The Spymistress

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  “I do not believe it,” said the general, affronted. “The Yankees exaggerate to provoke your sympathies.”

  “Do you truly think so? Are you familiar with the lively phrase ‘sporting for Yankees?’”

  “No. Should I be?”

  “Indeed you should. It’s the name the guards have given to their favorite pastime—­shooting prisoners who venture too close to the windows, or who otherwise break the rules. ‘To lose prisoners’ is another charming euphemism they’ve devised, which we all understand to mean cold-­blooded murder. Both phrases can be used in concert, as in, ‘When one goes sporting for Yankees, one can expect to lose prisoners.’ Nor do the guards restrict their brutality to the prisoners. The colored workers, slave and free alike, are flogged as a matter of routine, and civilians too feel their wrath. Not long ago, six colored women were stripped and beaten for passing bread to the prisoners as they were marched through the streets. Stripped and beaten, sir!”

  General Winder’s frown deepened as she spoke. “The prisons are no better and the guards no gentler in the North, let me assure you.”

  “I assure you that they are. They must be.”

  “How would you know that, Miss Van Lew?” he thundered. “Have you been to any Yankee prisons? Have you carried any delicacies or necessities into the prison where your noble Yankees held my brother for nineteen months without any charges being raised against him?”

  Lizzie stared. “Your brother—­”

  “William. My elder brother William, a prominent resident of Philadelphia. He was arrested in September of the first year of the war because he refused to take an oath of allegiance, and because he publicly denounced Lincoln’s actions. They confiscated all his private correspondence and certain personal possessions and locked him away, first in Fort Lafayette in New York and then at Fort Warren in Boston Harbor. My aged mother, a widow utterly dependent upon him, tried in vain to get him released, as did my other brother, who was imprisoned too for a time, as did our minister, all to no avail. A few months later William’s jailers offered to release him if he would abandon his principles and swear the oath of allegiance, but this he could not do, so he languished in prison for nearly another year, still protesting his arrest, still not charged with any crime, and no good lady brought him custard or books or medicines or”—­he lifted a corner of the cloth covering the basket—­“or a loaf of bread and ball of butter and bottle of milk.” Contemptuously he let the cloth fall.

  “General Winder, I beg your apologies,” said Lizzie, her voice trembling. “I had no idea.”

  “Of course not. Why should you?” He rested his elbows on the desk and fixed her with a steely look. “Although I can’t help thinking that if he were a Yankee in Libby, you would have known.”

  “You’re right, I might indeed have known—­not because he was a Yankee, but because he would be here in Richmond. I care for the suffering where I find them.”

  “You have a ready answer for every challenge, don’t you, Miss Van Lew?”

  “Has your brother returned to Philadelphia?” asked Lizzie, fighting to steady herself. “My sister lives in that city. If there is anything you would have her do for him—­”

  “Do you mean, take him ginger cakes and buttermilk?”

  She pretended not to detect his sarcasm. “If you think that would please him.”

  “I think it would please him better to be left alone.” Abruptly he stood. “I find myself feeling much the same way.”

  Wordlessly she rose and unpacked the basket, leaving her gifts on his desk. She inclined her head in farewell and departed, fighting the urge to sob in frustration and break into a run.

  Lizzie was desperate to keep her supply and communication lines into the prisons open, with or without General Winder’s consent, for she knew that with the coming of spring, furious and constant fighting would resume, and with that, the flood of Union prisoners into the capital.

  On the morning of March 13, at not quite half past eleven o’clock, Lizzie was writing letters in the library when a low rumble shook the house, rattling the windows and setting her teacup clattering in its saucer. Instinctively Lizzie seized the armrests of her chair until the temblor subsided, but then, heart pounding, she bolted from the room and into the foyer, where William, Louisa, and Mother immediately appeared, all of them breathless and startled.

  “What was that?” Mother asked shakily. “Are we under attack?”

  William shook his head, baffled and wary. “That didn’t feel like artillery.”

  From outside they heard exclamations of surprise and fear, but when Lizzie hurried to the window and peered outside, she saw nothing amiss. Gathering up her skirts, she raced upstairs and outside to the rooftop and scanned the horizon, and then she saw it—­a thick cloud of black smoke rising to the southwest, down by the river in the vicinity of the Tredegar Iron Works.

  Lizzie stood and watched, transfixed by horror, as the distant pealing of alarm bells drifted on the wind.

  She returned downstairs, where Hannah and the children had joined the others. “I think there’s been an accident at Tredegar,” she said. It would be a tremendous loss to the Confederate war machine if the ironworks had been destroyed—­and given the time of day, and the number of workers employed there, the death toll could be staggering. “Judging from the smoke, the damage must be considerable.”

  Anxiously, Mother asked, “Is this the work of Unionists?”

  “I knew nothing of it,” said Lizzie, but then she considered the numerous suspicious fires that had broken out in the factory in the past, and added, “That doesn’t mean it wasn’t sabotage.”

  “Peter and I will find out,” said William, and hurried off.

  It wasn’t until much later that the women left to worry and wonder at home learned, along with the rest of the frightened populace, the horror and tragedy that had erupted that morning.

  The explosion had occurred not at Tredegar but at the Confederate States Laboratory on Brown’s Island at the foot of Seventh Street. Within the low, long-­framed ordnance factory, at least seventy employees, most of them young girls and women, had been hard at work as usual, loading cartridges with gunpowder, packaging munitions caps, and filling the friction primers used to ignite cannon charges. An eighteen-­year-­old worker, Mary Ryan, had tapped a board containing primers against her work bench—­and the tap set off the primer, exploding the loose powder in the air and detonating the coal stove. The roof blew off, the walls collapsed, and the roof came crashing down again upon the workers. Ten to twenty were immediately killed. Some who survived the initial collapse leapt into the river, clothes and hair aflame. Others were too horribly burned to move, but lay amid the rubble wailing in anguish, skin charred and clothes in tatters and smoldering. Workers from nearby factories ran to help them while ambulances raced to carry the injured to military hospitals and panicked citizens searched for their daughters and sisters amid the chaos of the ruins.

  In the days that followed, Richmond plunged into mourning as funerals were held for the more than forty-­five workers killed in the terrible accident. A macabre and unrelenting series of gloomy processions wound their way through the city from the homes of the deceased to the cemeteries. Nearly all of the dead were indigent women and girls, the youngest nine, the eldest sixty-­seven. Another twenty-­three had been injured, most of them seriously, and as they struggled to recover, authorities vowed to conduct a thorough investigation and Mayor Mayo appealed for donations on behalf of the victims and their surviving friends.

  Lizzie and her mother, their sorrow as deep and heartfelt as any other Richmonder’s, gave generously, distressed and ashamed that their less fortunate neighbors had been compelled by hunger and need to place their children in such a dangerous occupation.

  Heedless of their grief, the work of war continued unabated.

  Two weeks after the ordnance lab ex
plosion, Jefferson Davis declared another official day of fasting and prayer. With inflation soaring and goods scarce, the command to fast in the midst of a famine struck Lizzie as either disingenuous or ridiculously ignorant. Beef was selling at a dollar twenty-­five a pound, cornmeal twelve dollars a bushel, flour forty dollars a barrel, molasses a dollar fifty a pint, and turkeys fifteen dollars each. Scarcity drove up prices, but so too did the vast amount of Confederate paper money in circulation—­some bills printed on behalf of the Confederacy, others for individual Southern states, and still more small bills, valued at anything from two to fifty cents, printed in vast quantities and so nearly worthless that they were derided as “shinplasters.” The army was so desperate for food that the commissary general was authorized to commandeer meat, flour, and corn to feed the hungry soldiers, but the prices they were willing to pay were so far below the going rate that farmers stopped bringing produce to the city markets. The army’s food shortages became so dire that General Lee ordered regiments to scavenge the countryside for wild onions, garlic, dandelion greens, and sassafras buds, all the while battling the commissary general to requisition more food for his underfed troops. Even so, the general was so devout and dutiful that he ordered his hungry soldiers to observe the March 27 day of fasting and prayer as President Davis had decreed.

  Not so the Van Lews. Long ago Lizzie had resolved to enjoy an even better meal than usual on Mr. Davis’s official fast days, and when storm clouds rolled in by midmorning and thunderstorms threatened, she was inspired to invite their Unionist friends for a feast. The windows would be shut tight against the storm, and no one would be out walking in such foul weather, and if the guests staggered their arrivals and departures, the neighbors would be none the wiser.

  The Carringtons came from across the street bearing a smoked ham they had intended to save for Easter. Mr. Rowley, his wife Catharine, and their children brought early spring vegetables from their farm near Oakwood, spinach and asparagus and watercress gathered in the wild. Mr. McNiven brought soda bread, hot cross buns, and shortbread in abundance, although he spent a good portion of the evening glaring darkly at the shielded windows and muttering that it was too dangerous for them all to be gathered together in one place and they must never risk it again. Mary Jane and Wilson came, and Lieutenant Ross, looking comfortable in civilian attire, and Mr. Ruth from the RF&P railroad, who revealed that, back in January, General Lee had accused him of operating the railroad “without zeal or energy.” Mr. Ruth assured them, and Wilson quickly concurred, that he was not in danger of discovery. He was adept at deception, and he made certain that intervals of poor performance by his railroad were interspersed with periods of efficiency. He also had powerful Confederate friends who were convinced of his ardent devotion to the cause and would intercede for him whenever suspicions arose.

  With the shutters closed and the curtains drawn tight, they enjoyed their feast, nourished as much by the company as by the delicious food. When they had eaten their fill, they withdrew to the library, where they spread out a map on Father’s desk and traced the progress of the Union armies. Someday soon they would be able to gather in the open, they assured one another heartily, their spirits buoyed by the restful hours spent among sympathetic friends. Someday soon the Union army would capture Richmond, and they would unfurl their illicit star-­spangled banners and sing “Hail, Columbia” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” to welcome the men in Union blue.

  Mr. McNiven was absolutely right—­it was dangerous for so many of them to meet in one place, especially when that place was the Van Lew mansion. But Lizzie knew too that their gathering was necessary, a significant act of defiance that would bolster their morale and strengthen their courage for the difficult trials that surely lay ahead.

  For many citizens of Richmond, Lizzie knew, a feast such as theirs had become the stuff of dreams and fond memories, and every day was a fast day.

  On the first Wednesday of April, after feeding her nieces their breakfast and playing with them in the garden, Lizzie entrusted them to Hannah’s tender care and invited Eliza Carrington to walk with her around Capitol Square. It was a soft, tender spring morning, and they were both eager to slough off the melancholy of winter and reflect upon the seasons of peace that they had once known and, God willing, would see again. The miasma of death still clung to the cobblestones, but the bright sunshine and gentle breezes seemed to clear it away, and the grass upon the square was freshly green, with the bright-­yellow pop of dandelions scattered here and there, and songbirds darting and trilling in the boughs.

  They chatted as they strolled, and surreptitiously observed officers and politicians going about their business, taking note of anything that might be useful to the Union. As they rounded the second corner, Lizzie realized that the crowd of people milling quietly about was not a chance gathering of citizens innocently enjoying the lovely day, but rather a planned assembly of women, most of them young, some of them clutching children, all of them thin and pale. One young woman with limp, honey-­blond hair poking out from beneath her bonnet eased herself down upon a nearby bench as they walked past. “I can no longer stand,” she said weakly, and as she raised a hand to adjust her bonnet, her sleeve fell back and revealed an arm so frail and bony that both Lizzie and Eliza gasped aloud.

  “My goodness, dear,” Lizzie said, hurrying to her side. “Are you ill?”

  Embarrassed, the girl pulled down her sleeve and gave an apologetic laugh. “No, but this is all that’s left of me.”

  “Would you like something to eat?” said Eliza, rummaging in her basket.

  “Of course,” said the girl. “Isn’t that why we’re all here?”

  As Eliza handed her a pair of shiny red apples, Lizzie nodded to the milling crowd, several hundred strong and steadily increasing. “Is this a celebration of some sort?”

  “I suppose,” said the girl, laughing bleakly. “We celebrate our right to live. We are starving.”

  “Are you planning to storm the Capitol?” Lizzie asked. “Or perhaps march on the Executive Mansion?”

  The girl shook her head, devouring the apples down to the cores. “When enough of us have come together, we’re going to the city’s bakeries and take one loaf each.” She nibbled the last bit of sweet, juicy fruit and flung the cores away. “That is little enough for the government to give us after it has taken all our men.”

  The look Eliza threw Lizzie was full of fear. “Forgive me, but that sounds terribly imprudent,” Eliza ventured. “Won’t the governor call out the guard to arrest you?”

  “At least we’ll have some food in our bellies when they throw us into Castle Thunder.”

  Lizzie knew the women would just as surely starve there. “Have you appealed to the authorities, explained to them your distress?”

  “We have, but no one listens.” The girl drew herself up. “We sent a delegation of ladies to Governor Letcher’s house to ask for food. They should be with him right now, unless he was too scared to let them in. Our leaders thought it was right to give him a chance to help us before we go out to help ourselves.”

  The crowd was growing, and when Eliza clutched Lizzie’s arm, she knew her friend wanted to be away from there as much as she did. “Do be careful,” Lizzie urged. “I hope Governor Letcher gives you all something to eat and more to take home to your families, but if he doesn’t—­”

  “If he doesn’t, he’ll wish he had,” the girl said flatly.

  With great misgivings, Lizzie bade her farewell and tucked her arm through Eliza’s. As they turned quickly toward Church Hill, a towheaded boy about four years old darted in front of them and began to scale a magnolia tree. A colored maid in hot pursuit snatched her wandering charge down before he had climbed more than a few inches off the ground. “Get away from there, Marse Billy,” she scolded, her gaze darting over the swelling crowd of women. “You might catch something from those poor white folks.”

 
Lizzie and Eliza hurried on their way, but just as they were leaving the square, a swell of voices brought them to a halt, and they turned in time to see a group of four women, one dressed as gaudily as a brothel keeper, with an elaborately curled white plume sweeping from the brim of her hat, approach the square from the direction of the governor’s residence. Lizzie could not make out what the newcomers reported, but from the lamentations and angry shouts that their address provoked, she could only assume that the quartet was the delegation and that Governor Letcher had given them an unsatisfactory response.

  “Let’s go home,” Eliza urged, tugging on Lizzie’s arm. “I don’t like this. It feels ugly.”

  Lizzie agreed. A sense of hopeless outrage radiated from the throng, as if they were on the cusp of turning from a gathering of desperate women into an enraged mob.

  It was not long after they returned home that Lizzie heard the alarm bell peal from its tower on the corner of the Capitol Square, but it was another day before she learned what had become of the desperate, ravenous women.

  Their delegation had interrupted Governor Letcher’s breakfast, so he had asked them to come to his office later, where he would assist them. As Lizzie and Eliza had observed, the crowd disliked his reply, and soon thereafter the angry throng left the square and proceeded down Ninth Street to Main. As the governor ordered the alarm sounded, Mr. Mumford of the Young Men’s Christian Association tried to turn them back, promising to distribute food to them if they came to his office. Some of the women did as he asked, but most swept past him down the street to the government commissary, where they forced their way in and seized provisions from the shelves. There was not enough for all, so they descended on the nearby shops, snatching up bread, flour, hams, and shoes, which they loaded into whatever carts and wagons happened to be parked along the street. When frightened storekeepers forced the women out and merchants all along the street quickly barricaded their doors, the mob turned violent, smashing windows with hatchets and grabbing whatever they could lay hands upon, not only food and necessities but luxuries like bonnets, silks, clothing, and jewelry. Soon hundreds more appeared—­men and women both, none starving by the look of it—­some merely to watch, others to join in the swiftly escalating riot. Fireman arrived on the scene and hosed down the looters, but that only inflamed their fury. The alarm brought the Public Guard running, and with them at his back Governor Letcher confronted the crowd and ordered Mayor Mayo to read the Riot Act.