Reveille in Washington

by Margaret Leech

  Mrs. Morris’s three-year-old boy, Frank, accompanied her to prison. His large hobbyhorse did not console him for the loss of freedom. He kicked against the door, and shouted to the guard, “Let me out, you damned Yankee.” On the mother’s protests that he should be allowed exercise like “the other gentlemen that are now confined here,” Superintendent Wood promised to arrange airings for Frank. Mrs. Morris submitted to detention more gracefully than her son. She was supplied with every comfort by Washington sympathizers, and at first had no fault to find with prison life, save for the fact that it interfered with her work. Her lively, jesting manners covered a sore heart, for she was bitter against her husband for his desertion, and angrily resented her mother-in-law’s hostility. She thought it a duty to be cheerful, and made herself very popular at the Old Capitol. “They only keep me here,” she flippantly wrote, “because they hate to part with me.” Scrawled above the mantel of her room were the opening lines of Byron’s Prisoner of Chillon; but Mrs. Morris’s defiance of her Yankee captors was always merry and sweet-tempered.

  Of the other women who were at this time briefly detained in the Old Capitol, the most conspicuous was Mrs. L. A. McCarty of Philadelphia. Mrs. McCarty was originally confined under the name of John Barton, because of the disgraceful circumstance that she was dressed as a man. Throughout the war, Washington saw a procession of gallivanting transvestites—smooth-faced, slender lads in uniform, whose rounded figures and fluting voices quickly betrayed them to the police or the provost guard. Usually they were given skirts and packed out of town. Only Mrs. McCarty was suspected of being a spy. Her trunk was found to contain a quantity of opium, morphine and quinine, as well as a revolver, a pair of military spurs and an iron projectile. This last item was her husband’s invention, which she had intended to proffer to the Confederate authorities at Richmond. Mrs. Greenhow took a fancy to Mrs. McCarty, and declared that she “admired her spirit and independence.” As their intercourse was held through the keyholes of a double door, Mrs. Greenhow had small opportunity to be shocked by the wanton display of trouser legs.

  If the lady, as Major Doster asserted, had “looked forward to the notoriety of a public trial,” she was presently disillusioned. On a dark, raw day toward the end of March, she was taken before Mr. Stanton’s commissioners, who were sitting in ex-Senator Gwin’s mansion at Nineteenth and I Streets, now appropriated for the use of the military governor and the provost marshal. Memories of its former elegance came back to Mrs. Greenhow, as she mounted the filthy stairs. She was kept waiting for an hour in a room without a fire. In a mood of high irritation, she was at last conducted to the examination, informally held around a long table, behind closed doors. “The most highbred courtesy marked the interview,” she wrote; but it was “merely an amusing conversation.” She openly sneered at the “mimic court,” made elaborately sarcastic answers and asked almost as many questions as Judge Pierrepont.

  Judge Pierrepont: “You can make any reply you desire to the charges.”

  Mrs. Greenhow: “Charges! How many have you? Now isn’t this a farce! Isn’t it solemn! It’s a perfect farce!”

  Judge Pierrepont: “You can make any reply you please to the charges.”

  But the replies that Mrs. Greenhow pleased to make threw no light on the investigation of her case. She demanded proof that she had ever corresponded with the enemy. When told that she was particularly charged with giving information about the Federal army before the battle of Bull Run, she said that she was not aware of having done so; she was not in a position to get important information. Otherwise, she would certainly have given it, as “a holy duty to my friends.”

  There ensued a long discussion as to whether Mrs. Greenhow would like to go South. Pierrepont supposed that it was hardly worth while to ask her to take the oath of allegiance, or give a parole not to aid the enemy. “You would blush to do that,” the lady replied.

  “General,” said Pierrepont to his fellow-commissioner, “I think you had better talk to Mrs. Greenhow. You are an old friend of hers.”

  “I don’t know as I have anything to say,” General Dix responded, lamely. But he went on to make some inquiries about Mrs. Greenhow’s cipher, which she blandly declared she had invented during an illness, but had never used.

  Conspicuously absent from the commissioners’ questions was any curiosity about the origin of Mrs. Greenhow’s information. “If I gave the information that you say I have,” she remarked to Judge Pierrepont, “I must have got it from sources that were in the confidence of the government. I don’t intend to say any more. I merely throw this out as a suggestion.” She reopened the subject with General Dix, by a reference to “traitors as you call them,” within the Republican party. “If Mr. Lincoln’s friends will pour into my ear such important information, am I to be held responsible for all that?” Here she suggested that she might be departing from the rules of strict examination.

  “We don’t wish to limit you at all, Madame,” said Pierrepont. “You are at liberty to state anything you wish.”

  “There is no restriction,” put in Dix.

  The examination of Mrs. Greenhow was getting nowhere at all. Dix pleaded that he and the Judge would be “much better pleased” to see her exonerated from the charges. “I don’t think you are bent so much on treason as on mischief,” Pierrepont indulgently hinted. Dix didn’t think there were any more questions.

  Mrs. Greenhow was justified in thinking that hers were the honors of this polite engagement. “In these war times,” she told the two gentlemen, as she took her leave, “you ought to be in some more important business, than holding an inquisition for the examination of women.”

  The commissioners had a brief session with Mrs. Baxley, who emphatically declined to take the oath or give a parole, and had strong objections to going South. They took quite a time over pretty little Mrs. Morris. In marked contrast with the sarcastic Mrs. Greenhow, Mrs. Morris was vague and feminine and appealing. Her method was equally effective in discomfiting the courtly commissioners.

  Mrs. Morris: “Even if I could have committed treason, I don’t know as I should have cared to do it.”

  Judge Pierrepont: “I don’t know as I understand your remark perfectly?”

  With wide-eyed innocence, she listened to the charges against her. “Now, I ask you,” she said, “where could I get such information?” She said that General Marcy was the only Federal officer she knew.

  Judge Pierrepont: “He didn’t give you anything?”

  Mrs. Morris: “I shouldn’t suppose he would. Do you think he would?”

  Judge Pierrepont: “I do not suppose he would.”

  But what harm, begged Mrs. Morris, could “a poor delicate, fragile woman” do? The Judge spoke of her offer to give the Confederate army signals. She was selfish, Mrs. Morris explained, and she had no particular desire to serve either side. She would have given the signals for ten thousand dollars.

  Judge Pierrepont (triumphantly): “Then you see a poor, delicate, fragile woman can be of help to a government.”

  Mrs. Morris (who had been unable to make the sale): “They can when they have the chance.”

  Judge Pierrepont: “These little fragile, delicate women can sometimes be of great service, in aiding strong men, and strong governments.”

  When it came to the disposal of her case, Mrs. Morris showed unexpected firmness. She could not take an oath of allegiance “or anything like that.” The Judge coaxingly alluded to “what we call a parole of honor.” She couldn’t even give that. She felt revengeful, she explained, because she had been so badly treated. The officers at the prison had been kind, and Superintendent Wood had behaved “like a gentleman.” But the regulars had been outrageous, and the volunteers were “the worst men in the world.”

  Neither was Mrs. Morris willing to be sent South. She had had domestic troubles, of which she preferred not to speak; and living was expensive in the Confederacy. “I insist upon being put back in Brown’s Hotel where you found me,”
she told Judge Pierrepont, who promised to talk to the President about letting her go free. He thought it possible that Mrs. Lincoln might help her. On this hopeful note, the examination closed. “I bid you all good morning, gentlemen,” said Mrs. Morris. “I shall remember you with pleasure.”

  More than eighty political prisoners were examined by Dix and Pierrepont during the time they sat in Washington. Of these, sixty-five—including Walworth and Mrs. McCarty—were discharged on taking the oath or giving a parole not to aid the enemy. The commission had no power to acquit or punish, but could only release. The three recalcitrant ladies of the Old Capitol were ordered to be conveyed beyond the Union lines into Virginia, if they consented to go; and they were there to be set free, on giving a parole not to return North during the war.

  Mrs. Greenhow was at first very angry over the decision. Her temper had been growing sharper, and her disdainful airs gave place to rages, as her hope of further usefulness to the Confederacy faded. She had become a side show for Yankee tourists, of whom she professed to be in terror, declaring that they made her think of the fish women of Paris during the French Revolution. She longed to revenge herself on the “Black Republican dogs.” “I fear now that my capacity of hate will over-shadow every other feeling,” she wrote her niece, Adele Douglas.

  A rumor that she was to be sent to Fort Warren in Boston harbor inspired Mrs. Greenhow with a vivid desire to go to Virginia. The spring days dragged by in suspense. It was not in the lady’s nature to be entirely dull. She could always point her empty pistol at a guard’s head, or run up a Confederate flag on her sewing machine, and hang it from the window. She loosened a plank in her closet floor, and lowered little Rose into the arms of rebel officers, who shared their fresh fruit with the child. One day, followed by the other female prisoners, Mrs. Greenhow climbed into Wood’s market cart, and drove rapidly around the yard, shouting “I am off for Dixie!” She enjoyed the panic and confusion of the guard. But these moments of excitement were poor compensation for the loss of her importance.

  After the commissioners left to visit other military prisons, inmates once more accumulated in the Old Capitol. The jail, Doster said, “operated like a rat-trap—there was only a hole in but no hole out. . . .” Stanton and his assistant secretaries, Baker and other detectives, the military governor and the provost marshal could all make arrests; “but none of them,” said Doster, “could discharge without running great risk of getting into trouble with some or all of the others.”

  Late in April, a prisoner was shot dead by a guard because he refused to obey orders to go away from the window. In May, another was wounded in the thigh, while trying to escape, and died next day, after an amputation. The whole prison knew that the sentinel who shot the second man had agreed to accept a bribe to let him go free; but, after a short period in the guard-house, the soldier was returned to duty. Mrs. Greenhow was suspected of having connived at the attempted escape. She had been permitted some visitors, among them the Honorable Alfred Ely of New York, in whom a friendly feeling for prisoners had been inspired by his own detention in Richmond. But now all her friends were barred. In solitude, she began to lose heart. The exploits of Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley gave her a burst of hope; but Jackson never came to set the prisoners free. Abruptly, a few days later, Wood notified Mrs. Greenhow that she was to leave for Virginia at once. There was barely time to pack. The captain of the guard conducted her through the prison to bid her fellow-captives good-by. Outside, the guard was drawn up under arms. There was, in addition, a mounted guard, as well as a special escort, a cavalry lieutenant and six men, “dressed in full uniform, with sword and carbine in hand.” Mrs. Greenhow, sensible of the attention paid her, thought it “quite a military display.” As an afterthought, she added that “the woman Baxley and Mrs. Morris or Mason were sent at the same time.”

  The door of the Old Capitol opened, and the ladies stepped into the street. For a moment, fearful of Yankee duplicity, Mrs. Greenhow hesitated. She asked the chief of escort if his orders were to conduct her to a Northern prison. He declared, on his honor, that they were bound for Fort Monroe; and, reassured by his answer, she entered the carriage. At the Washington depot, soldiers held off a throng of Southern sympathizers, but at Baltimore things were better arranged. Wood, who accompanied the party, permitted the ladies to receive their friends at the Gilmore House, where they spent the night. A story that they held “a regular levee” appeared in the New York Herald, and was indignantly denied by one of General Dix’s aides.

  The Baltimore secessionists gave the ladies an ovation, waving handkerchiefs and calling “God bless you!” as they embarked on the Old Point boat. General Dix, who was a fellow-voyager, on his way to take command at Fort Monroe, came on board with less notice. The journey was made by night, and the prisoners lay offshore for most of the following day. The tedium of the delay was relieved by the gentlemanly captain of the boat, who gave the ladies a luncheon, with iced champagne. Under the guns of Fort Monroe, Mrs. Greenhow raised her glass to the health of President Davis and the success of the Confederate cause. She said that the toast was drunk by all present. The chief of escort discreetly kept out of the way.

  On the sacred soil at last, Mrs. Greenhow flounced off, with little Rose in her wake, and a large Confederate battle flag concealed beneath her shawl. She was free from Yankee tyranny, safe in the Confederacy she had ardently served. It must have been exasperating that, in the suspicious fashion of wartime, half the people in Richmond persisted in taking her for a Federal agent. Men who knew the secrets of the Confederate high command at Manassas were quick to come to her defense. She proudly recorded Jefferson Davis’s greeting, when he visited her on the evening after her arrival. “But for you,” he said, “there would have been no battle of Bull Run.”

  It was late July and the Old Capitol was blanketed in heat and stench and bedbugs, when another female spy arrived at the prison. Belle Boyd was as defiant and theatrical as Rose Greenhow; but she was young and strong and unembittered, and she played her role of Southern heroine with zest. She was the darling of the Old Capitol.

  Belle had become famous during Stonewall Jackson’s raid in the Shenandoah Valley. Her home was at Martinsburg, a convenient base for her operations. The legend of her coquetry and her daring horsemanship had preceded her to Washington. Everyone had heard that her talent for fascinating Federal officers had redounded to Jackson’s advantage, and some gave her the credit for a Federal defeat at Front Royal. Belle was not beautiful. She had a mature, sharp-featured face with prominent teeth. But she was only nineteen, her slim figure was graceful, and there was charm in her vivacious personality, with its “air of joyous recklessness.”

  Superintendent Wood received Belle cordially, and conducted her to a second-floor room on A Street, scrawled with the names of former occupants, including that of Mrs. Morris. As she was urged to ask for anything she wanted, Belle demanded a rocking chair and also a fire, which she found cheerful, even in midsummer. She was soon given an opportunity to show her colors. A detective, introduced by Wood, suggested that she should take the oath of allegiance. Belle made a scornful speech, and ordered the detective to leave. Through the open door came the sound of cheers from the other rooms along the corridor. When she had been left alone, a small white object fell at her feet. A note, enclosing a tiny nut-shell basket, painted with Confederate flags, had been tossed by an English prisoner across the hall. Belle tossed back a reply. That night, looking from her window at the shanties of Swampoodle and the distant fields silvered by the moonlight, she felt almost happy in prison.

  Save for the want of exercise, Belle suffered no privations. At every meal she enjoyed a variety of choice dishes, supplied by the Washington secessionists and served to her in her room by a contraband whom Wood had assigned to her as a servant. The first time that Major Doster called on Belle, he found her reading Harper’s and eating peaches. “She remarked she could afford to remain here, if Stanton could afford to keep h
er. There was so much company and so little to do. Besides, it was an excellent chance to brush up her literature and get her wedding outfit ready.”

  At this time, Belle was affianced to a Confederate officer; according to one account, he was a handsome fellow prisoner, Lieutenant McVay. But her engagement by no means discouraged the attention of other admirers. From both side walls of her room and from the ceiling came the sound of knives scooping holes in the plaster. She was showered with notes and tokens, while the billets-doux of Lieutenant McVay rolled across the threshold, wrapped around a marble. When Belle sat in the hall, as in the evening she was sometimes permitted to do, the Confederate officers crowded at their doorways. On the stairs, the third-floor inmates—prisoners of state and Fredericksburg hostages, who were left unguarded—craned and scuffled for a glimpse of her face.

  Belle was fond of singing, and often treated the company to an evening concert. Her favorite selection, which she rendered with much pathos, was “Maryland, My Maryland.” In the last stanza, pathos gave way to exultation, as Belle pealed out, “Huzza! she spurns the northern scum!” A chorus of male voices made a deep and hearty accompaniment. The guard would stop pacing the corridor to bid Belle to hush up. “I shan’t do it,” Belle would answer, warbling the offensive line again; and, in illustration of the point, she would seize a broom, and sweep off the part of the floor on which the guard had stepped.

  This nineteen-year-old girl had not gone gallivanting about the camps in the Valley without starting malicious gossip. Controversies raged about her chastity. It was reported that at the Old Capitol she talked with abandon, and wore a dress that exposed her neck and arms. She was fond of shouting insults from her window at passing soldiers, and did not shrink when they replied with “coarse jests and the vilest slang of the brothel,” or bawled, “Hush up, you damn bitch, or I’ll shoot you.” Among the prisoners, however, she awakened not only devotion, but profound respect. When on Sunday mornings she descended to the yard to hear the Lord God preached according to Jeff Davis, the Southern chivalry put on their courtliest manners. Mr. Dennis Mahony, the white-bearded editor from Dubuque, Iowa—confined in the Old Capitol because of the anti-administration tone of his newspaper—was impressed by Belle’s entrance. In the bosom of her dress, she wore a small Confederate flag. As she swept to her place, “with a grace and dignity which might be envied by a queen,” she extended a gracious hand to the rebel captives, who stood with doffed hats in the blaze of her glowing glances, while the Northern prisoners of state stared enviously.