asked Rose to accompany him, and she quickly accepted, thrusting her arm through his. The duc de Morny, Napoléon’s half-brother, engaged her right away. Rose deemed him “very like the emperor, only younger, handsomer, and not so intellectual looking.”

  She was less impressed with the women. Princess Mathilde, Napoléon’s first cousin and former fiancée, wore a magnificent tiara of diamonds but was herself “fat and vulgar looking.” Princess Clotilde, the wife of Prince Napoléon, Matilde’s brother, was “thin with sharp features, turned up nose and very unnatural looking.” The empress wore a dress of white tulle garnished with a smattering of brown velvet butterflies, and her thick neck was entirely obscured by looping rows of pearls. The entire room knew that her husband was currently having an affair with a dancer. “She is not at all pretty,” Rose concluded, “nor distinguished in appearance.” She stood next to the empress for as long as possible, a tacit invitation for everyone to compare.

  After the ball Rose felt “no desire to enter further with the gaieties of Paris” and longed for news from home. A letter from a Confederate friend in London buoyed up her spirits slightly—“I think things are looking better for ‘our’ side,” he wrote—but reports in the Yankee press suggested otherwise. The papers spoke of daily bread riots; food was so scarce in Richmond that every rat, mouse, and pigeon had deserted the city. A single hotel meal cost nine Confederate soldiers $600, and a common kitchen utensil cost $1,000. One woman sold her hair for $100 in order to buy four pounds of flour. The masses were turning against Jefferson Davis, suggesting that if he thought $25,000 and the presidential mansion weren’t sufficient compensation, then he had best resign.

  The military situation was equally troubling. Soldiers had to kill their best mules for sustenance. Davis was so desperate for new recruits that he urged passage of a law to employ free blacks and slaves in noncombatant duties normally performed by soldiers, so as to utilize every white man possible on the battlefield. Richm
ond was bound to the South only by a single narrow line of communication, and the city was in imminent danger. “As soon as General Butler has a sufficient force (and we know he is increasing it day by day),” read one report, “we trust he will do more than harass and threaten the rebels.”

  Rose still believed in her mission and in a Confederate triumph, but it was now a question, she wrote, “of hope deferred.” She did not know how much time she had left.

  DESPICABLE REMEDIES

  RICHMOND

  In early January both President Davis’s manservant and Varina’s personal maid, Betsy, fled to Washington and divulged sensitive information. “The condition of our servants began to be unsettled,” Varina noted, suspecting that they were being paid to go North. Ten days later, during a reception at the Confederate White House, someone kindled a fire in a woodpile in the basement in an attempt to burn it down; smoke led to its discovery just in time. In the excitement two more slaves escaped and the mansion was robbed, all in the same night. Speculation abounded: it was the work of “Yankee plotters,” of escaped Union prisoners, of the president’s other servants, of all of the above.

  Despite the increased risk Mary Jane continued to spy, being extra obsequious as she waited on the president and his visitors. She incorporated her reports into Varina’s dresses and hung a red shirt on the line, signaling to Elizabeth that a delivery was waiting at the seamstress’s home. Elizabeth gathered information from other sources, too, mainly her friend Charles Palmer, characterized by rebel officials as a “loud-talking, violent” opponent of secession, and William S. Rowley, who used the code name “Quaker.” She interpreted, edited, and enciphered their notes, checking her Polybius square carefully, each letter represented by a two-digit number. Her latest dispatch contained 146 words in all, or approximately 652 letters, requiring 1,304 laborious strokes of her pen to convey everything on her mind.

  At sundown on January 30 she handed the report to Merritt Rowley, “Quaker’s” seventeen-year-old son, watching him tuck it inside the hollowed-out heel of his boot. The boy had stayed with her a week in preparation for his journey, and she treated him as if he were her own, arranging for a guide to deliver him safely to Northern lines and giving him a copper Civil War “token” that would identify him as a loyal Unionist. Such tokens had been in circulation since 1862, when people—panicked about the possibility of being driven from their homes with all of their worldly possessions—started hoarding “real” money, rendering commerce all but impossible. Private merchants, in both North and South, began minting these tokens in order to fill the void. Tokens fell into two major categories: “store cards,” which advertised a business; and “patriotics,” which featured nationalistic slogans or images—“Union Forever” and “Death to Traitors” were popular choices. The Bureau of Military Information procured a number of tokens featuring the same pro-Union design and smuggled them out to spies in Southern territory. In case of capture, they could maintain plausible deniability since nearly everyone had a few tokens in a pocket or a purse.

  Elizabeth had one final piece of information to pass on, a warning as imperative as it was ironic. “Tell Butler,” she said, “that all women ought to be kept from passing from Baltimore to Richmond. They do a great deal of harm.” She knew of one who carried treasonous mail for the rebels, making the journey in a wagon while pretending to sell corn, and Elizabeth hoped the general would catch her. “General Butler will take care of you,” she promised, and watched from her window until Merritt Rowley slipped from sight.

  Despite being paid $1,000 in Confederate money, the guide shirked his duty, bringing the boy only as far as the Chickahominy River before abandoning him. Merritt emptied his pockets, coming up with a few graybacks to buy a ride across the river, crouching down in the boat to avoid the rebel pickets, their torches blinking like fireflies through the trees. It took him five days to journey the seventy-five miles southeast to Fort Monroe, where guards brought him to General Butler. The boy opened his palm to reveal the Union token and retrieved the letter from his muddy boot.

  Tokens used by Union spies to identify one another.

  (Courtesy of Bart Hall)

  An aide to Butler swiped acid across the page, waiting for the ink to reveal itself, for the innocuous message from “Eliza A. Jones” to become something else. Once the symbols appeared, the aide checked them against the cipher code and began transcribing the contents. Butler decided to test the boy, who stood before him, hat in hand.

  “Well, my boy,” he said, “where did you get that letter from?”

  The response came in a nervous tumble: “Miss Van Lew gave it to me. I stayed for a week with Miss Van Lew before I came away. Miss Lizzie said she wanted to send you a letter, and I said I would bring it. Miss Lizzie said you would take care of me. I left there last Saturday night. Miss Lizzie told me what to tell you.”

  “Well, what did she tell you to say? You need have no fear here.”

  “She told me to tell you of the situation of the army,” Merritt said, and summarized, from memory, the main points of Elizabeth’s letter: There was a plan to alleviate overcrowding in the city’s prisons by shipping the inmates off to Georgia, far removed from the battlefields of Virginia and from any potential rescue operations by the Union army. Lee had about twenty-five thousand men, and there was a rumor he was in secret session at Richmond. The city could be taken more easily now than at any other time since the war began.

  “Miss Van Lew,” he concluded, “said not to undervalue Lee’s force.” He relayed Elizabeth’s warning about seemingly innocent female travelers hoping to pass through the lines, and Butler sent him on his way.

  Alone, the general reread Elizabeth’s words: “Beware of new and rash council! Beware! . . . Do not underrate their strength and desperation.” He sent her report to Secretary of War Stanton with the appeal, “Now, or never, is the time to strike.” With a force of six thousand men, Butler proposed to “make a dash” for Richmond and free thousands of Union prisoners, men who would then aid in the second objective of his plan: the capture of the Confederate Cabinet and President Davis.

  At midnight on February 7, Elizabeth awakened to the terrifying clamor of the alarm bells. Lifting the hem of her nightgown, she rushed out to the parapet, craning her neck and scouring the skyline. She heard the familiar cry—“To arms! To arms! The Yankees are coming!”—the hauling of cannon through the streets, children running to and fro, the tramp of armed men in all directions. The time had come: Butler was acting on her information, striking just as she had advised.

  But the Confederates were ready, charging out to Bottom’s Bridge, ten miles from the city, digging earthworks and rifle pits and blocking the path with felled trees. Union forces retreated back to Fort Monroe with a loss of nine killed and wounded, wondering how their surprise raid had gone so wrong. Butler blamed the defeat on the “corruption and faithlessness” of a Yankee deserter who had tipped the enemy off.

  Elizabeth had little time to dwell on the disappointment. For weeks she had been receiving cryptic reports from informants inside Libby Prison, warning that there was to be an exit and she should prepare, and so she did, nailing dark blankets over the windows in her parlors and burning the gas day and night to heat the rooms. “We were so ready for them,” she wrote, but she had no advance notice of the specific date or exactly how it would be done.

  Working between the hours of 10:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m., using nothing but chisels and spoons, two inmates hacked through the back of a kitchen fireplace, creating a portal to the basement. From there a group of them, numbering about seventy, worked in shifts, excavating a fifty-foot tunnel to an enclosed yard across Twenty-First Street. The yard led to a gate fastened by a swinging bar, the only exit. Twice a day Libby’s clerk, Erasmus Ross, conducted a prisoner count. While five of them were digging below, their accomplices sneaked to the end of the line, hoping to be counted twice to conceal the absences. Once, eager to play a joke on Ross, some of the prisoners dec
ided to imitate the repeaters, tiptoeing to the end of the line. Ross first counted too many, then too few, and then, flummoxed, unleashed a furious tirade against the “damned Yankees,” who laughed so hard for so long that the clerk gave in and joined them. Never once did the prisoners suspect that Ross was secretly on their side.

  On the night of February 9 a group of 109 men, two or three at a time, made their way through the tunnel and across the yard, free at last. Several of them headed straight for Elizabeth’s mansion, pounding at the servants’ entry door and begging to be let in. Others huddled across the street, watching from the lawn of St. John’s Episcopal Church. The Van Lews’ driver answered the door. He studied the men, faces smeared with dirt, the chilled air turning their breath to smoke. He caught snatches of their explanation of who they were and why they had come. He knew that Elizabeth hid prisoners in her secret room, and that she had prepared the windows and parlors for the possibility of sudden and desperate guests. But he also knew that rebel officers had disguised themselves as friends in the past, setting traps for Elizabeth that she had so far managed to elude. He refused to be the one who facilitated her capture, and on that night—of all nights—she was not there to speak for herself.