APRIL–OCTOBER 1864
T
he grave in which the body was buried was opened under the direction of the officials who interred the remains,” the Examiner testily reported the next day, “but the grave was empty—Dahlgren has risen, or been resurrected, and the corpse was not to be found. If the facts be as stated, an explanation and apology, not the corpse, will go down to City Point by the present flag of truce.”
By the time the article appeared, Lizzie had managed to get word to General Butler that Colonel Dahlgren’s remains were safely beyond Confederate reach, but the Richmond press and the Confederate government remained ignorant, mystified, and unsettled. In distinct contrast, the incident had left the Union underground satisfied and invigorated, and they took much secret amusement from the rebels’ consternation.
Each glimmer of hope and levity, however small and fleeting, offered them much-needed encouragement in an apprehensive season. Everyone knew that as soon as the spring sunshine dried the muddy roads of Virginia enough to make them passable, the armies would be on the move. For the first time, General Lee would face General Ulysses S. Grant, who had triumphed in Tennessee and at Vicksburg but had provoked harsh criticism, including demands that President Lincoln remove him from command, for the devastating casualties taken at the Battle of Shiloh. At the time, Mr. Lincoln had famously replied, “I can’t spare this man; he fights,” and in March, the president emphasized his confidence by promoting him to lieutenant general and naming him general-in-chief of the armies of the United States. General Grant made his priorities clear by establishing his headquarters in the field with his army rather than in Washington City, and in April, he halted all prisoner exchanges.
In March, so many hundreds of Union prisoners had been shipped south or exchanged that in the last week of the month, the Whig reported that only eighteen hundred remained in Richmond, but Lizzie knew that number would rapidly soar with the prisoner cartel shut down. Although she was dismayed on behalf of the prisoners languishing in Libby and Belle Isle and elsewhere in the capital, she understood General Grant’s rationale. Every Confederate prisoner freed was a rebel soldier returned to the battlefield, killing more Union men and prolonging the war.
On a warm, breezy afternoon on the last day of April, Lizzie was playing with Annie and Eliza in the gardens when Mary Jane unexpectedly paid her a visit. Lizzie frequently received encoded notes from Mary Jane as well as messages conveyed by Mr. McNiven, but they had not seen each other in weeks. Delighted, Lizzie embraced her, offered her a cup of tea, and invited her to stay for supper, but Mary Jane pressed her lips together, shook her head, and said, “No, thank you. I haven’t any appetite.”
Only then did Lizzie notice that Mary Jane looked queasy and drawn. “What’s the matter?” she asked, guiding her to a chair on the piazza.
“There was a dreadful accident at the Gray House today.”
Lizzie’s first thought was that President Davis had been killed. A few scattered attempts on his life had already been made—but no, Mary Jane had called it an accident. “What happened? Is Mr. Davis—”
“Grieving but otherwise unharmed.” Mary Jane placed a hand on her abdomen and took a deep breath. “At about one o’clock, I was helping Mrs. Davis carry lunch to Mr. Davis’s office on the second floor. Sometimes he’s so preoccupied with work that he forgets to eat. Mrs. Davis had just uncovered the basket when the children’s nurse came running.”
“Oh, dear,” Lizzie murmured, sinking into a chair.
“The children had been playing in Mrs. Davis’s room, but when she left to arrange her husband’s lunch, Joseph—he’s the four-year-old—he wandered onto the rear balcony, climbed onto the railing, slipped—and fell to the brick walk below.”
“My goodness, the poor child. Is he—”
Mary Jane shook her head, her eyes filling with tears. “His brother Jeff ran down to him, but when Joseph didn’t move, he ran to find Catherine.” She paused to clear her throat. “He told her, ‘Joe wouldn’t wake up,’ and when she looked and saw him lying so still, she ran for Mrs. Davis.”
Lizzie reached out and clasped Mary Jane’s hands, unable to speak.
“We all ran down to him together, the Davises, Caroline, and I, but there was nothing we could do. He lived only a few minutes longer, cradled in his father’s arms.”
“The poor child—and the poor parents!”
“The Davises are devastated—utterly torn apart. Joseph was his father’s greatest joy and hope. Mr. Davis kept saying, ‘Not mine, oh, Lord, but thine,’ over and over again, completely distraught. A messenger brought him a dispatch—”
“He couldn’t have waited?” exclaimed Lizzie. “Has he no heart?”
“Mr. Davis held the dispatch for a moment, looking at it but not really seeing it, and then he handed the paper to an aide and said, ‘I must have this day with my little child.’ And Mrs. Davis—oh, how she screamed and screamed.”
Lizzie imagined the scene all too vividly. “Mary Jane, I’m so sorry.”
“His poor little body lying broken on the bricks—” Mary Jane shuddered. “I see it afresh every time I close my eyes.”
“Try not to think about it,” Lizzie urged. “The shock will fade. The vision won’t torment you forever.”
“No, that unhappy fate belongs to Mr. and Mrs. Davis,” said Mary Jane. “You know they’ve lost a son before, in Washington.”
“I had heard that.”
“And Mrs. Davis is with child again even now, did you know?”
“You told me,” Lizzie reminded her gently. “I do hope she takes care of herself. Such a terrible grief cannot be good for her baby. Is anyone there to look after her?”
“She has her maid, and her friend Mrs. Chesnut was immediately summoned, and other friends are coming tonight—” Mary Jane caught herself. “And Mary, John’s Mary, she came too, with Mrs. Chesnut.”
Lizzie felt a jolt. “She’s well enough to call on friends?” Not only to call, but with enough presence of mind to comfort a grief-stricken mother. Mary must be well recovered, then. Lizzie had heard nothing from her since they had given up the house on Canal Street and Mary went to stay with her widowed cousin and John returned to Church Hill. Lizzie knew she ought to be relieved that Mary had been restored to health, but instead the news filled her with trepidation.
“Apparently so. She didn’t recognize me,” Mary Jane quickly added, before Lizzie even thought to ask. “She never paid much attention to black faces, and she’s never seen me in a maid’s garb before. Her gaze slipped right past me as if we had never met.” Her tone had turned bitter. “If her visits become too frequent, though, I may have to resign.”
“Of course.” Lizzie felt a pang of regret at the thought of losing such an essential part of her intelligence network, but if Mary Jane was recognized and exposed, the entire Richmond underground could be ruined.
“But none of this is why I came to see you today.” Mary Jane shook her head as if clearing it of shock and horror. “The provost marshal’s office and the Signal Bureau are blaming spies for every setback the Confederacy has faced in recent months.”
“With good reason,” said Lizzie, thinking of the Libby Prison break and Colonel Dahlgren’s mysterious resurrection.
“They’re demanding that the president and Congress take firm, decisive, and immediate action to discover and eliminate the spies in their midst.”
“Eliminate?” Lizzie echoed warily.
Mary Jane nodded.
“So we can expect harsher measures directed toward suspected Unionists.”
Mary Jane nodded again. “You should prepare, you and all your friends.”
Lizzie thanked her for the warning and again offered her tea or perhaps coffee, and this time, Mary Jane gratefully accepted a cup of coffee. She was probably expecting the ersatz coffee tha
t had become the beverage of last resort in the capital, but Lizzie surprised her with a cup of real, rich, robust coffee, made from freshly roasted and ground beans smuggled in from the North. Lizzie had intended to use the delicacy to win friends in influential places, but Mary Jane had been through quite an ordeal, and a good cup of coffee would brace her. There would still be enough left over for the weak-willed clerks and guards she meant to win over, low-paid staff who could hardly afford their daily bread on their pitiful salaries, what with food stores diminishing and prices inching higher day by day.
As soon as Mary Jane departed, Lizzie sent out a flurry of coded messages, warning her friends to take every precaution and not a single unnecessary risk. Jefferson Davis was distraught and grieving, and in that state of mind, he would show them no mercy.
Less than a week later, excitement surged throughout the city and many were the rumors as the Union and Confederate armies clashed in the Wilderness, north of Richmond. General Grant had conceived a new strategy, making the most of the superior manpower and resources of the North to strike multiple, simultaneous blows at the Confederacy. General Meade and the Army of the Potomac confronted General Lee, General Butler’s forces were moving up the James River to threaten Richmond from the south, and the German-born general Franz Sigel engaged the rebel troops in the Shenandoah Valley so they could not reinforce the Army of Northern Virginia. In the meantime, General Sherman moved to take on his Confederate counterpart in Georgia, and General Nathaniel Banks seemed poised to capture the vital port of Mobile, Alabama.
It was a bold, aggressive strategy, meant to trap the rebels in the grip of a closing vise, but the people of Richmond were more concerned with the battle on their doorstep than the broader scope of the coordinated assaults. Lizzie watched the distant fighting from the rooftop, but she had been disappointed too often to allow herself to hope that liberation was at hand. When she thought back to the exhilaration she had felt racing on horseback with Eliza and her cousin on the road to Mr. Botts’s farm, she could scarcely believe she had once found battle thrilling. Now nothing elated her, not the approach of the Union army, not the novel audacity of General Grant’s campaign. She felt only a calm hope, but with much sadness in it.
On May 6, the fighting was so close that the smoke of battle hung heavy in the air. All the stores were closed and few people ventured out onto the streets. Before long, word trickled into the capital that in the two days of savage fighting, the Confederacy had lost about eleven thousand men and the Union more than eighteen thousand. Lizzie was sickened to learn that many of the Union fatalities included wounded soldiers who had been unable to flee when fire broke out, and had been consumed alive by the burning woods.
The next day, Lieutenant Ross reported that an uprising at Libby had begun around midnight, when about one thousand officers had been ordered to prepare to be transported to Danville. The prison walls could not keep out the sounds of battle, and the men concluded that their captors believed the city would soon be taken, and were determined to move them to a more secure location where they could not be liberated. The prisoners swore they would not go and refused to have their names registered, but when confronted by several hundred Confederate bayonets, they submitted with bad grace. While most lined up for roll call, some of the officers slipped away and set fire to a lot of boxes on the second floor, intending to destroy the prison, but the blaze was extinguished before any damage was done. Furious, the prisoners spent their last moments in Libby dumping precious sugar and coffee and cutting up blankets and books that had recently been sent to them from the North, refusing to leave them for the benefit of their jailers. “As they were marched out to the depot, they swore they would escape from the train on the way to Danville,” Lieutenant Ross told her, “but I haven’t heard if they made good on their vow. They left on the Danville train at three o’clock this morning.”
“Let us hope they manage to escape,” said Lizzie wearily, with little hope that they would find the chance. However many hundreds the Confederates shipped south, she had no doubt that Libby Prison would soon be full again.
From the Wilderness the fighting moved on to Spotsylvania Court House, where the slaughter intensified. Assessing the city’s fortifications, Lizzie sent a dispatch by her most trusted courier to inform General Butler that a great number of Richmond’s defenders had been sent to reinforce General Lee. “The city is rarely so lightly garrisoned,” she emphasized. “Now is the time to strike at the heart of the Confederacy.”
General Butler’s dogged advances over the next few days seemed a deliberate, methodical, affirmative reply to her summons.
On the night of May 12, Lizzie was awakened by the roar of cannons, and with John, William, and Nelson, she watched from the rooftop, her hopes and fears and prayers intermingling as she strained to glimpse the fighting, which seemed astonishingly close. “Uncle Nelson, can you tell the Yankee guns from the Confederate?” she asked the aged man.
“Yes, Miss Lizzie,” he said, squinting off into the distance. “Them deep ones, they’re the Yankee cannon.”
“Are they coming closer?”
“It seems so.”
Lizzie smiled despite her worry and fatigue. She had thought so, but she wanted to be reassured.
She needed more reassurance in the week that followed, as General Butler’s advance seemed to grind to a halt. On May 16, Confederate General Beauregard launched a fierce counterattack on the army of Butler the Beast, driving him back to a narrow strip of land between the James and the Appomattox and holding the Union forces there while he dispatched reinforcements to General Lee.
And then the war truly did strike home: John was ordered to report to the field.
The Van Lews had expected the summons, and from the moment the campaign had begun, they had waited with dread for the inevitable. Richmond had never been in greater danger. The federal army coming up the James was much stronger and faster than government officials had anticipated, and Confederate defense forces were sent out to the north, south, and east to meet them. In the city, every man was called to arms, and in the streets none was without his musket and cartridge box. The hospitals braced themselves for another onslaught of wounded, and with the railroad lines to the South destroyed, anxious politicians scrambled to find horses to carry them to safety. Lizzie heard stories of ladies who sat up all night dressed in their best clothes and all their jewelry, ready to flee at a moment’s notice, although where they thought they might find refuge and how to travel there, Lizzie could only wonder. At a time of great distress, when even the city’s newspapermen had formed a company and prepared to fight off the enemy, John could not have hoped to avoid service.
Nevertheless, Lizzie fought to have his medical deferment extended, but the surgeon in charge refused to speak with her. She tried to arrange to smuggle him out of the city, but the raging battles had rendered her most reliable routes impassable. In desperation, although she knew it was risky, she decided to appeal to General Winder. She reminded him that he himself had confirmed John’s disability and had blamed the military’s relentless pursuit of him to a particular bias against the Van Lew family.
“I am sorry, Miss Van Lew,” the general replied. “The last time we spoke on this matter, I told you I could do nothing more for him.”
“But surely there is something else.”
“The cause needs every man.”
“Perhaps John could serve in another role,” she proposed. “As a prison guard, perhaps. A clerk. He is an excellent businessman. He can serve the cause better using his brain rather than his brawn.”
The general regarded her wearily. “Many gentlemen in worse physical repair than your brother are fighting and dying while he takes his leisure in your gardens.”
Lizzie felt her heart pound heavily in her chest. She had one last card, and she intended to play it—although if it failed, she could never come to him again. “General Win
der,” she said quietly, “I know what answer I want. Perhaps I have been asking the wrong questions.”
She reached into her bag, withdrew a thick wad of Confederate bills, and placed it on the general’s desk.
He stared at it for a long moment, silent and still. “What, may I ask, is this?”
“Six thousand dollars,” she said. “There was a time when this would buy dozens of substitutes.”
“That time has long passed.” The general looked up and held her gaze, his face reddening with fury. “Miss Van Lew, I strongly urge you to remove that offensive bribe from my sight before I forget you are a lady.”
“General Winder,” exclaimed Lizzie, feigning injured innocence. “I think you forget yourself, or you have forgotten who I am. This is no bribe. This is a fee. I am paying for a substitute—for several substitutes. Granted, I did not find them myself, as I believe is the custom, but time is of the essence, and as you said, I am a lady and hardly familiar with how one arranges such transactions.”
“Enough,” he barked, shoving his chair back from the desk and glowering. “Remove your property from my desk, and remove yourself from my office before I dispatch you to Castle Thunder.”
“But, General—”
“Not another word,” he said, his voice blistering.
Quickly Lizzie snatched up the money, returned it to her bag, and swept haughtily from the room, her chin lifted in a pose of offended dignity. She quickened her pace as she made her way down the hall to the exit, so that by the time she reached the sidewalk, she was nearly running.
Her error had cost her dearly, she knew. She had not saved her brother, and she had almost certainly destroyed whatever trust yet remained between her and the general.
She had made a terrible mistake, but there was no undoing it.
And so John reunited with his regiment at Camp Lee, and he marched off to battle as the fighting moved to the North Anna River and beyond. Lizzie and her mother had no idea where he might be as skirmishes were reported in all directions and reports became more confusing and contradictory. The only certainty was that casualties were massive on both sides, disproportionately so for the Union, although the rebels suffered the devastating loss of their revered, daring cavalry commander General J. E. B. Stuart, who died at the Richmond home of his brother-in-law after being shot in the abdomen at Yellow Tavern.
The Spymistress Page 32
