Double Death

by Gavin Mortimer

  *Mrs. Phillips and her daughters were released on September 18, thanks to Stanton’s intervention, but they were banished from Washington. A few months later Eugenia Phillips was arrested in New Orleans (then in Federal hands) for laughing as a Union army funeral procession passed by. As a result she spent several months in a prison ship in the Gulf of Mexico.

  C H A P T E R T H I R T E E N

  “You’ll Have to Be Mighty Careful Now, or You’ll Be Arrested”

  OVER THE ENSUING WEEKS those newspapers loyal to the North poked fun at Rose Greenhow and her ilk. The New York Times christened her home “Hotel Greenhow” and Harper’s Weekly ran several cartoons in its edition of October 12 titled “How to Deal with Female Traitors.” One illustration depicted a row of hats arrayed in front of a forlorn woman trapped behind bars; the caption beneath ran: “Let them see but not touch all the latest novelties in hats.” Another showed a jailor reading a newspaper in front of a prison door with the accompanying caption: “Have the fashionable intelligence read in their hearing to their intense aggravation.”

  Not all papers adopted the same mocking tone. The Baltimore Exchange thought the affair shameful and wondered what a founding father would have said if one day he had known that “virtuous, refined, pure-minded women, would be arrested, searched, shipped, shut up as prisoners in the custody of men, attended as prisoners by armed men, precisely as if they were men themselves.”

  Allan Pinkerton was equally indignant, although for different reasons. Rose Greenhow had been using her fragrant influence around Washington in an attempt to win her freedom, and Pinkerton feared she might soon be released. In November he dispatched a report to his immediate superior, Brigadier General Andrew Porter, Washington’s provost marshal, warning him against such a move. Not only had the “untiring energies of this very remarkable woman” already inflicted grievous damage on the Federal army, but there was nothing in her recent behavior to suggest she was reformed. Pinkerton was adamant that if released she would continue to pose a serious threat because she was an utterly “unscrupulous” woman. He concluded by reminding Porter that “nothing has been too sacred for her appropriation … she made use of whoever and whatever she could as mediums to carry into effect her unholy purposes. She has used her almost irresistible seductive powers to win to her aid persons who were holding responsible places of honor.”

  Pinkerton had been correct in his assessment of Rose Greenhow. She continued to slip messages to her handler, Thomas Jordan, throughout her confinement, usually bribing one of the soldiers who had replaced Pinkerton’s men as her sentinels. Unbeknownst to Greenhow, however, the soldiers took the bribes but also took the messages to Pinkerton, who was keen to let Greenhow believe she was still a successful spy. Greenhow liked to boast that “the devil is no match for a clever woman” but nor was he a match for a canny Scot.

  By the winter of 1861 Tim Webster was known as “Captain Webster,” considered to be one of the Confederacy’s most cherished spies, a man entrusted even with the letters of Judah Benjamin, the secretary of war. In Richmond Webster stayed at the Spottswood Hotel, one the city’s treasures, and only after he’d been lavishly wined and dined was he allowed to return North with his satchel full of letters. Webster charged $1.50 a letter—the same in the other direction—and on a good run he might have three hundred to deliver to Baltimore. Usually he made two round-trips a month, sometimes going via Fredericksburg, at other times crossing Chesapeake Bay in a sailboat between Gloucester Point and Cape Charles on Virginia’s eastern shore. When he wasn’t carrying letters, Webster continued to scheme rebellion in Maryland with the Order of the Sons of Liberty. It was a secretive organization, one had to be invited to join, but its membership was exclusive: Webster got to know Frank Key Howard, one of the editors of the Baltimore Exchange, the paper that had so stridently denounced the treatment meted out to Rose Greenhow; Thomas Hall, editor of the South; and Thomas Parkin Scott, a lawyer and author of The Crisis, a tract on the U.S. Constitution, published the previous year.

  The order met infrequently and always late at night, somewhere ordinary and unobtrusive. Pinkerton told Webster to attend each meeting and report back to him. He in turn liaised with Simon Cameron, the secretary of war. In the second week of September Cameron told Pinkerton he wanted the Order of the Sons of Liberty arraigned. Webster provided details of the next meeting, and shortly before midnight on Wednesday, September 11, Pinkerton and a team of his detectives, augmented by a squad of Fourth cavalry under the command of a Lieutenant Wilson, burst in on the Sons of Liberty. Howard was arrested, so too Hall, and Henry May and Teackle Wallis and half a dozen others. Webster managed to “escape.”

  He took off into Virginia, telling his secessionist friends that he was now a wanted man. In fact Webster used the time to make detailed notes of Confederate troop strengths, including those at Manassas and Centreville. He was as methodical as ever, observing such details as the make of rifles, the price of corn by the bushel and the prevalence of disease. He estimated that General Joseph Johnston’s army in the Shenandoah Valley comprised 104 regiments; that the regimental strength of General John Magruder’s Army of the Peninsula was twenty-nine, and that Richmond was defended by six regiments.*

  It was a quick turnaround for Webster, who was instructed to return to Baltimore and mingle once more with his rebel friends. He booked into his old room at Miller’s Hotel and reestablished contact with John Earl, the establishment’s secessionist bartender. Earl was thrilled to see Webster again; so too was William Hart, another rebel who had evaded capture. Sam Sloan, a lumber merchant, met Webster for a drink at Miller’s and warned him, “You’ll have to be mighty careful now, or you’ll be arrested yet.”

  Webster was soon headed back to Richmond via Fredericksburg. It was probably in the bar of the Spottswood Hotel that he read in the November 21 edition of the New York Times that the previous morning detectives had descended on Miller’s Hotel, “seizing the whole establishment and all its contents … a number of letters were seized but have not yet been examined. Two parties, Wm. Hart and John Earl, were arrested. The nature of the evidence against them is not known.”

  Papers such as the Times and Chicago Tribune were devoured by Richmond’s citizens; not because they disbelieved what their own papers told them, but because the antirebel views propagated in their pages amused and angered in equal measure. There was another reason, however, to scan the Yankee papers, as the forty-one-year-old John Beauchamp Jones had noted in his diary of November 8. “The Northern press bears testimony of the fact that the spies in our midst are still at work.”

  Before the war Jones had edited the Philadelphia-based Southern Monitor, a pro-slavery newspaper whose offices had been ransacked following events at Fort Sumter. Jones fled to Richmond and secured a position as clerk to LeRoy Pope Walker, secretary of war for the Confederacy. When Walker was replaced by Judah Benjamin in September, Jones remained in his post, and ever since he had been complaining to his diary about his new master’s generosity in issuing passports. “I have declared my purpose to sign no more for the Secretary without his official order,” wrote Jones on November 8, the same day he alluded to the spies operating in Richmond. On November 17 Jones damned the letter carriers operating from the city, confiding to his diary that “it is my belief that they render as much service to the enemy as to us; and they certainly do obtain passports on the other side.”

  On December 11 Jones related an incident that had occurred in his office that day: “Several of Gen. [John] Winder’s [the provost marshal general of Richmond] detectives came to me with a man named Webster, who, it appears, has been going between Richmond and Baltimore, conveying letters, money, etc. I refused him a passport. He said he could get it from the Secretary himself, but that it was sometimes difficult in gaining access to him. I told him to get it, then; I would give him none.”

  The unbending pedantry of a bureaucrat was no obstacle to Tim Webster. Sidestepping Jones, he obtained a passpor
t from Benjamin and returned the 130 miles to Washington, where he handed to Pinkerton an important package that had come into his possession. He was back in Richmond at the end of December, this time with Hattie Lawton posing as his “wife,” the pair of them checking into the Spottswood Hotel on the southeast corner of Eighth and Main streets.

  The five-story hotel was one of Richmond’s most luxurious; room 83 was where Jefferson Davis and his wife, Varina, had stayed when the Confederate government relocated from Montgomery. In the early summer of 1861, before the Davises moved into the presidential mansion on Clay Street, the Spottswood became what one woman described as a “miniature world … the hum of conversation, the sound of careless, happy laughter, the music of a band playing outside.” The fashionable ladies sat in the drawing room and talked of anything but the war, while beneath them, in the hotel basement, “brothers, husbands, sons, and sweethearts of most of them were learning the duties of artillerymen in the smart new corps, the Richmond Howitzers.” Many of the regiment’s officers based themselves in the hotel, relaxing with a large whiskey and a game of billiards whenever they were off-duty.

  When Tim Webster walked into the hotel lobby he was warmly greeted by Theodore Hoenniger, who, in the opinion of the Richmond Whig, was “perhaps the youngest landlord of a large hotel in the world.” Hoenniger was a New Yorker, still in his early twenties, but possessed of “unobtrusive manners and [a] genial disposition.” He complimented Mrs. Webster on how well she looked and arranged for a porter to show the couple to their room.

  Webster woke the next morning with a raging fever and an aching body. Hoenniger sent for a doctor, who diagnosed inflammatory rheumatism and told the patient to remain tucked up in bed. When the doctor had gone, Webster speculated to Hattie Lawton that the rheumatism was a consequence of what happened earlier in the month. He told her about his journey from Washington to Virginia, and of how, as usual, he had contacted John Moore, the rebel landlord of a small hotel in Leonardtown, Maryland. Webster stayed one night at the hotel, and the next day Moore had arranged for a boatman to ferry the spy across the Potomac. On this occasion, however, there were other passengers, the wives and children of two Confederate officers who were leaving Washington to join their husbands in Richmond.

  It was a rough crossing, and by the time they reached the safehouse on the other side of the Potomac they were cold, wet and hungry. Their host fed them, and then the women and children bedded down in one room, while Webster spread his blanket upon the stone floor of the kitchen. As he was removing his boots Webster “noticed, lying upon the floor, a short distance from him, a small packet wrapped in oiled-cloth and tied with red tape.” Webster removed the tape with a surgeon’s precision and saw that “the contents of the bundle were complete maps of the country surrounding Washington, with a correct statement of the number and location of the Federal troops.” He slipped the packet inside his coat until he returned to Washington a week later. How unfortunate, Webster told Lawton with a weak grin, that during his trip south he had picked up not only a vital packet but an attack of rheumatism. Such were the vagaries of war.

  As Webster lay in his sickbed, the man responsible for the map, “James Howard, a native of the south and … a clerk in the Provost-Marshal’s office,” was arrested after his boss, Brigadier General Porter, recognized his handwriting on the maps. At first Howard denied Pinkerton’s accusation that he was anything but a loyal Unionist, but soon he “confessed his treason and implicated several others in the conspiracy.”

  Webster was back on his feet by the second week of January. Though not fully recovered, he wished to fulfill a long-standing arrangement to travel to Nashville, Tennessee, with a government contractor, a good friend of his named William Campbell, who wished for some agreeable company on the trip. They were gone more than a week, and while Campbell returned having purchased a large quantity of leather, Webster brought back detailed observations of the Confederate army.

  Stopping in Richmond just long enough to take delivery of another satchel of letters, Webster headed north and handed to Pinkerton his report of the trip to Tennessee. It was a masterpiece of espionage. Webster described the cavalry he had seen at Abingdon, Virginia, as “armed principally with breech-loading rifles, made in Baltimore, also each with Colt revolvers, Navy size, and several with heavy, large shot guns for buckshot, each having sabers. Artillery 2-6 pounders, iron, one smooth.” Webster also related a conversation with a gloomy rebel officer in Knoxville, who “did not believe there were 10 good soldiers” in the town and predicted an easy victory should Union forces choose to attack. In Nashville itself, reported Webster, there are “2 regts. of Infantry, one stationed on Fair Ground, about one mile S.E. of Nashville; the other stationed across Cumberland over from Nashville, at a short distance from the river; all comfortably but coarsely dressed; all armed with percussion muskets.”

  The final nugget of information had been mined in Bowling Green, Kentucky, from the mouth of Major George Harris, brother of Isham, the Tennessee governor. Harris told Webster that he couldn’t wait until May, when his twelve-month term of enlistment expired. He was “getting tired of the war, especially of its inactivity,” and he longed for the day he would be back in the arms of his wife. Harris then began to whine about the soldier’s life, telling Webster to take a look at the men’s shabby uniforms, their meager rations and their ancient muskets. Little wonder, he added, that the majority of soldiers in the First Arkansas Regiment “would refuse to serve beyond the termination of their enlistment.”

  Webster didn’t linger in Washington; he stayed just long enough to purchase a few items that had been requested by his friends in the South, goods that were becoming scarce in Richmond. Pinkerton told him about the arrest of James Howard, and Webster in return mentioned his attack of rheumatism. He was fine now, he reassured Pinkerton, “impatient to be actively employed once more.”

  In Richmond Webster was reunited with Hattie Lawton, who had just returned from a mission to Leonardtown, where she “cultivated the acquaintance of the most important people in that locality.” They arrived at the Spottswood Hotel at the end of January, but Theodore Hoenniger regretfully informed them that on this occasion it was full; he could, however, recommend the Monumental Hotel on the corner of Grace and Ninth streets.

  The Websters checked into the less salubrious Monumental and soon encountered Samuel McCubbin, “a gentleman of about thirty-six, stout and squarely built … [of] dark complexion and open countenance.” He knocked on the Websters’ door, and before long they were catching up on news and exchanging gossip. McCubbin casually mentioned that he too was staying in the Monumental, lately transformed into the temporary office of the city’s second auditor. Webster was puzzled. He knew McCubbin well and had come to like the former brush maker from Baltimore, but wondered why it was that the chief of the Confederate Military Police had booked a room adjacent to his own.

  *Subsequent research showed that in fact Johnston had eighty-seven regiments at his disposal, Magruder twenty and Richmond could call upon four regiments. Webster’s computations were among the more accurate of Pinkerton’s spies. After the war both McClellan and Pinkerton were accused of wildly overestimating the enemy strength. Pinkerton received much of the opprobrium and was accused of rank incompetence, but others believed that McClellan was happy to use the inflated estimates as a means of avoiding a battle.

  C H A P T E R F O U R T E E N

  “It Would Be Folly for Me to Go to Richmond”

  THE NEW YEAR BROUGHT NO RELIEF to the tedium felt by Pryce Lewis. It was more of the same repetitive, unexciting, rather unsavory work that he had been obliged to undertake in the autumn of 1861.

  For several weeks he had tailed Captain John Elwood, the officer who had visited Rose Greenhow’s house on that stormy August night. Lewis, more adroit at surveillance work than Pinkerton, had shadowed Elwood unchallenged and “discovered in his conduct several suspicious circumstances.” Lewis didn’t think there was enou
gh evidence “to justify harsh measures [against Elwood], but Pinkerton was vindictive and ordered his arrest.”*

  Another task given to Lewis was to pay a visit to I Street and investigate the loyalties of Elizabeth Morton and her two sons and two daughters. Mrs. Morton was the well-to-do wife of Jackson, a former senator of Florida and one of the state’s largest slaveholders.

  It had been a long time since Elizabeth and her husband shared the marital bed. Jackson preferred the intimacy of his female slaves, and his fathering of several children had prompted Mrs. Morton to leave the family estate (“Mortonia”) in Santa Rosa County, Florida, and take up residence in Washington.

  Lewis and three other Pinkerton operatives arrived at the house and told Mrs. Morton their “orders were to gather all letters within a certain date and transfer them to the provost marshal’s office.” One pair searched upstairs; the other scoured the ground floor. Lewis’s partner was John Scully, the twenty-one-year-old Irishman who had recently returned from a brief trip with Tim Webster. For four days they sifted through the Mortons’ correspondence, but there was nothing incriminating, just a few letters expressing solidarity with the Confederate cause.

  Frustrated by the absence of treacherous material, the provost marshal told the detectives to turn the place upside down; he wanted proof. Lewis reluctantly informed the Mortons of his orders, which provoked “the great disgust of the ladies.”

  Lewis apologized, and Mrs. Morton accepted he was only following instructions. Unlike Rose Greenhow, Elizabeth Morton had innate polish. Forced to endure the indignity of strangers rifling through her house, she was nonetheless grace personified and “provided [Lewis] occasionally with refreshments.” The sons were equally unflappable, and Lewis, once again, found himself enjoying the impeccable manners of the Southern gentlemen. The eldest son, Chase, liked to smoke, so he and Lewis often sat “passing the time of day” with a cigar or two.