Authors: Jennifer Chiaverini
The garb of a Southern lady would be her uniform, her cleverness her weapon, her battlefield the prisons and markets and dining rooms of Richmond, or wherever else duty beckoned her.
Chapter Thirteen
JULY-AUGUST 1862
L
izzie and her mother waited anxiously for General McClellan’s forces to take Richmond, listening in dismay as the sounds of battle grew fainter day by day after the Union army was thrown back from Mechanicsville. To prevent General McClellan from marching upon the capital, General Lee led a furious assault on his right, while on his left, General Magruder paraded his meager forces back and forth, stirring up dust and raising such a commotion that General McClellan was apparently deceived into believing that he was vastly outnumbered. Then, at Gaines’s Mill, eight miles northeast of the city, General Lee’s troops severed the Union lines and drove the federals south of the Chickahominy, forcing General McClellan to pull back toward the James, away from Richmond.
In the end, the week of fighting that soon became known as the Seven Days Battles concluded with the capital securely in Confederate control and General Lee proclaimed a hero. In the meantime, General McClellan regrouped his forces at Harrison’s Landing, nineteen miles from Richmond, as the crow flew, but a much longer and more hazardous journey along the crooked country roads and winding rivers he would be obliged to follow if he dared mount another assault.
While Richmond rejoiced, Lizzie and her mother dejectedly swept up the fallen flower petals from the floor of the bedchamber they had prepared for General McClellan, and when they threw out the withered stems and emptied the murky green water from the vase, they did not replace it with a fresh bouquet.
It was a decisive Confederate triumph, but even as pride and relief surged through Richmond, the people’s jubilation swiftly diminished as they learned the terrible price of victory. The more than twenty thousand Confederate casualties included thirty-three hundred dead and sixteen thousand wounded, while the Union suffered seventeen hundred deaths, eight thousand wounded, and six thousand taken captive and crammed into Richmond’s already overflowing prisons.
Again trains and wagons and carts hauled the dead and wounded into Richmond, and again hospitals and private homes strained to accommodate the injured and sick and dying. Venturing downtown to observe the scene, Lizzie discovered the largest and finest shops on Main Street filled with rows and rows of cots, each bearing a groaning, coughing, suffering man. The doors and windows were left open to collect the faint breezes that barely stirred the air within, and no curtains shielded the suffering from the curious glances of passersby, or protected horrified residents from witnessing their anguish, gruesome and heartrending to look upon. Tents were erected in the streets and on the hillsides to accommodate the most hopeless cases, patients afflicted with gangrene and injuries considered likely to prove fatal. In the heat of the day, a sickening, fetid odor permeated the city, so that even high atop Church Hill, the air was so foul that Lizzie and her mother could not sit on the piazza for long before choking, clutching handkerchiefs to their faces, and fleeing back inside.
Lizzie might have remained behind the safe walls of home if not for her memory of Mr. Botts’s urgent appeal—and her own longing to shake off her oppressive loneliness by meeting other Unionists. She went first to McNiven’s Bakery at 811 North Fifth Street, where she introduced herself to the proprietor only to learn that the stocky, red-haired Scotsman knew her on sight and had been monitoring her activities in and about the prisons for months, debating whether to contact her. Mr. McNiven was well practiced in smuggling and subterfuge, he told her with gruff, modest pride, for even before the war, he had been active in the Underground Railroad, concealing fugitive slaves in a secret compartment in his bakery wagon and transporting them north out of Richmond. His bakery served some of the most important households in the Confederacy, including Jefferson Davis’s, where Mr. McNiven often picked up useful information from the slaves and servants employed therein.
In a similar fashion, Lizzie wrote a cheery note to Mr. William Rowley, thanking him for lending her the book that their mutual friend had recommended so highly and inviting him to call on her at home whenever he wished to retrieve it. She assumed he would be clever enough to figure out who their mutual friend was and that she had invented the borrowed book to divert suspicion should the letter fall into the wrong hands—and if he was not clever enough, she did not want to speak to him. But he understood what she could not risk writing down, and he visited her the day after receiving her letter—a tall, lean man with short, neatly trimmed reddish-brown hair atop his head and a remarkably long, bushy beard that more than made up for it. They quickly fell into an easy, earnest conversation in which they discovered their opinions matched perfectly on all the most important subjects. Mr. Rowley owned no slaves, and commiserated with her that she could not free her mother’s. He was perhaps only a year or two older than she, married, with three sons aged ten to sixteen whom he was determined to keep out of the Confederate army. He confided that a friend, one he trusted with his life, had become a private courier, and that any secrets Lizzie could bring to him would be swiftly and safely carried across Union lines, all the way to Washington City if needed.
“We will keep your friend busy,” Lizzie promised, and they soon arranged that Lizzie would send a servant to Mr. Rowley’s farm once a week so they could exchange information, more often if an urgent matter compelled them.
Mr. Rowley also advised Lizzie to choose an ingenious hiding place for her letters and papers, something the pickets had not encountered dozens of times before, yet something so ordinary they would not bother to inspect it. “No false bottoms in suitcases,” he said firmly. “They search every valise, every trunk, every satchel. No hollows carved out of the pages of books; they know that one too.”
“I used to smuggle many secrets in books, although not in that fashion,” Lizzie remarked, thinking of Mr. Ely. His ingenious method of concealing messages on the printed page could be useful in a pinch, but her serving dish, adequate enough for the prisons, would not fool an average Confederate private on picket duty. She would have to contrive another hiding place, and soon. Already Lieutenant Ross had brought out from Libby prison sketches of the interior, prisoner rosters, and copies of confidential letters from General Winder and Secretary Benjamin to the prison commandant, Major Thomas Pratt Turner. Lizzie handed these papers to Mr. Rowley herself, but there would be more from Lieutenant Ross, and from Robert Ford, who occasionally slipped her letters from newly arrived prisoners describing troop movements and enemy fortifications they had witnessed on the battlefield and during transport to Richmond. Mr. Ford also unwittingly confirmed that Lieutenant Ross was thoroughly convincing in the role of cruel overseer, for the prisoners hated him bitterly and complained about his nasty temper and arbitrary punishments.
“When all this is over, Mr. Ross should take to the stage,” Lizzie remarked to her mother one afternoon as they gathered up the scraps of papers and hid them in a sconce above the fireplace until they could be delivered to Mr. Rowley’s farm. “He would give Mr. John Booth some competition for the admiration of Richmond’s theatergoers.”
“You condemn Mr. Ross with faint praise,” Mother scoffed, smiling. “In my opinion, likening him to John Booth is to label him a fair to middling actor. John Booth’s elder brother Edwin is the far superior performer. Your father and I saw him in
Richard III
in Boston in 1849, and he was marvelous. And—don’t you remember?—you yourself saw them share the stage in
Hamlet
at the Richmond Theatre. You must agree that Edwin’s Hamlet was far better than John’s Horatio.”
“I suppose so, but
you
must admit that John made a very convincing Brutus a few years back.” Lizzie smiled wistfully. It felt like ages since she had last enjoyed a night at the theater, although several were still open in the city, drawing tremendous crowds from among the soldiers, politicians, and opportunists who had flooded the capital since secession. “Even so, you’re absolutely right. Mr. Ross is no John Wilkes Booth. He must be an Edwin, or the prisoners would not loathe him as they do.”
Lieutenant Ross was obliged to perform not only for the prisoners, but also for Major Turner, the junior officers, and the guards. So convinced were they of his commitment to the cause and his antipathy for Yankees that he was permitted to move about the prison as he pleased, and at the end of his shift, he carried out copies of important documents in his pockets, unbeknownst to all.
Lizzie knew that
she
could not rely on a hiding place as obvious as pockets, and eventually a box of old Easter decorations inspired an ingenious solution—a hollowed eggshell, with a hole just large enough to contain a narrow scroll of paper. Nestled into a basket of real eggs, with the opening buried in straw, the false egg was indistinguishable from the others and would go undetected unless a particularly scrupulous guard examined each egg by touch.
Every Thursday, Lizzie would send Peter and Caroline out to Mr. Rowley’s farm, precious secrets hidden within the basket of eggs on Caroline’s lap. Mr. Rowley would send back news of the war from the North and money that Lieutenant Ross and Mr. Ford smuggled in to the prisoners, who could then purchase extra food, a blanket, a few minutes to stand in the outside doorway and savor the wind and the sun, or a respite from beatings.
With every battle, more Confederate wounded and more Union prisoners packed into the capital. Even with a prisoner exchange system finally in place, Richmond’s prisons filled, overflowed, and spilled into neighboring buildings. To help ease the overcrowding, General Winder ordered a temporary holding facility established on Belle Isle, an island in the middle of the James River at the fall line, fifty-four acres of rocky earth surrounded by swift rapids, a serendipitous deterrent against escape attempts. Since it was meant to be used only until more adequate quarters could be arranged, no barracks were built, although a makeshift hospital was hastily constructed. Earthworks about three feet high encircled the perimeter of the island, and roughly three hundred conical pole tents, each sleeping ten men, provided the prisoners’ only shelter. The need for the prison camp never diminished, however, so by midsummer it was decreed that captured Union officers would remain at Libby Prison, but all noncommissioned officers and privates would be held on Belle Isle.
Belle Isle was “a very pleasant spot,” the Richmond
Enquirer
remarked soon after the open-air stockade was established, “much more agreeable than any locality which has been given to our wounded soldiers...Their friends in the North may be perfectly satisfied that they will pass a pleasant summer at Richmond.”
A pleasant summer, perhaps, Lizzie thought worriedly, but summer would not last forever. It was true that the cool breezes off the river would provide welcome relief from the hot, stifling warehouses during the sultry days of summer, but as Lizzie eyed the tents from the riverbank and watched the flaps flutter and the poles bend, she pictured the scene in autumn, and then in winter, and she could not imagine how the prisoners would survive until spring.
Upon returning home from one of her walks along the riverbank, where the wind and swift current brought blessed escape from the foul miasma of gangrene and rot that hung like an invisible fog over every street in the city, Lizzie was pleasantly surprised to discover an invitation from Mary Jane Bowser to call the following afternoon. The next day, Lizzie spent the morning browsing the shops on Main Street for suitable books, slates, pencils, and other necessary items for Mary Jane’s school, and in the afternoon, she took the carriage to the Bowser residence and happily delivered the gifts.
“Thank you very much, Miss Lizzie,” said Mary Jane, delighted. “The children will be so pleased.”
“Let’s arrange everything on their desks so it’s the first thing they see when they enter the classroom tomorrow morning,” Lizzie suggested, wishing she could see the children’s sweet faces when they discovered the surprise.
Mary Jane agreed, and as they worked, they chatted like old times, catching up on all the family news. Afterward, Mary Jane invited her into the dining room, and over tea and shortbread—from McNiven’s Bakery, if Lizzie was not mistaken—the conversation turned to the war and the horrific, heartbreaking changes it had wrought upon their city.
“We all must do our part to bring about a Union victory, no matter what the danger,” said Mary Jane, “and as swiftly and decisively as possible, so this terrible carnage will come to an end.”
Something in her tone—fear, anxiety, determination, pride—told Lizzie she had not reached that conclusion easily. “Are you worried about me and all that my ardent patriotism compels me to do, or are you concerned for yourself?”
Mary Jane picked at a piece of shortbread on her plate, crumbling the edge into coarse, buttery crumbs. “Neither.” She glanced up from her plate to give Lizzie a small, anxious grimace. “I’m afraid for my husband. And now we come to the reason for my invitation.”
“There’s a reason?” Lizzie asked lightly. “I assumed you simply missed me.”
“I did miss you, of course, but Wilson wanted to speak with you too. He...discovered something at work that he thought might be useful to you.”
“At work—you mean, on the RF&P Railroad?”
Mary Jane nodded. “That’s right.”
Lizzie drew in a slow breath, her thoughts racing. The Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac Railroad ran north from Richmond through Henrico, Hanover, and Caroline counties to a terminus five miles south of Fredericksburg. It had once run all the way to Aquia Creek on the Potomac River, but in April, Union troops had forced the Confederates to retreat fourteen miles to the Rappahannock, and in an attempt to delay the federals’ advance, the rebels had destroyed the Aquia Creek wharf and warehouses, several bridges, and three miles of track. Even so, the RF&P remained a crucial supply line for General Lee’s army. “What does Wilson know?” Lizzie asked.