by Karen Abbott
It was from Samuel. He had come to England and, failing to find her, went on to Paris to continue his search. Guessing that she might have been delayed en route, he left word for her in London. Belle was “deeply touched at this new proof of his honest attachment” and telegraphed a message, telling him to come back right away. Their reunion was made all the more joyful by the news that Samuel was no longer officially a Yankee; the Navy Department had dismissed him for “neglect of duty” for permitting the captain of the Greyhound to escape. Belle would make him a proper rebel yet.
She busied herself with wedding plans, sparing no expense on flowers, cake, or dress, using the Confederacy’s gold coins to pay for all of it, hoping the press was watching every move. Invitations were printed on bands of white ribbon, mounted on white parchment, folded, and sealed. Servants delivered them by hand, alerting guests to a morning ceremony on Thursday, August 25, at St. James Church in Piccadilly. Belle carried a bouquet dotted with orange blossoms to represent purity, chastity, and fertility.
Among the attendees were several distinguished representatives of the Confederate government, including the Honorable James Williams, former US minister at Constantinople under President James Buchanan; the Honorable John O’Sullivan, a former US minister at Lisbon who’d coined the term “manifest destiny” to describe American imperialism; and the aforementioned propagandist Hotze. An elegant breakfast reception followed at the Brunswick Hotel on Jermyn Street, where various guests proposed the health of Mr. and Mrs. Hardinge, eulogized Belle’s work for the South, and toasted President Davis and General Lee.
News of the wedding quickly reached the United States, where Northern journals scoffed at Samuel for tolerating his wife’s demand that he serve the Confederate Army. “Belle,” declared the Boston Post, “has made a fool of him.” The newlyweds spent a week together on the coast, strolling along New Brighton beach and getting lost amid the remains of Liverpool Castle. They discussed what came next. She wanted him to go to West Virginia to introduce himself properly to her family, distribute wedding cake to her cousins, and sleep in her childhood room. He would set sail on a blockade runner soon after their honeymoon.
While Samuel made preparations for his trip, Belle flailed about for a purpose. She had no official business in London, no clandestine meetings on behalf of the Confederacy, no reason for spies to trail her or for reporters to ask questions. She felt like a party everyone had left. She had to do something, say something, before no one cared what she did or said. Irrelevancy was the one enemy she truly feared.
She fetched one of the press clippings from her wedding, a long and laudatory article from the London Morning Post, and composed a letter to the Confederate president:
Brunswick Hotel,
Jermyn Street, London.
Piccadilly.
Sept. 22, 1864
Hon. Jefferson Davis,
Dear Sir;
I suppose that the news of my marriage has been rec’d in the Confederacy. I send you a paper containing the English account of my wedding. My husband will soon be in the South where I trust he will meet a warm reception, and all will forget that he was once in the ranks of the enemy. I trust from my having married a man of Northern birth my Country will not doubt my loyalty. Though I loved him I asked the advice of Mr. Hotze and other Confederates here before I took the step, fearing that my country would judge me wrong. Mr. Hardinge has given up all property and everything. His father is a Republican and has disinherited him for joining the Southern Cause and marrying a Rebel.
Do you think there will soon be peace? England wishes for it, and all here sympathize with the South. I have been met so kindly. Of yourself, and Stonewall Jackson and Gen’l Lee, the English have the greatest admiration and respect. If at any time I can be of benefit to my Country, command me.
Respectfully,
Your o’b’t serv’t,
Belle Boyd Hardinge,
CSA
Back in Richmond, Jefferson Davis could not have been less concerned with Belle Boyd or the question of her husband’s loyalties. His five-year-old son, Joe, had died after falling fifteen feet from a porch at the Confederate White House, and there were ugly rumors that another son, Jeff Jr., had pushed him. Davis arrived just in time to hold his son’s hand as he died. Jeff Jr. stood nearby, watching. “I have said all the prayers I know how,” the boy insisted, “but God will not wake Joe.”
The president had little time to grieve. Although Lee had held his own during the Overland Campaign—those spring battles against Grant in the Wilderness, at Spotsylvania Court House, and at Cold Harbor—the Union army had since maneuvered into a siege of Petersburg, some twenty miles south of Richmond, crossing the James River and cutting off the Confederate lines of supply. Union general William Tecumseh Sherman had just captured Atlanta, setting up headquarters and evacuating the civilian population. There was a great exile, an endless stampede of hogs and sheep, female slaves and their children, whites crammed like chattel into wagons. Those left behind became refugees in their own city, living in empty railroad cars and eating nothing but yams. Confederate ranks continued to plummet, and these losses were now exacerbated by Grant’s Circular No. 31, which rewarded deserters with money and transportation home, so long as they took an oath to the Union. And Davis still had the disconcerting sense that his confidential communications were being read by the wrong eyes and repeated to the wrong ears—the most recent example being a plan to raid a Maryland prison camp to free Southern inmates. When he heard details about the raid being spoken of on the streets, he had to cancel the entire operation.
A mile away, Elizabeth penned a diary entry praising her spy inside the Confederate president’s home: “I say to the servant, ‘What news, Mary?’” she wrote, “and my caterer never fails!”
THE DELICACY OF THE SITUATION
RICHMOND
No matter how tightly she drew the curtains or how low she turned the gaslight, Elizabeth always feared that someone was watching, aware that even her simplest movements were not what they seemed. General Winder had left her home and Richmond for Andersonville, Georgia, but his detectives remained vigilant, especially since her brother John had finally been forced to the front lines and deserted during the Battle of Cold Harbor, escaping to Philadelphia to live with their sister Anna. His friends told the Richmond press and officials that he’d been captured and carried off by a Yankee raiding party, but rumors persisted that he’d fled north, and that “Beast” Butler had hired him as a spy. “Van Lew rode out from his friend’s in Hanover with a nigger in a buggy,” the Confederate police chief observed. “The nigger and the buggy came back, but Van Lew didn’t. It is damned strange if the Yankee raiders took Van Lew that they didn’t take the nigger and buggy, too.”
Elizabeth began varying her methods of delivering dispatches, both to throw off the detectives and to meet increased demand from Union officials. In one note she told them that her spying “puts me to a great disadvantage and I do not wish to do it unless it is received welcomely.” It was, especially with General Grant now in charge of the eastern theater, headquartered twenty miles south of Richmond. She mined her contacts in the Confederate government, deployed members of the Richmond Underground to gather information, and picked up Mary Jane’s reports from the seamstress, sitting in her study and interpreting each piece of information. Three days per week, after either encrypting her dispatches or writing them in invisible ink, she closed her fist around them and walked slowly, casually, to the ornamented iron fireplace at the far end of the room.
On either side of the fireplace grate stood two slender columns, each topped by a brass figurine of a lion preparing to pounce. She had loosened one of these so it could be raised like the lid of a mailbox. With her back to the mantel, she slipped the dispatches beneath the crouching lion and left the room; her part was finished. In a few moments one of the housemaids would enter and go about her work, seemingly intent on polishing each brass curve and mahogany spire, humming
as she made her way to the lion and lifted the lid, tucking the letters down her homespun dress.
The maid took it from there, looping a basket around her arm and strolling down to Old Market Hall. She passed by the vegetable benches and butcher stalls, where ribbons of moist pink flesh dangled from strings; bacon was now $20 per pound, about $300 in today’s dollars and a 6,700 percent increase from before the war. She stopped at a cart where she recognized the merchants: two men, also Van Lew servants, who’d come from the family farm in Henrico County. The maid feigned interest in the contents of the cart, sifting through the pile of corn and potatoes and peas, picking a few pieces for her basket. Instead of money she paid with dispatches, which the servants discreetly plugged inside the soles of their shoes. The shoes were great strong brogans made by a Richmond cobbler working with the Underground, and he fashioned the soles so they were double and hollow, capable of holding letters and even maps. Shoes, like everything else, had become exorbitantly expensive—high-laced shoes cost $100, and a new pair of boots $225—but Elizabeth’s servants all had two pairs each and changed them every day, never wearing out of Richmond the same shoes they wore into the city each morning.
When the soles were filled to capacity, the men hollowed out an egg or a turnip, compressing the notes into slender scrolls and sliding them inside, hiding the dummy goods among the real thing. They departed after dusk, connecting with a Union scout at one of five Underground rendezvous points between Richmond and Grant’s headquarters at City Point, at the junction of the James and Appomattox Rivers. The servants’ preferred route was Charles City Road, which meandered southeast to the banks of the James, but if it was closed to civilian traffic they abandoned their carts and continued on foot, bushwhacking their way through thirty-five miles of woods, a journey of two days. Either way the guards passed them through the lines without question or incident; they were just slaves obeying orders, running errands for their mistress, not so much above suspicion as below it. Before daylight the Union scout, dispatches in hand, reported to headquarters, sometimes bringing along a Richmond newspaper and flowers from Elizabeth’s garden, still fresh when they arrived on the general’s breakfast table.
On the evening of September 27 an old family friend, Miss Lucy King, called at the mansion. She stood in the doorway, hands shielding her face, and whispered, “Do you think I am being watched?”
Elizabeth glanced left and right and hustled her inside.
Lucy told a story: one recent morning, while she lay in bed sick, her maid came to her room and said a detective was asking for her. She sent word she was ill. The detective returned the following day and left a handwritten message requesting her to report immediately to Eleventh and Broad Streets. Captain Thomas Walker Doswell, the new provost marshal, was seeking testimony against the Van Lew family, and her cooperation would be most appreciated.
Miss King felt she had no choice but to go.
Doswell pulled out a chair for her and smiled, the tip of his full brown beard grazing his cravat. He assured her she had nothing to fear. He, like his predecessor, General Winder, was well acquainted with the Van Lews. He had been a dinner guest in their home. He knew Elizabeth and her mother were upstanding Christian women, and he certainly did not want them to be lured into danger by the wrong sort of people, risking their lives for false and foolish ideals. Perhaps she was privy to information about the Van Lews? Information that, if they were on a wayward course, might help set them straight? He understood the “delicacy” of the situation, and promised that her name would not be mentioned to the Van Lews.
Routes of the Richmond Underground: first, seventy-five miles southeast to “Beast Butler” at Fort Monroe; and later, tweny miles southeast to Grant at City Point.
(Library of Virginia)
He leaned forward, waiting, lips pushing to maintain his smile.
“I am not with them as a spy,” Miss King responded.
Doswell let her go, suggesting she keep his words in mind.
Elizabeth was relieved her friend had not succumbed to the pressure, and hoped that the new provost marshal would give up.
He didn’t.
Next he sent detectives to interview various neighbors and associates. A neighbor had no direct knowledge of disloyalty but heard his sister damn the Van Lews as “good Yankees.” A businessman distinctly recalled Elizabeth saying, “I wish the Yankees would whip the Confederates.” The minister of the Third Presbyterian Church had heard Elizabeth praise the “violent and outrageous federal raiding parties.” A Richmond grocer remembered Elizabeth’s advice to “go to the Yankees and take the oath of allegiance.”
The detectives were particularly interested in this last bit of testimony, given Elizabeth’s brother John’s suspicious absence from his Confederate regiment. They had one last person on their list: John’s estranged wife, Mary, who surely harbored many incriminating secrets about the family, and who would be all too willing to share them.
General Ulysses S. Grant at City Point, fall 1864.
(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
NOT AT ALL CHANGED BY DEATH
ON THE CONDOR, HEADING HOME
Rose knew the South would be different from what it was when she’d left it, a country damaged and diminished and yielding itself piece by piece, just as it had been formed. The Yankees closed the vital port of Mobile Bay, Alabama, completing the blockade east of the Mississippi River. Atlanta had fallen, and now Sherman was conducting his relentless march toward Milledgeville, where women hid jewelry inside their dresses and took advice from the few haggard rebel soldiers who remained: “Lock your doors. Keep inside. If the Yankees come, unlock the door, stand in the doorway, be polite, and ask for a guard. You will not be mistreated, I hope.” In the Confederate capital, Lee’s army was hindered by a spy system so “complete and efficient,” fretted the Enquirer, that “the Richmond evening papers reach Grant’s headquarters before 3 o’clock the next morning.” President Davis embarked on a publicity campaign, appealing to every man able to bear arms to rally to the front. In Palmetto, Georgia, he reviewed Confederate troops, drawing obligatory salutes from the soldiers but not one cheer.
But Rose was anxious to reach Southern soil, to shed the “cold isolation” that had enveloped her during her final days in Europe, and by 3:00 a.m. on Saturday, October 1, she had almost made it. The Condor drifted toward the entrance of the Cape Fear River, a two-hundred-mile black-water river that flowed into the Atlantic Ocean. She was a sleek, elegant, 270-foot iron-hulled sidewheeler, painted “elusive white” to make her difficult to spot and built for tremendous speed; the British company that built the Condor believed she had no superior among blockade-running steamers. This was her maiden voyage.
She had a crew of forty and a few notable passengers, including James Holcombe, a judge and onetime Confederate spy in Canada, and Joseph D. Wilson, the young rebel officer whom Rose had saved from imprisonment and vowed to take home with her. A thirty-year-old British naval officer named William Nathan Wrighte Hewett served as captain, hoping to make a fortune running military supplies and coal through the Union blockade. The pilot, twenty-six-year-old Thomas Brinkman, had brought along his Newfoundland puppy. Rose carried a valuable cargo of her own: her European diary (which contained no mention of her burgeoning romance with Lieutenant Wilson); dispatches from Henry Hotze, the Confederate propagandist, for Richmond; a letter from Confederate emissary James Mason to President Davis praising her diplomatic efforts abroad; and four hundred British sovereigns, worth about $2,000—book royalties she planned to donate to a Southern relief fund. She kept the gold coins in a bag and fastened its chain around her neck.
The sky opened and dropped a hard rain, long, cool needles stabbing the deck. The Condor crept noiselessly toward New Inlet, taking the northern approach to Cape Fear, a strong wind at its back. The waves thrashed and churned. Two lines of Federal vessels skulked in the dark, patrolling just out of range of the Confederate guns of Fort Fisher. Rose was in
her quarters, seasick again, her stomach feeling like a separate and defiant thing inside her, disobeying orders to stay still. They were almost there, only three hundred yards from shore.
There was a hard, long jolt, the whole ship shuddering. She was heaved from her bunk. The floor quivered beneath her knees, and then silence, stillness. She scuttled to her wardrobe and dressed in haste, panicked. She gripped her leather pouch, full of dispatches. The bag of gold swung low, pulling against her skin; she wore it even to bed.
Up on the deck the rain soaked her skin and veiled her eyes. The wind howled and whipped the surf into great white billows that broke across her feet. The Newfoundland puppy ran in frantic circles. She demanded to know what was happening. She strained to listen to Captain Hewett, his words coming in staccato bursts: he’d realized he was being trailed by a Yankee ship, the Niphon. Rockets flared and shots cracked, tearing up the water around the Condor. Momentary relief as he evaded them. Then he saw what he thought was another Union ship looming ahead and he swerved to starboard. A mistake: the ship was actually the wreck of the Night Hawk, another blockade runner that had been driven onto the bar two nights before. Now the Condor was stuck on the shoals, immobile and helpless.
She heard enough to understand. The Yankees were out there, and they would get her. They would toss her back into the Old Capitol Prison, where those emissaries of Lincoln would force her to live in filthy quarters with Negroes, taking away her sun and air and dignity. This time they might leave her there until she died.
She grasped Captain Hewett’s arm and pulled him close, yelling in his ear over the crush of the waves. She had to go ashore, she said. She had no choice.