Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy

by Karen Abbott

  By nine the next morning Belle’s train had reached Washington, and a carriage waited to convey her to the Old Capitol Prison. She was delighted to learn that Rose’s old cell was directly above her own. The door moaned open to reveal Superintendent William Wood, and she straightened herself to match his modest height. He bowed vaguely in her direction.

  “And so this is the celebrated rebel spy,” he said. “I am very glad to see you, and will endeavor to make you as comfortable as possible. So whatever you wish for, ask and you shall have it. I am glad I have so distinguished a personage for my guest.” He promised to send her a servant, and that she would not be there for long if she was a model prisoner.

  He shut the door gently behind him.

  Belle stopped herself from calling him back and scolding him for his courtesy. She didn’t understand. Could it be that Union authorities considered Rose Greenhow a true and dangerous threat, and her a mere nuisance? She contemplated how to remedy the situation. If she behaved badly enough, if she compounded every demand with another, more absurd demand, perhaps Superintendent Wood would be inspired to do his job and torment her properly.

  She paced around her cell, taking inventory of her effects: a washstand, a looking glass, an iron bedstead, a table, a couple of chairs. Two windows stretched the entire length of one wall, giving her a partial view of Pennsylvania Avenue and, in the distance, the home of John Floyd, secretary of war during the Buchanan administration. There she had passed “many happy hours” after her society debut, her hair tied up in combs and ribbons, dancing to “Old Zip Coon” and telling the loudest stories in the room. She pressed her face between the bars and called for a sentry. She needed a rocking chair and a fire immediately, she said; the cell was too gloomy for her to bear.

  Wood returned at 8:00 p.m., accompanied by a detective sent by Secretary of War Stanton. Belle ordered them both to sit. Behind them the fire hissed like a perturbed cat.

  “Ain’t you tired of your prison a’ready?” the detective asked. “I’ve come to get you to make a free confession now of what you’ve did agin our cause. And, as we’ve got plenty of proof agin you, you might as well acknowledge at once.”

  “Sir,” Belle replied, “I do not understand you; and, furthermore, I have nothing to say. When you have informed me on what grounds I have been arrested, and given me a copy of the charges preferred against me, I will make my statement, but I shall not now commit myself.”

  He launched into a stuttering monologue about the enormity of her offense and the futility of her cause, and suggested she sign the oath of allegiance.

  Belle stepped closer and said, “Tell Mr. Stanton from me, I hope that when I commence the oath of allegiance to the United States Government, my tongue may cleave to the roof of my mouth; and that if ever I sign one line that will show to the world that I owe the United States Government the slightest allegiance, I hope my arm may fall paralyzed by my side.”

  The detective scratched her speech across the pages of his notebook. “Well, if this is your resolution,” he said, “you’ll have to lay here and die, and serve you right.”

  Once again she thought of Rose, and how the older spy managed to get her bold condemnation of the Yankee government printed in the newspapers. Her next words aligned quickly in her mind, and she recited them at full volume: “Sir, if it is a crime to love the South, its cause, and its President, then I am a criminal. I am in your power; do with me as you please. But I fear you not. I would rather lie down in this prison and die, than leave it owing allegiance to such a government as yours. Now leave the room; for so thoroughly am I disgusted with your conduct towards me that I cannot endure your presence longer.”

  Cheers and cries of “Bravo!” rang up and down the floor, and she wished Stonewall Jackson could see her now.

  Save for the want of exercise, Belle suffered no privations. Washington secessionists supplied her with meals of soup, beefsteak, chicken, boiled corn, tomatoes, potatoes, Irish stew, bread and butter, and a variety of fruits, all served to her in her room by a contraband whom Wood had assigned as her servant. One of the sentinels brought her every newspaper that mentioned her name and allowed visits from curious journalists, which Belle welcomed. “She was dressed today,” reported a correspondent for the Washington Star, “in a plain frock, low in the neck, and her arms were bare. Jackson, it appears, is her idol. . . . She takes her arrest as a matter of course, and is smart, plucky, and absurd as ever. A lunatic asylum might be recommended for her.” When the new provost marshal, twenty-five-year-old Major William Doster, came to call on her, he found her relaxing by her fire, reading Harper’s and eating peaches.

  “I can afford to remain here,” Belle told him, “if Stanton could afford to keep me. There is so much company and so little to do.” Besides, she added, it was an excellent chance to brush up on her literature and get her wedding outfit ready; she was certain one of her fellow inmates was destined to be her husband. The provost marshal laughed, but Belle was serious. If she weren’t going to be tortured, she wanted to at least be pursued.

  At first she did the pursuing, slipping her mouth between the bars of her cell and singing:

  She is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumb

  Huzza! She spurns the Northern scum!

  She breathes! She burns! She’ll come! She’ll come!

  Maryland! My Maryland!

  Every prisoner stopped to listen, entranced. Those somehow unfamiliar with Belle’s name sought to rectify this omission, asking who she was, where she had come from, what she had done. “The pathos of her voice,” wrote one, “her apparently forlorn condition, and at these times when her soul seemed absorbed in the thoughts she was uttering in song, her melancholy manner affected all who heard her, not only with compassion for her but with an interest in her which came near on several occasions [to] bringing about a conflict between the prisoners and the guards.” Another prisoner admitted that Belle’s voice brought “a lump up in my throat every time I heard it. It seemed like my heart was ready to jump out as if I could put my finger down and touch it. I’ve seen men, when she was singing, walk off to one side and pull out their handkerchiefs and wipe their eyes, for fear someone would see them doing the baby act.”

  Her intentional emphasis of the words “Northern scum” further enflamed emotions, once prompting a sentry to yell, “Hush up!”

  “I shan’t do it!” Belle retorted. Picking up a broom, she repeated the offending line and swept at the guard’s feet, shooing him away.

  Sunday morning proved to be the optimal time to assess her romantic prospects. Superintendent Wood (an avowed atheist, it was said) stopped at every floor to announce services: all who wished to hear the Lord God according to Abe Lincoln should convene in Room 16, and all who preferred the Gospel according to Jeff Davis would be accommodated in the yard—the only way, Belle reasoned, to “separate the goats from the sheep.” Wearing a small Confederate flag, the stem tucked in her bodice, she sat near the preacher, close enough for him to reach out and touch her head. She read intently from her prayer book, which she’d inscribed “Belle Boyd, Old Capitol Prison,” and smiled at the rebel prisoners as they passed—a gesture, admitted one, that “did them more good than the preaching.”

  She began corresponding with a group of prisoners from Fredericksburg, confined in Rose’s old cell, who’d found a loosened plank in the floor—the one through which Rose had lowered Little Rose. They tied strings around their letters and dropped them through the slat to Belle, and she always made them wait before sending up her reply.

  She found herself drawn to one rebel soldier in particular, Lieutenant Clifford McVay, whose acquaintance she’d first made years earlier, during her time as a socialite in Washington. He’d been wounded during the ongoing Peninsula Campaign and left for dead on the battlefield, where Federal forces captured him. His cell conveniently faced hers, and at night, if her favorite guard came on duty, she winked at McVay and signaled for him to open his door. He sang her a love son
g, and she responded in kind, trilling the lyrics to “My Southern Soldier Boy.” As she hit the final note she peeled off her glove, pausing at her wrist, letting it dangle from the tips of her fingers. She pitched it to him in a graceful arc. He caught it and, keeping his eyes on her, reached into the silk to withdraw a billet-doux. Scribbling a response, he tucked it inside the glove and aimed it at her heart.

  One night her servant brought her a sugar loaf with her dinner, a treat she wished to pass to her suitor. She asked the sentry on duty for permission to deliver it across the passage.

  He shrugged. “I have no objection.”

  As her outstretched hand made contact with McVay’s, the sentry swung his musket, connecting with the points of her knuckles, smashing her thumb. He had set her up. Without meaning to, she began to cry. She faced the sentry and demanded to see the corporal of the guard. The sentry refused, and Belle stepped forward.

  “Go back,” the sentry ordered, “or I’ll break every bone in your body.”

  He raised and thrust his bayonet, a shiny streak coming straight at her, carving a scoop of flesh from her arm, pinning her to the wall by her dress. He held her there for a moment, like a prize catch on a line, while she screamed and thrashed. She had never been physically assaulted in her (now) eighteen years. Beneath the pain she felt confused, as if the guard had made a mistake, and she wanted him to take it back. When he finally let her go, her mind refocused, shifting back to defiance, its proper and natural setting. The scar from that wound became one of her favorite souvenirs from the war. She rolled up her sleeve for anyone who asked, fingering the scar like a talisman.

  THE STILL, SMALL VOICE

  MANASSAS, VIRGINIA, AND WASHINGTON, DC

  On August 14 General McClellan, per Lincoln’s orders, began to withdraw his army from Harrison’s Landing and head for northern Virginia, where Union forces were being threatened at Manassas. Emma and her comrades were demoralized at the thought of retreating from Richmond. The entire campaign had been a waste: all of those entrenchments built, all those tracks and bridges repaired, and all those Union boys lost, fifteen thousand graves scattered along the length of the Peninsula, remains sinking in the marshy ground, waiting to be yanked up and eaten by hogs or desecrated by rebel hands. They had been so close, and now all of the Army of the Potomac swore at the prospect of giving up. In a letter to his wife McClellan detected the hand of God in his failure: “I think I begin to see his wise purpose in all this. . . . If I had succeeded in taking Richmond now the fanatics of the North might have been too powerful & reunion impossible.”

  Emma was cheered only by learning, finally, what had happened to Jerome Robbins after she left him in the hospital at Talleysville. The following evening a group of Confederate cavalry, led by Robert E. Lee’s nephew, Colonel Fitzhugh Lee, clattered into the clearing. To Jerome’s surprise the rebels were courteous, and instead of being taken prisoner he was offered parole, a policy mandated by Stonewall Jackson, who believed treating medical personnel as enemy combatants was immoral. A steamer collected Jerome and 105 others and brought them to Camp Parole on the Chesapeake Bay, a facility set up to house parolees until they could be exchanged. Emma sent him a letter expressing her relief and a $5 note. He wrote to thank her, his tone and his words somehow reaching back to the place he had broken—that had been broken for as long as she could remember, if she were honest about it—and both Frank Thompson and Emma Edmondson forgave him, this time for good.

  On the march north the men bivouacked in the street, many of them drunk, and several others mildly scandalized by the fact that Colonel Orlando Poe, the married commander of the 2nd Michigan and Emma’s friend, invited a woman to stay with them. “She slept in the tent with us & he lay next to her,” one soldier confided to his diary. “I believe she said she belonged to some Soldiers’ Aid Society though the exact nature of the aid she did not state to me.” The 2nd Michigan continued to Manassas, planning to reinforce General John Pope, whose troops had been in the vicinity of the Shenandoah Valley for days with no rations but the rotting fruit and corn in the fields. Emma was delayed in joining them, ordered instead by General Samuel P. Heintzelman to go on a scouting mission across the rebel lines to determine Confederate strength and positions.

  She boarded a train to Washington at Warrenton Junction, gathered items for a disguise as a female slave—calico dress, headscarf, and silver nitrate, her skin be damned—and returned the same night. Since connecting with the group of contrabands who came to camp during the Peninsula Campaign, Emma interacted with slaves whenever she had the chance, listening to their stories and hoping she might one day teach them. Her choice to disguise herself again as a slave was, in her current circumstances, the best way she knew to show empathy.

  Union forces under General Pope skirmished with Lee’s advancing forces all along the Rappahannock River, the lines between the two armies fluid and evolving, and Emma fell in with a group of nine contrabands in the neighborhood of Warrenton, nine miles from the train depot. The contrabands, Emma deduced, “preferred to live in bondage with their friends rather than to be free without them.”

  At headquarters they began cooking rations, the air filling with the scent of “coosh”—bacon grease (and salt pork, if they were lucky), cornmeal, and water fried up into a flimsy pancake, a Confederate staple similar to a common meal of plantation slaves. Rebel officers lingered nearby, murmuring among themselves. Emma strained to listen, and within a few hours she learned the troop numbers at several important points and the number expected to arrive during the night. The lines were thick with pickets and she waited until dawn to break away.

  On the journey back she found herself in the cross fire of a skirmish and sought refuge in the cellar of an old house. The firing grew hotter, shot and shell shaking the foundation, the floor above her opening up in patches and raining down in crumbling stone. She recalled the story of Elijah remaining in the cave during the tempest, the earthquake, and the fire, and afterward came the still, small voice. She closed her eyes, hoping to hear that same small voice speak to her.

  Back at camp Emma learned that Stonewall Jackson’s division had torn through the Union supply depot at Manassas Junction, burning a hundred railroad cars and seizing all of the ammunition and subsistence stores his men could carry; only a half dozen barrels of hard bread and as many hams lay scattered around the tracks. The cars were pierced with rifle shots and still burning. Bridges were torched and tracks torn up. Smoke drifted from the scorched remains of a bakery. From Manassas Junction the general slashed his way to the railroad bridge over Bull Run, destroying it after he crossed, the reflection of the flames lighting the sky for miles. The Second Battle of Bull Run (Second Manassas) was about to begin, Yankees and rebels meeting on the same ground as in the previous year, but this time the Federals were on the defensive, and Emma’s regiment was on the front lines.

  At 5:00 a.m. the 2nd Michigan moved down the road to the old battlefield at Manassas and deployed as skirmishers, taking position in the woods about a mile from Jackson’s headquarters. The rebels caught sight of them and opened with a section of artillery, firing high into the oak trees, sending splinters the size of stove wood plunging to the ground. One piece swiped the cap clear off a lieutenant’s head but left him otherwise unharmed.

  Emma was sent to the front with messages and mail, her mount a mule instead of a horse, and along the way she detoured to a side road and came upon a wide ditch. She tried to cross, but instead of leaping the mule reared and fell headfirst into the gap, heaving her against the side; everything turned black.

  The dull thump of cannon pounded above, rousing her. She didn’t know how long she’d been unconscious, or how her mule had managed to extricate his hooves from the mud, but there he stood at the edge of the ditch, looking down at her, quizzical and waiting. The mail! she thought, and began crawling out of the ditch on elbows and knees, panicked at the idea of it going undelivered.

  Each motion forward revealed anothe
r injury. Her left thumb was limp and a rope of pain stretched through her left side, from foot to breast, but she crept inch by inch toward the mule. The mailbags, spattered with mud, still hung beneath the animal’s stomach. With broken leg, foot, and finger she remounted and made her delivery, every bump and jostle bringing a sharp, hot pain, substantial enough that she took a risk and visited the hospital corps. The surgeon wanted to examine her but she demurred, fearing what he might discover, and convinced him she needed only some morphine sulfate and chloroform.

  The Union defeat at Second Bull Run cost sixteen thousand casualties, five times as many as were lost in the first conflict there. Inside Pope’s headquarters at Nalle House, an elegant brick mansion belonging to a captain in the US Navy, the entrance hall and parlor looked “more like a butcher’s shambles than a gentleman’s dwelling,” said one witness, with the dying and wounded lying head to foot. Silk settees and curtains were polka-dotted with blood. Beside the piano stood the amputating table, its instruments scattered across mantelpieces once dedicated to leather-bound books and vases of flowers.

  The 2nd Michigan spent the next several days near Fairfax Station, where Emma worked in a field hospital set up by the train depot, and where she watched thousands more of the wounded wait in agony for trains to Washington. The city’s hospitals were overflowing, and two thousand cots were filled and laid out in the Capitol; lawmakers had to navigate carefully to avoid tripping over bandaged and bloody limbs. Belle leaned out the window of her cell in the Old Capitol Prison and taunted the returning soldiers as they passed by: “How long did it take you to come back from Bull Run? Are you going on to Richmond? Where’s General Pope’s headquarters?”

  “Hush up, you damn bitch,” one retorted, “or I’ll shoot you!”

  “Shoot me?” Belle laughed. “Go meet men, you cowards! What are you doing here in Washington? Stonewall Jackson is waiting for you on the other side of the Potomac. Aye, you could fight defenseless, imprisoned women like me, but you were driven out of the Shenandoah Valley by the men of Virginia.”