Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy

by Karen Abbott

  She couldn’t recall if they were the same men who had searched her home before, but she approached their intrusion in the same manner, smiling and ushering them inside as if they were invited guests. She again instructed her nieces to go and play quietly. She suggested they might enjoy some sweet tea and homemade cookies. She began the tour of fourteen rooms—library, parlor, dining room, their boss’s temporary chamber. She led them upstairs and down the hall, stopping at the entrance to the secret room, facing the wall to close her eyes and moderate her breath. Only the basement kitchen was left.

  She started down the first set of stairs and then the second, the men inches from her back, a roaring quiet in her ears. She circled the wooden table and benches, long enough to seat a staff of twenty, and walked past the spit for roasting pigs. She approached the far corners and hoped the heaping bags of turnips and potatoes wouldn’t suddenly and inexplicably move.

  The detectives ate their cookies, drank her tea, and thanked her for her time.

  They were finished, at least for now, but Elizabeth was not. She walked the thirteen blocks to Winder’s office, thinking of nothing but what she would say once she arrived. She used the front entrance this time and threw open his door, as if it were as much her territory as his.

  “Sir,” she said, “your ordering your underlying officers to search my home for evidence to convict me in league with the enemy is beneath the conduct of an officer and a gentleman.”

  He looked up, startled, and she added, “It is an insult, sir, to unprotected ladies.”

  She let herself out before he could respond.

  That night, at dinner, Winder did not mention the incident and seemed suitably chagrined. He would be leaving Richmond soon, heading to Georgia to manage the infamous military prison at Andersonville, where Union inmates were starving to death, their rations consisting of no more than a cup and a half of flour per week. She did her best to “talk Southern Confederacy,” words that Winder received like salve on a wound, but she feared his successor might not be so willing to play her game.

  GOOD-BYE, MRS. GREENHOW

  LONDON

  During the early days of May, Rose sequestered herself in her room, refusing all callers—even her beau, Lord Granville—and declining all invitations. She declared herself “sick with anxiety,” waiting for word of the fighting back home. The first two days of battle in the Wilderness, a seventy-square-mile patch of gnarled underbrush about fifty miles north of Richmond, had cost General Grant seventeen thousand men, and at night he wept in his tent as brush fires raged, burning some two hundred of his wounded alive. The armies met again closer to the city, near Spotsylvania Court House, attacking and counterattacking, bodies piling up four layers deep, the soldiers stuffing their nostrils with leaves to insulate themselves from the stench. Lee telegraphed triumphant reports to the Confederate secretary of war, boasting that he’d “handsomely driven back” Grant’s men, and Rose received the news by steamer. “Thank God it is good,” she wrote. “Lee repulsed the enemy . . . if Grant is routed, I believe the time proper to press recognition.”

  She resumed her rigorous social schedule, accepting a congratulatory visit from Lady Abinger, lunching with the Countess of Chesterfield, dining with Earl and Countess Hilton (“he 60, she 24,” she noted), and attending a party hosted by Edward Montagu Granville Stuart Wortley, better known as Lord Wharncliffe. After dinner Wharncliffe stood and raised his glass. “I am going to propose a sentiment which will be acceptable to everyone here, I am sure: the success of the Confederate cause and Mrs. Greenhow.”

  The woman curtsied and the men bowed, the entire room sinking in one cohesive movement, bright cravats peeping out from jackets, sprigs of flowers bobbing atop hats. She held the moment still, imprinting it in her mind, recalling her life back in Washington before it was ruined by death, and more death, and war. She did not know how many such moments she would have left, and found herself responding with an uncharacteristic economy of words: “Thank you all, for my country and for myself.”

  The fighting raged just twelve miles from Richmond, so close that Jefferson Davis listened from his office and Elizabeth watched from the parapet of her mansion, peering through binoculars and asking one servant, Uncle Nelson, if he could distinguish between Yankee and Confederate guns; “Yes Missis, them deep ones,” he replied, leaving her to guess which one he meant. Benjamin Butler sent large numbers of troops to reinforce Grant while Lee waited for men from the Shenandoah Valley. “Confederate loss is heavy,” Rose wrote. “God grant that this is the last of the bloody fighting.” It only got bloodier when the two armies met at Cold Harbor east of the city. Union troops engaged in a hapless frontal assault against fortified Confederate troops and suffered nearly thirteen thousand casualties, a throttling of such magnitude that one Richmond diarist quipped, “Grant intends to stink Lee out of his position, if nothing else will suffice.”

  The good news inspired Rose to write, regarding the Yankees, “God grant that those vandals may be destroyed, exterminated so that the vile race may no longer cumber the earth. Impatiently I wait to see the bitter chalice placed at their lips, the assassin’s knife at their throats and the torch of the incendiary applied to their homes.” The Confederate victory failed to change Europe’s position on recognition, but she had one last chance to serve her country abroad when Confederate envoy Mason summoned her for a meeting. He told her that Raphael Semmes, captain of the CSS Alabama, a rebel warship that had been trapped by a Union sloop-of-war off the coast of Cherbourg, France, needed her help. The captain was concerned about the mental state of third lieutenant Joseph D. Wilson, one of the Alabama’s officers who’d been taken prisoner.

  “The very person we want,” Mason remarked to the captain as Rose approached. “She can get him off if anybody can.” He stood and shook her hand. “Good morning. Madam, we want somebody to do something.”

  “I’ll do it—what is it?” Her tone was flat, all business, hiding her pleasure at the flattery. All of those meetings and parties and arguments had amounted to nothing, but there was a still a task suited only for her.

  They explained: she needed to go to Charles Francis Adams, the son of John Quincy Adams and the US minister to the Court of St. James’s, and “get this poor fellow off his parole, so that he can be taken care of.” Since both Mason and Semmes held official positions in the Confederacy, Adams would refuse to see them; but Rose, having no title, would be at an advantage. She took a carriage straight from the meeting to the American embassy and presented her card: “MRS. ROSE GREENHOW, of Richmond.”

  Adams received her with “great courtesy,” and refrained from mentioning a long-ago testy exchange between Rose and his wife, Abigail. During a dinner party at Rose’s home in 1859, the conversation turned to abolitionist John Brown, who had just been hanged for inciting a slave revolt at a Federal armory in Virginia. Abigail leaned across the table, stared pointedly at her hostess, and called him a “holy saint and martyr.” Rose didn’t hesitate with her retort: “He was a traitor, and met a traitor’s doom.” An awkward silence settled over the gathering, and prominent Washingtonians gossiped about the incident for months.

  Rose sat across from Adams, surmising his thoughts. While it was true that his wife had displayed poor manners at Rose’s dinner party, there was also the obvious and pertinent fact that his government had imprisoned her as a spy and sent her into exile. He could either feel compelled to make amends or deny and dismiss her. She reminded him that Captain Semmes had taken more than 250 Union prisoners and pardoned all of them for exchange, and she hoped that Mr. Adams would follow this humane precedent.

  Four days later, Joseph “Fighting Joe” Wilson was released, and he called on Rose to thank her. “Poor fellow,” she said. “So happy and grateful for his release.” He was just twenty-two years old and striking, with a small, beautiful mouth and a sweep of feathery dark hair. Rose forgot both their nearly thirty-year age difference and Lord Granville. She spent many of the rest of
her days with Fighting Joe, even sitting with him for a formal photograph in a pose typically reserved for married couples: she in a chair and he standing behind her, one arm grazing her back. She wanted him to accompany her when she sailed back home.

  The time had come, and she applied the same fervor to saying good-bye as she did to everything else. She received the sacrament of Confirmation (something she’d never gotten the chance to do as a child), considered a last-ditch effort to enlist the help of Pope Pius IX, and met with Lord Palmerston who made the argument she was so tired of hearing: recognition would only hurt the South by uniting the North, bringing together various factions—Copperheads, Irish Catholics, and about half the Democratic Party—who currently opposed the war.

  Rose retorted, “Does it never occur to you that you probably bring upon yourself the very evil which you deprecate?”

  She bade farewell to Mason, who consoled her by saying she had aided in “stimulating the slim English mind.” She was reunited with her oldest daughter, Florence, who had arrived unexpectedly on a ship from New York. They hadn’t seen each other since before the war, when Florence warned her against becoming a spy. “O how sad has been this terrible war in its effect upon families,” Rose lamented. “Mine has been torn asunder.” She was struck and saddened by her daughter’s appearance—the sunken cheeks, the blade-edged bones, the veins shooting through the milk of her skin—but Florence was still so “very lovely.” She went to Paris one last time to visit Little Rose, her heart growing “sorely tired” when the girl begged her not to leave. “Alas,” Rose wrote, “inexorable destiny seems to impel me on. My heart yearns to stay and also to go. . . . The desperate struggle in which my people are engaged is ever present, and I long to be near to share in the triumph or be burned under the ruins.” She embraced her youngest daughter as if for the very last time.

  She packed her ball gowns, a leather money belt stuffed with $2,000 in gold, and her European diary, in which she made one final entry on August 10: “A sad sick feeling crept over me, of parting perhaps forever, from many dear to me.” Her ship would leave that day from Greenock, Scotland, and she prayed that the journey back would be without incident. The business of blockade running had grown increasingly treacherous, with the Union Navy capturing or destroying nearly 92 percent of the South’s blockade vessels, sending entire crews to prison, using deadly force if faced with resistance.

  Rose made a pact with herself: she would sooner die than lose her freedom again.

  THIS VERDICT OF LUNACY

  EN ROUTE TO EUROPE

  Things moved fast even by Belle’s standards, starting from the moment Lieutenant Hardinge entered her cabin and made her his prisoner. Afterward he took her hand and pulled her toward the wheel of the ship. He pointed to the sky, admiring the perfect silver rind of moon, of how its light seemed to shine only on her. He murmured verses from Byron and Shakespeare—Here we will sit, and let the sounds of music creep in our ears; soft stillness, and the night, become the touches of sweet harmony—to the ceaseless rhythm of the waves.

  Belle applauded with gloved hands, and asked for more.

  He stepped closer, brought his face inches from hers, and told her he “endeavored to paint the home to which, if love could but fulfill its prayers, this heart would lead thee!”

  The following night, sitting at the same spot, “Mr. Hardinge,” as Belle still called him, asked the question she’d been waiting to hear, one that proved he was as much her prisoner as she was his.

  “Will you be my wife?”

  She admitted to herself that she loved him, and yet she couldn’t stop a practical thought from drifting through her brain: “If he felt all that he professed to feel for me, he might in future be useful.”

  She let her expression go solemn and compressed her voice into a whisper. “Your question involves serious consequences,” she told him, and insisted she could not give him an answer until they arrived in Boston—the Greyhound’s final destination, if not her own.

  Samuel quickly proved his usefulness. While he was off giving orders, Belle stayed in her cabin with the Greyhound’s commander, Captain Henry, and two Union officers keeping her company. She offered the Yankees some wine, encouraging them as they swiftly made their way through the bottle. When Samuel returned he ignored the sight of his drunken officers and asked Belle if she’d seen certain papers about the ship. She pretended to think for a moment and then replied, “They must be in the lower cabin, where you’ve been dressing yourself.”

  He left to fetch them, suspecting nothing.

  Belle nodded at Captain Henry, who donned his hat and walked out on deck, making his way to the harbor boat bobbing alongside the ship—the same harbor boat Samuel intended to take ashore to report his arrival. When Samuel discovered that his boat was gone, he assumed that the waterman had grown tired of waiting and pulled off. He called another and sailed to the Boston shore, returning, three hours later, with US marshal John Keyes. Together they appeared at the doorway of Belle’s cabin, the marshal wild-eyed and panting his words: “Captain Henry has escaped!”

  “What?” she gasped. “It is impossible! Only a few moments ago he was here!” Again I have got the better of the Yankees, she thought, laughing as they fumigated the ship in an attempt to smoke the captain out. They never found Captain Henry, but Samuel finally got his answer from Belle: Yes, she said, she would be his wife. She believed that God had intended them to “meet and love,” and that He had purposely sent her a Yankee, a Union boy from Brooklyn. “Women,” she reasoned, “can sometimes work wonders; and may not he, who is of Northern birth, come by degrees to love, for my sake, the ill-used South?”

  Upon their arrival in Boston, Marshal Keyes told Belle he had procured rooms for her at the Tremont House, the city’s preeminent hotel and the first in the country to offer water closets. She was to remain there, under watch of Federal guards, until he received word from Washington about her fate. He would either take her to Canada, home of numerous Confederate exiles, or deliver her to the Union commandant of Fort Warren, at the entrance to Boston Harbor.

  Belle’s guards reported her numerous shopping trips, during which she paid for purchases by dramatically retrieving gold coins—money the Confederacy had provided to finance her trip—from a pouch around her waist. The pouch rested atop a skirt belt holding what one observer called a “sufficiently persuasive” pistol, a piece Belle was happy to flash at anyone who cared to look. The pistol was necessary, she explained, to protect herself against the Federal spies who were stalking her. “She was proving a troublesome customer as she was overrun by curiosity seekers,” Keyes concluded, “and had no discretion herself.” He was eager to get rid of “her ladyship.”

  Samuel had gone to Washington to lobby for her release, bringing with him several letters of introduction to influential men, and Belle herself wrote to Gideon Welles, secretary of the US Navy, telling him that she wished to go to Canada—a request she believed the Federal government was unlikely to grant. Given her past activities and imprisonments, and the fact that she’d been caught on a blockade runner, the proper course would be to detain her for the duration of the war. If the North proved foolish enough to let her go, she could still sail to England, meet with Confederate officials, and orally convey the contents of the dispatches she’d destroyed.

  To Belle’s surprise, while Samuel was still in Washington, Marshal Keyes received a telegram ordering him to escort her and her servants to Canada. She must leave within twenty-four hours, and if she was caught again in the United States she would be shot. One Washington newspaper suggested that the government had released her because she was “insane,” a characterization that Belle, for once, appreciated: “For this verdict of lunacy I thank them, if it contributed in any degree to mitigate my sentence.” But Belle suspected another motivation: her claim that she was “in possession of a vast amount of information implicating certain high officials at Washington both in public and private scandals”—information s
he would withhold so long as they did what she asked. For now, she would say only that she felt “much obliged” to members of Congress and others who used their influence on her behalf.

  Shortly before her scheduled departure the following day, Belle received an unsettling letter from her betrothed:

  My dear Miss Belle:

  It is all up with me. Mr. Hall, the engineers and myself, are prisoners charged with complicity in the escape of Captain Henry. The Admiral says it looks bad for us; so I have adopted a very good motto, viz: “Face the music!” and, come what may, the officers under me shall be spared. I have asked permission of the Admiral to come and bid you goodbye. I hope that his answer will be in the affirmative.

  Belle was distraught. True, her behavior had caused Samuel’s unfortunate predicament, but how was she supposed to plan and execute a wedding when her fiancé was stuck in a Federal prison? When he arrived to say good-bye he implored her not to worry. He would meet her in Canada or in London, and make her his wife.

  Belle stopped at Montreal on her way through Quebec, trailed by those same Federal spies all the way, finally eluding them when she boarded her ship for England. She arrived in early August, just as Rose Greenhow was leaving, and reported directly to the Confederate propagandist Henry Hotze. She informed him that she’d destroyed communications from Richmond so that they wouldn’t fall into enemy hands, and recited what she could recall of their contents. Hotze, in turn, handed her a letter, and told her it was personal.