The Spymistress

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  Two days before his inauguration, Mr. Davis had declared Friday, February 28, another day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer to appeal to the Lord for His protection and favor, that they might be saved from their enemies and from the hands of all who hated them. Official fast days were observed more scrupulously than the Sabbath because they were considered a test of loyalty, and when the Gibbs family had resided with them, the Van Lews had diligently done what was expected. This time when the appointed day came, Lizzie and Mother refrained from joining the public prayers and instead invited Eliza’s family over, drew the curtains, and enjoyed the most sumptuous meal Caroline could put together with the markets closed. “We should always resolve to have a better meal than usual on Mr. Davis’s fast days,” Lizzie declared, and the merry company raised their glasses and chimed in their agreement. It was a rare comfort to be able to speak freely with sympathetic friends.

  It was the last lighthearted moment they would know for quite some time.

  At midnight on March 1, one week after condemning the suppression of civil liberties in the North, President Davis placed Richmond and the surrounding countryside within a ten-­mile radius under martial law.

  The measure had not been announced beforehand, but Lizzie and her mother learned of it early, and discovered just how swiftly, suddenly, and mercilessly it would be implemented. They had just sat down to breakfast when they heard a distant pounding on the back door, and moments later, Mary Jane Bowser dashed into the room. They scarcely had time to greet her before she blurted, “Mr. Botts has been arrested.”

  Lizzie bolted to her feet. “What? Why? On what grounds?”

  A friend who knew of their mutual ties had witnessed everything, Mary Jane explained breathlessly, slipping out of her wraps and dropping into a chair. Shortly before dawn, one hundred armed deputies had surrounded the Botts residence at Elba Park while others burst into the home and dragged Mr. Botts from bed. While he fumed and protested in his nightclothes, the assistant provost marshal read the charges and placed him under arrest as other detectives collected his private papers and letters. His wife and children were frantic; one son fainted dead away from fear. Mr. Botts was allowed to dress before he was taken away in a buggy to the filthy McDaniel’s Negro Jail, a holding pen for slave dealers on Lumpkin’s Alley off Franklin Street.

  “What are the charges?” asked Lizzie shakily, pacing.

  “I don’t know,” Mary Jane said, “but I can find out.”

  Lizzie stopped short, instinctively shrinking away from the window, half expecting to see a stranger’s ugly visage glaring menacingly back at her. “Who else?”

  “Who else has been arrested?” Mary Jane shook her head and shrugged. “No one that I know of.”

  “We must learn if Mr. Botts has been singled out because of his prominence or if they’re rounding up all suspected Unionists.” Her heart pounded with dread and fear, knowing it was likely the latter. There was no need to declare martial law to arrest a single man, but if the authorities wanted to cast a net and drag in many—­

  Lizzie took a deep, shaky breath, forced herself to draw back the curtain, and peered outside. It was a lovely morning, cool and dewy, fresh with the promise of the coming spring. She saw no one lurking outside, watching the house—­no armed deputies, no soldiers, not even the lanky man with the tobacco-­stained beard, who had been absent for many weeks.

  “Do you suppose—­” Mother hesitated. “I wonder if they are coming for us.”

  Shuddering, Lizzie wrapped her arms around herself as if caught in a sudden chill wind. “Not for you, Mother.” She had done what she could to ensure that.

  With the aid of Mary Jane’s grapevine telegraph, by the end of the day, they had assembled a rough picture of the morning’s alarming events. The prosperous distiller Franklin Stearns, who had never made a secret of his Union sympathies and was said to have done more with his whiskey to contribute to illness and absenteeism within the army camps than any weapon the enemy had yet produced, was arrested at his Tree Hill estate southeast of Richmond shortly after dawn. A butcher named Valentine Heckler and a grocer named John M. Higgins were also arrested on charges of uttering incendiary sentiments. A slave named Allen was arrested too, charged with treasonous language for allegedly declaring, “Jeff Davis is a rebel,” and “I acknowledge no man as my master.” Also caught up in the sweep were an ice dealer, a city night watchman, a lieutenant in the Wise Legion, and many others, but except for a carpenter who did business with the Van Lews’ hardware store, Lizzie knew none of them. They were tradesmen and laborers, outside her usual social circle.

  In the days that followed, the roundups continued and more arrests were made, men snatched from every neighborhood in Richmond and each outlying district. A shipbuilder, a merchant, a barkeeper, a Maine-­born Universalist pastor who had refused to open his church on an official day of thanksgiving marking the Confederate victory at Manassas— ­the newspapers printed every name, every accusation. Lizzie and her mother and their entire household waited in terror for a pounding upon their own door. They slept little and went out not at all, sending Peter and William to collect whatever news they could, awaiting messages from Mary Jane. Once, Lizzie sent Peter to carry a letter to Mr. Botts to encourage him in his confinement, but just as he was leaving, she frantically called him back, realizing almost too late that the letter would lead the authorities right back to her.

  Days passed, but the dreaded knock on their door never came.

  A week after martial law was imposed, Lizzie became too restless and agitated to skulk behind closed curtains any longer. She packed a basket with two dozen rolls and half as many ginger cakes for bribes and ventured out into the streets, which seemed strange in their ordinariness. The city she knew in her heart and mind had been shaken so violently that she had expected to find it reduced to rubble. But with every unimpeded step her courage returned to her, so that by the time she was within a few blocks of the prison complex, she was striding along as briskly as ever, head held high, a cordial smile upon her face should anyone dare to greet her.

  But a block away from the prison entrance, she stopped short at the sight of a double cordon of sentinels stationed around the tobacco warehouses. She held perfectly still for a moment, pondering her next step, but then she took a deep breath to steel herself and approached the nearest guard with a smile.

  “I beg your pardon,” she greeted him pleasantly, taking care to remain a respectful distance away, “but I couldn’t help noticing how the guard has been increased lately. Was there an escape attempt?”

  “There’s always one or two Yankees tryin’ to run off,” the guard replied. “But General Winder ordered the double guard on account of the recent mischief of the Unionists. Nothin’ and no one goes in or out. No visitors, no letters, no newspapers. Them Yankees are none too happy about it.”

  “Nor would any reasonable person be in their place.” Smiling, Lizzie took a ginger cake from the basket and gave it to him. “This is for your time and your charming conversation. I do hope you’re allowed to eat on duty.”

  He grinned and thanked her, and as she went down the row of sentinels handing out the ginger cakes and the rolls she had intended to give the prisoners, she made pleasant small talk, though her thoughts were churning. She dared not use General Winder’s pass to bluster her way into the prison, not in defiance of the extraordinary restrictions he himself had set in place. The pace of the Unionist roundups had already slowed. When the crisis passed, if the new rules were not lifted, she would call on the general and ask him if she might continue her work.

  When the basket was empty, she apologized to the remaining guards for not having enough for everyone, for she had not expected so many. With the empty basket on her arm, she walked next to the Henrico County Jail, where the fourteen Union hostages were confined, and there too she found that the guard had been doubled. Disheartened, she turned toward
home.

  By the middle of March, the former slave pen on Lumpkin’s Alley, which had acquired the nickname “Castle Godwin” after its commander, held twenty-­eight men accused of disloyalty, including Mr. Botts. The suspects denied that they were involved in any conspiracy, and those who could afford decent lawyers petitioned the government for their immediate release. Through Mary Jane’s channels, Lizzie managed to get a letter to Mr. Botts expressing her profound sympathies and offering to help him any way she could, and when he managed to smuggle out a reply, she learned that since his arrest, he had been kept in solitary confinement, forbidden visits from his family and his lawyers. “Can any true Virginian witness such scenes as these,” he wrote, “men detained without benefit of hearing or counsel, and not feel the blood curdle in his veins?” He added that General Winder was pressuring the men, whose numbers increased daily, to betray one another, but although he and Mr. Stearns were very good friends, most of the accused had never met before their arrests, so they had nothing to confess.

  Lizzie’s heart sank at the mention of General Winder. Even as the widespread seizure of Unionists had earned him accolades in the press and on the streets, he had grown hard and brittle, and his responsibilities had only increased. At the end of March, so that fewer guards would be needed to prevent escapes, the prison complex at Twenty-­Fifth and Main was closed down and all five hundred or so prisoners were marched to the large, connected structure of Libby & Sons’ old warehouses on Cary Street, below Twentieth near the dock. Lizzie dared not approach him across such uncertain ground as this new venture. But perhaps if she were patient, and allowed time for his inexplicable, sudden fury to pass, she might find a way to persuade him to parole Mr. Botts.

  Every morning when Lizzie read the papers, she took note of the arrests and learned by heart the names of those who were accused of harboring Union sympathies.

  Without ever meaning to do so, the Confederate government had introduced Lizzie to her allies.

  Chapter Eleven

  * * *

  APRIL 1862

  R

  ichmond’s Unionists were not the only enemies of the Confederacy swept up in the arrests that followed the imposition of martial law. A handful of agents from Mr. Pinkerton’s detective bureau in Washington had infiltrated some of the most sensitive departments in the Southern capital, but even in a city full of strangers, they had stood out enough to raise suspicions. Most were brought to the attention of the authorities by alert citizens, but one was turned in by his fellow spies.

  Timothy Webster, a Pinkerton with years of undercover experience, had managed to earn the confidence of important officials in the War Department, including General Winder and Secretary of War Benjamin, who trusted him enough to employ him as a dispatch courier. He carried many secrets from Richmond to Washington City, but he was undone when two other Union agents, John Scully and Pryce Lewis, were sent to check on him after illness kept him bedridden and unable to contact Mr. Pinkerton for two weeks. Soon after their arrival in Richmond, Mr. Scully and Mr. Lewis were recognized on the street by a civilian whose family home in Washington they had once searched for evidence of Southern collusion, and they unwittingly led Confederate agents to the boardinghouse rooms Mr. Webster shared with his wife and colored servant. Mr. Scully and Mr. Lewis were arrested, convicted, and sent to Castle Godwin, where, under orders from General Winder, they were alternately threatened with death and offered mercy if they cooperated. Eventually they were broken, and they confessed not only their own missions as spies but also Timothy Webster’s. He and his wife were immediately arrested and sent to join the others at Castle Godwin, where Mr. Botts and all the men taken in the early days of martial law still languished. Mr. Scully and Mr. Lewis were scheduled to hang within a week, and Mr. Webster, gravely ill from rheumatism, was sentenced to die at the end of the month.

  Lizzie hung on every word the papers offered about the captured spies, sickened by the thought of their impending executions. “Why did Mr. Pinkerton send Northern agents south?” she asked her mother. “Why did they not recruit among Richmond’s loyalists, people who are known here, who don’t have to explain their presence in the city?”

  “Perhaps these were men he knew well and trusted. Perhaps he couldn’t send anyone here to do the recruiting.”

  “If he could send agents to spy, he could send agents to recruit.” Lizzie wondered what would become of Mrs. Webster, who had not yet been sentenced, but remained in prison. Surely they would not hang a woman. Surely the same government and press who had condemned the Union’s imprisonment of Rose O’Neal Greenhow would not be so hypocritical and cruel as to execute a woman.

  On the day John Scully and Pryce Lewis were scheduled to hang, the road from Castle Godwin to Camp Lee, where the gibbet had been erected, was thronged with curious onlookers. No one had been hanged for spying on American soil since Nathan Hale was executed by the British in 1776, and many people couldn’t quite believe it would happen that day either. Lizzie could not bear to be a spectator at such a horrifying event, so she stayed well away. Only later did she learn that the crowds seeking a novel entertainment were disappointed. At the last moment, Mr. Scully and Mr. Lewis were granted a reprieve and returned to prison.

  Perhaps the Confederate government did not want to hang anyone for spying, not only women—­but although Lizzie searched the papers every day for an announcement that Mr. Webster’s death sentence had been commuted, she never found one.

  The first few months of 1862 brought reports of Union victories in Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina, and of Union troops massing and preparing to march under their new young leader, General George McClellan. At Yorktown, General Magruder’s Confederate line was stretched thinly, but holding, as they awaited reinforcements. General Joseph Johnston was determined to bring them swift support, and so he decided to march his troops through Richmond and down the Peninsula. It was almost noon on a Sunday when word of the first arriving regiments swept through the city, passing from church to church: Three trainloads of soldiers had come from Fredericksburg, famished and weary, having had nothing to eat for twenty-­four hours. While the ministers preached on, young wives and elderly matrons alike began stealing quietly from the pews, determined to share their family’s dinners with the passing soldiers.

  Soon Broad and Ninth Streets were lined with women, children, and servants carrying baskets of food—­loaves of bread and hams and apples and hunks of cheese, anything they had been able to seize in a hurry. As the regiments marched past, the citizens of Richmond passed out food to the ravenous soldiers, until it seemed that every man among them was eating and stuffing his haversack. As soon as a woman emptied her basket, another stepped forward with more foodstuffs to take her place.

  Beckoned from Saint John’s by the distant commotion, Lizzie stood in the churchyard amid a crowd of curious worshipers and looked down upon the scene from atop Church Hill. While some of her fellow parishioners promptly raced off to carry more provisions to the troops, Lizzie could only stand and watch, shocked by the contrast between these ragged, hungry, sunburnt, filthy soldiers and the bright, grinning, untested young recruits in spotless uniforms who had marched through those streets less than a year before. “Poor fellows,” Lizzie murmured. “What they have seen, and what they have suffered these past months.”

  “God bless and protect them,” said Mother, beside her. “Come, Lizzie. We should do our part.”

  Lizzie tore her gaze away. “Mother,” she protested in an undertone, mindful of the people around them, any one of whom could be an informant. “Are you really suggesting that we aid and abet the enemy army? Do we want them well fed and strong?”

  “Lizzie,” Mother chided her gently. “What if Cousin Jack were marching off to battle through a town full of strangers? What if John were?”

  Not for the first time, Lizzie thanked God that John was not enlisted in either army, but she knew her moth
er was right. She was ashamed that she had considered even for a moment to refuse to feed hungry men.

  “Let’s make a good impression on the neighbors,” she said, linking her arm through her mother’s. “We’ll burden the rebels with so much food that the suspicious citizens of Richmond will never doubt us again.”

  That was not her only reason, but she did not need to explain that to her mother.

  Soldiers from all corners of the South had filled the capital in the early months of the war—­so many that some of them had been sent home, to be called upon if needed later. So Lizzie was startled by new rumors that the troops were spread too thin, and that recruitment must be drastically and swiftly increased. In mid-­April, the Confederate Congress passed a conscription act requiring all healthy white men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-­five to join the military for three years, and all soldiers currently serving one-­year terms to have their enlistments extended to three years. Men engaged in certain essential occupations—­ironworkers, railroad laborers, telegraph operators, civil officials, miners, nurses, and teachers, among them—­were exempt, for they were considered more valuable on the home front than on the battlefield.

  Lizzie clutched the arms of her chair, dizzy with relief—­the Confederate ranks were thinning, but John, at thirty-­eight, would not be conscripted.