by Chris Enss
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid.
51. Ross, Rebel Rose, pp. 120–23.
52. Ibid.
Chapter Six
Operative Ellen
Several months before the start of the Civil War, Kate Warne was masquerading as a Southern sympathizer and keeping company with women of refinement and wealth from the South. When war did break out, those women were not afraid to express their support of the Rebels. Some of them were secretly supplying the Confederate forces with information they had acquired using their feminine wiles. Kate was tasked with staying close to opponents of the government who were seeking to overthrow it, and secure proof that secrets were being traded.
For weeks Kate had been monitoring the movements of Mrs. Rose Greenhow, a Southern woman believed to be engaged in corresponding with Rebel authorities and furnishing them with valuable intelligence. By late August 1861, Allan Pinkerton and a handful of his most trusted operatives, including Kate, had compiled enough evidence against Rose that a warrant for her arrest was granted. She was outraged when Pinkerton detective agents invaded her home and began gathering boxes of secret reports, letters, and official, classified documents. She called the agents “uncouth ruffians,” and objected to her home being searched.1
Pinkerton and his team left none of Rose’s possessions intact in their quest to extract all suspicious paperwork. The head- and footboards of all the beds were taken apart, mirrors were separated from their backings, pictures were removed from frames, and cabinets and linen closets were inspected. Coded letters were found in shoes and dress pockets. Among the items found in the kitchen stove were orders from the War Department giving the organizational plan to increase the size of the regular army, a diary containing notes about military operations, and numerous incriminating letters from Union officers willing to trade their allegiance to their country for a romantic interlude with Mrs. Greenhow.2
Mrs. Rose Greenhow was a renowned Confederate spy. Kate Warne and other Pinkerton operatives helped bring her career to a halt. Courtesy of the Library of Congress
According to Rose’s account of the inspection of her house and the seizure of many sensitive letters, the “intrusion was insulting.” One of the investigators at the scene complimented her on the “scope and quality” of the material found. It was “the most extensive private correspondence that has ever fallen under my examination,” the operative confessed. “There is not a distinguished name in America that is not found here. There is nothing that can come under the charge of treason, but enough to make the government dread and hold Mrs. Greenhow as a most dangerous adversary.”3
Pinkerton had hoped to keep the arrest quiet, but Rose’s eight-year-old daughter made that impossible. After witnessing the operatives foraging through her room and the room of her deceased sister, she raced out the back door of the house, shouting, “Mama’s been arrested! Mama’s been arrested!” Agents chased after the little girl, but after she climbed a tree, nothing could be done until she decided to come down.4
A female detective Rose referred to in her memoirs as “Ellen” searched the suspected spy for vital papers hidden in the folds of her dress, in her gloves, shoes, or hair. Nothing was found. Historians suspect the operative Rose referred to as Ellen was Kate Warne. Kate divided her time between guarding the prisoner and questioning leads that could help the detective agency track and apprehend all members of the Greenhow spy ring. Rose realized quickly that Kate was not someone to be trifled with, and she kept her distance.5
In the days to come, several women suspected of being a part of Rose’s spy ring were also arrested and kept under lock and key with their leader at her house. The Rebel informer’s home was referred to as Fort Greenhow, and newspaper reporters flocked to the house of detention hoping to get a look inside and converse with the prisoners. The January 18, 1862, edition of the Boston Post included an article about the home for inmates, and described what it looked like. The article reported that Rose and her daughter had been confined to the upstairs portion of the residence, and that all other guests occupied the downstairs.6 The article continued:
We were admitted to the parlor of the house, formerly occupied by Mrs. Greenhow. Passing through the door on the left we stood in the apartment alluded to. There were others who had stood here before us, we have no doubt of that—men and women of intelligence and refinement. There was a bright fire glowing on the hearth, and a tête-à-tête [an S-shaped sofa on which two people sit face-to-face] was drawn up in front. The two parlors were divided by red curtains, and in the backroom stood a handsome rosewood piano with pearl keys upon which the prisoners of the house, Mrs. G. and her friends, had often performed.7
The walls of the room were decorated with portraits of friends and others, some on earth and some in heaven, one of them representing a former daughter of Mrs. Greenhow, Gertrude, a girl of seventeen or eighteen summers, with auburn hair and light blue eyes, who died sometime since.8
Just now, as we are examining pictures, there is a noise heard overhead, hardly a noise, for it is the voice of a child, soft and musical. “That is Rosey Greenhow, the daughter of Mrs. Greenhow, playing with the guard,” said the Lieutenant, who noticed our inquisitive expression. “It is a strange sound here; you don’t often hear it, for it is generally quiet.” And then the handsome face of the Lieutenant relaxed into a shade of sadness.
There are many prisoners here, no doubt of that, and maybe the tones of this young child have dropped like rains of spring upon the leaves of the drooping flowers! A moment more and all is quiet, and save the stepping of the guard above there is nothing heard.9
Among the number of items seized at the Greenhow home was a cipher or special code used to write cryptic messages. Pinkerton gave the cipher to Kate and asked her to rewrite one of Rose’s dispatches and insert bogus information. The dispatch would then be disseminated in hopes of reaching Confederate colonel Thomas Jordan, a key figure in the network of spies. Rose was his protégé, and prior to the First Battle of Bull Run, he had assisted in passing messages about troop numbers and positions. He had devised the cipher Rose used, and Pinkerton believed there was a chance Colonel Jordan would act on the misinformation Kate supplied.10
Colonel Jordan was aware that Rose was under house arrest, and considered the possibility that she might have been able to smuggle the message out to him from where she was being held. After examining the letter and discussing the situation with his associates, it was decided that it was too dangerous to reply to her or act on the instructions she suggested. Colonel Jordan created a new cipher and waited. If Rose was still an active informant, the cipher would find its way to her.11
Pinkerton was furious that the message Kate had penned had obviously not been deemed legitimate. “Our efforts failed, and I’m sure she expected that,” Pinkerton recalled of Rose and her accomplishments as a counterspy. He continued:
She made use of whomever and whatever she could as mediums to carry into effect her unholy purposes . . . 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 had made them all they were . . .12
For a great many years Mrs. Greenhow has been the instrument of the very men who now lead in the Rebel councils and some of those who command their armies; who have successfully used her as a willing instrument in plotting the overthrow of the United States Government and which she, no less than they, had desired to accomplish; and since the commencement of this rebellion this woman with her uncommon social powers, her very extensive acquaintance among and her active association with the leading politicians of this nation, has possessed an almost superhuman power, all of which she has most wickedly used to destroy the government. With her as with other traitors, she has been most unscrupulous in the use of means. Nothing has been too sacred for her appropriation, as by its use she
might hope to accomplish her treasonable ends.13
The fact that Pinkerton and his operatives, as well as Union soldiers, were standing guard inside and outside of Rose’s house did not deter her from attempting to get messages to Jefferson Davis. She tried to slip messages out in hollowed-out tobacco plugs and canes. She even placed a note inside a ball of pink yarn and gave the ball to her daughter to deliver. Rose’s defiance prompted Pinkerton to have her transferred to the Old Capitol Prison. When rumor reached her that in all probability she would be moved and tried for treason, she boldly announced there would be “rich revelations” if such a thing occurred.14
The day Rose was transferred to the Old Capitol Prison, the street where she lived was filled with curious bystanders. Neighbors, business owners, soldiers, and Union supporters lined the thoroughfare to watch the spy being escorted to jail. Kate and the other Pinkerton detectives were on hand to witness Rose’s journey as well. Taking her daughter’s hand and holding it tightly, she paraded past the sea of faces staring intently at her. Her head up and her eyes fixed straight ahead, Rose said nothing as she walked along. Mother and daughter were housed in a room on the second floor of the prison. Their room had one window overlooking the yard where inmates could congregate. The furnishings were plain: a bed, chair, mirror, and sewing machine.15
Rose Greenhow didn’t lack contact with the outside world while interned at the Old Capitol Prison. The October 7, 1911, edition of the Syracuse Herald noted that there were a number of men and women who delighted in supplying her with any information they had. She also had friends in governmental departments who lost no opportunity in communicating with her. Many letters Rose wrote were to officials she believed could do something about her dismal “living conditions.”16
“She composed letters of complaint to Congressmen and local authorities,” the Syracuse Herald reported. “Two of the scathing letters were sent to the Secretary of State and duplicates were successfully dispatched to Richmond, where they were published in the newspapers.” According to the January 9, 1862, edition of the McArthur Democrat, Rose objected to being a “closed prisoner, shut out from air and exercise.”17 In a complaint to Secretary Seward, she wrote:
Patience is said to be a great virtue, and I have practiced it to my utmost capacity of endurance. I am told, sir, that upon your ipse dixit [a dogmatic and unapproved statement] the fate of citizens depends, and that the signed manual of the ministers of Louis XIV and XV had not more potential in their day than that of the Secretary of State in 1861.18
I therefore most respectfully submit that on Friday, August 23, 1861, without warrant or show of authority, I was arrested by the detective police, and my house taken in charge by them; that all my private letters and papers of a lifetime were read by them; that every law of decency was violated in the search of my house by Pinkerton detectives, and my person by an uncivilized female operative, and by their surveillance over me.19
Historians suspect that Rose’s “uncivilized female operative” refers to Kate Warne. Rose’s letter of grievance to Secretary Seward continued:
We read in history that the poor Marie Antoinette had a paper torn from her bosom by lawless hands, and that even a change of linen had to be affected in sight of her brutal captors. It is my sad experience to record even more revolting outrages than that, for during the first days of my imprisonment, whenever necessity forced me to seek my chamber, a detective stood sentinel at the open door.20
For a period of time I, with my little child, was placed absolutely at the mercy of men without character or responsibility; that during the first evening, a portion of these men became brutally drunk and boasted in my hearing of the “nice times” they expected to have with the female prisoners.
Pinkerton and his operatives utilized the time Rose was incarcerated to complete their investigation. The additional dispatches collected at the Greenhow home provided the agents with the names and locations of key members of her spy network. More than fifteen arrests were made subsequent to Rose being apprehended.21
Eugenia Phillips, the wife of a farmer, Alabama congressman, and Washington attorney; Colonel Thomas Marshal Key, judge advocate and McClellan’s aide-de-camp; banker William Smithson; and a well-respected dentist named Aaron Van Camp were among those whom Pinkerton agents investigated. Their investigation unearthed proof that supported the premise that the suspects were involved with Rose Greenhow and helped to steal secrets.22
Members of the Greenhow spy ring joined Rose in her opinion that the Pinkerton operatives were manufacturing evidence. Critics of the detective agency believed they had concocted tales of spies and assassination plots to further their business. Rose’s letter-writing campaign to the secretary of war not only called into question the integrity of the Pinkerton agency and its operatives, but also included a list of additional problems about life at the Old Capitol Prison. Rose wrote that she was living in a “squalid physical environment, contending with rats, bad food, and exposed to an uncomfortable and unsanitary cell.”23
The October 7, 1911, Syracuse Herald noted that Rose was not so much concerned for herself but for her daughter. “I am seriously alarmed about the health and life of my child. Day by day I see her fading away. Her round chubby face, [formerly] radiant with health, has become as pale as marble. The pupils of her eyes are unnaturally dilated, and finally, a slow, nervous fever seized upon her. I implored in vain, both verbally and in writing, that a physician might be sent.”24
Rose declined the services of a military doctor called to the prison. She wrote the provost marshal and told him that the treatment of her child had no “precedent in a civilized age.” In response to her note, a doctor was sent whose services she had already rejected. Rose tossed the doctor out of the cell. Finally, her family physician was allowed to examine the girl. With better food and more exercise, the child’s health improved.25
The hearing against Rose Greenhow began in March 1862. She considered the entire proceeding an outrage. She wasted no time in proclaiming it a mock trial, scoffing at the incriminating evidence compiled by Pinkerton and his Washington operatives. She referred to all the detectives as “despicable scoundrels,” and “denied any wrongdoing.” “I have not made nor will I make any confession of treason or treasonable correspondence,” Rose announced to the court on April 2, 1862. “Neither was I subjected to an examination intended to bring to the light my sources of information. I but claim the right which our fathers did in ’76—to protest against tyranny and oppression.”26
Rose Greenhow was found guilty of being a spy against the federal government and was sentenced to be banished from the North. On June 2, 1862, Rose, her daughter, and four other female traitors were released from the Old Capitol Prison and sent to Baltimore. From there the women were to be transported by boat to the South. The June 3, 1862, edition of the National Republican reported that Rose received “quite an ovation from the secession women of Baltimore, much to the disgust of the Union people of the city.”27
Pinkerton objected to Rose and the other accused traitors being exiled and transported to the South. His operatives had been seen by Rose, and Pinkerton feared that if she was permitted to travel to Richmond (where she requested to be sent), she would expose the detectives and their lives would be in jeopardy. She could provide the Rebels with descriptions of George Bangs and Kate Warne. Both agents worked assignments throughout the Confederate states, and if they were recognized as detectives employed by the Union, they would be put to death. Pinkerton believed Rose should have been hanged for her actions and not allowed to place the lives of his best operatives at such risk.28
Rose was celebrated in Richmond. Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States, extended his appreciation for her patriotism. According to Rose’s memoirs, Davis boasted that there would have been no victory at the first Bull Run without her help.29
If the efforts of operatives like Kate Warne and Hattie Lawton had
been made public, perhaps the press would have praised the capable agents for their work at uncovering Rebel espionage rings. The women employed by the Pinkerton Detective Agency were content with being anonymous. They lived their lives in secret; apart from exposure to counterspies such as Rose Greenhow, there was little chance of their vocation being discovered. As long as Rose was free, Pinkerton operatives would be on guard.30
When Rose left the country with her daughter in August 1863, she hadn’t a worry in the world. She was headed to London to write a book about her experiences as a spy imprisoned by Union forces, Allan Pinkerton, and his agents. The book, entitled My Imprisonment and the First Year of Abolition Rule at Washington, became a bestseller. In August 1864, Rose returned to America aboard the steamer Condor, leaving her daughter behind in France. Parisian convent school. She was carrying with her the proceeds she had earned from the sale of her book, hundreds of gold sovereigns sewn into her corset and underclothes.31
On the evening of September 30, 1864, the Condor was making its way from Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, when it entered the New Inlet Bar near Wilmington, North Carolina. In the dark of the night, the captain of the vessel mistook a partially sunken blockade ship as a working ship set to attack. Hoping to avoid a collision, the captain turned the Condor out of the way and accidentally ran the vessel aground. Rose and two Confederate agents decided to escape from the doomed ship using lifeboats. The lifeboats quickly overturned in the rough water. Rose was attempting to swim ashore when she drowned, the gold sovereigns she was wearing having weighed her down.32
Newspapers throughout the South reported on Rose’s death, as well as the particulars of her funeral. The October 20, 1864, Wilmington Journal noted that “hundreds of ladies lined the wharf at Wilmington upon the approach of Mrs. Greenhow’s remains.” The Soldiers’ Aid Society took charge of the funeral, held in the chapel of Hospital No. 4. “It was a solemn and imposing spectacle,” the Wilmington Journal article continued. “Mrs. Greenhow leaves one child, an interesting little daughter, who is in convent school at Paris, where her mother left her upon her return to this country.”33