by Karen Abbott
Trusting an immediate reply,
I am Sir, Yr. Obdt. Sevt.
Belle Boyd Hardinge
The letter traveled on the fastest westbound crossing, Liverpool–New York, reaching America in eight days, fifteen hours, and forty-five minutes. Lincoln was most likely familiar with its author and her involvement in the Valley Campaign of 1862, and the ensuing panic in Washington after Stonewall Jackson’s surprise victory. In the spring of 1863 he had suspended the sentence of her first cousin, William Boyd Compton, a Confederate spy in West Virginia who’d been captured and sentenced to be hanged. “Let the execution of William B. Compton be respited or suspended till further orders from me,” Lincoln wrote, “holding him in safe custody meanwhile.” His act saved the lives of five Union prisoners, whom Jefferson Davis had threatened to hang in retaliation.
Outside his office window the still unfinished Washington Monument, which Mark Twain likened to “a factory chimney with the top broken off,” lurched toward a bleached and dismal sky. Encampments of Union soldiers dotted the Potomac River, so frozen that an escaped Confederate prisoner had recently skated across its surface on rag-bound feet, heading toward freedom in Virginia. Aided by information from Grant’s spy ring in Richmond, the Union army and navy had just captured Fort Fisher, guardian of Wilmington, North Carolina, where rebel blockade runners had come and gone and even died. After considerable political wrangling and furious debate, the House of Representatives passed the Thirteenth Amendment, officially abolishing slavery. Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, through emissaries, were engaging in secret negotiations, but reached an impasse when the Confederate president mentioned peace for “the two countries”; Lincoln wanted nothing less than restoration of the Union. But the downfall of arms drew nearer every week.
Lincoln made no notation on Belle’s letter, nor did he indicate any knowledge of the “atrocious circumstances” to which she referred. Perhaps because the war was almost over, perhaps because Samuel Hardinge’s only crime was being Belle’s husband, perhaps because the president admired the twenty-year-old girl’s audacity, the prisoner was released on February 3, exactly ten days after Belle made her demand. After stopping at his family home in Brooklyn to say good-bye to his mother, Samuel boarded the steamship Cuba and was reunited with Belle a few weeks later.
Her circumstances had grown dire since she had last seen him four months before. She’d spent all of her funds and begun pawning her jewelry and wedding gifts, one by one. She suspected the Federal government was intercepting funds sent by relatives in Virginia. When she had nothing left, the owner of the Brunswick Hotel evicted her from her room, forcing her to move to a boardinghouse in an “unfashionable” part of town. She wept to the London press, insisting that her current state of suffering was worse than what she’d endured in Washington’s Old Capitol Prison. “I’d rather be there as I was,” she declared, “than here as I am.” She took her frustrations out on Samuel, who responded by drinking until he passed out, but even in this condition he couldn’t escape Belle’s wrath. She stood over him, shaking her fist at his closed eyes, deriding him as “the fool who had married” her. Soon she would no longer have even the war, those four ferocious, thrilling years that had raised her and given her a name.
At night, the strange flutterings growing more persistent, tickling the underside of her skin, she lay awake and imagined what came next. She would publish Belle Boyd in Camp and Prison but withhold—at least for now—her knowledge of Union misdeeds. She would start training for the stage, maybe starring in comedies by Edward Bulwer-Lytton and classics by Shakespeare (as Juliet, of course), receiving raves in every city she played. And when she was ready, and the world was ready to hear them, she would dress up in her Confederate costume and reenact scenes from her life, beginning with that afternoon long ago, on the Fourth of July, when the Yankees came to town and threatened to fly their flag over her home. She would tell her fans that she loved the South the way “a child loves its mother,” and that she never wanted to fail it again.
AS THIS MIGHTY WORK WAS DONE
RICHMOND
Elizabeth pulled Mary Jane inside, checking for anyone lurking behind her in the dark. The story came out in hoarse gasps: They suspected her. Not only Varina and Jefferson Davis, but their other, loyal servants. She sensed she was being followed throughout the house. Her manner of clearing plates and polishing wood invited a sudden and intense scrutiny. Voices dropped or fell silent in her presence. In rare unguarded moments the president wondered aloud how the Union knew Lee’s plans as soon as the general decided them. She began awakening to a persistent sense of something gone wrong. She grew intently aware of every step behind her back, every shadow beneath her door. She needed to leave before leaving was no longer possible.
In the morning Elizabeth helped Mary Jane into a farm wagon, telling her to lie low and flat. Two other servants shoveled horse manure on top of her from head to foot, several layers deep. She would pass through the lines as if she herself were a secret dispatch, riding to City Point, and from there Elizabeth’s contacts would send her to Philadelphia, where brother John would be waiting. Elizabeth had been in touch with John since he deserted the army and fled north, writing to him under the alias “Emma G. Plane,” using couriers to deliver messages and money. She watched the wagon rattle off and prayed that her servant would make it.
She knew Mary Jane was right to be worried: rebel authorities had recently arrested nine members of her spy ring, including Confederate railroad superintendent Samuel Ruth, and imprisoned them in Castle Thunder. As with Elizabeth, Ruth’s status and wealth gave him a sheen of innocence; the press lauded him as “a most efficient railroad officer” and a “respectable, prudent and cautious man.” While the others languished behind bars, Ruth was honorably discharged. He immediately resumed his undercover work, even asking the Federal government to reimburse the $2,500 he’d spent on his defense—money he could use to bribe rebel sources.
The spy ring now spanned the city and three surrounding counties. It was impossible to keep track of every name and face and background. Richmond authorities might try to entrap Elizabeth again at any time, especially in the wake of Mary Jane’s sudden disappearance, since Varina would certainly remember hiring the servant on Elizabeth’s recommendation. Any new agent was immediately suspect, even if introduced through legitimate channels, as when a Federal scout named Judson Knight knocked on her door in early February.
She led Knight into the darkened library. Behind her, alongside the fireplace, the lion figurines concealed the latest intelligence, waiting for pickup and delivery. Knight told her that an Englishman named R. W. Pole would come through the lines, posing as a Southern sympathizer while working for the Underground. He insisted Pole was a loyal Unionist, but Elizabeth had her doubts.
“My heart sank,” she wrote after Knight left, “for here was another avenue of danger.”
She waited, for days and then weeks, dealing only with those who had long since proved themselves, and on February 27 heard the news: the Englishman had gone to the provost marshal and reported two of her spies, Lemuel Babcock and William White, both of whom were sent to Castle Thunder. A Confederate detective touched a pistol to White’s temple and demanded, “Tell all you know or I’ll blow your brains out. Tell all who are concerned in this thing.”
White replied, “Blow away.”
Elizabeth only increased her efforts. Her spy ring divulged a Confederate plan to exchange $380,000 worth of tobacco for bacon, prompting Grant to organize a raid on Fredericksburg, during which his troops seized the illicit goods, destroyed railroad bridges, and took four hundred rebels prisoner. The spy ring placed ads in newspapers promising payment to “engine-runners, machinists, blacksmiths, molders, and other mechanics” who deserted to work for the Union; large numbers accepted the offer, severely restricting Confederate use of the railroads. The ring wrote of preparations to move the sick and wounded from hospitals, of an extraordinary excitement pervading the c
ity, of alarm bells pealing forth upon the startled air and the home guards seizing their muskets, scrambling directionless toward an unspecified threat. “Everybody turned out upon the streets,” read the dispatch. “The cause of the alarm could not be distinguished, except in the unsettled state of the public mind.” They reported “an entire prohibition” of all news; people were forbidden to discuss the state of the Confederacy even on the streets.
They reported that the James River Canal was frozen, allowing no boats to pass through and limiting the delivery of provisions. They provided updates on public morale, detailed surging prices (more than $1,000 for a barrel of flour, more than $1,200 for a suit of clothes), and revealed that counterfeiting was so rampant that people no longer discerned the difference between good and bad money. Elizabeth stood on her parapet, counting troops and defenses, listening to the sidewalk hubbub and the wails of the bereaved in their homes. “May God bless and bring you soon to deliver us,” she wrote to Grant. “We are in an awful situation here.”
She sent him the information he needed to win the last crucial battle of the war. On March 14, Grant told his staff that he had read “a letter from a lady in Richmond” revealing that Confederate troops had been ordered down the Danville Road, which connected Richmond to the sources of supply for the Confederate army; privately owned warehouses of tobacco and cotton had been turned over to the government; and citizens were “ordered to be organized, no doubt to prevent plundering in the city when it is evacuated.” The general understood that the enemy intended to fall back southwest to Lynchburg, and that he had less than a week to position his men.
On the final day of March, under a light rain, fifty thousand Union troops commanded by General Philip Sheridan drove beyond the right end of Lee’s line, where some ten thousand Confederates tried to stave them off. For a while they did, pushing the Yankees back and settling around the crossroads of Five Forks. The following morning Lee told his forces to “hold Five Forks at all hazards,” and the battered Confederates dug in, singing “Dixie” and unleashing a stream of rebel yells: Woh-who—ey! Who—ey! Who—ey! Woh-who—ey! Half of them were captured. Among the Southern dead left behind were shoeless old men and boys as young as fourteen. Grant saw a chance to “end matters right there.” He ordered an immediate assault all along the lines, and dispatched a correspondent to Lincoln bearing a package of rebel flags collected on the battlefield.
The morning of Sunday, April 2, dawned bright and cloudless, the sun easing into position and turning up its heat, a merciless spotlight on the city below. For the moment church bells replaced alarm bells, their chimes trilling sweetly through the streets, beckoning everyone to the pews. At St. Paul’s the usual congregation was in attendance, including Jefferson Davis; he had given Varina a pistol and told her to take the children to safety farther south. Halfway through the service a messenger hurried up the aisle and pressed a scrap of paper into the president’s hands. A woman sitting nearby noticed a gray pallor coming over his face as he read Lee’s words: “My lines are broken in three places. Richmond must be evacuated this evening.” He arose, walked unsteadily from the church, and ordered his government to move to Danville, 140 miles southwest. All of his cabinet boarded a series of freight cars, each gamely labeled—“Treasury Department,” “Quarter Masters Department,” “War Department”—a veritable government on wheels, rumbling slowly from sight.
Elizabeth stood on Grace Street and watched her city empty itself. Young soldiers on horseback and foot bade frantic farewells, all saying they wished they could stay. She walked to a nearby home and found her neighbor sitting on the steps in shocked acquiescence.
“The war will end now,” Elizabeth said. “The young men’s lives will be saved.”
The woman lifted her head and gazed dully. “I have a son in the army about Petersburg.”
Elizabeth lowered herself and met the woman’s eyes. She spoke in hushed and dulcet tones. Just think: she might now hope for her son’s life. They might never again hear the awful saying, “The last man must die,” uttered and acted upon so often during the past four years.
The woman replied, “It would be better, anything would be better, than to fall under the United States Government.”
Elizabeth rose and backed away without another word.
Hours had passed, daylight easing from the sky. A Confederate naval officer blew up all that was left of the fleet idling in the James, the shock shattering windows throughout the city. Series of bursting shells formed violent constellations, shaking the air around her. Everywhere everyone was rushing to escape. Wagons rattled furiously down the streets. People bartered for vehicles, offering any price in any currency. Porters toppled under heaps of baggage. Nurses carried pale men on stretchers, unsure of where to go. Lines snaked around the open banks. Rebel soldiers lugged wheelbarrows of paper money, both Federal and Confederate, to Capitol Square for burial. Retreating soldiers burned everything in their path—tobacco warehouses and flour mills, arsenals and ironclads, bridges and depots—the wind kicking up twisted tangles of flames. Vandals set the Confederate White House afire four times; each conflagration was extinguished by the gardener. City Council called a hasty meeting and ordered the destruction of all liquor. Whiskey ran in the gutters ankle-deep. Half-drunk men and women and children dipped cups and pans into the streams. Some lay facedown on the streets and lapped it up like dogs. Mobs plundered shops and broke into abandoned houses. Terrified women tore at their hair and screamed, “The Negro troops will be turned loose on us!” They gathered up silverware in their skirts.
Some of them, both neighbors and strangers, banged on Elizabeth’s door, begging her to secrete their valuables, knowing they would be safe in a Unionist’s home. She let all of them in, even the ones who had testified against her. During the bedlam three members of her spy ring had escaped from Castle Thunder, and now they got to work, hauling and hiding the neighbors’ vases and jewelry and gleaming sets of knives.
One spy, returning through the front door, told Elizabeth that her house was to be burned, that groups of rebel soldiers were right then on the way. She sprinted outside and watched the men charge toward her, jabbing torches at the sky. She took a few steps out onto the lawn, meeting them.
“If this house goes,” she said, “every house in the neighborhood will follow.” Union troops, she warned, would take vengeance against the homes of Confederate loyalists.
The rebels retreated down Grace Street and left her alone.
The night advanced into dawn, but Elizabeth couldn’t sleep. Every now and then a magazine exploded and the ground rocked and trembled beneath her feet, tickling her through the soles of her shoes. There was a terrible roaring and hissing and cracking of flames. The doorbell rang until dawn and more escaped prisoners crowded in, collapsing on cots she and her mother had strewn across the parlor floor. Her nieces, Annie and Eliza, came downstairs, terrified that they would be blown up in their beds. The whole night, Annie said, seemed a dream she would never forget. The girls had packed up their clothes in carpetbags and sheets, ready to run from the rebels. Elizabeth told them that there was no need, that they were all safe now. She walked with them to the window, all three transfixed by the sight of the smoldering city; to Elizabeth the destruction was “the consummation of the wrongs of years.”
The ruins of Richmond, April 1865.
(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
Beneath it all she heard a sweet sound—the quick, sure notes of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” They were there, finally, all those boys in their blue wool coats, taking in wild bursts of welcome from former slaves. “No wonder that the walls of our houses were swaying,” she would write in her diary. “The heart of our city a flaming altar, as this mighty work was done.” She thought of Mary Jane, safe up North, a whole new life opening up to her.
There was a knock at the door. She opened it to find a Union guard, sent by General Grant to protect her. “I want nothing now,” Elizabeth told the soldier. “
I would scorn to have a guard now that my friends are here.” (Grant himself would soon send a personal note, telling Elizabeth, “You have sent me the most valuable information received from Richmond during the war.”) She insisted the soldier stay for dinner and the night; he could meet some of her contacts and sources, men who once occupied prominent positions in the Confederate government. Now if he would excuse her for a moment, there was something she needed to do.
She climbed the stairs to her secret room, finding the corner where she’d hidden her American flag, unseen and untouched since Virginia left the Union; it would be the first to fly over the city in four years. She unfurled all eleven by twenty feet of it and counted its thirty-four stars, all of them united again, back where they belonged.
She crossed the hall to a room with a gabled window, the glass reverberating against her palm as she pushed it open, letting the smoke and music—now the first notes of “The Star-Spangled Banner”—rush in. Clutching the flag close, she climbed out and steadied herself, trying each corner to the roof railing and letting it fall, rejoicing at its soft weight in her hands.
EPILOGUE
Elizabeth Van Lew’s family flag.
(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
When searchers retrieved Rose’s body from the Cape Fear River, they found a note meant for her youngest daughter: