A Treasury of Foolishly Forgotten Americans

by Michael Farquhar

  Had Macready been content to stay in England and stew in his grievances, the Astor Place Riot would have been averted. But his career was declining in his native country, and in the fall of 1848 he arrived in America to revive his fortunes. It was a fateful move. Though Macready had enjoyed successful tours of the United States in the past, Forrest was now at the peak of his popularity and clearly had public sentiment on his side. He was the rugged giant of the American stage who had put the spindly, aristocratic Englishman in his place. The public feasted on the actors’ spat as newspapers gleefully reported every exchanged barb. And when it was announced that each would be performing the role of Macbeth on different stages, the people were ready. “During the last thirty-six hours the excitement among the theatre-going people has been rising to fever heat in this atmosphere,” the New York Herald reported on May 7, 1849. “Forrest plays at the Broadway, Macready at the Astor Place…. The excitement began in the green room, and has been generating for some time, in consequence of the public attitude of the two great tragedians of the age towards each other, and their appearance in this city at the same time, in the same characters, at different theatres.”

  Macready got a sobering preview of the mayhem to come during his opening performance that night at the Astor Place Theater (or Opera House, as it was also called). He was greeted with a cacophony of groans and hisses when the curtain rose—“an alarming outbreak that defies description,” according to one account of the evening. That rousing welcome was followed by a barrage of “eggs of doubtful purity, potatoes, a bottle of pungent and nauseating asafoetida, old shoes, and a copper coin.” Macready picked up the coin, the report continued, “placed it in his bosom with dignity,” and with “mock humiliation bowed to the quarter of the galley from which the visitation had descended.” He gamely continued through the first two acts of the tragedy, though not a word from the stage could be heard over the din as he dodged rotten vegetables and other unsavory missiles. But by the third act, when Macbeth came out as the new king, the crowd went crazy and began hurling chairs onto the stage. It was clearly too dangerous to continue, and the curtain fell. “Three groans for the English bulldog!” members of the audience chanted triumphantly. “Nine cheers for Edwin Forrest!”

  Macready was sufficiently frightened by his reception to immediately book passage back to England. But a reassuring letter from prominent citizens like Washington Irving and Herman Melville, as well as editorials condemning the night’s events, convinced him to stay and perform again at the Astor Place on May 10. “The English actor was certain that the ‘best citizens’ and all the forces of law and order were exercising themselves in his behalf,” writes Richard Moody, “and that to play out his engagement would establish once and for all his superiority to the American scoundrel [Forrest] and all his ill-bred supporters.” If he only knew.

  A loose confederation of rabble-rousers from various gangs and nativist organizations like the Order of United Americans (forerunner of the anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party) papered the city with calls to rally at the “English Aristocratic Opera House” on the night of May 10 and to stand up for Forrest and America. In anticipation of a disturbance, the windows of the theater were barricaded, and New York mayor Caleb Woodhull ordered a large contingent of police to be present at the scene. The military was also put on alert. No one thought to cancel the show, however, and thus all the elements of the unfolding tragedy were in place.

  Macready seemed blithely unaware of any impending trouble. “I went gaily, I may say, to the theatre,” he reported in his diary, “and on my way, looking down Astor Place, saw one of the Harlem cars on the railroad stop, discharge a full load of policemen; there seemed to be others at the doors of the theatre. I observed to myself: ‘This is good precaution.’ I went to my dressing room, and proceeded with the evening’s business.”

  While Macready primped backstage, an enormous crowd began to gather outside the theater. All day there had been a scramble for tickets and as curtain time approached for the sold-out performance, people began to rush for the doors. Policemen struggled against the surge and blocked the entrances before the theater was completely filled, leaving some ticket holders outside with the growing mob. Inside, the curtain rose and the first two scenes were played without incident. But the theater loudly erupted when Macready first appeared in the third. All action stopped on stage for fifteen minutes, and even as the play resumed, not a word could be heard through the continuous storm of groans and shouts of abuse. The police stationed in virtually every corner of the theater made no move against the demonstrators until the final scene of the third act, when they arrested a particularly rowdy group and ushered them away. It made little difference. Others in the audience continued the disruption, while the mob outside, almost as if on cue, launched an assault on the building. The barricades put in place earlier proved useless against the onslaught.

  “As one window after another cracked,” the New York Tribune reported, “the pieces of bricks and paving-stones rattled in on terraces and lobbies, the confusion increased, till the Opera House resembled a fortress besieged by an invading army rather than a place meant for the peaceful amusement of a civilized community.” Through it all, the report continued, “the obnoxious actor went through his part with perfect self-possession, and paid no regard to the tumultuous scene before him.” Indeed, Macready was quite taken with his own performance. “The fifth act was heard,” he pompously recorded in his diary, “and in the very spirit of resistance I flung my whole soul into every word I uttered, acting my very best, and exciting the audience to a sympathy even with the glowing words of fiction, while these dreadful deeds of real crime and outrage were roaring at intervals in our ears, and rising to madness all around us.”

  Police surrounding the theater were quickly overwhelmed, and many fell injured under the barrage of bricks and stones hurled by the increasingly ferocious crowd. “About 8 o’clock I reported to the Chief that I thought it would be impossible to retain our position much longer, as the lines had been broken,” Benjamin Fairchild, captain of the Eighth Ward police, later reported. “I was directed to rally the men and make another effort. There was a space cleared in front of the theatre, the people having left to avoid the stones. After this I went again on the 8th street side, and found one or two hundred young men and boys stoning the building. I attempted to make an arrest of one and was beaten back by the mob and had to run for my life.”

  As the assault mounted in intensity, it was apparent that military reinforcement would be necessary, and the troops were called in. The mob was unmoved by this display of strength, however. Like the police, the soldiers were mercilessly stoned. According to General Charles Sandford, “Every man was more or less hurt and the horses were rendered almost unmanageable. A dense mob extended as far as I could see to the Third Avenue. The mounted men, being conspicuous marks, received most of the stones, and were finally driven off the ground. I dismounted, returned through the mob, and took charge of the infantry, who were halted in line across the open space beyond the theatre, with a dense mob on both sides, who were assailing them with all sorts of opprobrious epithets and frequent volleys of stones.”

  A volley of warning shots was fired, at which the crowd scoffed. “They’ve got leather flints and blank cartridges,” some shouted, while others, according to one account, “commenced wresting the muskets from the soldiers’ hands” and “pelting stones as large as your double fist like a shower of hail.” Another series of shots had more fatal consequences and the desired effect. As people lay dead and dying, many of them innocent bystanders, the mob began to disperse. In the end, at least thirty people were killed, and many more suffered debilitating injuries. Macready, meanwhile, had concluded his performance; soon after the first shots were fired, he snuck out of the theater in disguise and found refuge in the home of Robert Emmet, nephew of the famous Irish patriot. He left New York the next day.

  While the riot raged at the Astor Place, Edw
in Forrest was at the Broadway performing before a wildly cheering crowd one of his signature roles: the heroic, defiant Spartacus in Robert Bird’s The Gladiator. (Forrest’s and Macready’s simultaneous renditions of Macbeth had already taken place several nights before.) Although some editorials blamed Forrest in part for encouraging the mayhem at the Astor Place, his career was hardly compromised and he remained so much an American icon that a Harper’s columnist was shocked to meet a man in 1862 who had never seen Forrest. “If he had said he had never seen Trinity Church, or the Astor House, it would have been strange; but to aver that he had never seen Forrest was to tax credibility.”

  How surprised, then, would that writer have been had he known that one day Edwin Forrest, and the riot he inspired, would be a mere footnote. To Forrest, though, it was entirely expected. “The actor’s popularity is evanescent,” he once said; “applauded today, forgotten tomorrow.”

  14

  Rose O’Neale Greenhow: A Spy of Grande Dame Proportions

  Allan Pinkerton found himself in an awkward position outside the home of Rose O’Neale Greenhow, one of the most prominent hostesses in Washington, D.C. The head of the famed detective agency—imported from Chicago by the Union to track and capture rebel subversives operating around the capital—stood barefoot in the pouring rain, balancing himself on the shoulders of two associates, trying to see and hear what he could through a second-story parlor window.

  American counterespionage was in its infancy in 1861, but Pinkerton’s quarry was no beginner. From her home on Sixteenth Street, which was noted by Confederate General P. G. T. Beauregard as being “within easy rifle-range” of the White House, Greenhow was running a spy ring meant to undermine the Union war effort. “To this end,” she later wrote, “I employed every capacity with which God had endowed me, and the result was far more successful than my hopes could have flattered me to expect.”

  While she may have overestimated her achievements, her efforts on behalf of the South were relentless. “She did a better job than most in infiltrating the political and military elite of Washington,” Tyler Anbinder, associate professor of history at George Washington University, said in 1999. “She flattered men into revealing sensitive information.”

  The nation’s capital has been home to plenty of covert operatives, as well as highly connected grandes dames. But Greenhow, “the Rebel Rose,” managed to unite the two professions within herself; in the process she added a unique chapter to the city’s long history of deeply held Southern sympathies. As a young girl, she was sent from Rockville, Maryland, to live at the Old Capitol with an aunt who ran an inn there. This building, on the site now occupied by the U.S. Supreme Court, was constructed as a temporary home for Congress after the original Capitol was burned during the War of 1812. Years later, after the Old Capitol was converted to a prison during the Civil War, Greenhow would reside there again—this time as one of the Union’s more celebrated captives.

  With her charm, intellect, and ambition, as well as through her husband, Robert, a State Department official whom she married in 1835, Rose Greenhow came to know virtually everyone of importance in Washington. Dolley Madison, Daniel Webster, and President James Buchanan were among her many friends and intimates. No one was closer to her, however, than John C. Calhoun, the powerful statesman from South Carolina who served as senator, secretary of state, and vice president. As one of the great intellectual progenitors of the Southern Confederacy, he won Greenhow’s eternal admiration and devotion. “I am a Southern woman,” she wrote, “born with revolutionary blood in my veins, and my first crude ideas on State and Federal matters received consistency and shape from the best and wisest man of this century.” As her idol suffered through his final illness at the Old Capitol in 1850, Greenhow was in constant attendance. Calhoun’s memory remained sacred to her, and fueled her increasingly fanatic devotion to the Southern cause as the Civil War approached.

  An uncomfortable chill swept through one of her dinner parties in the winter of 1859 when Abigail Adams, wife of presidential scion Charles Francis Adams, professed sympathy and admiration for the radical abolitionist John Brown, who recently had been hanged. With sectional feeling festering just below the surface, polite society in Washington assiduously avoided the topic of John Brown as simply too hot for discussion. Greenhow, however, had no hesitation in challenging Adams. “I have no sympathy for John Brown,” she snapped. “He was a traitor, and met a traitor’s doom.” While Greenhow later professed to have regretted this breach of gracious hostessing, she would never temper or compromise her fierce Southern loyalties.

  It was this fervor, along with her many intimate connections in the capital, that made the forty-four-year-old and widowed Greenhow a prime rebel recruit in April 1861, when the Civil War finally broke out. She proved her worth as a spy in a very short time, supplying to General Beauregard the information that Federal troops would be advancing on Manassas, Virginia, in mid-July. Her courier, a young woman named Betty Duvall, rode out of Washington dressed as a country girl. Meeting General Milledge L. Bonham at the courthouse in Fairfax County, Virginia, Duvall advised him that she had an urgent message for General Beauregard. “Upon my announcing that I would have it faithfully forwarded at once,” Bonham later recalled, “she took out her tucking comb and let fall the longest and most beautiful roll of hair I have ever seen. She took then from the back of her head, where it had been safely tied, a small package, not larger than a silver dollar, sewed up in silk.” As author Ishbel Ross noted in her book Rebel Rose, “Greenhow had ciphered the message. Greenhow had sewn it in silk. Greenhow had obtained the information.”

  Though historians debate the ultimate impact of her messages on the First Battle of Bull Run, both Beauregard and Confederate president Jefferson Davis honored her for her contribution to the rout of the Northern army in this opening conflict of the Civil War. “Had she not leaked word [of the Northern advance], I don’t think anything would have happened differently,” said Anbinder. Beauregard had a number of sources of information, he said, “but it served to embarrass the North that a woman could obtain such sensitive information.” Indeed, Greenhow’s covert activities did attract unfavorable attention in Washington, and soon enough Allan Pinkerton was peeping into her windows. “She has made use of whoever and whatever she could as mediums to carry out her unholy purposes,” the detective reported. “She has not used her powers in vain among the officers of the Army, not a few of whom she has robbed of patriotic hearts and transformed them into sympathizers with the enemies of the country which made them all they were…. With her as with other traitors she has been most unscrupulous in the use of means. Nothing has been too sacred for her appropriation so as by its use she might hope to accomplish her treasonable ends.”

  Despite the fact that she was being watched, and was well aware of it, Greenhow continued to operate with bold defiance. She soon found herself under arrest. “I have no power to resist you,” she declared grandly after challenging Pinkerton’s authority to seize her, “but had I been inside of my house, I would have killed one of you before I had submitted to this illegal process.” The dramatic flair she demonstrated when captured would characterize much of her time in captivity.

  Under house arrest, she grew indignant that her home was being ransacked in the search for incriminating evidence and that she was subject to constant surveillance. “She wants us to know how her delicacy was shocked and outraged,” Civil War diarist Mary Chestnut recorded. “That could be done only by most plainspoken revelations. For eight days she was kept in full sight of men—her rooms wide open—and sleepless sentinels watching by day and by night. Soldiers tramping—looking in at her leisurely by way of amusement…. She says she was worse used than Marie Antoinette when they snatched a letter from the poor queen’s bosom.”

  Other female prisoners were sent to Fort Greenhow, as Rose’s home came to be known—most of them “of the lowest class,” as she called them. During her home confinement, Greenhow managed to
continue her secret communications with the South. A letter she had sent to Secretary of State William H. Seward complaining of her mistreatment, in fact, was published in a Richmond newspaper. Because of all the leaks, Fort Greenhow was closed in early 1862, and Rose was transferred to the Old Capitol Prison, along with her eight-year-old daughter, Little Rose. Ironically, they were confined in the very same room in which Greenhow had comforted her dying hero, Senator Calhoun, more than a decade earlier.

  Unpleasant as it was, Rose’s imprisonment was ultimately her greatest service to the South—far more useful than the information she secretly provided. “They made her a martyr in the eyes of the Southern people,” said historian James McPherson. “The brutal Yankees who would imprison a mother and child provided ammunition for the Confederate propaganda mills.” In the squalid (yet hardly brutal) confines of the Old Capitol, Greenhow played the role of martyr for all it was worth. Mary Chestnut commented sardonically on this in her diary, while a fellow prisoner named Augusta Morris wrote, “Greenhow enjoys herself amazingly.”

  “This is the gloomiest period of my life,” Rose wrote. “Time dragged most heavily. I had absolutely nothing to occupy myself with. I had no books, and often no paper to write on, and those who approached me appeared entirely oblivious of the mental as well as physical wants of a prisoner…. [I was] chafing against my prison bars, with the iron of the despot eating into my soul.”