Nearby, with a “great, gurgling yell,” Cushing’s fireman Samuel Higgins went under and disappeared. Nearby, too, the Confederates soon were out on the water in their own boats, picking up other members of the Union raiding party.
Cushing, his strength fast ebbing in the chill water, swam onward in the dark. He tried to help another crewman he heard splashing just behind, but that man also “sank like a stone.”
Cushing then forced himself to keep moving, keep stroking, in the direction of the town side of the river. “At last, and not a moment too soon,” he wrote later, “I touched the soft mud and in the excitement of the first shock I half raised my body and made one step forward; then fell, and remained half in the mud and half in the water until daylight, unable to even crawl on hands and knees, nearly frozen with my brain in a whirl, but with one thing strong in me—the fixed determination to escape.”
The growing light disclosed that he was at one end of a swamp on the edge of Plymouth—“not 40 yards from one of the forts.” Daylight showed the rebel town to be “swarming” with excited, angry soldiers and sailors. “It was a source of satisfaction to me to know that I had pulled the wire that set all these figures moving, but as I had no desire of being discovered, my first object was to get into a dry fringe of rushes that edged the swamp.”
First he would have to cross a belt of open ground thirty or forty feet in width without alarming the sentry pacing back and forth on a nearby Confederate parapet. Cushing waited until the man turned, dashed for half the distance and then threw himself flat as the sentry turned once more. The dash had placed Cushing between two paths—and with little cover except the river mud that covered him from head to toe. “Soon a party of four men came down the path at my right, two of them being officers, and passed so close to me as almost to tread upon my arm.”
To Cushing’s great relief, they moved on. He resumed his journey to the swamp, crawling “inch by inch, toward it.” Once there and out of sight, he rose to his feet and struggled ahead for about five hours before he came to solid ground. His path then took him alternately through thickets of thorns and briars “that cut into the flesh at every step like knives” or through mire so soft under his weight that he was forced to throw his body upon it at length, and haul himself along by the arms.
“Hands and feet raw from the ordeal” and thoroughly exhausted, Cushing found more trouble ahead—a party of Confederate soldiers busy sinking schooners in the river channel to block it. He circled behind them in a cornfield, then plunged into a woods, where he found an old black man and paid him $20 to go into town and find out what had happened to the Rebel ironclad the night before. While awaiting the report, Cushing was able to rest.
The old man returned with welcome news—the Albemarle had “gone down.” Happy, Cushing resumed his escape journey. He was soon in more swamp with thick underbrush, thrashing around until he hit a road, a stream, and a Confederate picket party of seven soldiers. More important, he found their small, flat-bottomed skiff tied to the root of a cypress tree.
The pickets were eating, and as they did so, Cushing braved chill waters one more time to cast loose the skiff, push it along for thirty yards to the first bend in the stream, then squirm aboard. He then paddled away furiously—“as only a man could whose liberty was at stake.”
Rowing unceasingly for hours, he finally reached the mouth of the Roanoke River, the sound beyond, and at last the first ships of his own Union fleet on blockade station. With a cry to the nearest vessel of “Ship ahoy,” he fell, now totally exhausted, into the water in the bottom of the skiff. “I had paddled every minute for ten successive hours, and for four my body had been ‘asleep’ with the exception of my arms and brain.”
The Union sailors of the picket ship Valley City pulled the remarkable Commander Cushing aboard, and soon “rockets were thrown up and all hands…called to cheer ship” at news of his safe return.
Faces in the Crowd
A SECRET AGENT SO SECRET NOT EVEN HIS OWN SIDE KNEW OF HIS EXISTENCE! THAT was smalltime publisher William A. Lloyd’s precarious situation the moment that Abraham Lincoln was shot. Only the late president, it seems, had been aware that Lloyd did a bit more than simply publish railroad and steamship guides for Southern consumption. It was in that guise, though, that Lloyd had been allowed to reenter the break-away territory, live there, and travel widely while ostensibly gathering material for his guidebooks.
By prior, personal arrangement with Abe Lincoln, Lloyd was also gathering information on forts and troop dispositions, along with any other useful intelligence to be gleaned in his travels throughout the South. In short, he was spying.
The oddity was that he was spying for Lincoln, and Lincoln alone. He was, by contract signed with Lincoln, the president’s own man in the Confederacy. He was paid two hundred dollars a month and expenses for his services.
The trouble was, only two of Lloyd’s employees (and possibly his wife) knew of the arrangement. When Lloyd returned to Washington at war’s end, after four years spent in the Confederacy, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton was willing to reimburse him for expenses ($2,380) but balked at paying the two hundred dollars a month retroactively. After Lloyd’s own death just three years later, his estate sued the government for his back pay. Like Stanton, the U.S. Supreme Court raised a central question: Where’s the contract signed with Lincoln? Unfortunately, at one time, faced with arrest in the South and the contract in his hat, Lloyd had destroyed it. Sorry, plaintiff denied.
Boston Corbett was a mystery man. A sergeant in the 16th New York Cavalry who survived five years as a prisoner at Andersonville, in April 1865 he joined in the pursuit of John Wilkes Booth and was present when the barn in which Booth was trapped was set on fire. When Booth was shot and wounded fatally, people asked who fired the shot. I did, Boston Corbett replied. God told me to.
Perhaps Booth shot himself, perhaps not, perhaps Corbett shot him—but some say Booth’s pistol-ball wound could not have been caused by Corbett’s carbine. In any case, Corbett accepted accolades (and reward money) from Secretary of War Stanton, then stumped the country as the “Avenger of Blood.” With Corbett, it should be explained, anything was possible. Before the war, he castrated himself. Later, hired as a doorkeeper for the Kansas state legislature, he fired two pistols indoors one day in 1886. No one was killed, but he was sent to an insane asylum. Eventually he escaped and was never seen publicly again.
A mystery man of another sort was Confederate officer John D. Kennedy of South Carolina, who somehow survived being wounded six times and being struck by fifteen spent balls. An attorney in civilian life, he watched the shelling of Fort Sumter, then appeared at First Bull Run, Yorktown, Fair Oaks and Seven Days, Savage’s Station, Antietam, Chancellorsville, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, Knoxville, Petersburg, Shenandoah Valley, and even Bentonville at the war’s eleventh hour. After all this action, he then returned to his lawyering but only lived to age fifty-six.
This captain of Confederate cavalry was probably unique. Not because the captain ran a hospital in Richmond and never rode a horse into combat, but because she was a woman—Captain Sally Tompkins. A single, still young and wealthy woman when the war began, she arranged to use a recently vacated home in Richmond as an emergency medical facility when the wounded from First Manassas began to flow back from the front lines. The city was overwhelmed, and Judge John Robertson was more than happy to lend his Richmond home at Third and Main Streets for use as a twenty-five-bed medical facility, since he and his family were moving to the country. In short order, and for some time after that battle, Sally Tompkins ran Robertson Hospital with a better survival record for its patients than most, if not all, other Confederate hospitals—thanks in large part to her obsession with cleanliness. When the government insisted a few months later upon closing all such private hospitals to centralize the management of scarce medical supplies (and keep track of the soldier-patients), she appealed to Jefferson Davis. Impressed, he appointed her a captain in the C
onfederate Army. “In that way, your hospital can be saved,” he said. With her close companion and faithful worker, a slave woman named Phoebe, Sally Tompkins kept her hospital going until war’s end. Her astounding record was only seventy-three deaths among her 1,333 patients.
Both grandsons of Revolutionary War icon Paul Revere, Joseph Warren Revere and Paul Joseph Revere carved out entirely contradictory careers as Civil War soldiers. Only one of them survived. Joseph, the older of the pair, had served in the U.S. Navy and in the Mexican Army prior to the Civil War. Twenty years younger, Paul was far less experienced in military matters. Both served in the Union Army, and both appeared at one or more of the war’s major battles in the East—Joe at Chancellorsville, Paul at Ball’s Bluff and Antietam, among others. Joseph, however, didn’t fare so well as a temporary division commander at Chancellorsville. He was court-martialed for withdrawing his command without orders to do so. The sentence was outright dismissal from the Army, but President Lincoln allowed him to resign instead.
In the meantime, young Paul had been wounded and captured at Ball’s Bluff. He was held as a hostage, guaranteeing the safety of Confederate privateers detained by Union authorities. Released at last, he was wounded again at Antietam. Once more recovered from his wounds, he led the 20th Massachusetts at Gettysburg, where he was wounded again, this time fatally. Paul died two days after his wounding the second day of battle at Gettysburg. Joseph Revere lived until 1880, publishing a memoir of his career and traveling widely in the postwar period.
You don’t hear much about Jay Cooke, a high school dropout, but where would the Union Army have found its funding without his success in selling government bond issues? Arriving in Washington as a financial adviser to Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, Cooke wasted no time in obtaining loan guarantees from Northern banks. His Jay Cooke and Company, as the Federal government’s exclusive agent, then sold more than $850 million in bonds during the early months of the war. “This money kept the army in the field,” said Stewart Sifakis in his compendium Who Was Who in the Civil War. Some in Congress, Sifakis also said, gave vent to their uneasiness over allowing the Ohioan what amounted to a monopoly, but Cooke nevertheless proved himself a wizard with money and “has been credited with doing as much to win the war as the armies in the field.” Toward war’s end, he even advanced personal and company millions “to stabilize the market, which, due to the actions of speculators, was facing a panic.” All this from a man who left school at the age of fourteen.
If Jefferson Davis, future president of the Confederacy, was one of Mississippi’s two U.S. senators at the time of secession, who was the other, and what became of him? Meet, please, Albert Gallatin Brown, South Carolina–born antebellum attorney and militia general in Mississippi after moving there as a child. A successful—indeed, outstanding—politician, he served in the state legislature and in the U.S. House, and then became governor of Mississippi. Brown had been in the U.S. Senate for nearly ten years at the time he and Davis resigned their seats on January 12, 1861. Brown then went home, gathered together an infantry company, and, as a captain with the 18th Mississippi, saw action at First Bull Run and Ball’s Bluff. He returned to the legislative forum as an appointed member of the Senate in the First Confederate Congress (February 1862). There, as chairman of the Naval Affairs Committee, he argued that the legislature should have greater control over the war effort, even at the expense of some civil liberties. If that were not enough to explain his split with fellow Mississippian Jefferson Davis, Brown also urged the emancipation and arming of the South’s slaves, an expanded draft, and using the Confederacy’s moneymaking cotton fields to produce vitally needed food crops. At war’s end, he urged the South to “shake hands” with the North and adopt a cooperative attitude during Reconstruction. For this, he was branded a “submissionist.”
He was black, a freed slave, and he sang a number of Scottish songs with an authentic Scottish “burr,” thanks to his onetime master, a Virginian of Scottish descent. For a time John Scobell traveled with Union spymaster Allan Pinkerton’s agent Hattie Lawson (white and female), as her servant. When she was arrested in Richmond in March 1862, her “manservant” Scobell was allowed to walk away—no interrogation, no suspicion attached. He spent the entire war as a spy for the Union, protected in large part by the fact he was a black man. Thus he worked at different places—as a laborer helping to build earthworks, even as a vendor visiting Southern encampments. Said Pinkerton one time: “He had only to assume the role of a light-hearted darky, and no one would suspect his real role.” Helpful in Scobell’s spying career, too, was the fact that his equally “invisible” wife stayed in Richmond, the Confederate capital, as a cook—presumably feeding valuable information, knowingly or unknowingly, to her spy husband. With the war’s end, though, there were no medals, no hoopla—the pair simply disappeared from the pages of history.
Red Shirt, White Shirt
IN THE UNION CAMP HARD BY THE RAPPAHANNOCK RIVER, FEW OF THE MEN IN blue gave much thought to the new black man Dabney, hired to serve as cook and body servant. This was at “Fighting Joe” Hooker’s headquarters in early 1863, after Fredericksburg and before Chancellorsville.
Few thought it odd when the free black from a farm across the river offered to share his knowledge of the local terrain. Nor did it seem unusual when he showed a lively interest in the Union Army’s signals system and picked up on the various signals, remembering them quite easily.
One day his wife, having arrived in camp with him, announced that she would like to go back across the river because, it was explained, she had opportunity to work as a servant over there for a “secesh woman.” Neither Hooker nor his staff made any real objection.
Life went on with Dabney home at Union headquarters and his wife gone across the river.
Perhaps her job wasn’t quite what it first seemed, since it soon turned out that she was really a laundress at a Confederate Army headquarters. If such a situation really existed—a husband at one headquarters and his wife at the opposing army’s headquarters—it does seem surprising to us today that the arrangement would have been allowed by either headquarters to continue, had either set of officers really known.
At Hooker’s headquarters, people began to realize that Dabney knew amazing things about Confederate plans and movements, yet he never left the Union encampment. He was too busy as a cook and body servant. Hooker had his reliable scouts and other intelligence sources, but as time went on, few of them could match the stream of accurate information that Dabney seemed to pick up daily.
How did he do it? One day he agreed to explain the mystery to one of the Union officers. He took the officer to a nearby spot with a view across the river on the outskirts of Fredericksburg. He told his listener to take note of a cabin close to the river on the opposite side—to look at its clothesline.
Here’s what he allegedly said: “Well, that clothesline tells me in a half an hour just what goes on at Lee’s headquarters. You see my wife over there? She washes for the officers, cooks, and waits around, and as soon as she hears about any movement or anything going on she comes down and moves the clothes on that line so I can understand in a minute.” In sum, Dabney’s tutelage in Union signals had come home to roost. He and his wife had worked out a system of communication that wasn’t exactly from the manual but, like a baseball manager’s signals to his pitcher, worked very effectively.
“That there gray shirt,” explained Dabney to his dumbfounded listener, “is Longstreet; and when she takes it off it means he’s gone down about Richmond.”
There were other shirts, too. “That white shirt means [A. P.] Hill; and when she moves it down to the west end of the line, Hill’s corps has moved upstream. That red one is Stonewall Jackson. He’s down on the right now, and if he moves, she’ll move that red shirt.”
Dabney was able to point out a clothesline signal being sent even as they gazed across the river. See the two blankets pinned together at the bottom? he asked his com
panion. “Why that’s her way of making a fish trap; and when she pins the clothes together that way, it means that Lee is only trying to draw us into his fish-trap.”
Who knows? Perhaps a “fish trap” was in Lee’s mind not long after when he engaged Hooker at Chancellorsville on May 1 and sent “Red Shirt” Jackson on a fourteen-mile loop to strike Hooker’s forces at their western flank. Except that in carrying out the maneuver, Stonewall Jackson was mortally wounded by his own men. He died shortly afterward, and A. P. Hill (Dabney’s “White Shirt”) was one of the last names he mentioned.
More Than a Few Ghosts
YOU MAY BELIEVE THEM OR NOT, BUT QUITE A FEW GHOSTLY STORIES CAME OUT OF the Civil War era…such as the repeated sightings over the years of a phantom train plying the rails of upstate New York, its headlight stabbing through the night. Abe Lincoln’s funeral train, it is alleged.
Or Lincoln’s very own story—a lengthy, detailed statement—that he dreamed of a person lying dead in a casket, surrounded by mourners, in the East Room of the White House. In his dream, Lincoln approached a soldier guarding the catafalque bearing the body that was lying in state. The dead man’s face was covered up.
“Who is dead in the White House?” Lincoln demanded to know in his dream. “The president,” came the horrifying reply. “He was killed by an assassin.”
A haunting dream indeed! “I slept no more that night,” said Lincoln later, “and although it was only a dream, I have been strangely annoyed by it ever since.” It was shortly afterward that Lincoln was killed by assassin John Wilkes Booth and himself lay in state in the same East Room of the White House.
Best Little Stories from the Civil War: More than 100 true stories Page 19
