Double Death

by Gavin Mortimer

  The information given to President Jefferson Davis on the evening of May 9 had been erroneous. The Union gunboats that were reportedly steaming up the James River didn’t appear until six days later. And when they did, a Confederate artillery battery at Drewry’s Bluff, seven miles below Richmond, repulsed the vessels in a fierce exchange. But McClellan’s army continued to edge closer to the city until it was six miles distant, close enough to hear the Reverend Dr. Woodbridge’s church bells.

  General Robert Lee had been absorbing the gravity of the situation since the moment McClellan had landed on the Virginia Peninsula at the start of April. McClellan had one hundred thousand troops at his disposal, with a further thirty-five thousand to come when General McDowell arrived. Lee had approximately seventy thousand. McClellan, he could handle, but McDowell had to be prevented coming south.

  Lee ordered General Stonewall Jackson into the Shenandoah Valley, instructing him to harry and hound the enemy, stretching them this way and that so they wouldn’t know if they were coming or going. Jackson was the ideal man for the job. He led by tyranny, pushing his men to the limits of their endurance, punishing them severely if they erred. He was pious and cheerless, but he inspired respect because he demanded of himself what he demanded of his men. He endured their hardships, and he shared their danger. He was also a master strategist. Throughout May Jackson tore through the Shenandoah, winning victories against General Frémont’s army at McDowell (a hamlet in Virginia), Front Royal and Winchester.

  The moment President Lincoln heard of the defeats he suspended General McDowell’s move south and ordered him to crush the impertinent rebels. McDowell protested, but obeyed, and led his army west instead of south. For a fortnight they chased Jackson’s exhausted army all the way to the Blue Ridge Mountains, where, on June 9, there was a bloody but indecisive clash at Port Republic. Then Jackson withdrew through the mountains, out of the reach of the Union troops.

  While the seventeen thousand soldiers of Stonewall Jackson’s army were causing trouble for the Yankees in western Virginia, those troops belonging to Joseph Johnston went on the offensive at Seven Pines. (The Union army called this battle Fair Oaks, after the nearby railroad station.) Not only had McClellan taken an inordinate amount of time to move up the Virginia Peninsula, but once he got within striking distance of Richmond “Little Mac” foolishly split his army. Two corps were ordered to establish positions on the southern bank of the Chickahominy, and these were the troops attacked by Johnston.

  As John Beauchamp Jones and others listened to the battle from the top of Hospital Hill, seven miles to the east young American men fought each other to the death among the Judas trees and white dogwood flowers close by the Chickahominy. A Union lieutenant in the Twentieth Massachusetts Regiment, Henry Ropes, who fought at Seven Pines, later recalled how “we again took the double quick step and ran through deep mud and pools of water toward the battle. The whole field in the rear of the line of firing was covered with dead; and wounded men were coming in great numbers, some walking, some limping, some carried on stretchers and blankets, many with shattered limbs exposed and dripping with blood. In a moment we entered the fire. The noise was terrific, the balls whistled by us and the shells exploded over us and by our side; the whole scene dark with smoke and lit up by the streams of fire from our battery and from our Infantry in line on each side.”

  When the fighting stopped, neither side could celebrate a resounding victory. Among the six thousand Confederate casualties was Johnston himself, shot in the shoulder. Robert Lee replaced Johnston as commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, and the first half of June was spent stiffening Richmond’s defenses and reconnoitering the enemy’s positions. By the middle of the month Lee had his plan: he would attack the Yankees head on and hit their right flank north of the Chickahominy. Lee ordered Stonewall Jackson south, and on June 25 the offensive began. It raged for seven sanguinary days, leaving thirty thousand Americans dead and wounded.

  On July 1, the final day of the slaughter, at the Battle of Malvern Hill, General Daniel H. Hill watched six thousand of his men destroyed by Union artillery, and later wrote that “it was not war, it was murder.” McClellan’s army triumphed at Malvern Hill, but the general quailed at the thought of pushing on to Richmond. He still put faith in Pinkerton’s reports that the rebel army was “near to 200,000 men.”*

  Richmond had been saved, for now, at least, and while McClellan’s army tended to its wounds, dysentery, malaria and typhoid began to ravage his men throughout the hot and humid July. At the end of the month, an exasperated Lincoln instructed McClellan to withdraw his army north from the Virginia Peninsula.

  By the beginning of July Richmond reeked no longer of tobacco but of death. When Varina Davis returned to her husband she wrote how “the odors of the battlefield were distinctly perceptible all over the city.” More than five thousand wounded soldiers were brought to one of Richmond’s sixteen army hospitals that were “crowded with ladies offering their services to nurse.” Many of the ladies fastened purple calycanthus flowers on their chest to combat the stench, and they propped up their gallant menfolk on cushions taken from the city’s churches.

  When the army hospitals overflowed six private hospitals and thirteen emergency hospitals received the stricken soldiers, and when they were full citizens opened up their houses and looked on impassively as young men dripped blood over their carpets. Even the basement of the Spottswood Hotel, where once eager volunteers of the Richmond Howitzers had been initiated into the art of soldiering, became a temporary hospital.

  The lucky ones, the able-bodied, staggered into town with wild eyes and black lips from the powder of the cartridges that they had bitten off in their haste to kill McClellan’s Yankees. They were greeted “by a string of girls, children and Negroes, each carrying dishes, trays of popcorn, buckets and pitchers of sorghum and vinegar and water, the ‘Confederate lemonade.’” There were shrieks of delight and tears of joy as “mothers found sons, and sisters brothers, whose fate had for days been uncertain.” Other women ran among the ranks of the returning, looking frantically for the face they loved. “Some were not found,” recalled one bystander, “and, oh, the woe of it.”

  One woman who didn’t deign to dirty her hands in Richmond hospitals was Rose Greenhow, who had been deported from Washington on May 31. She had expected to be released in April, and when she hadn’t been she sent a truculent letter to Washington’s military governor demanding to know the cause of the “unnecessary delay.” The reason was the sentence of death hanging over Lewis and Scully; the Federals weren’t going to release a woman who had caused far more harm to the enemy than either of their two spies if there was any chance of their being executed. (Webster had been a different matter. His life wasn’t exchangeable. He was a double agent, and the Confederates were in a position to claim that they were hanging a traitor, one of their own.) What brought about Greenhow’s eventual release was an assurance that in return for her freedom, she would work to secure the release of Pryce Lewis and John Scully the moment she reached Richmond.

  Greenhow never kept her promise. She arrived in the city on June 4 and “was taken to the best hotel in the place, the Ballard House, where rooms had been prepared for me.” She was then visited by General Winder, who, if Rose was to be believed, prostrated himself at her feet and swore to the sparkling heroine that he would “dispense with the usual formality of my reporting to him.” The procession of male pilgrims continued late into the day, and Greenhow was particularly humbled when “the President did me the honor of calling upon me, and his words of greeting ‘But for you there would have been no battle of Bull Run’ repaid me for all that I had endured.”

  In the ensuing weeks and months Greenhow embroidered herself into the pattern of Richmond life, dancing regally at “Starvation Balls,” gracing the theater with her presence and promenading in Capitol Square. She did nothing for Lewis or Scully, ignoring their letters petitioning her to intervene. Instead she began to wr
ite a book about her life as a prisoner of Abraham Lincoln.

  The news of McClellan’s withdrawal north confirmed to Lewis and Scully that their release might be a long time coming. It also had the effect of canceling a proposed transfer from Richmond to Salisbury Prison in North Carolina, a far more salubrious establishment than Henrico County Jail or Castle Godwin. In Salisbury the prisoners’ food was prepared by captured cooks from the Union army and consisted of boiled beef, rice and wheat bread. Vendors from local stores were allowed to visit the camp and sell such luxuries as sweet potatoes, onions and coffee, and a large wall enclosed sixteen acres of grounds on which the prisoners amused themselves with games of baseball. Lewis and Scully were told they would be transferred to Salisbury on May 15, but the order was rescinded, as was a second command on June 5, when it became clear the Union army wouldn’t be marching into Richmond.

  There was, however, one face familiar to Lewis and Scully in the city that month, though they only discovered his presence when they read the Richmond Whig on Wednesday, June 18. The paper described how a Yankee spy named Dennis had been relaxing in the parlor of the Exchange and Ballard Hotel when “he was recognized by the little daughter of Mrs. Greenhow … [but] the shrewd rascal, it seems, recognized the little girl at the same time that she discovered him and when she ran to give the intelligence to her mother he disappeared.” This was the Paul Dennis who had disarmed little Rose’s mother when she pointed a pistol at Lewis on the day of her arrest in August 1861.

  That Pinkerton had sent him to Richmond, presumably to ferret out information about his captured colleagues, was incredible, particularly as the Greenhows had been released only a fortnight earlier. Pinkerton had not learned his lesson, and only the cunning of Dennis in eluding his pursuers and returning North prevented another of his agents falling into enemy hands.

  *The Merrimac or Merrimack was a United States’ ship converted by the Confederates in 1861 to their first ironclad and rechristened the CSS Virginia. It was blown up by its crew on May 11 after a dramatic battle with the USS Monitor.

  *Pinkerton arrived at this figure through a combination of inexperience and incompetence, and his touching naïveté in putting faith in the accounts of escaped slaves whom he interviewed. As James Horan wrote in his biography of the Pinkertons, “Though [the slaves] were incapable of giving realistic information about what was happening on a grand scale behind Confederate lines, it is evident that Pinkerton believed everything they told him.” If Pinkerton learned of a presence of a rebel regiment, he assumed it was at full strength and part of a division, also at full strength. Such was his devotion to McClellan that he preferred to err on the side of caution.

  C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - F O U R

  “They Held Existence by a Frail Tenure”

  ON THURSDAY, AUGUST 21, the Richmond Enquirer reported that a new prison had opened three days earlier, under the direction of Captain George Alexander, assistant provost marshal, and its capacity was reputed to be in excess of one thousand, more than five times the number of Castle Godwin. When Lewis and Scully had been thrown in Godwin four months earlier, it held sixty prisoners; now that number had bloated to nearly two hundred, and conditions were intolerable.

  The new prison, to be “christened ‘Castle Thunder,’ a name indicative of Olympian vengeance upon offenders against her laws,” was located on Cary Street and was converted from a tobacco warehouse. The Enquirer’s reporter had visited the L-shaped premises and approved of what he’d seen, though he worried the prison might be too luxurious for the sort of person to be incarcerated within.

  The general cleanliness of the place is the first object which strikes the visitor’s sense of appreciation as he enters. The arrangement of the offices of Assistant Provost-Marshal [Alexander], superintendent, and police, all on the first floor in the front of the building; of the store-rooms, armory and “halls for confiscation” in the rear, and of the culinary department in the court, is as orderly, convenient, and comfortable as could be desired. The prison department is above, and is appropriately divided into sections for males, females, citizens and soldiers respectively; and still higher up is the hospital, where everything is kept in proper condition, and the patients have plenty of breathing and sleeping room. Convalescents enjoy a promenade upon the roof of an adjoining wing of the building.

  There were a couple of features the correspondent overlooked, such as the windowless “Condemned Cell” and the three six-foot-square dungeons, or “sweat houses,” as Alexander preferred to call them. The stench from inside was pestiferous, worse than a pigsty.

  The hospital didn’t long retain its perfect condition. On October 3 Surgeon William Carrington was commissioned by Jefferson Davis to inspect all the hospitals in Richmond’s prisons. When he came to Castle Thunder he was appalled, writing that there “are about 70 patients in a garret room 40ft by 80 of low pitch and very imperfect ventilation. The capacity of the room was 32 patients. There was no bath room, linen room or hospital clothing. The beds and bedding were filthy and the clothing & the persons of the patients in the same conditions.”

  Pryce Lewis, John Scully, and the other inmates of Castle Godwin were transferred to Castle Thunder on Monday, August 18. Waiting to greet them was George Alexander, newly promoted to assistant adjutant general. The elevation had made him even more conceited. He yelled commands at his prisoners “as though delivering them through a speaking-trumpet.” He was also in the habit of regaling prisoners with stories of his own exploits earlier in the war, which while impressive enough, were burnished by Alexander’s braggadocio. Alexander warned the prisoners, “There is no use, men, of trying to get out of here. It is absolutely impossible … you can not have a thought that is unknown to me. You might as well attempt to scale Heaven as escape from the Castle. You had better behave yourselves, and become resigned to your situation.”

  Each prisoner was searched for weapons, then dispossessed of money and jewelry, and given a receipt in return. Then they were escorted to their cells. Lewis and Scully were taken down the passage and up three long flights of stairs—armed guards were stationed at the foot of each staircase—to the third floor, directly beneath the garret hospital. This floor “consisted originally of two large rooms and one small room which was [their] cell.” The door to the spies’ cell was made from wooden boards, which with a bit of effort could be removed and replaced without drawing attention to the fact. So at night when most of the prison’s fourteen guards were off-duty or relaxing on the first floor, Lewis and Scully would “squeeze out into the large rooms and enjoy the society of the other prisoners.” The camaraderie among the incarcerated transcended wartime loyalties; everyone knew about the two Northern spies, but no one cared. If anything, Lewis and Scully were celebrities. The prisoners with whom they mingled represented all of war’s detritus; there were dozens of Confederate soldiers awaiting trial for desertion, mutiny or murder. There were civilian men accused of disloyalty or forgery, women caught selling either liquor or sex, and there were thieves and drunkards both male and female.

  The highlight of Lewis’s day was the exercise hour. Not only could he escape for a few blissful minutes the stench imparted from the tubs that served as toilets on the prison floors, but he had the chance to converse with prisoners confined in “the Citizens’ Room” on the second floor. Among the topics of conversation was the course of the war, which at the time was discouraging for the Northerners. Not only had the Federals pulled back from Richmond, but the rebels had chased them north, crossing the Potomac on September 5 and engaging McClellan’s army twelve days later at a Maryland creek called Antietam. Unimaginable carnage ensued. By the end of the day twenty-three thousand American soldiers lay dead or wounded.

  The inmates soon learned that Captain Alexander was a fair man: civil to the good, evil to the bad. Pryce Lewis struck up a rapport with the preening superintendent, who saw himself as the Confederacy’s answer to Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Where the Crimean War had inspired the Eng
lish poet to write “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” so Alexander had been moved by the South’s travails to pen verses of similar stature. Unfortunately Alexander didn’t quite possess Tennyson’s turn of phrase, but Lewis discovered that “by praising his poetry it was easy to keep on the right side of him.” So adroit was Lewis in playing to Alexander’s ego that the prison governor took to printing souvenir copies of his ballads and poems.

  In Castle Godwin Lewis and Scully had been well fed, but in Castle Thunder there were just two meals a day, and they barely qualified as meals. The food was brought to them in their cells, for breakfast “a piece of wheat bread of good quality and a piece of fresh soup meat, often in an uneatable condition.” The second meal was served between three and four in the afternoon and consisted of “a tin can of soup and a piece of bread. The soup was made of black beans and, if allowed to stand a little while, the maggots and winged insects would rise to the surface.” Lewis and Scully fished out the insects and threw them away, but ate the maggots for their nutrition.

  An acquaintance Lewis made among the prisoners on the second floor was Colonel Thomas Jordan (not to be confused with the Thomas Jordan who was Rose Greenhow’s spymaster), Ninth Pennsylvania Cavalry, who had been captured in Kentucky the previous July. Subsequently Jordan was accused of having orchestrated a campaign of robbery, rape and murder throughout the state of Tennessee a few weeks before his capture. George Randolph, the Confederate secretary of war, had ordered an inquiry into the allegations, the results of which were pending.