Double Death

by Gavin Mortimer

  Lewis dabbed daintily at his mouth with his handkerchief and reassured Patton that during the Crimean he and Lord Raglan had often been glad to eat the thinnest strips of salted pork. Then he went on to regale Patton about the time in 1854 when “the transports [ships] went down in the Black Sea one night, fourteen of them, leaving us entirely out of provisions.” How dreadful, commiserated Patton, who was eager to hear more of Lewis’s war. He himself was untested as a fighting soldier, yet here was a battle-hardened veteran of the Crimea. In normal circumstances Patton would have been too discreet to pose the question, but now, emboldened by the champagne, he asked Lewis what it was like to fight a war.

  It was a question that needed an accompaniment, so Lewis “called upon Sam for a bottle of port and damned him for the bungling way in which he opened the bottle.” Then he drew two cigars from his case and in the still night air waxed lyrical about the glory of war.

  He surprised even himself with what he remembered of Henry Tyrrell’s History of the War with Russia: Giving full details of the operations of the Allied Armies. Dates and names rolled off Lewis’s tongue as Patton sat engrossed, hardly able to credit that here was a man who had witnessed the Charge of the Light Brigade. Lewis steered the conversation away from Crimea to America, and for a while it was Patton’s turn to hold forth, as he compared and contrasted the merits of General Winfield Scott of the Union army and General William Hardee of the Confederate army. The evening ended in merry uproar with the veranda transformed into a temporary parade ground and Patton teaching Bridgeman, a veteran of the Mexican War of 1846–48, how to drill like a Kanawha Rifleman. Eventually Lewis, wiping the tears from his eyes, insisted he really must be on his way. Patton urged him to stay the night—it was too late to leave for Charleston—but Lewis had drunk too much and “was afraid something might happen to show that I had not entirely learned my part.”

  He thanked his host for his first-class hospitality but made it clear he wouldn’t be dissuaded a second time. Patton gave him directions to a country inn between the camp and Charleston, and then the pair bid each other a fond farewell. It had been a memorable evening, they both agreed. Perhaps one day they would meet again.

  C H A P T E R S E V E N

  “Don’t You Know There Is a War in This Country, Sir?”

  CHARLESTON IS QUITE A PRETTY PLACE,” commented one newspaper in the summer of 1861. “It is located on the beautiful bottom on the northeast bank of the river and is entirely surrounded by lofty hills. There are many pretty residences but they and the public buildings are built after the old style and have not much pretension to magnificence.”

  On the morning of Sunday, June 30, Charleston, Virginia, was quieter than normal. Most of the town’s 1,500 inhabitants were in church, and regardless of whether they were Presbyterians, Methodists or Episcopalians, they prayed for the Lord to take care of their Southern soldiers.

  Just east of McFarland Street, on which stood St. John’s Episcopal Church, was the white-timbered “Elm Grove,” home to Colonel George Patton and his family. Mrs. Patton and the children were worshipping, as were the storekeepers who on any other day would have been open for business in Charleston’s commercial center.

  Visitors approaching Charleston from the west along the James River and Kanawha Turnpike arrived on the southern side of the Kanawha River and crossed the water by means of an old bridge. Once on Lovell Street (present-day Washington Street) they continued east toward the heart of the town, traversing the Elk River, which flowed from the north to join the Kanawha River at Charleston, on an iron suspension bridge. Before them now were Charleston’s biggest stores, finest hotels and the impressive Kanawha Courthouse.

  A month earlier, on May 30, Colonel Christopher Tompkins had issued a rallying cry from the steps of the courthouse: “Men of Virginia! Men of Kanawha! To Arms! The enemy has invaded your soil and overrun your country under the pretext of protection. You cannot serve two masters. You have not the right to repudiate allegiance to your own State. Be not seduced by his sophistry or intimidated by his threats. Rise and strike for your firesides and altars. Repel the aggressors and preserve your honor and your rights.”

  Tompkins, forty-eight, a West Point graduate and veteran of the Mexican War, had struggled to recruit volunteers since his appointment as colonel of the Army of Kanawha on May 3. His predecessor, Lieutenant Colonel John McCausland, had raised five companies totaling 350 men in the three weeks since the bombardment of Fort Sumter, but Tompkins had found these men poorly equipped and badly trained. Unfortunately Tompkins labored to improve either the recruitment or the training; it had been fourteen years since he’d last shouldered arms, and in the interim he’d become a successful coal mine operator. Business, not soldiering, was now his occupation.

  Tompkins’s call to arms had been his last significant act as commander of the Kanawha forces. A few days later, in early June, General Wise was appointed to the position by Robert Lee, and Tompkins was demoted to commanding officer of the Twenty-second Virginia Regiment.

  Wise had already gathered his own militiamen, known as “Wise’s Legion,” and he marched them northwest from Richmond into Kanawha County, arriving on June 26. Aided by appeals in the pages of the Kanawha Valley Star newspaper, the county’s volunteers numbered nearly four thousand (including the “legion”) by the time Wise commandeered the best room of the Kanawha House Hotel.

  With the nine hundred men of Colonel Patton’s command established at Camp Tompkins, Wise dispatched smaller forces of men in three westerly directions to guard against Union incursions across the Ohio River at Point Pleasant, Ripley and Barboursville. While a further one thousand troops were deployed at various points from Gauley Bridge (thirty-five miles southeast of Charleston, the small town assumed strategic importance because of its location at the head of the Kanawha Valley) to as far north as Suttonsville. The bulk of Wise’s force, however, approximately sixteen hundred men, remained close at hand, encamped at Kanawha Two Mile, just north of Charleston. Wise had originally intended to install himself in the home of the Littlepage family, whose stone mansion lay on the bank of Kanawha Two Mile Creek surrounded by one thousand acres of their farmland, but that was before he encountered the lady of the house.

  Mrs. Littlepage refused to give her house to General Wise. She didn’t care who he was, she told him, the Confederate army had taken her husband for its army, but it wouldn’t take her house. Wise warned her that the house would be “blown down over your head” if she didn’t comply. Mrs. Littlepage gathered her six young children around her and dared Wise to do it. The general ordered his men to fire on the house, but they refused. Many of them were friends of the family. Humiliated and infuriated, Wise cursed Mrs. Littlepage and let her be, though he instructed his soldiers to set up camp on the family’s one thousand acres. On the hill overlooking the stone mansion, Wise’s men constructed a one-hundred-square-foot fort in which were mounted several small artillery pieces. Fort Fife, named after a Confederate officer, commanded excellent views of the James River and Kanawha Turnpike and its junction with the road to Parkersburg, the town seventy miles northwest from where it was suspected General McClellan’s soldiers would come. In spite of Mrs. Littlepage’s impertinence, Wise was a satisfied man as he surveyed the Kanawha countryside. Never mind the Yankees, he bragged, with the defenses he had built he could “whip the world.”

  Pryce Lewis was a little slow in rising on the morning of Sunday, June 30, though he presumed Colonel Patton’s head was even sorer. After a recuperative breakfast he ordered Bridgeman to fetch the horses, and they were soon on their way east toward Charleston. Looking out of the carriage window, Lewis rejoiced in the fact the “sky was clear, the air inspiriting and the scenery along our way delightful—meadows, upland and faraway peaks of the Alleghenies.” He reflected on the resounding success of the previous day, and with the colonel’s pass tucked inside his frock coat he “anticipated little difficulty in making my way out of the rebel lines.” But a worr
y, small but persistent, like a Kanawha mosquito, wouldn’t let Lewis alone. It burrowed its way into his mind, irritating his contentment. Its name was Henry Wise. Lewis had no wish to meet Wise, a man “whose reputation as a fierce Southern fire-eater and as the actual executioner [sic]* of old John Brown was well known the country over.” But if he wanted a pass out of Virginia, Lewis would have to go begging to Wise.

  They reached Charleston around midday, not long after the churches had scattered their flocks. Bridgeman asked for the best hotel in town and was directed to the four-story Kanawha House on the corner of Summers and Kanawha streets. As the carriage moved along Summers Street Lewis sat back and made subtle observations of soldiers he passed, all of whom were “rough-looking men, mountaineers in woolen shirts and overalls with little or no indication of uniforms, but all heavily armed, some with two revolvers at the belt, others with revolver and bowie knife.”

  As the carriage pulled up outside the Kanawha House Hotel two well-dressed officers emerged from the front door. Both wore slouch hats, and one, the older of the two, cradled a shotgun in the crook of his arm. The pair stood and watched with cool curiosity as Bridgeman helped his master out of the carriage. Lewis raised a finger to his silk top hat as he swanned past the soldiers and into the hotel. At the reception desk he asked for a room but was informed by the landlord, Mr. Wright, that the hotel was full on account of General Wise and his staff. The landlord gestured toward the general standing at the entrance, beside the man carrying the shotgun.

  Then the landlord looked beyond General Wise to Lewis’s gleaming carriage. Instantly his demeanor changed and he remembered that there was a room available, though he would have to expel one of the general’s officers. Wright the landlord, a moon-faced man, said it with soft relish, and Lewis sensed they were on the same side. He wrote “Pryce Lewis and servant, London, England” in the register, and then, as if to emphasize his status, he turned and barked at Bridgeman to get a move on with his valise.

  A Confederate officer was busy packing his trunk when Lewis entered the room in the company of the landlord. Lewis was most apologetic, but the officer didn’t seem too bothered. Bridgeman deposited his master’s valise and was shown to the servants’ quarters on the top floor of the hotel. Lewis freshened up, brushed his whiskers and then went for a Sunday afternoon stroll through Charleston. Groups of soldiers were clustered on street corners chattering with excitement about the recent rebel victory at Big Bethel on the Virginia Peninsula. The news was patchy, no one seemed sure of the exact details, but Johnny Reb had won a famous victory* and now the soldiers joked about the “slaughtered Yankees” and wondered when it would be their turn to join the fun.

  The more Lewis saw of Charleston, the more he realized the danger he was in. He was to all intents and purposes a prisoner, unable to go anywhere until he had a pass from General Wise. Lewis returned to the hotel, his head swarming with doubts and anxieties. He paced his room, telling himself that self-possession and nerve could carry him through, but he knew what happened to wartime spies. In Henry Tyrrell’s book of the Crimean War Lewis had read about the fate of the Russian spy captured by the Allied forces: interrogated, beaten, executed.

  By the time he heard the gong for supper Lewis had composed himself and was attired in his finest clothes with a mask of insouciance to match. He sauntered into the dining room and stopped. Arrayed in front of him must have been every officer on General Wise’s staff. There wasn’t a civilian to be seen, and worst of all, the only available chair in the room was opposite the man Lewis now knew to be General Wise.

  Lewis was shown to his chair, but neither Wise nor the other officers acknowledged his presence. Throughout the meal Lewis stole glances at the general, short, careful glances, lest he incur the wrath of a man who during his younger days had dueled with his adversaries.

  Lewis found Wise “thin and below the average size, not so old as I supposed, fifty-five perhaps, face smooth-shaven, mouth very stern, jaws somewhat cadaverous. His straggling iron gray hair was pushed behind his ears, his eyes were dark and restless.”

  The dinner table conversation was similar to that of the enlisted men, the sketchy details of the action at Big Bethel and the number of Union casualties. Estimates were more temperate, and few of the officers reveled in the victory.

  After dinner the officers retired to the parlor for a smoke, and Lewis followed in the hope of finding a convenient moment to ask the general for a pass. He was kept waiting for what seemed like an age as one officer after another occupied Wise’s attention. Then he was alone, and Lewis, like a timorous boy steeling himself to ask a girl for a dance, took a deep breath and moved across the parlor floor.

  “I would like to speak to your Excellency in private for a minute or two,” said Lewis. Wise sized up the Englishman for a second or two, running his dark eyes from the Dundreary whiskers to the red leather shoes. All right, Wise said at length, and instructed Lewis to follow him to his office. The reply took Lewis by surprise, but he accompanied Wise to the office that had been installed inside his bedroom. Lewis was disconcerted to discover it was opposite his own room.

  Wise sat down behind his desk and in a brusque tone asked what Lewis wanted. Lewis held Colonel Patton’s pass in the sweaty palm of his hand as he explained who he was, where he was from and what he was doing in Virginia. Then he mentioned George Patton’s name and repeated what the colonel had told him about obtaining a further pass from the general. Lewis went to show the pass, but Wise waved it away. Instead he sat back in his chair and eyed Lewis “in a suspicious manner” before refusing the request. Lewis asked why, and Wise, not used to being queried, snapped, “Don’t you know there is a War in this country sir?”

  Lewis tried to soften the general by excusing his oversight on the fact that when he’d left England there had been no war. But Wise didn’t care. He began attending to some papers on his desk, a clear indication that the meeting was now over. Lewis stood staring at the lank iron gray hair for a few moments and then asked the general if he’d mind if he applied to the British consul at Richmond for a travel permit. Wise replied that he had no objection, appending an unequivocal “Good night, sir” to his answer.

  Bridgeman was waiting for his master in the lobby of the hotel, desperate to know the upshot of the meeting. Lewis instructed him to ask the landlord for some writing materials and bring them to his room. Bridgeman appeared a few minutes later, and Lewis, his heart still racing, explained what had been said. The coachman was appalled. There was only one thing to do, advised Bridgeman, “Let’s leave everything behind us, let carriage and horses go to hell and take to the woods. We can find our way to the Ohio River.”

  Lewis said it was an absurd idea, that the rebels would hunt them down and exact a terrible revenge. But if we stay in Charleston, said Bridgeman, “then they will hang us both.” He reminded Lewis he had a wife and children back in Chicago; spying for the Union cause was one thing, dying for it was another matter.

  Lewis sympathized with Bridgeman’s predicament but insisted they stay put. As for the letter, if Bridgeman wouldn’t mail it to the British consul, Lewis would do it himself.

  Bridgeman fell into a sullen silence as Lewis wrote his letter in which he explained that he “was traveling as an inoffensive tourist, etc., and had been arbitrarily stopped by General Wise, who appeared to enjoy a display of petty authority by treating me very discourteously.” He asked Consul George Moore to make out a pass forthwith so that one of Her Majesty’s subjects could continue on his journey without further impediment.

  Lewis sealed the letter inside the envelope. The rebels are sure to open it, said Bridgeman sulkily. Lewis knew that, but what would it matter? There was nothing incriminating in its contents, everything was as he had explained to Colonel Patton and General Wise. Lewis held out the letter, but Bridgeman made no move. Take it, urged Lewis, assuring Bridgeman that “if the consul should be suspicious and write for further evidence of my identity … then there woul
d be time enough to take to the woods.” Bridgeman accepted the letter but wanted to know what they would do while they waited for a response from the British consul. Collect information that might aid their escape, replied Lewis, as well as any details that might be of value to General McClellan.

  Bridgeman might not have taken the letter if he had known the true state of affairs of the British consulate in Richmond at that time. Chaos reigned, as the English governess Sarah Jones discovered when she arrived at the beginning of July seeking a pass out of Virginia. Jones had entered the state nine months earlier, just days before Abraham Lincoln was voted into office, and though the first few months had passed agreeably enough she was now desperate to leave the bellicose city.

  Unfortunately for Jones, and the dozens of other British citizens stranded in Richmond, Consul George Moore had left for England two months earlier on account of his twenty-three-year-old daughter’s “incipient insanity.” The physician told Moore that the only cure for such a case was “a more bracing climate,” hence his request to the British Foreign Office for an immediate transfer home. While the condition of his daughter was regrettable, the prescribed treatment was agreeably convenient for George Moore. He was a fey individual, fragile in both mind and body. For the first twenty-two years of his diplomatic career, Moore had been posted in Italy, a country whose rich culture he adored. Virginia had come as a rude shock when he arrived in 1858 to take up the post of state consul. The climate and the people were too much for his weak character, as they evidently were for his daughter, so there were smiles all around when the physician pronounced his novel remedy for “incipient insanity.”