Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy

by Karen Abbott

  “It is exiling me to use any force, to send me South from my home.”

  “I merely made it as a suggestion.”

  “Is there any other charge of treason against me?” Rose taunted him. “It may be that I am charged with having spies in the government. It is really absurd to suppose that I could get important information of the Government’s designs when I am not in the Government; or that I could get such information about the Government when no one in power would give it to me; or that if such information that you say I have, I must have got it from sources that were in the confidence of the Government. I don’t intend to say any more. I merely throw this out as a suggestion.”

  The judge sighed and turned to Dix. “General,” he pleaded, “I think you had better talk to Mrs. Greenhow. You are an old friend of hers.”

  “I don’t know that I have anything to say,” Dix muttered.

  Rose smiled and said sweetly, “You both see how pleasant it is.”

  “You might ask Mrs. Greenhow about the correspondence in cipher,” Pierrepont suggested.

  Rose interrupted him. “I am not obliged to answer that question.”

  “You are not obliged to answer any question that you do not please to,” Dix conceded. “Those that you do answer will be recorded, so you see you have perfect freedom.”

  Rose couldn’t quell her sarcasm. “Liberty of speech!”

  Her friend’s response was tight and controlled: “You have the privilege of putting the answer in your own form.”

  “Of course, General, I decline to answer questions of that sort,” she replied, returning to the query about her cipher and throwing it back at him: “Although I believe your chief detective”—meaning Allan Pinkerton—“found some cipher at my house while I was sick. It was a very good cipher, and it might have been found useful, but I did not get an opportunity to use it.”

  Dix rummaged through his pile and held a paper aloft. “I want to know in regard to this letter which was found in your house,” he said, waving it in the air. “It reads: ‘There are 45,000 on the Virginia side; 15,000 around the city, to wit, up the river above Chain Bridge. . . . If McClellan can be permitted to prepare, he expects to surprise you . . .’ Did you write this?”

  “I have no recollection of it,” Rose replied.

  Dix took a step closer to her. “There are other letters of the same sort.”

  “Are those letters said to be found in my house?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think that is false. I think that is unequivocally false, I don’t swear it is. I have been in the habit of entertaining guests at my house. So far as I am myself concerned, I pronounce it unequivocally false.”

  “You know, Mrs. Greenhow,” Dix scolded, “that in a context like this, while the very existence of the Government is in danger, the communication of such information as this, which tends to subvert the interests of the Government, should certainly be considered a very serious offense.”

  Rose seized the opening. “I don’t know about that,” she said. “When the President, with his 100,000 men, has to hold in confinement a poor woman and children, I think he had better give up the ghost. Since his Black Republican party came into power—and I detest it in my very soul—I have kept entirely out of the world. I lost my child a short time before. I have not been in the world during that time; therefore any information I may have got must have been brought to my house, and brought to me. Brought to me by traitors, as you call them, in that party. Therefore I am to be held responsible for that? If Mr. Lincoln’s friends will pour into my ear such important information, am I to be held responsible for all that? Could it be presumed that I could not use that which was given to me by others? If I did not, I would be unjust to myself and my friends. It is said that a woman cannot keep a secret. I am a woman, and a woman usually tells all she knows.” She let those words settle and then took a gamble, asking for her papers to be returned to her. “I don’t see any treason,” she insisted, “in all that you have told me.”

  The naïveté of Pierrepont’s response surprised her. “I don’t think you are bent so much on treason,” he admitted, “as mischief.”

  Mischief? Rose thought, offended by the downgrade of her contributions. She again went on the offensive. “Let me tell you,” she said, “I have studied the Constitution and law of this country. I have informed myself about the Constitution as well as I have about my Bible. Your Government ought to be ashamed of itself for allowing me to be scandalously treated; in allowing such scoundrels as it did to get to my letters, and read them and laugh over them. I have been made the victim of every kind of villainy.”

  Pierrepont took a turn, rattling a piece of paper.

  “So you know J. S. Sheldon?” he asked, referring to the one guard who had been kind to her and Little Rose.

  Rose hesitated, wondering what the judge knew. “Yes, very well.”

  Now Pierrepont sounded smug. “There seem to be some letters here that passed through his hands.”

  Pierrepont was bluffing when he said “letters”—there had been only one—but Rose understood: that single instance when she’d asked Lieutenant Sheldon to mail a letter, he instead delivered it straight to Union authorities. Rage crept into her voice. “Call him up and let him answer. Call him up and we will see what he has to say about that.”

  Pierrepont and Dix both kept quiet, waiting for her next words to convict her.

  Rose spoke haltingly. “I have no intention . . . I have no recollection of it at all. During the first month of my imprisonment I had perfect freedom to write what I pleased, and the letters were carried through the provost marshal’s office.”

  “The question is not as to whether you have written the letters,” Pierrepont pointed out, “but, also, whether you have a right, knowingly, to try and subvert the purposes of the Government.”

  “I don’t consider that I was,” she replied, regaining her footing. “I look at it in an entirely different light. I have a right to write what I please. I always did so.”

  Pierrepont cut her off. “It is wartime now.”

  Dix picked another piece of paper from his pile. Rose recognized her pink stationery and wild scrawl. It was a letter to her daughter Florence in which she ranted against “black Republican dogs” and gossiped that Secretary of War Stanton was planning to replace McClellan.

  “This letter is equal to declaring determined hostility to the Government,” Dix charged. “I believe there are a great many others of the same purport.”

  “The Government knew what my feelings have been, and always were,” Rose said. “I have not changed them. I have no other feelings than those now.”

  She felt a shift in the room, an invisible tilt of a lever, spilling momentum in her direction. Dix seemed to give up; he knew they had gotten all they would from Rose. He returned her letters to his pile and turned to his co-commissioner: “Judge, I don’t know as we wish to ask Mrs. Greenhow any more questions.”

  Rose left them with some patronizing advice. “In these war times,” she said, “you ought to be in some more important business than holding an inquisition for the examination of women. I look upon this as nothing more than an inquisition.”

  The court reporter transcribed the final words: “Further consideration of the case was postponed, and the prisoner remanded.”

  She was escorted back to her cell at the Old Capitol Prison, feeling triumphant even as the guards locked the door behind her. The noise jarred Little Rose awake from a nap. “Mamma,” she said, “tell me a story.” Rose sat the girl in her lap and obliged, making it up as she went along and letting the good guys win.

  A few days later Superintendent Wood appeared at Rose’s cell to convey an offer from the commissioners. They would exile her to the South on one condition: she must stay there until the war was over. She wrote a letter in response, informing them she accepted her “banishment” but did so under protest, and would not promise to avoid the North. “I ask of your clemency time and
freedom to make the necessary arrangements for clothes for myself and little child,” she wrote, and couldn’t resist a parting shot: “Of course, if this is granted me, I shall bind myself for the period allotted not to blow up the President’s house, equip a fleet, break open the treasury, or do any other small act which you may suppose comes within my limited powers to perform.”

  Two weeks passed with no further word from the commission. Little Rose once again grew wan and listless. An ex–US Army officer being held on Rose’s floor on suspicion of disloyalty defied a sentry’s order to back away from his cell window. The sentry fired a shot through the bars, killing the prisoner inside his cell—an act Rose called murder “in cold blood.” She stopped sleeping, aware of every shadow and sound, intent on coaxing Little Rose out of her nightmares.

  A small measure of hope came via an unexpected visitor: Alfred Ely, the New York congressman who was captured at Bull Run and befriended by Elizabeth Van Lew while imprisoned in the Confederate capital.

  “I had been treated well and kindly at Richmond,” he told Rose, “and I’ve come to see what I can do for you.”

  She had nothing to lose, so she took him up on the offer, asking if he might ascertain why his government was delaying her release. Ely returned four days later, on April 22, and said, according to Rose, that General McClellan himself had objected to her release on the grounds that she “knew his plans better than Lincoln, and that he did not wish me sent South at this time.” Another possible reason was that Lincoln, furious over the execution of Union spy Timothy Webster, was holding Rose in retaliation.

  Ely asked for her carte de visite and told her he would try again.

  “No,” Rose said, “you will be refused a pass. They are afraid lest my fearless denunciations of their infamies may open the eyes of their followers, and make them question the orthodoxy of Abolitionism.”

  Ely suppressed a smile, but in a sense Rose was right: he was never permitted to visit her again.

  Partly out of boredom and partly for revenge, she promised two rebel prisoners she would aid in their escape, confirming plans during a walk through the prison yard, sneaking one bribe money and the other her gun. She considered how her complicity might affect her and Little Rose, and decided it was worth the risk.

  A SLAVE CALLED “NED”

  WASHINGTON, DC, AND THE VIRGINIA PENINSULA

  Emma’s carriage pulled up to Secret Service headquarters, a two-story, lead-colored building at 217 Pennsylvania Avenue, widely said to be “the nation’s most feared address.” A guard ushered her into a room where three Union generals, including George McClellan, waited to interview Frank Thompson. Emma, accustomed to seeing her military hero from afar, galloping through camp on his horse, Dan Webster, was both thrilled and terrified to stand so close to him, as in awe of the general as he clearly was of himself. McClellan was shorter than she’d expected and wonderfully square, thick-throated and broad-chested, with a soft, boyish face and auburn mustache curtaining his mouth. She pulled herself up to her full height and emptied her face of expression, wanting to appear as soldierly (and manly) as possible, and wondered what these men saw when they looked at her.

  McClellan and the other generals, Samuel P. Heintzelman and Thomas F. Meagher, questioned and cross-questioned Emma about her views of the rebellion and her motive for wishing to “engage in so perilous an undertaking.” She would be going undercover, wearing clothing other than her military uniform, so if the Confederates caught her, they would treat her not as a prisoner of war but as a spy, and hang her as they did Timothy Webster.

  Emma cited her strong Christian faith and her belief that slavery was against God’s will. Next came the easy part, a test of her skill as a marksman. She was most nervous about the final phase, a physical examination. She recalled her first medical exam with the army, when the doctor merely measured her height and shook her hand, and worried that it might be more thorough this time around.

  This doctor, fortunately, focused mainly on her head, both internally and externally, a strangely intimate blend of psychoanalysis and scalp massage. With the doctor’s fingers kneading her skull, she answered dozens of queries about Frank Thompson, even venturing into the years before she became him. The doctor stretched a measuring tape from ear to ear and sketched a rough diagram of her head, estimating the development of various regions of her brain. She silently prayed that her head did not betray her sex; phrenological studies on women often concluded that their organs of “adhesiveness,” cautiousness, and procreation were so prominent as to elongate, and even deform, the middle of the back of the head. The doctor poked and prodded with his caliper and scratched notes on a pad. Emma felt stifled inside her frock coat, drops of sweat sliding down between her breasts. He determined, finally, that Frank Thompson indeed had the head of a man, with “largely developed” organs of secretiveness and combativeness. Emma acted as though she’d expected to hear as much, and took the oath of allegiance.

  She had three days to prepare for her first mission: slip into Yorktown disguised as a slave and determine the number of Confederate troops stationed there, and the strength of the fortifications. The request was not unusual; spies on both sides used costumes and props and even handicaps, real or feigned, to deceive the enemy. There was a sudden proliferation of newsboys, actors, peddlers, doctors, and itinerant photographers, all of whom had a natural pretext for passing through the lines. Lafayette C. Baker, the Federal government’s chief detective and a professional rival of Pinkerton’s, wandered around rebel camps with an empty camera box. A Confederate spy named Benjamin Franklin Stringfellow capitalized on his slight figure and delicate features by dressing as a woman and frequenting Northern balls, gleaning information about Ulysses S. Grant from his dance partners. One of Pinkerton’s men, Dave Graham, feigned stuttering and epileptic fits as he wandered in Confederate territory, pretending to be a peddler. John Burke, a rebel scout for Generals Beauregard and J. E. B. Stuart, went undercover by removing his glass eye. Another Confederate spy, Wat Bowie, donned a homespun dress and scoured his body with burned cork, posing as a slave girl so convincingly that he fooled the Union detectives on his trail. Emma recognized the irony of her mission, layering a temporary disguise over the one she could never remove.

  In the morning she set out for Fort Monroe to gather the elements of her disguise: a plantation-style suit, purchased from the contraband camp; a black wool wig from the postmaster (she explained that it was for “reconnaissance business”); and a vial of silver nitrate from the hospital medical supplies. A barber sheared her curls. She darkened her head, face, neck, hands, and arms; donned her suit and wig; and returned to camp near Yorktown, where everyone believed she was a contraband in search of work: “I found myself without friends—a striking illustration of the frailty of human friendship.” Nonetheless she was relieved; if the disguise fooled her comrades, she would certainly go undetected by the rebels. Staring at the mirror, she barely knew herself. She spent an hour practicing Negro dialect and picked a new and temporary name, “Ned.”

  That evening, after the bugle call signaling lights-out, Emma filled her pocket with hard crackers, loaded her revolver, and hid a pencil and folded squares of paper under the inner sole of her shoe. She passed the Union guards outside Yorktown and walked as quietly as she could, at one point coming within yards of a Confederate sentry without being observed. She thanked heaven for her good luck, stretched out on the cold wet ground, and waited for morning.

  At sunrise a group of slaves passed by, returning from bringing breakfast to the rebel picket lines. She followed them to camp, where they were ordered to work on fortifications, but she had neither tools nor any idea what to do. A young Confederate officer noticed her confusion and approached.

  “Who do you belong to, and why are you not at work?”

  “I dusn’t belong to nobody, Massa,” Emma replied, adding that she had always been free and was heading to Richmond to find work. The officer nodded and called for the o
verseer. “If he don’t work,” the officer said, “we’ll tie him up and give him twenty lashes just to impress upon his mind that there’s no free niggers here while there’s a damned Yankee left in Virginia.”

  Emma thought of the fugitive slaves back at the Union camp, falling to their knees when they realized they were free.

  The overseer furnished her with a pickax, shovel, and wheelbarrow. Emma watched the other slaves and followed their lead, pushing a load of gravel—the smallest she could get away with—up a narrow plank to the parapet. It was an arduous task for even the strongest man, each hoist of the shovel and stab of the ax grating against her skin, and by dusk she was raw from wrists to fingertips. If she wasn’t able to work at all the next day, the rebel officers would discover her deception. An idea struck: she paid a fellow slave to switch places; she would carry water for the troops while he built the fortification.

  She took advantage of her new position, roaming freely about the camp, occasionally ducking behind a tree to sketch fortifications and jot down the number of mounted guns, 151 in all: three- and four-inch rifled cannon, thirty-two-pounders, forty-two-pounders, eight- and ten-inch Columbiads, nine-inch Dahlgrens, ten-inch mortars, and eight-inch siege howitzers. Lingering with one brigade, she overheard snatches of talk about the arriving Confederate reinforcements and was thrilled to glimpse Robert E. Lee. The men whispered that the general had come to inspect the Yankee fortifications, and that he had pronounced it impossible to hold Yorktown after McClellan opened his siege guns upon it. Another rumor claimed that the Confederates planned to evacuate Yorktown, the final piece of intelligence Emma needed. She had to return to her own camp before someone realized she was not what she seemed to be.

  For the next two days Emma carried water, listened, and waited for a chance to escape. She was losing her disguise. Her scalp itched, her wool wig shifted askew, the silver nitrate peeled away to reveal patches of pale flesh. One slave studied her quizzically and joked to another: “I’ll be darned if that feller ain’t turnin’ white.”