But the Confederates needed proof, not speculation, if they were to bring Webster to justice. The problem was how to get the proof. He’d outfoxed them for a year, and he’d do so again if given the chance. Then Webster fell ill, and an idea came to the rebels. If Webster really was a Union agent, the longer he and his wife—for that’s who they believed Hattie Lawton to be—remained incommunicado in Richmond, the more anxious his handlers would become.
Before long they would try to make contact with him; so all the Confederate military police had to do was keep a constant watch on Mr. and Mrs. Webster. Discretion didn’t matter; in fact, the more Webster felt the net closing, the more likely he was to break cover.
Though sick with fever, Webster remained lucid. It wasn’t delirium causing him to imagine the worst; he sensed it in Samuel McCubbin’s demeanor. Webster told Hattie Lawton not to try to leave Richmond with a message for Pinkerton as it was too dangerous. She was to act as his devoted wife, to nurse him back to health, and the moment he was well enough they would flee. One week passed, then two, then three, and Webster was still too frail to stand. The weather that winter was singularly disagreeable, a succession of cold, wet days, with Saturday, February 22, particularly grim. From first light “a cold rain fell in sheets, turning the streets into seas of mud, the gutters into rushing torrents.” Webster lay in bed listening to the rain drumming at his window, but the buzz of excited chatter soon drowned out the rain as people from across the Southern states filed past the Monumental Hotel toward Capitol Square to witness the inauguration of President Jefferson Davis. The square was “black with spectators … [and] the parade, the soggy footpaths and saturated grassplots, even the streets far back beyond the great iron gates of the entrance, were packed with people.” Rain dripped from the bronze statue of George Washington upon his horse as nearby Davis mounted the covered podium to address his people who were huddled under oil clothes and umbrellas. Webster heard the crowd fall silent, and a short while later a the cry went up: “God Save Our President!”
Four days later, on Wednesday, February 26, Webster had been bedridden for almost a month, yet still Samuel McCubbin prowled the hotel, waiting, waiting, waiting for his perseverance to be rewarded.
For the first-time visitor Richmond was best viewed from the south. A passenger entering the city across the railroad bridge in the spring of 1861 wrote how “Richmond burst beautifully into view, spreading panorama-like over her swelling hills, with the evening sun gilding simple houses and towering spires alike into a glory. The city follows the curve of the [James] river, seated on amphitheatric hills retreating from its banks; fringes of dense woods shading their slopes, or making blue background against the sky. No city of the South has a grander or more picturesque approach.”
The railroad from Fredericksburg entered Richmond from the north, a route less pleasing to the eye. As the train passed through the city line, just south of Shockoe Creek, the first buildings the passengers saw were the ramshackle houses of Richmond’s poor. Most of these men and women—many of whom were German or Irish immigrants—worked in either the iron industry or in one of the city’s dozens of flour mills or tobacco factories.
The average wage for these employees was approximately $1.25 a day, a pittance for their productivity. Each year Richmond’s tobacco factories processed around fifteen million pounds of the weed, while the twelve flour mills brought in over three million dollars annually. The biggest industry was iron, the employer of 1,550 workers, 900 of whom worked at the Tredegar Iron Works. Among other things, they manufactured the tracks for the five railroads that serviced Richmond.
The train headed south for a mile, toward the heart of the city, before a ninety-degree turn at Sixteenth Street took it west along Broad Street. Now passengers sitting on the left-hand side of the train had a wonderful view of the capitol building, the centerpiece of the eight acres of Capitol Square, that sprang from Shockoe Hill. In 1862 the New York Herald described how Richmond consisted of “twelve parallel streets, nearly three miles in length, extending northwest and southeast [they] were originally distinguished by the letters of the alphabet, ‘A’ street being next to the river; but other names, however, are now generally used. The principal thoroughfare of business and fashion is Main, formerly ‘E’ Street. The cross streets, or those which intersect the streets, just mentioned, are designated by numbers such as First, Second and so on.”
The train carrying Pryce Lewis and John Scully pulled into the Fredericksburg railroad depot, on the north side of Broad Street near Eighth, at one o’clock on the afternoon of Wednesday, February 26. They walked out of the depot to see “the long, gaily-painted buses from the hotels stood hub to hub” waiting to ferry passengers to their destination. The buses, like the cabs and hacks, threw up a fine spray of filth from the unpaved streets. All up Broad Street gangs of laborers worked to repair the damage caused by a recent storm; the roof of the Methodist Church needed three hundred slates replaced, and scaffolding was being erected outside Trinity Church. Colonel Biggar, meanwhile, was barking instructions at the workmen rebuilding the fence outside his home.
Lewis and Scully had no need of a bus or cab. They headed south with the brisk stride of men who knew where they were going, toward the Spottswood Hotel on the corner of Main and Eighth streets, a route they had rehearsed over and over in their minds. Beneath the confident exterior the men’s senses worked furiously to absorb everything around: the sights, the sounds and, above all, the smells that were generated in a city of thirty-eight thousand inhabitants.*
One odor in particular unsettled all first-time visitors, as it had Sarah Jones, the English governess, who upon her arrival fifteen months earlier wrote in her diary that “the atmosphere of Richmond is redolent of tobacco. The tints of the pavements are those of tobacco. One seems to breathe tobacco, and smell tobacco at every turn, the town is filthy with it; not so much because it abounds in warehouses, and tobacco cases stand in every corner, but because it abounds in people’s mouths.”
The two spies passed the United Presbyterian Church, one of thirty-three places of worship in the city, and approached the Spottswood Hotel. Leave the talking to me, Lewis told Scully under his breath. The lobby was full of Confederate army officers, none of whom took any notice of the newcomers. Lewis asked for two rooms. The clerk consulted the guest book, then apologized: there was nothing available. He suggested they try either the American or the Monumental. Which was closer? asked Lewis. The American, replied the clerk, it was two blocks farther up Main Street. As an afterthought, Lewis asked if there was a Mr. Webster staying in the hotel. The clerk searched the register but found no Webster. They walked up Main Street past Archer & Daly, the steel engravers, past the Farmer’s Bank and the next-door bank of Virginia, past the store of George Bidgood, who sold books and stationery, and past Pizzini’s, the confectioners, where the ice cream was legendary. They stepped to one side when “gay ladies and grande dames, bedecked in their silks or cashmere,” approached, and they avoided eye contact with military men who might have wondered why two such strapping specimens were not in uniform.
The American Hotel was full. The clerk was most contrite, but the inauguration had brought so many visitors to town and most were making a week of it. Lewis and Scully were directed to the Exchange and Ballard Hotel on Franklin Street at the corner of Fourteenth Street. Lewis gave a heavy sigh. How far? Four blocks east, the clerk replied.
The hotel was Richmond’s most prestigious, despite what Theodore Hoenniger of the Spottswood might have said to the contrary. Certainly no other hotel boasted such an illustrious guest book; among the names were those of Charles Dickens, who had sat in his room at the Exchange in 1842, perspiring, longing to return to the North and cooler climes; William Makepeace Thackeray rated Richmond “the merriest little place and the most picturesque I have seen in America!” during his visit in 1856, and wrote to a friend from the Exchange with a gold fountain pen he had bought in the city for four dollars, “which is
really very ingenious and not much more inconvenient than a common pen.”
It was in the parlor of the Exchange that Edgar Allan Poe had lectured on “The Poetic Principle” on his final visit to Richmond in 1849, and the following year P. T. Barnum and his circus troupe checked in during their tour. Ten years later, in 1860, the establishment had hosted its most distinguished guest, Edward, Prince of Wales, an occasion that, as the Richmond Dispatch reported, was marred by the crowd who let excitement get the better of them. “During all the night of the arrival, every room and stairway in the Ballard Hotel was crammed with a low, wretched mob, each striving and hurtling to get some look into the apartments where his Royal Highness was staying. There were cat-calls, shouts and whooping, with cries for him to show himself—invitations with which I need scarcely say, his Royal Highness did not comply, for the rough, howling, brutal mob that had swarmed round his carriage on arriving at the hotel, had given him a pretty good insight into the general tendencies of a Richmond crowd.”
As Lewis and Scully walked toward the Exchange and Ballard Hotel, they could see that it was two separate buildings linked by a raised and covered walkway above Fourteenth Street. From the outside the Exchange was the grander of the two with a colonnaded façade and turreted corners. Inside it was equally imposing. Brass gas lamps hung from the ceiling of the lobby illuminating the polished black-and-white marble floor beneath.
A bellboy took the pair’s valises the moment they entered, and guided them to the reception desk. There were rooms available. Only the very wealthiest could afford the Exchange and Ballard Hotel, such as messieurs Lander, Gaither, Bonham, Arrington, Batson, Royston and the ten other senators who had taken up residence since the Confederate government relocated to Richmond from Montgomery.
Lewis and Scully registered in their own names and were relieved to learn they weren’t too late for a spot of lunch. In the splendid dining room they studied the menu with mounting excitement; the rest of Richmond might have been suffering a shortage of food, but not the Exchange and Ballard Hotel. Senators needed nourishment if they were to lead their people to victory. Guests could choose from “rounds of beef, saddles of mutton, venison, whole shoats, hams, sausage of country make, rich with sage and redolent with pepper, turkies [sic], geese, ducks, chickens, with vegetables, such as potatoes, turnips, large as cannon balls, and beets like oblong shells.”
In between courses Lewis and Scully spoke softly to each other, preparing for their visit to the offices of the Richmond Dispatch. They had passed the building on their way to the Exchange and Ballard Hotel. It was on the corner of Main and Thirteenth streets, a four-story block known as the “Dispatch Building.”
When they arrived at the offices of the Richmond Dispatch, they were shown straight to the office of the editor, James Cowardin, a portly man in his early fifties who had founded the newspaper twelve years earlier. Like the editors of the city’s other three daily newspapers,* Cowardin had been forced to downsize because of the shortage of paper. And what paper remained was of an inferior quality to that of the prewar days; it was coarse, vaguely brown, the sort of paper that a year earlier wouldn’t have been deemed good enough to wrap presents.
Nevertheless, Cowardin’s Dispatch still outsold its rivals: the Whig, Examiner and Enquirer. Its circulation figure of eighteen thousand was sustained “by the accuracy of its reporting and the moderation of its editorial policy,” not something that could be said of the Whig or the Examiner. This pair were virulent in their denunciation of the Yankees, particularly the Examiner, which was edited by John Moncure Daniel, a man with “the qualities of the scimitar of Saladin and the battle-ax of Couer de Lion.” In his eyes Abraham Lincoln was a “ferocious old Orang-Outang from the wilds of Illinois,” while Jefferson Davis was too timid for a wartime leader. The Confederacy required “a dictator,” wrote Daniel, someone who would do whatever necessary to win the war.
The interview with Cowardin was cordial but brief. It was the middle of the afternoon, and he was rushing to finish the next day’s issue. Lewis handed him the letter, and Cowardin read it, then told him matter-of-factly he “would find Captain Webster at the Monumental Hotel laid up with rheumatism.”
Lewis and Scully walked out of the Dispatch Building, crossed Main Street and approached the southern corner of Capitol Square. They passed the state courthouse and found themselves in the middle of the square, with the capitol building in front of them. Up close they realized that the beauty of the building was best beheld from afar. The nearer one was to the capitol, the more one saw that “the rough brick walls had been covered with stucco in a way that gave them a look of cheapness.”
Richmonders in fine clothes promenaded under the linden trees and around the fountains, and they sat on the steps at the foot of George Washington’s statue, gossiping about the war, about the weather and about the cost of food. Imagine, bacon at twenty-five cents a pound and butter twice as much! Beef was up from thirteen to thirty cents a pound, but the quality of the meat was down. The price of fish, even a pair of shad or a rockfish, was exorbitant, and coffee was $1.50 a pound. Ladies swapped tips on coffee substitute—roasted rye or roasted corn were favorites—while others extolled the virtues of dried willow leaves as a tolerable replacement for tea. “Dutch treats” were arranged, dinner parties where guests contributed to the meal with rare luxuries such as sardines, brandied peaches and French prunes. At least the women could be thankful that rich silks and laces not only were affordable but had actually dropped in price thanks to the number of merchants who had moved to the city from other parts of Virginia.
As Lewis and Scully walked north, they saw to their left the tall thin steeple of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, the place of worship for Jefferson Davis and General Robert Lee, and to their right, partially obscured by some linden trees, the Monumental Hotel.
It was four o’clock when Lewis and Scully strolled up to the desk and inquired after Mr. Timothy Webster. Yes, replied the clerk, Mr. and Mrs. Webster were guests of the Monumental. As a bellboy was summoned, Lewis glanced around and wondered what Webster was doing in “a second-rate house.”
The bellboy led the pair upstairs to Webster’s room, and Lewis entered “a long, narrow room [and] near the entrance on the right side of the door was a bed upon which Webster lay.” Hattie Lawton sat in a chair close to Webster, and a man Lewis didn’t recognize was also in the room. Lewis advanced and shook the clammy hand of Webster, who propped himself up and welcomed “old friends of his from Baltimore.” Gesturing toward the man, Webster introduced Lewis and Scully to P. B. Price, a staunch member of Richmond’s Young Men’s Christian Association.
They exchanged pleasantries and swapped banalities, and then Lewis said he’d like a word with Webster in private. Lawton and Price invited Scully to observe Richmond through the window, and while they did so Lewis gave the letter to Webster, who read it with a look of “utter astonishment.” Soon Lawton, Scully and Price returned to Webster’s bedside, and some coffee was ordered as Lewis and Scully “remained for an hour or more,” chatting to Mr. and Mrs. Webster, and hoping that Mr. Price might leave and allow old friends to catch up in private. But he didn’t, and when Lewis declared it was time for Webster to get some rest, Price insisted the two visitors accompany him to the theater that evening.
Lewis and Scully departed with a promise to return the following morning. Look forward to it, replied Webster, who sank back into his pillow when he was alone with Lawton. He was scared, he told her, scared that the “unheralded appearance of his companions might lead to their being suspected.”
Lewis and Scully had an early supper at the Exchange and Ballard Hotel and met Mr. Price in the lobby. There was no need to take a cab to the theater, he explained, as it was just across the street. It was a chill night, but the Metropolitan Hall was warm and snug. Price refused to let his guests pay for their fifty-cent tickets. On me, he told them, adding that they were in for a treat tonight. It was Harry Macarthy, not only the most ce
lebrated entertainer in the Southern states but an Englishman turned Confederate. Like themselves.
The theater was busy when the curtain went up, and a “small, handsome man … brimful of humor” strolled onto the stage. The London-born Macarthy was a comic, a mimic, a musician and a songwriter. The Richmond Enquirer reckoned that “all who wish to enjoy a hearty laugh and hear a good song should not fail to see Macarthy.” The song the audience wanted to hear, particularly those in uniform, was the “Bonnie Blue Flag,” a battle anthem written by Macarthy after he’d witnessed delegates at the Tennessee Secession Convention waving a blue flag.
Macarthy knew how to work his audience, making them roar with laughter as he began with a few jokes about the Yankees. Then a song, another joke, some impressions—a Negro, a German, an Irishman—and more songs, with Macarthy joined on stage by his pianist (and wife), Lottie Estelle: “Missouri,” “O the Sweet South,” and “Let the Bugle Blow.” Lewis tapped his feet to the music as all around “soldiers, free and easy in their ways … applauded the rebel songs of the actors vigorously.” The climax would be a lusty rendition of “The Bonnie Blue Flag,” but before that was another song guaranteed to get the crowd on their feet, “The Stars and Bars.” Soldiers whooped and hollered and punched the air with their fists as they joined Macarthy in the song.
Come, hucksters, from your markets,
Come, bandits, from your caves,
Come, venal spies; with brazen lies
Bewildering your deluded eyes,
That we may dig your graves;
Come, creatures of a sordid clown
And driveling traitor’s breath,
A single blast shall blow you down
Upon the fields of Death.
Lewis and Scully allowed themselves the luxury of sleeping late the following morning, Thursday, February 27, enjoying the soft splendor of the hotel linen and their hair mattresses.
Double Death Page 16
