Now that the Yankees had been soundly defeated, Washington was even more concerned about attack, convinced that General Beauregard would follow the retreating Yankees right to the Capitol. “A strong guard was stationed around all the public buildings.” Rose mockingly reported, “Everything about the national Capitol betokened the panic of the administration. Preparations were made for the expected attack, and signals arranged to give the alarm.” Excited to repeat her triumph, the spy “took advantage of the situation. The alarm-guns of the Yankees were the rallying cry of a devoted band whose hearts beat high with hope.” If the Rebels advanced on the city, Rose had organized her sympathizers in the shadows to assist them. But that’s not what happened. Here’s what happened: Rose Greenhow was arrested.
Sixteen-year-old Julia Taft had advance warning: “To our house came one day a bland gentleman with distinguished black whiskers to make inquiries about Mrs. Rose Greenhow. Mrs. Greenhow and her little daughter Rose often came to our house and we liked them both.” Julia could not imagine why the strange man, who turned out to be secret service agent Allan Pinkerton, would be asking about the “dashing, beautiful woman . . . a brilliant conversationalist, dressed in the mode, and a leader in Washington society.” But, in answer to his questions, the family admitted: “Yes, she did seem glad to meet officers who visited our house. Yes she had asked Bud and Holly and me about our visits to the White House and what Mr. Lincoln said. My father remembered that she had asked him questions about the regiments that had arrived.” Then Pinkerton took Taft aside, whispered something, and cautioned the children not to say anything about the mysterious visit.
Tad Lincoln solved the mystery with his announcement that “Mrs. Greenhow had been arrested as a dangerous spy.” The little boy shouted with glee, “ ‘they’ll probably shoot her at sunrise tomorrow.’ ” That turned out not to be true, but the rest of his report was accurate: Rose Greenhow had secretly been put under house arrest along with other spies who had come to her home to exchange information. They had walked into a trap. “Various persons called at her residence and were taken in custody and held until evidence was shown that they were loyal,” explained the New York Times. “It was little Rose who at last gave the alarm and perhaps prevented the capture of other Confederate agents,” Julia revealed. Everyone else in the house was watched constantly but the eight-year-old daughter was allowed to go outside to play. She climbed a tree near the garden wall and screamed so all could hear: “ ‘Mother has been arrested. Mother has been arrested.’ ”
Rose was not surprised. One of her spies had passed along the information that arrest was imminent. When it happened, detectives searched her house for days, going through all of her papers, but Rose managed, right under the noses of her captors, to spirit out the documents that would be most damaging to the Confederate cause. As the juicy content of her letters and diary spread through the town there was more than one embarrassed member of the Lincoln administration and Congress. And Rose kept finding ways to receive and reveal important information even while confined to her home prison. Eventually the government turned her house into a jail for other suspected female spies and the establishment was quickly dubbed “Fort Greenhow” by the Washington wags.
The guards allowed members of the press to roam around in the makeshift prison, hoping to humiliate their charges. Accounts about the house and its occupants even appeared in the European papers. One curious correspondent took in Rose’s first floor: “The two parlors were divided by a red gauze, and in the backroom stood a handsome rosewood piano, with pearl keys . . . the walls of the room were hung with portraits. . . . The Sixteenth-street gaol has been an object of considerable interest for months past, to citizens as well as visitors.” Rose managed to get her own side of the story out by leaking a letter to her friend Secretary Seward describing her rude and rough treatment—“whenever necessity forced me to seek my chamber, a detective stood sentinel at the open door.” This aroused so much sympathy for the still-admired figure that her pro-Union family finally relented and came to visit her. Her niece, Adele Douglas, brought Christmas presents for the eight-year-old child, but then, the New York Times reported, Rose “received a cake from some friend of hers, unknown to the guard.” When he examined it he “found embedded therein a note informing the lady that arrangements had been made for her escape and conveyance to Richmond.” A follow-up story described Rose’s reaction: “When Mrs. Greenhow lost her cake, containing her plan of escape, she was furious, not desisting from ringing her bell until the guard threatened to shut her in the garret and feed her on bread and water. . . . She has been cut off from her allowance of a quart of wine a day.” Mrs. Greenhow’s captors decided to move her to the more secure and far less comfortable Old Capitol Prison.
ONCE A BOARDINGHOUSE that had been home to such notables as John C. Calhoun and to Rose Greenhow herself, the prison boasted a distinguished past. After the British burned the Capitol in the War of 1812, the government hurriedly erected a structure across the street from the ruin as a place for Congress to meet while it was restored. Abandoned as an official building when the new Capitol opened, private owners started a school in what came to be called The Old Capitol and then took in boarders until the government bought the site again, this time as a holding pen for Confederate spies and prisoners of war. When the first of those prisoners arrived after the Battle of Bull Run, “they were pelted with stones and other missiles, which seriously wounded a number. In order to prevent the prisoners from being actually torn to pieces, a company of U.S. regulars had to be called out to protect them to their quarters, the old Capitol prison,” Rose Greenhow indignantly recounted, never dreaming she would eventually end up there herself. The secessionist spy wasn’t the only one outraged by the mob. Ann Green too was horrified: “the Southern prisoners were attacked by some infuriated soldiers yesterday as they were being brought into Washington and would have been killed but that a Company of Cavalry charged on and dispersed them.”
Rumors ran rampant that the Rebels, who had captured many more prisoners than the Yankees, were treating their captives badly. And those were just some of the stories Mrs. Green heard spreading through the city after the massive Union defeat: “All sorts of reports have been floating about today. One was that a boat had been kept steamed all night in readiness for Lincoln and his Cabinet to desert the premises.” For days the city churned chaotically: “Soldiers lying all on the cellar doors and pavement—some sleeping and some drunk, but in inconceivable numbers,” clucked Mrs. Green. “They are completely demoralized and are still coming in.” Blame, of course, had to be assigned and General Irvin McDowell, who led the charge, came in for most of it, along with General Daniel Tyler: “Great censure is cast on the commanding officers—and persons did not hesitate to say today that both McDowell and Tyler were drunk,” Ann Green confided the whispered charges. “The government is making great exertions to reorganize the Army—it is not supposed they can succeed before three months.” That was one report Mrs. Green had right.
As far as the president’s advisor Francis Preston Blair was concerned, the silver lining in the defeat would be reorganization of the army. He informed his daughter Lizzie Lee, who had taken refuge in Philadelphia and was desperate for news, “I think we have gained more than we have lost by the late battle—It is the opinion of everybody that we have gained a good general for the fold & probably are released from several bad ones.” General George B. McClellan rode in from the west to replace McDowell, but even as he rounded up soldiers off the streets and cellar doors and herded them into camps where they drilled day and night, the city huddled once again in terror of imminent attack. The Blair family was so sure that it would come that Preston Blair sent a telegraph to Lizzie in Philadelphia ordering her to “ ‘stay till you hear from me.’ ” And a subsequent letter informed her that “defences were being thrown up all around the City to the north—even ‘around Silver Spring vicinity.’ ”
For families who had no choice but
to stay in Washington, the situation was both frightening and infuriating. “We have had a day of commotion—two or three thousand troops with numerous wagons went up the road. There was nothing but shouting and shooting. Two balls came near the house . . . one seemed to go over my head and lodge in the garden,” fussed Ann Green, who was trying to eke out a living for her family on the farm while ducking bullets and dodging begging from the soldiers. And still more soldiers came: “More artillery passed up today. There are now about fifteen thousand troops about Tennallytown,” a section of the District very close by and where the officer in command assured a neighbor “the Southerners were confidently expected to make an attack on Washington immediately.” Visiting a neighbor, Mrs. Green learned that just a few hours earlier “a musket shot passed through her clothes, just grazing the knee, and fell at her feet. I looked at the shot hole, made through five garments and the pieces of each, laying with the ball which she had preserved.” Close calls for these women, from the men who were supposed to be protecting them.
The soldiers were not just careless, they were crass, helping themselves to pretty much anything they wanted. One friend had “not less than fifty soldiers lolling and moving around her doors . . . everything about her was destroyed, the cornfield cut down and every particle of poultry gone.” Mrs. Green’s orchard was also there for the picking: “All our peaches that were capable of being shaken off were taken today.” Every day soldiers would show up foraging for food; “one of the days we counted forty-two . . . they have finished on the fruit and begun on the vegetables,” food planted to feed Mrs. Green’s large family. But then, as a welcome reminder that life goes on despite danger and deprivation, on August 6 Mrs. Green’s daughter-in-law, Mimi, gave birth to a “dear little boy.” That baby became the family’s salvation during those long months fearing for their lives. “What a difference the baby’s arrival has made, it seems as if everybody had someone and the same thing to love,” Ann smilingly related when the baby was twelve days old, but this new grandchild also reminded her of the others, the children of her two daughters in Virginia: “How much I would enjoy my other grandchildren that I have not seen in so long!”
Not only could she not see her family, she couldn’t even hear from them. When the U.S. Post Office cut off mail to Dixie at the beginning of June, families straddling both sides of the lines had to rely on travelers between the warring regions to deliver personal information. And then it could be agonizing. If someone brought her word of a sick grandchild, Ann had no way of knowing whether the child had gotten better or died, as so many did. “Oh the separation with all its restrictions is dreadful!” she sighed, and she was totally in the dark about what to expect. As the fall approached Mrs. Green, like many in Washington, waited for the next shoe to drop: “About the war we know nothing—everything is kept still.”
Even those close to the president knew very little. “My argument is that McClellan can embody against them 100,000 men & that he is active & able & knows how to handle them,” Preston Blair confidently told his daughter Lizzie in late August, guessing about the Rebels, “If they do not take Washington in ten days they will never do it.” All the same, he continued to advise her to stay put in Pennsylvania. And since her boy Blair, who had just turned five, was with her, she readily acquiesced: “I shall not come home when the Army at Wash[ington] are daily reported to have slept on their arms.” Though she was an ardent Unionist, Lizzie worried about her friend Varina Davis. In early September a false report hit the newspapers that Jefferson Davis was dead: “I have thought a great deal of Mrs. Jeff Davis. If she has lost her husband it is really one of those cases where death has been deliverer from a more bitter sorrow. For I cannot believe in the eventual success of this wicked conspiracy.” Little did Lizzie know that Varina too had trouble believing in secessionist success. Soon after she arrived in Richmond, the much-hailed first lady of the Confederacy confided to her mother, “Amidst all this enthusiasm however comes over me the deep horror of our not being ready & armed. Their hordes are very near & their bitterness is very great. They have manufacturies of arms—we have none.” But still, she had “made up my mind to come here & be happy no matter what danger there was.” And her friend Lizzie Lee knew Varina would not be happy if anything had happened to her husband: “She will be a heart broken woman for tho’ in some awe of her husband she was devotedly in love with him.” A few days later Lizzie reported a different story: “we hear Mrs. Jeff. has another Baby & old Jeff is still alive.” In fact the baby wasn’t born for another three months, but the President of the Confederacy was still very much alive, with a war to wage against the men in Lizzie’s family.
The Blairs were pleased with McClellan’s appointment as commander of the Army of the Potomac, and they helped manipulate the selection of their old comrade in politics John C. Frémont as head of the Western Department, headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri. Congressman Frank Blair, Lizzie’s brother and Preston’s son, had schemed against the secessionist governor there to keep the state in the Union and his success allowed him to wield considerable clout in Washington, along with his father the presidential advisor and his brother Montgomery the Cabinet member. “The point which Father has been laboring for is at last attained—McClellan has the eastern division & Fremont the West,” Lizzie announced with satisfaction, “for nearly two months this has been labored for by our set—to get the work out of lukewarm hands heads & hearts.” But Frémont had ideas of his own about how to manage the Rebels making trouble in Missouri, and President Lincoln was far from pleased with the general’s orders. To make his case, John C. Frémont sent his wife to Washington.
JESSIE BENTON FRÉMONT, once the most recognizable woman in the capital, had only been to Washington briefly in the five years since her husband’s presidential defeat in 1856. She and her father, Thomas Hart Benton, had reached an uneasy rapprochement after the bitterness of the campaign. And in 1858, following a grand tour of Europe hailed as an American celebrity, Jessie went to comfort Benton while he was dying. But then her husband summoned her back to their home in California to help him run Las Mariposas, so with the four children she once again crossed the country for hard work in the far west. Life improved for the now thirty-four-year-old matron when the family moved from the remote Mariposa settlement into San Francisco, where Jessie established a must-visit salon for literary and political sojourners. But when the war broke out the passionately antislavery Frémonts saw an opportunity to relive their glory days and to contribute to the Union cause.
Once John received his command, thanks to lobbying by the Blair family, Jessie and the children packed up to join him in Missouri, a place she knew well. The state that sent her father to Congress for so many decades was now represented in the House by Elizabeth Blair Lee’s younger brother Frank. Jessie had kept up her correspondence with the Blairs, especially with her girlhood companion Lizzie, over the years and when Jessie announced to them her intention to relocate to St. Louis with the army, the scion of the family, Preston Blair, advised her instead to come to Washington. The general’s wife wouldn’t hear of it—she would be with John. For headquarters the couple rented a mansion belonging to a relative of Jessie, where officers could live and work together and where she could keep closely involved with everything going on. And there was a great deal going on.
Though Missouri was officially in the Union, the secessionist governor refused to supply troops to the Army and turned a blind-eye to Confederate sympathizers staging attacks across the state. Jessie spent the summer militating for more men and matériel. Griping to Lizzie that General Frémont was forced to cope with “an arsenal without arms or ammunition—troops on paper” because western soldiers had been diverted to protect Washington, she wanted to make the case for more troops and arms to President Lincoln herself. “I have begged Mr. Fremont to let me go on & tell him how things are here.” Since she had just made the long trip through Panama to New York and then on to Missouri, her husband thought the journey w
ould exhaust her, so she stayed in St. Louis. But she kept up her barrage of badgering letters.
To Lizzie’s brother, Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, Jessie complained: “I don’t like this neglect & I look to you & to the President to see that it has not a fatal effect. Just now the Potomac is so interesting that I do not blame every care for it but don’t expect miracles on the Mississippi.” Bureaucratic red tape kept getting in the way of sending the money and munitions needed even as the Confederate army closed in from both the south and north. Frémont went north and staved off that advance; General Nathaniel Lyon went south with too few soldiers and lost his life. As southwest Missouri fell to the enemy, Jessie’s letters became more agitated: “By dint of begging and bullying some guns & money are being gotten in, but every useful thing is being concentrated around Washington.” The hounding missives didn’t stop at the Cabinet level. Jessie went right to the top, protesting to President Lincoln: “The State is being occupied by the Home Guards & the occupation would have been complete but for the absolute want of arms.” The fact that Frémont had found men to fill the “Home Guards”—many of them German immigrants—to secure Union rule convinced the Blairs that their man could do the job. “Fremont has stirred up things in St. Louis & given new life there,” Lizzie Lee rejoiced to her husband; “if he & Frank can’t take care of Missouri I am mistaken in the men.”
But when Frank Blair went back to Missouri after the congressional session, he heard grumblings not just from the Frémonts, but about them as well. John was said to be aloof, refusing to see anyone, including his officers. Jessie was said to be running the show, protecting her husband from information he needed. Behind her back she was derisively called “General Jessie.” And she had in fact organized everything—including the hospitals where she enlisted the newly named Superintendent of Army nurses Dorothea Dix. Frank, who had originally been one of Frémont’s staunchest supporters, now advised his brother Montgomery of mass irregularities in the Western Division: Frémont’s suspicious dealings with contractors, his excessive spending, and his disorganization. The state was in danger of falling entirely into enemy hands.
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