Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy

by Karen Abbott

  She was growing tired and short on patience; everything, simply put, began to seem “stupid.” Dinner at Westbourne Terrace was “stupid.” Dinner at the table d’hôte was not only “very stupid” but also “disagreeable.” She endured the tedious company of “le creme de la creme de societie” during a “very stupid” trip to the London zoo. “The most interesting object was a very intelligent but malignant monkey,” she recounted, “which approached more nearly in intelligence to man than was at all comfortable. In fact, I think the Yankee President would have had a goodly feeling of fellowship.”

  Another pleasant meeting with Thomas Carlyle during which he praised her “gallant countrymen” was followed by “3 stupid visits.” A visit with Mr. and Mrs. George Watson-Taylor, owners of the island of Montecristo, and their friends left her bored and unimpressed. “They are all stupid,” Rose concluded, “and [I was] right glad when it was time to come home.” An afternoon at the House of Commons was especially disappointing—nothing like her time spent in the Senate gallery back in Washington: “The place assigned for ladies is small and dark and screened from observation by a bronze grating. It is almost impossible to hear. Written up on the wall in the only place where a ray of light penetrates: ‘Silence is especially enjoined,’ which seemed the most absurd idea for a ladies gallery.” Even a charity event at the Grand Hotel was “dull and lifeless,” as the men mingled on one side of the ballroom and the women on the other, with “no conversation going on between the sexes.”

  Alone in her hotel room Rose wrote melancholy diary entries, fat tears blurring the ink: “What trifles color life and make it dark as night? Blessed are they who let no human feeling stir their lives. I know I ought not to be miserable and yet I am and tears which I try to keep back flow down my cheek and blind me.” Abruptly she changed tone, scolding herself for revealing too much, even on the page. “Well,” she signed off, “I will put up my paper and hope that tomorrow’s sun will disperse the cloud, which is now heavy upon my soul. “Je suis très misérable ce soir. Au revoir, Mrs. Greenhow, vous êtes très mauvaise compagnie [I am very miserable tonight. Good-bye, Mrs. Greenhow, you are very poor company].”

  In public she relied on her default emotions of anger and disgust, as exhibited one night during a party attended by a number of London abolitionists. One guest innocently posed a question: Who was the superior man, President Lincoln or President Davis?

  Rose turned to face him and replied, “Sir, if you accept the scientific weight rather than the religious one—and believe man in the beginning was a baboon or an orangutan, and that successive ages of improvement has brought him to this present high state of perfection, almost equaling the God head—I will assume Mr. Lincoln is the beginning of the specimen, Mr. Davis the end.”

  The man backed away and did not approach her again.

  Another guest, the Reverend Newman Hall, a prominent supporter of the Union, seized the chance to lecture Rose about slavery. She listened for a moment, sipping her sherry, until she could no longer tolerate his unintelligible nonsense.

  “Your remarks are so absurd,” she declared, “that I could almost suppose that you could have derived your argument from the romance of Mrs. Beecher Stowe.”

  A crowd had gathered around them, turning its collective head to follow the volley of words.

  Hall confessed that Mrs. Stowe was, in fact, an inspiration, at which point Rose refused further conversation. “I consider you a subject for compassionate tolerance rather than argument,” she murmured in mock sympathy, “and a candidate for the strait jacket.”

  The crowd tittered and hissed.

  “What about the massacre at Fort Pillow?” Hall persisted, referring to a recent battle along the Mississippi River in Tennessee, where Confederate troops slaughtered more than three hundred soldiers of the US Colored Troops after they had surrendered. From the North came reports of unimaginable butchery: one man nailed to the boards of a tent so he couldn’t escape when it was set afire; Negro children as young as seven forced to stand and face a rebel firing squad. “If I were a Negro,” he argued, “I would have taken arms!”

  The crowd fell silent, making room for Rose’s reply. She hurled her words: “Then I would have shot you with as little compassion as I would a dog. You must excuse me but I do not consider the opinions of a man who confesses Mrs. Stowe as his authority worthy of reputation.”

  “The sympathy of England is worth something,” he protested.

  “The sympathy of the enlightened classes are all with us. Besides, we attach far less importance to that now than you seem to think. When it is to your interest to recognize us, you will. Our destiny is entirely in our own hands and the events of this war have removed from us all anxiety upon the slavery question. The fate of the slave rests with his Southern Masters, as the Masters with God.”

  She allowed Hall one last line: “But will you free him?”

  “Never! Either extermination or eternal slavery is his lot, according to the lights before me.”

  The crowd parted, letting her pass, flinging whispers at her back. She took a carriage back to her room and turned in for the night, too tired even to cry.

  BE PRUDENT AND NEVER COME AGAIN

  RICHMOND

  On April 7, in an outbuilding behind a farm on the edge of the city, Elizabeth stood over an open metallic coffin, staring at a month-old corpse. The body was that of Ulric Dahlgren, a Union colonel just twenty-one years old, who had been killed during General Butler’s latest raid on the city, a second bid to liberate Union prisoners that had gone spectacularly wrong. Again the alarm bells had rung late in the night, coaxing Richmond’s motley home defense brigade—clerks, factory workers, politicians, merchants, schoolboys, and elderly men—out of bed and into five battalions, trudging their way to the battle front. Elizabeth had seen them drilling earlier that afternoon, spotting many Northern men among them—“Some I know to be Unionists,” she wrote. “So potent is fear to blind conscience!”

  Union troops, led by Colonel Dahlgren, advanced on the city, but were betrayed again by a Northern deserter. Dahlgren’s men failed to connect with another body of Federal troops under H. Judson Kilpatrick, and the Confederates took advantage of the confusion. Kilpatrick was forced to withdraw toward the Peninsula and the safety of Union lines, while Dahlgren was left to contend with Richmond’s local militia and reserves. He, too, tried to retreat, but fell into an ambush and was fired upon and killed. The Confederates claimed to have found on Dahlgren’s body papers detailing a plan to execute Jefferson Davis and his entire cabinet, but Elizabeth believed they were forged—nothing more than an attempt to “irritate and inflame” the Southern people and defame a noble man. After defacing Dahlgren’s corpse and putting it on display at the train depot, they buried it in a shallow, muddy hole below Oakwood Cemetery.

  Elizabeth bribed a Negro gravedigger to divulge the exact location of the grave, and three members of the Richmond Underground—including a current candidate for mayor—dug up Dahlgren’s body and conveyed it to the farmhouse in a mule-drawn wagon. That morning, as soon as her new boarder, General Winder, finished eating breakfast with her mother Eliza (he seemed to have a soft spot for the sixty-six-year-old widow, just two years older than he) the women called for a carriage, planning to meet their Unionist friends at the farmhouse. Winder professed to be on his way to the office, but Elizabeth suspected he first would spend some time rifling through her papers and drawers, both exasperated and pleased by the lack of damning evidence.

  Now, at the farmhouse, Elizabeth lowered herself closer to the coffin. The young colonel wore an unbleached cotton shirt and the pantaloons of a Confederate, with a tattered camp blanket for a shroud. The pinky finger of his left hand had been cut off for its golden ring, a memento from a deceased sister, and his prosthetic wooden leg had been sent to service a wounded rebel soldier. He had not been embalmed, nor treated with carbolic acid to ward off the odor of decomposition, but she was surprised by his state of preser
vation. Everything except his head, where he had been shot, was “fair, fine, and firm,” with just an occasional purple blotch, like mildew, marring his skin. “The comeliness of the young face was gone,” she saw, “yet the features seemed regular and there was a wonderful look, firmness or energy stamped upon them.” Gently she let her hands drift across his chest, feeling for wounds and finding none. She cut a lock of his red hair, intending to smuggle it to his father, a rear admiral in the US Navy, through the Underground.

  They were taking an incredible risk, but she believed Dahlgren deserved a proper viewing and burial in keeping with the peacetime ideal of the “good death”—the desire of every person, male or female, Northern or Southern, to die well and, in the tradition of ars moriendi, even artfully: surrendering the soul gracefully, meeting the devil’s temptations, being laid to rest in a way befitting the life already led. War made a good death difficult. Men died far from home, leaving the fate of their remains in the hands of strangers or even enemies, as in the case of Ulric Dahlgren. In reburying the colonel, Elizabeth and the Richmond Underground were taking control of his death and making it, after the fact, a good one.

  The men hoisted the casket and slid it back into the wagon, covering it with a load of young peach trees to fool the rebel pickets. They headed to another friend’s farm just outside the city limits, planted a peach tree over Dahlgren’s grave, and reported to Elizabeth upon their return to Richmond. “Every true Union heart who knew of this day’s work,” she wrote in her diary, “felt happier for having charge of this precious dust.”

  She returned the diary to its hiding place and headed out again, crossing the street to Eliza Carrington’s home to read Mary Jane’s latest report. There was much work to do before General Winder returned for the night.

  Even Winder hadn’t been able to save Elizabeth’s brother John from conscription, but he did place John in his own regiment, the 18th Virginia, and promised to protect him and keep him from active duty. John didn’t even have to wear a uniform, and he won the affection of his company by sharing his generous supply of whiskey. When Elizabeth offered Winder $6,000 in Confederate bills for the favor, the general seemed insulted, explaining that he had helped because John’s conscription was a “clear case of personal animosity to the family.” Elizabeth had known the general since the beginning of the war, had deftly played the mouse to his cat. She studied his face, gauged the inflection in his voice, and concluded he was being genuine.

  After nearly three years of dealing with Winder, throughout all of their delicate negotiations and volatile truces, she finally understood: he recognized her as a true patriot, someone who didn’t want to denigrate the South so much as nudge it back to where it belonged, a citizen stuck in a prodigal country. Because she was a woman—a wealthy, socially prominent woman at that—he tempered his suspicions with decency and Southern manners. He respected her dedication to her cause even as it diverged from his own, and the constant monitoring and attempts at entrapment were merely requirements of his job.

  Elizabeth suspected, though, that his understanding extended only so far, that his willingness to look the other way was based entirely on what he might find.

  With that in mind, as long as Winder was her boarder, she conducted her correspondence with Union officials from Eliza’s home. At General Butler’s request, she sent her spies through the lines with reports about Confederate plans to capture Norfolk and the skimpy defenses around the city: “nothing in Richmond except Home Guards & the men in Batteries & a cavalry force of 1500 men.” Butler responded, addressing his queries to his “dear niece”—a unintended departure from his first letter to his “dear aunt” and a mistake that could have been deadly if detected by Confederate officials. “My Dear Niece,” read one,

  Your Aunt Mary has decidedly improved in health, and will be so far helped by the spring air and warm weather as to make her quite well.

  Your old acquaintance, the Quaker, called on me two or three days ago, and is quite well and very happy to have escaped so luckily a visitation of the prevailing fever in his town, of which you have heard. He is going back to the North soon. He says your sisters are all quarreling over the question whose baby is the prettiest, but I decided in favor of Emily’s perhaps because it is the fattest. All are well and send love.

  I should like to tell you about the Negro soldiers here, but I suppose if I did they would not let the letters go through. Keep up good heart, Eliza. I hope we shall soon get through our trials, and meet in a better country where all will be peace and happiness.

  Your affectionate Uncle, Thomas ap Jones

  Alone in Eliza’s study, curtains drawn, Elizabeth applied acid to the letter and held it close to the gaslight, waiting for the real message to emerge:

  Give what account you can of the rebel rams. Letter about messenger received. Does messenger need money? If so, give him all he wants, and it shall be repaid. Arrests will be made. Will there be an attack in North Carolina? How many troops are there? Will Richmond be evacuated? If any thought of it, send word at once at my expense. Give all possible facts.

  As payment for her spying, Elizabeth requested shoes, gunpowder tea, and a “muff of the latest style”—items that had grown increasingly expensive and hard to find, especially since John could no longer travel to the North. Butler also sent $50,000 in Confederate money for her to use in recruiting others (“employ . . . only those you know to be faithful, brave, and true,” he cautioned), and on one occasion sent her to an informant in the last place she’d expect: General Winder’s office. For two years, Captain Philip Cashmeyer had been Winder’s chief aide and “pet,” and Elizabeth found it hard to believe that he was actually a Union spy.

  His loyalty to the Confederacy had seemed unimpeachable save for one recent incident: he had been caught giving an exchanged Federal prisoner a package containing several letters, written in his native German, and copies of orders issued from Winder’s office. He defended himself, claiming that he wanted to impress his wife in Baltimore with evidence of his importance as a Confederate official, but was arrested and imprisoned in Castle Thunder until the letters could be translated and examined. The investigating officer informed Winder that Cashmeyer had made “a contemptible ass” of himself but that he was no traitor. He was, however, still under suspicion, which made Elizabeth’s mission all the more dangerous.

  She carried in her bosom a confidential letter from Butler to Cashmeyer, imploring him to meet another Unionist at New Kent Court House. The challenge would be calling on Cashmeyer without attracting Winder’s suspicion; if she had business in that office, the general would surely wonder why she hadn’t come straight to him. Thinking the Winder Building’s side entrance on Tenth Street might be safer, she ducked in, creeping past the offices of various aides and adjutants and quartermasters. She found Cashmeyer alone, sitting at his desk. Her heart tripped.

  If General Butler was wrong about him—if Cashmeyer really was a devoted Confederate—this incident would be evidence that Winder couldn’t ignore. He would arrest her and send her to prison, if her neighbors didn’t kill her first.

  Without a word she dipped her hand down her bodice and produced the letter, and without a word he took it. She watched as he read, his skin turning “deadly pale.” Abruptly he stood and then listed to one side, grasping his desk for purchase. She turned to leave, and he followed her, speaking in broken English.

  “Be prudent and never come again,” he warned. “I will come to see you.”

  On the last Saturday in April, in the dead of night, Elizabeth was pulled from her sleep by her driver whisper-screaming her name: Miss Elizabeth. He stood in her doorway, lantern in hand, and told her that three Union soldiers, just escaped from Libby, had knocked on the servants’ entry door. They were still there, waiting outside, hoping to come in.

  Following him on tiptoe, she tried to make herself weightless as she passed Winder’s room, descended the stairs, and turned toward the back of the house. She open
ed the door, pressed a finger against closed lips, and motioned for the men to enter. She could not risk bringing them upstairs, past Winder’s floor, to the secret room, and instead led them down to the kitchen in the basement. There they hid in dank, dark corners behind towering bags of turnips and potatoes. She told them she would be back with food and to direct them to the outhouse, and emphasized that under no circumstances were they to come upstairs.

  For the next few days she strove to maintain composure when both she and Winder were home. Fortunately the general was preoccupied with work, dealing with the case of Dr. Mary E. Walker, a rare female surgeon for the Union army whose costume of men’s pants, boots, cloak, and broad-brimmed beaver hat made her even more of a curiosity. She had been arrested in Georgia under suspicion of being a Union spy and sent to Castle Thunder, where she gave testy interviews to Richmond reporters. “I am a lady, gentlemen,” she stressed, “and I dare any man to insult me.” For emphasis she stroked a small knife resting on her lap.

  On Saturday morning, just hours before the Libby prisoners escaped, Dr. Walker—or “this disgusting production of Yankeeland,” as the Whig preferred to describe her—was marched from her cell to Winder’s office, presumably for a conference about sending her north under a flag of truce. The general had been kept busy organizing the logistics of her exchange, as well as the transportation of a hundred Libby prisoners from Richmond to Danville, Virginia, to relieve overcrowding. Elizabeth was frantic herself, trying to round up three Confederate uniforms for her escapees and arrange for their journey north, and did not even consider the possibility of Winder’s detectives showing up at her door until the moment they were actually there.