In 1827 Frances gave birth to her sixth child (a daughter, Esther, had been born in 1824), a boy who was christened Godfrey but lived just fifty-nine days. The following year Mrs. Webster produced twins, James and Jonathan, increasing her brood to seven.
Her husband probably made up his mind to emigrate at the start of 1830. Perhaps it was his New Year’s resolution. Struggling to support his large family, Webster would have suffered along with everyone else because of the poor harvest of 1829. It was the second consecutive bad harvest, and now “men were found dead behind hedges with nothing but sour sorrel in their famished bellies.”
He wasn’t alone in casting his eyes west toward America. Other men in Sussex, particularly those who worked the land, feared what the invention of the threshing machine meant for them. While some farmworkers resisted the Industrial Revolution, destroying threshing machines and torching the barns of farmers who owned the hated contraptions, others chose to escape the upheaval. In February 1830 Robert Peel, the home secretary, received a letter from an anxious Sussex magistrate complaining “about the number of Sussex laborers emigrating to America … leaving their families dependent on the parish.”
But Timothy Webster had no intention of abandoning his family. When he applied to the overseers of Newhaven Parish for assistance in emigrating, he explained that he wished to take with him his pregnant wife and their seven children: Mary, fifteen, Maria, thirteen, Samuel, ten, Tim, eight, Esther, six, and the two-year-old twins, Jonathan and James.
The committee of Newhaven Parish would have been willing to help Webster, as they were in assisting most paupers. For years they had been doling out money to the family, keeping them in food and clothes; now with one final sum they would be released from all further obligations. In 1830 it cost parishes such as Newhaven six pounds and five shillings (there were twenty shillings to the pound, and a shilling was subdivided into twelve pennies) to send one adult pauper to North America and three pounds and two shillings for each child under the age of fourteen. On arrival, the adults were given two pounds each and one additional pound for each of their children. With this pittance they entered their new world.
England had not been kind to Timothy Webster. If one was born into poverty, that was how one remained, no matter how hard one worked, or how valiantly one fought. When he and his family reached America in 1830, with eleven pounds between them, he looked to the future. From now on the Websters would consider themselves Americans.
The Tim Webster that Pryce Lewis watched stroll along a Baltimore sidewalk in August 1861 looked, and sounded, every bit the American. The man himself might have retained a vague memory of swimming in the river Ouse or playing in the streets of Newhaven, but Webster was now an American citizen, married to an American, with three American children. His accent was New Jersey—Princeton, to be precise—where his father had built the family home thirty-one years earlier. Though his mother, Frances, had been in the ground for years, worn out by all the children she had brought into the world, Timothy Webster Senior had died in 1860 at the age of sixty-nine.
After he married at nineteen and became a dad at twenty-one, Tim Webster’s life had appeared to be set for the same unremitting grind as his own father’s, the same constant struggle to put food on the family table. He’d been handed down the paternal profession, that of tinsmith, and in the early 1840s scraped a living in Princeton. But at some point in the latter half of the decade Webster took a different path.
When the Federal Census was compiled in 1850, Tim Webster and his wife, Charlotte, were living in New York City. It was a big household, with their four children, one of Tim’s brothers (and his wife) and one of his sisters. But Webster could afford it; he was a police officer earning far more than he had as a tinsmith.
By 1853 Webster was a sergeant, and that summer he was one of the officers responsible for policing the huge crowds that descended on the Crystal Palace exhibition in the city’s Reservoir Park. When Horace Greeley visited the palace in his capacity as editor of the New York Tribune he described how “the thickly-studded drinking shops were flaunting in their intemperate seductions, the various shows of monsters, mountebanks and animals, numerous as on the jubilee days of the Champs Elysees, opened wide their attractions to simple folk [and] little speculators in meats, fruits and drinks had their tables and stalls al fresco. A rush and a whirl of omnibuses, coaches and pedestrians encircled the palace, but amid all this were plainly discernible the excellent provisions of the police to maintain order. The entrances to the palace were kept clear and no disturbance manifested itself through the day.”
One of the visitors elbowing his way through the crowds at the Crystal Palace was Allan Pinkerton, there not so much to admire the exhibitions as to recruit detectives to his agency. He noted Webster’s calm but firm authority, and asked his friend James Leonard, a captain in the New York Police, for his name along with those of five other policemen whom he judged to be detective material. Most accepted Pinkerton’s offer but not Webster, who didn’t wish to uproot his family to Chicago. Three years later, however, Webster changed his mind and joined the Pinkerton agency. His family remained in New York until 1858, by which time he’d saved enough money to have a house built for them in Onarga, a community ninety-five miles south of Chicago.
By 1861 Webster was the undisputed star of the agency. When he wasn’t on duty, “he was of a quiet, reserved disposition, seldom speaking unless spoken to, and never betraying emotion or excitement under any pressure of circumstances.” Pinkerton, with his belief that a man’s face was the window to his soul, remarked that Webster “always wore that calm, imperturbable expression denoting a well-balanced mind and a thorough self-control, while the immobile countenance and close-set lips showed that he was naturally as inscrutable as the Sphinx.”
But Webster was transformed the moment he went undercover. He was no longer the silent, stoic son of the tinsmith turned soldier; instead he changed into what Pinkerton described as “a genial, jovial, convivial spirit, with an inexhaustible fund of anecdotes and amusing reminiscences, and a wonderful faculty for making everybody like him.” The Scot said Webster’s ability to play a part amounted “to positive genius, and it was this that forced me to admire the man as sincerely as I prized his services.”
Pinkerton believed that the secret to being an effective detective was the operative’s talent for acting, and Webster was a natural. Clearly he’d inherited some genes from his paternal grandfather, Samuel, a tinsmith by training but an actor by calling, who had appeared in numerous amateur stage productions throughout the county of Leicester.
Webster’s first wartime assignment had been to travel from Cincinnati to Memphis, acting the part of a wealthy Baltimorean, a hater of the Union and a loyal secessionist. In the latter half of May 1861 Webster booked into the Worsham House Hotel on the corner of Front and Jefferson streets, and wove himself into the city’s tapestry. Using his real name, he made a particular friend of an overbearing army doctor named Burton, all gold braid and no brain, who showed off his standing in the city by taking Webster on a tour of his camp.
Webster had returned to Cincinnati toward the end of June, around the time Pryce Lewis and Sam Bridgeman set out for Charleston, but on July 23 he departed once more for Tennessee. Riding the train to Memphis the following day, Webster “got in conversation with men from Louisville going to Camp Boone, Tenn., under Col. Tillman. Near the State line in Tennessee there is a camp of 200 men but few of them are armed. At Camp Boone near Clarksville under Col. Tillman there is 1800 men [sic], all Kentuckians not armed. At Clarksville an officer from Fort Dover near the Cumberland River near the Ohio said there was 500 men well armed and 4-32 pounders (iron) to guard the river.”
The next day Webster’s train was detained at Humboldt so he alighted and “drank and talked with officers from Union City. They said they had 6,000 men nearly all armed and 2-32 pounders (iron).”
In Memphis Webster looked up his old friends. They were deligh
ted to see him. Join us for a night’s carousing, they proposed, so that evening Webster went from bar to bar with Colonel Robert Seeley and the military engineer “Bob” Rowley, and “the whole conversation was about how they, the Southern Army, had cleaned out the ‘Yankees’ at Bulls Run [sic].”
On July 29 Webster was still warming the bar stools of Memphis, along with the faithful Colonel Seeley. They hailed a Confederate captain, stood him a couple of whiskeys, and the officer whispered loudly to Webster “that there was 3,000 men at Randolph [Tennessee,] there was 1,000 men at Fort Clearborn and 35 heavy guns and … that the officers that were there were talking about the Manassas battle. They all wanted to rush to Washington and St. Louis.”
Webster left Memphis on July 31 with warm demands to hurry back, as well as a pocketful of introductions to trusted men in Richmond, Virginia, where Webster said he intended to stay during the winter; to Charles Stebbins, the proprietor of a china, glass and crockery store; to Colonel William Ritchie; to Colonel J. S. Calvert, state treasurer; and to George Bagby, the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger and the associate editor of the Richmond Whig.
Webster had also on his person several other letters of a more sensitive nature, letters that were to be delivered to trusted secessionists in Baltimore and that were on no account to fall into Federal hands. The information concerned the Confederate effort, not just the overt activities in the Southern states, but also the covert work being carried out in Maryland.
Webster was now a double agent, embarking upon missions for two sides but betraying only the South. He returned north using the Confederate pass signed by Secretary of War Judah Benjamin, and delivered his hoard to Pinkerton’s headquarters in Cincinnati. The letters were painstakingly steamed open with every scrap of information noted, and then they were resealed with equal thoroughness. Webster tucked the letters into his satchel and continued east to Baltimore, where he handed them to their rebel recipients.
Webster was still in Baltimore when Lewis and Bridgeman arrived in early August. Webster was portraying himself as a wealthy gentleman of leisure and to that end Pinkerton had supplied him with the carriage used by Lewis. It had needed a spot of repair work after its flight through the mountains of Kentucky, and a new driver was recruited, but it complemented Webster’s role as an affluent Baltimorean. With him was Hattie Lawton, the young female detective who had worked with Webster during the febrile days of February.
She was his “wife,” the devoted Mrs. Webster, a woman of few words but great beauty. Webster’s rebel friends were impressed; a man with a wife so toothsome should be admired as well as envied.
Before Lewis had the opportunity to discreetly introduce himself to Webster, he and Bridgeman were summoned to Washington, where Pinkerton had recently relocated. As the pair took a train south, Webster remained in Baltimore fortifying the persona of a trusted confidant of the Confederate cause. By the end of August he’d been invited to join the Order of the Sons of Liberty, Baltimore’s branch of a secretive organization first founded by American patriots during the Revolutionary War, and whose enemy now was the North.
On August 23 he had a long discussion with a man named Merrill, a gun store owner and a rebel to the core. Webster told him he wanted to buy his stock of three hundred rifles. Not a problem, said Merrill, who added that he could also supply some Bowie knives. From the gun store Webster went to William Allen’s Eating Saloon, where Alexander Slayden told him “there was 5 to 6,000 stand of arms in Baltimore … and all of our boys had been getting muskets, rifles and pistols since wherever they could buy them.” Later Webster, Slayden and a thirty-year-old lumber merchant named Sam Sloan went to the Baltimore racetrack, where they met ten other rebels, and in between gambling and drinking, they discussed in low tones how to seize control. Who would lead an uprising now that George Kane, the chief of police, had been imprisoned for disloyalty to the Union? asked Webster. Slayden told him not to worry; “we have leaders enough. There is Colonel Street, just as good a man as we want and he is ready at any time.”
When Webster returned to his hotel he wrote a detailed report of everything he had learned. In the report was a name, that of Daniel Stiltz, a twenty-five-year-old photographic artist. Webster explained that Stiltz was a dedicated secessionist about to visit Federal camps in the Washington area “and take likenesses.” He’d even duped a prominent Unionist into writing him a letter of introduction. Webster asked Pinkerton to rush an operative to Baltimore so he could put him on the tail of Stiltz. Webster suggested sending John Scully, a young Irish detective whose energy compensated for his inexperience. The next morning, August 24, Hattie Lawton left Baltimore early to deliver the information to Pinkerton’s Washington headquarters. Webster spent the day moping about town, pining for his “wife” who’d been suddenly called away on a family matter.
C H A P T E R T W E L V E
“The Most Persuasive Woman That Was Ever Known in Washington”
ON WHAT WAS CALLED “BLACK MONDAY,” the North woke to learn that the day before, Sunday, July 21, its troops had been smashed at Bull Run. “We are utterly and disgracefully routed, beaten, whipped,” asserted Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune. A few days later he wrote to Abraham Lincoln, inquiring if perhaps “it is best for the country and for mankind that we make peace with the rebels.” But by the time Greeley sent his letter the president had already implemented a new policy, one which was diametrically opposed to that suggested by the newspaper editor
Bull Run was a painful blow for the North, but Lincoln used it as a chance to administer some stringent medicine. It would no longer be a “Ninety-Day war,” as the more martial of the Union newspapers had glibly prophesized. The rebels had proved themselves worthy opponents, so on Black Monday Lincoln authorized the recruitment of half a million men, not for three months, which had been the original terms of enlistment back in April, but for three years. On July 25 Lincoln agreed to a demand to draft a further half million men.
To command them, Lincoln ordered George McClellan to hand over the army in western Virginia to General Rosecrans and hurry to Washington. He arrived on July 26 and was told to turn the willing volunteers into the Army of the Potomac. McClellan soon demonstrated that his military skill was on the training ground, not the battleground, and that he was as punctilious in raising an army as he had been pusillanimous in fighting a battle.
The tens of thousands of recruits learning to become soldiers admired their leader and called him “Little Mac.” Others were not so well disposed toward McClellan, notably the officers who were purged from the new army on account of their incompetence or inefficiency. There was also a crackdown on debauchery, led by the new provost marshal, Colonel Andrew Porter, who arrested scores of soldiers for drinking and fighting.
McClellan bolstered Washington’s defenses against any rebel attempt to attack the city; then he turned his attention to the enemy within. Before his arrival in the capital McClellan had written to Pinkerton informing him that in future he was to report to General Rosecrans. However, McClellan added, Pinkerton should “be prepared to hear from me that I need your services elsewhere.” Sure enough, once he was established in Washington McClellan summoned Pinkerton and instructed him to set about “procuring from all possible sources, information regarding the strength, positions and movements of the enemy. All spies, ‘contrabands,’ deserters, refugees and prisoners of war, coming into our lines from the front, were to be carefully examined.”
Pinkerton accepted the challenge with brio, replying to McClellan’s instruction with an overview of the strategy he planned to adopt. At the same time, he warned the general that there must be no political or military interference, regardless of what his investigations revealed. It was, he continued, his belief “that the rebels have spies who are in the employment of this government, or who possess facilities for acquiring information from the civil and military authorities … and that this information is imparted to others, and transmitted within a very
short time to the rebel government. Many of the parties thus leagued with the enemy are said to be persons of wealth and position.”
When Pinkerton warned McClellan that certain aspects of his work might be somewhat distasteful, he had someone particular in mind. Her name was Mrs. Rose O’Neale Greenhow.
Rose Greenhow was not an agreeable woman. Conceited, vain, petulant, manipulative, hypocritical, dishonest and a shameless bigot, Greenhow nevertheless had one quality that outshone all her myriad defects: intoxicating beauty. Her looks simply overpowered most men. Though she was scorned by her female rivals in Washington’s antebellum society—they knew her for what she was, an unsophisticated country girl whose ruthless scheming had snared a rich and influential husband—Greenhow won male admirers with every artful tilt of her gorgeous head.
Greenhow’s husband had been killed in an accident in 1854 while working in San Francisco, a tragedy that was attributed to ongoing street repairs. Greenhow received ten thousand dollars in compensation, and Congress saw fit to award her a further forty-two thousand dollars as her husband had been engaged in government business at the time of his death. Such largesse was unusual, but Rose Greenhow’s links to Washington’s political elite were unusual. Her niece was the wife of Illinois senator Stephen Douglas, and she had been a good friend of John Calhoun during his illustrious political career.
Greenhow used the money to buy a spacious, two-story house at 398 Sixteenth Street West, on the corner of K Street. With all but one of Greenhow’s daughters grown-up and independent, she had time to cultivate her standing within Washington society. Such was “her love of notoriety and dread of sinking back into her early obscurity” that her dinner parties became legendary. Rarely was there a dance or a ball without the bewitching presence of the widowed Rose. Stephen Mallory, a Florida senator, marveled at the way “she hunted man with that resistless zeal and unfailing instinct.” By the late 1850s it was widely rumored that her friendship with President Andrew Buchanan, a bachelor, had moved from the platonic to the carnal, and in 1860 tongues began to wag that Greenhow and Henry Wilson, a married Massachusetts senator, were engaged in an improper relationship.
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