Reveille in Washington

by Margaret Leech

  There were fearful men in the President’s office that Sunday, but the most frightened of all was the Secretary of War. As he paced the room, he foretold the destruction of the United States Navy the capture of Fort Monroe, the capitulation of Boston and New York. Burnside’s expedition would be taken, McClellan could not sail for the Virginia Peninsula. Stanton dashed off telegrams to governors and mayors, advising them to obstruct their harbors. He kept running to the window and looking down the Potomac for a sight of the Merrimac on her way to shell the Capitol and disperse Congress. His alarming predictions kept the President at the window, too. Mr. Welles remarked that the Merrimac’s draft of water was such that she could neither pass up the Potomac, nor reach the Burnside expedition, and that, with her heavy armor, she would probably not venture outside Hampton Roads.

  Mr. Welles was passing one of the most unpleasant days of his life, but it was not entirely devoid of secret satisfaction. He was taking the measure of the new Cabinet member, Stanton, “as he ran from room to room, sat down and jumped up after writing a few words, swung his arms, scolded and raved.” Mr. Stanton was a physical coward. Fear drove him to bluster, sneer and rage. Mr. Welles just sat quietly looking at Stanton. There was an expression in his big, luminous eyes which he thought that the War Secretary could not fail to read. The next day, he would have a sharp argument with Stanton for trying to override his authority by ordering Dahlgren to sink canal boats, loaded with stone and gravel, in the Potomac channel. Mr. Welles won that battle, and asserted his authority and kept the Potomac open. Mr. Stanton took his measure, too, and always treated him with courtesy thereafter.

  On Sunday night, the telegraph clicked out a message which changed despair into exultation, and vindicated the judgment of the Secretary of the Navy. The little Monitor had forced the Merrimac to retire to Norfolk. It had been a drawn battle, but its effect was that of a victory. Naval history had been written in Hampton Roads, and all men read the portents of change in the battleships of the world. The foreign ministers were eager to learn the details of the combat that they might transmit to their governments the facts concerning armor-plated ships. The Swedish minister, Count Piper, was bursting with pride—the inventor Ericsson was of Swedish birth, and Dahlgren, who had devised the guns on the Monitor, was the son of a Swede.

  Two other messages were received in Washington on that momentous Sunday evening. The first disclosed that the rebel batteries on the Potomac had been abandoned. The other brought the tremendous news that the Confederates had evacuated Manassas. Incredulous, McClellan posted across the river. That night he ordered an advance of the whole army.

  A friend slapped the Prince de Joinville on the shoulder, shouted into his sealed ears, “Vous ne savez pas? l’ennemi a évacué Manassas, et l’armée part demain!” Word that the rebels had skedaddled aroused the camps. The next morning, Washington was in commotion. Artillery, cavalry and wagons blocked the streets, moving toward the Potomac. The two balloons were made ready, and the new portable gas generators, which permitted them to be inflated in the field, were loaded on their twenty trucks. On the sidewalks, officers were tenderly bidding farewell to weeping ladies, while through the streets the army passed in strong and steady ranks. Blue-clad infantry and gaudy Zouaves marched with shining rifles, smartly slung blanket rolls and haversacks, new canteens and cartridge boxes. Regimental bands blared their brassy tunes. The generals rode in splendor with their staffs. But the rain poured down in torrents; and Washington, which had cheered so many raffish regiments, showed little enthusiasm on the day that the Army of the Potomac advanced.

  Silently, efficiently, General Joe Johnston had withdrawn his troops beyond the Rappahannock. The march of the Federals was no more than a promenade, an exercise in the neglected business of making an advance. Beyond the battlefield of Bull Run, where General McDowell could not restrain his tears at the sight of the bleaching bones, the ramparts of Manassas proved to be no more than rude earthworks, with Quaker guns in the embrasures; and a fantastically minded man named Hawthorne thought of the old tales, in which great armies are kept at bay by the arts of necromancers.

  As he crossed the Long Bridge, the Prince de Joinville had met General McClellan. In the midst of several batteries, which were slowly defiling across the shaky structure, the general was riding alone, without aides, attended only by a few troopers. He appeared anxious. The Prince thought that there was bitterness in his soul. Nearly eight months had passed since the young Napoleon had come out of the West, crowned with the laurels of his little victories. He had not fought a battle. Yet perhaps in that moment he was aware that he was already defeated.

  VIII. Ladies in Durance

  THE EARLY WINTER NIGHT had fallen on the park to the east of the Capitol, and behind the stripped trees the white stones glimmered in the gas lamps, when a carriage splashed through First Street, and stopped before a corner building of dingy brick. Its imposing doorway, surmounted by a triple window, was the mark of an obsolete importance. Behind that great arched window had sat the senators of the infant nation. The building had been erected for the use of Congress in 1815, while the prouder edifice across the park, burned by British soldiers, was being restored. On this January evening of 1862, the windows, great and small alike, were disfigured by horizontal slats of wood, through which light feebly twinkled. Armed sentries paced their rounds on First Street, and around the corner, along a rambling series of extensions on A Street. The Old Capitol had been turned into a military prison.

  In the anteroom, officers loitered with an air of expectation, as a lady and a little girl stepped from the carriage, and were escorted across the threshold. Like an eager host, Superintendent Wood hurried to meet them. It was his custom to do the honors to new arrivals. “Hello, Gus; you’re back again. You couldn’t stay away from us very long,” he would say to a Virginia farmer, repeatedly arrested for refusing to take the oath of allegiance. “I’m always glad to see your countrymen here,” he once greeted an Englishman, taken up while attempting a visit to Richmond via the Federal lines. Gentlemen he was in the habit of receiving, but a lady was a novelty in the Old Capitol. Mrs. Rose O’Neal Greenhow, standing, dark and handsome, in the anteroom, had not only been a prominent figure in the social life of the capital; she was considered the most important Confederate spy arrested by the Government. She noted that the superintendent received her with “great empressement,” and seemed “sensible of the honor” of being her custodian.

  “You have got one of the hardest little rebels here that you ever saw,” piped young Rose. She was her mother’s daughter; and five months of romping with detectives and soldiers cannot have been conducive to mending her manners. Of Mrs. Greenhow’s entrance speech, there is no record. Perhaps she did not condescend to reply to the jailer’s courtesies. Her admiration for Southern institutions embraced the conception of caste; and she understood the theatrical value of a disdainful silence.

  Mrs. Greenhow knew the Old Capitol well. For years, it had been a boardinghouse—kept, some said, by her aunt. One famous lodger, her husband’s friend, John C. Calhoun, had hallowed this house for her. The South Carolina statesman had been Mrs. Greenhow’s idol. He had formed her political philosophy. The bare room to which she was taken, while she waited to be shown to her cell, was the room in which Calhoun had died. There, with his black eyes burning in his wasted face, he had uttered to the last his defense of State sovereignty and his prophecies of disunion. Rose Greenhow had sat by his bedside and ministered to his wants, while she listened. After twelve years, his influence had brought her back to his room again. But, if she thought of this, it was without qualm or regret. Hers was the happy arrogance of a convinced superiority. In the dreary jail, she sat like Marie Antoinette, with whom she was fond of comparing herself.

  The rout of Bull Run had filled Mrs. Greenhow with the exultation of a personal triumph. While she carried presents to the Confederate prisoners and schemed to deliver Washington into the conquering Beauregard’s hands, sh
e had continued to send her dispatches to Colonel Jordan. They contained, she herself declared, “verbatim reports” of the Cabinet meetings and the Republican caucuses, exact drawings of the Washington fortifications, and the “minutes of M’Clellan’s private consultations, and often extracts from his notes.” Mrs. Greenhow may have exaggerated her information, but it was extensive and valuable to the enemy. Some men who were privy to the councils of the Union, or wore its uniform with apparent honor must have trembled at the news of her arrest.

  After Bull Run, Rose Greenhow’s activities were soon curtailed. Suspicion fell on her almost at once, and on the sultry morning of August 23—five months before her removal to the Old Capitol—she took her last promenade in Washington. She had been warned. She knew that she was being watched and followed. On her walk, she was joined by “a distinguished member of the diplomatic corps,” and it was not until she reached her door that two men stepped forward, with some mumble of verbal authority, to arrest her. One of them was in uniform, and called himself Major E. J. Allen. Among the miscellaneous bits of information which Mrs. Greenhow was skillful in collecting, was the knowledge that he was Allan Pinkerton, the Scottish barrelmaker turned detective who headed McClellan’s secret service.

  The house was filled with men. Downstairs, in the parlors divided by a red gauze, Mrs. Greenhow coolly waited while the detectives searched beds, drawers and wardrobes, tumbled out soiled clothes and ransacked the papers in her library. All was quietly done in the hope that, if no alarm were raised, some accomplices might call. But little Rose ran out to climb a tree in the garden and shout to the passers-by, “Mother has been arrested!” Detectives issued from the house, and dragged the eight-year-old rebel from the tree, in tears. In spite of her warning, a number of Confederate sympathizers presented themselves, and were promptly taken into custody.

  That August day another clever Southern woman, Mrs. Philip Phillips, was also imprisoned in her own house. During the night, the mayor of Washington, James G. Berret, was arrested by the provost guard. No one suspected Berret of being a spy. However, as an ex-officio member of the Metropolitan Police Board, he had balked at repeating the oath of allegiance. His past record and his associations smacked of sympathy with secession, and Beret was whisked off on the early morning train to Fort Lafayette in New York harbor.

  For the first week of her imprisonment in the Sixteenth Street house, Mrs. Greenhow was under continual surveillance. All privacy was denied her. Pinkerton had a number of women operatives, for he had brought the entire staff of his Chicago agency to Washington; but a man peered through the open doors at the intimacies of Mrs. Greenhow’s toilet. When she lay down, a man sat by her bed. At the end of August, she was relieved of these intrusions. It had been decided to turn her house into a female prison. Mrs. Greenhow was confined to her chamber, and other occupants were installed in the remaining rooms. A detachment of General McClellan’s bodyguard, a Chicago company known as the Sturgis Rifles, took the place of the detectives.

  A War Department clerk sorted the torn scraps of letters which the Pinkerton detectives had found in Mrs. Greenhow’s stove. Some contained military information evidently intended for the enemy. There was also a letter from Donellan, the messenger who had carried the news of McDowell’s advance. Mrs. Greenhow had succeeded in destroying the key to Colonel Jordan’s cipher, but the amateurish cryptograms were soon translated by experts. Several of her recent dispatches, moreover, had fallen into the hands of Secretary Seward. The Government was amassing ample evidence to support its contention that Rose Greenhow was a “dangerous, skillful spy.”

  The Sturgis Rifles were more considerate guards than the Pinkerton detectives. Lieutenant N. E. Sheldon, a good-looking New Yorker, proved to be an indulgent jailer. Mrs. Greenhow recorded that he was obliging enough to undertake to send her dispatches to the rebels. She made no allusion to the fact that he actually delivered them to the provost marshal; but Sheldon was the only helpful army officer whose name she betrayed when she came to write her story. She repeatedly expressed her gratitude for his kindness. She was provided with writing materials, and permitted to use her library. Sheldon protected her from the unwelcome visits of Brigade-Surgeon Stewart, who had been ordered by the provost marshal to make a daily inspection of her “sanitary condition.” For some reason—perhaps for purposes of espionage—one of the prisoners, a Mrs. Onderdonk of Chicago, was allowed to eat with Mrs. Greenhow. But, as the latter protested at the outrage of holding intercourse with “a woman of bad repute,” Sheldon restricted Mrs. Onderdonk to her own room. Finally, as Mrs. Greenhow could not eat the prison food, this solicitous officer bought delicacies for her out of his own pocket, until she discovered the generous deception and put a stop to it.

  Mrs. Greenhow had a gift for interesting men, and winning their confidence. When, as Rose O’Neal, she had first come to Washington from her home in Maryland, she had been a girl so fresh and lovely that she had been called “the Wild Rose.” But now she was over forty, and her smoothly parted hair was threaded with gray. Her photograph, taken by Brady in the yard of the Old Capitol, shows a handsome, resolute, time-worn face. Her heavy mourning silk has little ruffles of net, and full, transparent sleeves. She wears short black kid gloves, and a veil falls from the back of her sleek head. There is something indomitable in the picture of the finery, the dignity and the pride, seated in a kitchen chair before a barred window in a whitewashed wall. One arm encircles little Rose, who stands, in crisp muslin crinoline and pantalettes, resting her head against her mother’s. Mrs. Greenhow’s dark eyes, looking steadfastly into Brady’s camera, are still fine. But the portrait is that of a woman who has passed the age of sexual conquest.

  Some radiance must have lighted her lined face when she spoke with men, for Rose Greenhow triumphantly maintained a reputation for allure. The National Republican romanticized her as “the beautiful rebel of Sixteenth Street” and “the fascinating female rebel.” In the cold, official pages of the war records is written Pinkerton’s tribute to “her almost irresistible seductive powers.” She had not used them in vain, he reported to General Andrew Porter, on the officers of the army; she had unscrupulously exerted them on “persons holding places of honor and profit under the government,” in order to obtain intelligence for the enemy.

  Five years after the war ended, Hamilton Fish, then Secretary of State, heard a curious story from a fellow New Yorker, the newspaper proprietor and diplomat, James Watson Webb. It was the account of a confidence made to Webb by General Thomas Jordan, of the late Confederate army. Jordan told Webb that, at the outbreak of the war, he had found that an intimacy existed between Senator Wilson and “one Mrs. Greenhow.” He, Jordan, had established “the same kind of intimacy” with her, and then induced her to obtain official information from Wilson, and forward it in cipher to the Confederates. It was from the Massachusetts senator, as Webb repeated the story to Fish, that Mrs. Greenhow obtained the news of McDowell’s advance.

  That Jordan gave Mrs. Greenhow a cipher, that she used it to communicate with the Confederates and that she advised Beauregard of McDowell’s movement are matters of record. Mrs. Greenhow was bent on involving Henry Wilson in her disloyal activities. In her book, My Imprisonment, published in London in 1863, she definitely stated that he was implicated in certain of her intercepted dispatches. Several Republican officials, she said, were summoned to give an account of themselves before the Cabinet, Scott and McClellan. Wilson’s was the only name she mentioned.

  Moreover, in destroying much of her correspondence, Mrs. Greenhow carefully preserved a packet of love letters, which fell into Federal hands. They were signed with the initial, H. One of them, dated January 30, 1861, is written on stationery stamped with the seal of the United States and the heading, Thirty-sixth Congress. Two letters refer to the consideration of the Pacific Railroad bill, in which Wilson took an active interest. They are hastily written notes, filled with ardor and frustration—the frustration of a man too busy to indulge
his passion, and also fearful of exposure of a secret relationship.