Authors: Jennifer Chiaverini
They had no ginger for ginger cakes, nor fruit for a tart, and few preserves to spare, but they did have fresh milk, and butter as well, thanks to the bounty of their farm as well as Mr. Rowley’s generosity, so Lizzie had Caroline bake a loaf of her finest bread, simple and wholesome and nourishing, which she packed in a basket with a ball of butter and a bottle of milk. Then Lizzie and Peter set out in the carriage in a freezing drizzle, which turned to snow by the time they arrived at the general’s headquarters at Broad and Ninth Streets.
Lizzie was determined not to be put off by the general’s secretary this time, not to be delayed or told that the general was out when she knew he was in. “I must see General Winder at once,” she announced, setting her basket on the secretary’s desk with a thud. She did not need to give her name, so familiar had she become to the staff. The smell of freshly baked bread, quite possibly one of the most enticing aromas ever created, wafted out from beneath the cloth. Whether inspired by the promise of her basket or intimidated by her imperious manner, the secretary hurried off and returned moments later to say the general would see her.
Before he could change his mind, Lizzie assumed her most charming smile and swept into his private chamber. “General Winder, what a pleasure,” she purred, hastily concealing her shock at his appearance. Dark circles shadowed his eyes, worry had cut new furrows in his brow, and his haggard look spoke of exhaustion and toil.
“Miss Van Lew.” His greeting was curiously flat, although a new interest came into his eye as he spied the basket and caught the delicious aroma. “What delicacies have you brought to tempt me today?”
“Nothing too fancy, just simple bread, butter, and milk.” She smiled as she set the basket before him and drew back the cloth. “What evokes fonder memories of home than a good loaf of freshly baked bread?”
“Apples plucked fresh from the tree,” he said distantly. “Sweet and ripe, a perfect fit to the hand. The view from my father’s hayloft.”
Lizzie regarded him with true sympathy as she seated herself. “I’m sure you must be terribly homesick.”
“Yes, well, as to that—” He sat up and briskly straightened a few scattered papers on his desk. “I sleep in a comfortable bed at night rather than in a tent in the mud like so many thousands of our brave soldiers, so it would be unconscionable for me to complain overmuch. What do you require of me today, Miss Van Lew?”
She tried to conceal her surprise at his sudden directness. “Major Thomas Pratt Turner has forbidden me to send food to the men suffering in the hospital of Libby Prison. I cannot understand his presumption in countermanding your orders.”
“What orders of mine has he countermanded?”
“Why, you granted me permission to provide food, delicacies, and other necessary items to the prisoners,” she said, bewildered, “and he will not allow it.”
“I have charged him with maintaining order. If he feels that your gifts subvert his authority and discipline, then he is right to refuse you.”
Lizzie studied him, mindful that General Winder’s explanation echoed words from Major Turner’s letter, as if they had conferred before he wrote it. “Major Turner denies me because he believes the prisoners receive good food in ample quantities. You and I both know that is not so.”
“No one in Richmond receives enough good food these days, whether they be prisoners, soldiers, politicians, or civilians.” He scowled and added, as if to himself, “Or wretched newspapermen.”
“I do what I can to see that
your
pangs of hunger are few and far between,” Lizzie reminded him, gesturing to the basket. “But let us speak of the prisoners and what
they
suffer. Perhaps you are unaware that there are more than one hundred men crammed into each of the six rooms on the upper floors of Libby. They endure scarce rations, regardless of Major Turner’s protestations to the contrary, and lacking cutlery, they eat with their fingers like savages when permitted to eat at all. Their quarters are poorly ventilated and lit, they have no furniture and few blankets, and they are subject to all manner of cruel abuse from their guards.”
“I do not believe it,” said the general, affronted. “The Yankees exaggerate to provoke your sympathies.”
“Do you truly think so? Are you familiar with the lively phrase ‘sporting for Yankees?’”
“No. Should I be?”
“Indeed you should. It’s the name the guards have given to their favorite pastime—shooting prisoners who venture too close to the windows, or who otherwise break the rules. ‘To lose prisoners’ is another charming euphemism they’ve devised, which we all understand to mean cold-blooded murder. Both phrases can be used in concert, as in, ‘When one goes sporting for Yankees, one can expect to lose prisoners.’ Nor do the guards restrict their brutality to the prisoners. The colored workers, slave and free alike, are flogged as a matter of routine, and civilians too feel their wrath. Not long ago, six colored women were stripped and beaten for passing bread to the prisoners as they were marched through the streets. Stripped and beaten, sir!”
General Winder’s frown deepened as she spoke. “The prisons are no better and the guards no gentler in the North, let me assure you.”
“I assure you that they are. They must be.”
“How would you know that, Miss Van Lew?” he thundered. “Have you been to any Yankee prisons? Have you carried any delicacies or necessities into the prison where your noble Yankees held my brother for nineteen months without any charges being raised against him?”
Lizzie stared. “Your brother—”
“William. My elder brother William, a prominent resident of Philadelphia. He was arrested in September of the first year of the war because he refused to take an oath of allegiance, and because he publicly denounced Lincoln’s actions. They confiscated all his private correspondence and certain personal possessions and locked him away, first in Fort Lafayette in New York and then at Fort Warren in Boston Harbor. My aged mother, a widow utterly dependent upon him, tried in vain to get him released, as did my other brother, who was imprisoned too for a time, as did our minister, all to no avail. A few months later William’s jailers offered to release him if he would abandon his principles and swear the oath of allegiance, but this he could not do, so he languished in prison for nearly another year, still protesting his arrest, still not charged with any crime, and no good lady brought him custard or books or medicines or”—he lifted a corner of the cloth covering the basket—“or a loaf of bread and ball of butter and bottle of milk.” Contemptuously he let the cloth fall.
“General Winder, I beg your apologies,” said Lizzie, her voice trembling. “I had no idea.”
“Of course not. Why should you?” He rested his elbows on the desk and fixed her with a steely look. “Although I can’t help thinking that if he were a Yankee in Libby, you would have known.”
“You’re right, I might indeed have known—not because he was a Yankee, but because he would be here in Richmond. I care for the suffering where I find them.”
“You have a ready answer for every challenge, don’t you, Miss Van Lew?”
“Has your brother returned to Philadelphia?” asked Lizzie, fighting to steady herself. “My sister lives in that city. If there is anything you would have her do for him—”
“Do you mean, take him ginger cakes and buttermilk?”
She pretended not to detect his sarcasm. “If you think that would please him.”
“I think it would please him better to be left alone.” Abruptly he stood. “I find myself feeling much the same way.”
Wordlessly she rose and unpacked the basket, leaving her gifts on his desk. She inclined her head in farewell and departed, fighting the urge to sob in frustration and break into a run.
Lizzie was desperate to keep her supply and communication lines into the prisons open, with or without General Winder’s consent, for she knew that with the coming of spring, furious and constant fighting would resume, and with that, the flood of Union prisoners into the capital.
On the morning of March 13, at not quite half past eleven o’clock, Lizzie was writing letters in the library when a low rumble shook the house, rattling the windows and setting her teacup clattering in its saucer. Instinctively Lizzie seized the armrests of her chair until the temblor subsided, but then, heart pounding, she bolted from the room and into the foyer, where William, Louisa, and Mother immediately appeared, all of them breathless and startled.
“What was that?” Mother asked shakily. “Are we under attack?”
William shook his head, baffled and wary. “That didn’t feel like artillery.”
From outside they heard exclamations of surprise and fear, but when Lizzie hurried to the window and peered outside, she saw nothing amiss. Gathering up her skirts, she raced upstairs and outside to the rooftop and scanned the horizon, and then she saw it—a thick cloud of black smoke rising to the southwest, down by the river in the vicinity of the Tredegar Iron Works.
Lizzie stood and watched, transfixed by horror, as the distant pealing of alarm bells drifted on the wind.
She returned downstairs, where Hannah and the children had joined the others. “I think there’s been an accident at Tredegar,” she said. It would be a tremendous loss to the Confederate war machine if the ironworks had been destroyed—and given the time of day, and the number of workers employed there, the death toll could be staggering. “Judging from the smoke, the damage must be considerable.”
Anxiously, Mother asked, “Is this the work of Unionists?”
“I knew nothing of it,” said Lizzie, but then she considered the numerous suspicious fires that had broken out in the factory in the past, and added, “That doesn’t mean it wasn’t sabotage.”
“Peter and I will find out,” said William, and hurried off.
It wasn’t until much later that the women left to worry and wonder at home learned, along with the rest of the frightened populace, the horror and tragedy that had erupted that morning.
The explosion had occurred not at Tredegar but at the Confederate States Laboratory on Brown’s Island at the foot of Seventh Street. Within the low, long-framed ordnance factory, at least seventy employees, most of them young girls and women, had been hard at work as usual, loading cartridges with gunpowder, packaging munitions caps, and filling the friction primers used to ignite cannon charges. An eighteen-year-old worker, Mary Ryan, had tapped a board containing primers against her work bench—and the tap set off the primer, exploding the loose powder in the air and detonating the coal stove. The roof blew off, the walls collapsed, and the roof came crashing down again upon the workers. Ten to twenty were immediately killed. Some who survived the initial collapse leapt into the river, clothes and hair aflame. Others were too horribly burned to move, but lay amid the rubble wailing in anguish, skin charred and clothes in tatters and smoldering. Workers from nearby factories ran to help them while ambulances raced to carry the injured to military hospitals and panicked citizens searched for their daughters and sisters amid the chaos of the ruins.
In the days that followed, Richmond plunged into mourning as funerals were held for the more than forty-five workers killed in the terrible accident. A macabre and unrelenting series of gloomy processions wound their way through the city from the homes of the deceased to the cemeteries. Nearly all of the dead were indigent women and girls, the youngest nine, the eldest sixty-seven. Another twenty-three had been injured, most of them seriously, and as they struggled to recover, authorities vowed to conduct a thorough investigation and Mayor Mayo appealed for donations on behalf of the victims and their surviving friends.
Lizzie and her mother, their sorrow as deep and heartfelt as any other Richmonder’s, gave generously, distressed and ashamed that their less fortunate neighbors had been compelled by hunger and need to place their children in such a dangerous occupation.
Heedless of their grief, the work of war continued unabated.
Two weeks after the ordnance lab explosion, Jefferson Davis declared another official day of fasting and prayer. With inflation soaring and goods scarce, the command to fast in the midst of a famine struck Lizzie as either disingenuous or ridiculously ignorant. Beef was selling at a dollar twenty-five a pound, cornmeal twelve dollars a bushel, flour forty dollars a barrel, molasses a dollar fifty a pint, and turkeys fifteen dollars each. Scarcity drove up prices, but so too did the vast amount of Confederate paper money in circulation—some bills printed on behalf of the Confederacy, others for individual Southern states, and still more small bills, valued at anything from two to fifty cents, printed in vast quantities and so nearly worthless that they were derided as “shinplasters.” The army was so desperate for food that the commissary general was authorized to commandeer meat, flour, and corn to feed the hungry soldiers, but the prices they were willing to pay were so far below the going rate that farmers stopped bringing produce to the city markets. The army’s food shortages became so dire that General Lee ordered regiments to scavenge the countryside for wild onions, garlic, dandelion greens, and sassafras buds, all the while battling the commissary general to requisition more food for his underfed troops. Even so, the general was so devout and dutiful that he ordered his hungry soldiers to observe the March 27 day of fasting and prayer as President Davis had decreed.
Not so the Van Lews. Long ago Lizzie had resolved to enjoy an even better meal than usual on Mr. Davis’s official fast days, and when storm clouds rolled in by midmorning and thunderstorms threatened, she was inspired to invite their Unionist friends for a feast. The windows would be shut tight against the storm, and no one would be out walking in such foul weather, and if the guests staggered their arrivals and departures, the neighbors would be none the wiser.
The Carringtons came from across the street bearing a smoked ham they had intended to save for Easter. Mr. Rowley, his wife Catharine, and their children brought early spring vegetables from their farm near Oakwood, spinach and asparagus and watercress gathered in the wild. Mr. McNiven brought soda bread, hot cross buns, and shortbread in abundance, although he spent a good portion of the evening glaring darkly at the shielded windows and muttering that it was too dangerous for them all to be gathered together in one place and they must never risk it again. Mary Jane and Wilson came, and Lieutenant Ross, looking comfortable in civilian attire, and Mr. Ruth from the RF&P railroad, who revealed that, back in January, General Lee had accused him of operating the railroad “without zeal or energy.” Mr. Ruth assured them, and Wilson quickly concurred, that he was not in danger of discovery. He was adept at deception, and he made certain that intervals of poor performance by his railroad were interspersed with periods of efficiency. He also had powerful Confederate friends who were convinced of his ardent devotion to the cause and would intercede for him whenever suspicions arose.