Authors: Jennifer Chiaverini
Eliza sighed and nodded, acknowledging her point, but then she gave a little start, and her brow furrowed as she examined the heading of the second letter more closely, and then quickly confirmed the signature on the first. “Lizzie,” she said, “did you see the names of the gentlemen involved in this exchange?”
“No,” replied Lizzie, puzzled. “I couldn’t even bring myself to unfold the pages. I left that to you.”
Eliza lay the documents upon the table and pointed at the lines that had captured her attention. “The provost marshal who sent this letter and received that one is Isaac Carrington.
Carrington
, Lizzie.”
Lizzie peered closely at the signature, hardly daring to hope. “Is he a relation?”
“Yes,” Eliza said, her face lighting up with joy. “Distant, but nevertheless, yes, we are related.”
Lizzie pressed a hand to her heart. “Do you think he would help me?”
“I don’t know. We haven’t spoken in ages, but that won’t prevent me from appealing to him.” Eliza bounded to her feet. “I will go to him at once and beg a favor on behalf of the good Carrington name.”
“Oh, Eliza,” Lizzie exclaimed, rising and embracing her. “I have never doubted your friendship, but today you have proven yourself the truest, most loyal friend I’ve ever known.”
Eliza hugged her, but then she quickly cautioned, “Don’t shower me in too much praise too soon. I haven’t done anything yet.”
“Oh, but you have,” Lizzie insisted. “Your kindness has lifted me from the depths of despair. Take the carriage. Peter has it ready and waiting, and I would much rather send it on this errand than the one we had intended.”
Eliza agreed, urged her not to worry, and hurried on her way.
Lizzie spent the day in anxious, hopeful waiting, and when Eliza returned late that afternoon, her proud, satisfied smile told Lizzie that she had met with success. “Don’t waste another moment worrying about this investigation,” she said, taking Lizzie’s hands in hers and beaming. “It’s going to quietly fade away.”
“But—how?” Lizzie felt dizzy and weak from relief and thought she might burst into tears. “What did you say? How did you persuade him?”
“I told him that you are my dearest friend and that I have accompanied you on most of your missions of mercy to care for the Union soldiers, which is what inspired the cruel gossip about your loyalty,” she said. “I told him that if he prosecutes you, he must do the same to me, and whatever punishment you receive, I must share.”
“You didn’t,” gasped Lizzie, horrified. “What a risk you took! What if he had called your bluff?”
“It was no bluff. It’s true. This investigation cannot bring shame to the Van Lew family without also disgracing the Carringtons.” Eliza smiled. “As you might expect, Provost Marshal Isaac Carrington is not eager to do that.”
“I should think not,” said Lizzie, laughter and hope bubbling up within her. She was safe—from this threat, at least, if none other. She would not be sent to Castle Thunder, or exiled to the North, and her nieces—her precious, beloved nieces—would not be taken from the home they loved best.
What a blessing was the courage of a true and loyal friend!
. . .
Tensions grew and tempers flared in Richmond as news from the disparate battlefields grew ever more demoralizing for the Confederacy. Mere survival was celebrated with forced good cheer as if it were a victory. The papers celebrated the recapture of six hundred slaves from the Yankees while disparaging the Union’s increasingly more visible use of colored soldiers. They noted with satisfaction that countless households across the North were engulfed in mourning thanks to the butcher Grant’s heavy losses, and they took heart from reports of Old Abe’s political troubles as he faced re-election, noting that unlike their President Davis, he contended with significant opposition. Northern Peace Democrats had nominated General George McClellan as their candidate to replace Mr. Lincoln, and thanks to Mary Jane’s delicate touch in Mr. Davis’s study, the Richmond underground had learned that the Confederacy fervently wanted General McClellan to triumph at the polls. They all knew that if Mr. Lincoln lost, the Confederacy’s chances for victory would increase a thousandfold.
No strained cheer in the papers or forced frivolity at ladies’ parties could conceal the truth that the rebel armies were struggling, worn down by the enemy’s superior numbers and resources. In September, Union general Sherman had defeated General Hood and captured Atlanta, despite the anguished, fervent prayers of the devout throughout the Confederacy. In October, General Sheridan dealt General Jubal Early his most significant defeat and seized control of the Shenandoah Valley, confiscating or slaughtering livestock and provisions, burning crops and barns, and thereby laying waste to the most important source of food for Richmond and the Army of Northern Virginia.
On November 8, Abraham Lincoln won re-election handily, crushing General McClellan’s political ambitions and destroying any hope of a negotiated peace that included the preservation of slavery. Behind closed doors and drawn curtains, the Van Lew household celebrated, splurging on a chicken dinner with all the trimmings and an applesauce cake for dessert.
Surely, they told one another, they had come at last to the final months of the war.
The day after the election, the mood in Richmond was sour and angry everywhere but in the Van Lew residence, and, she surmised, the homes of other secret Unionists throughout the South. Since Lizzie doubted she would be able to conceal her merriment, she spent most of the day contentedly at home, writing dispatches and perusing the newspapers for information that might interest Colonel Sharpe. Shortly after evening fell, she was on her way from the library to the kitchen when she passed through the foyer and noticed a folded piece of paper that had been slipped beneath the front door.
Quickly she snatched it up. None of her messengers ever delivered messages so carelessly, but perhaps some unknown danger had demanded haste. Her eye immediately went to the crude skull and crossbones drawn at the top of the page, and then to the harsh scrawl that followed:
Miss Van Lough.
Old Maid: Look out for your fig bushes. There ain’t much left of them now. Do you have insurance? White Caps are around town. They are coming at night. Look out! Look out! Look out! Your house is going at last. FIRE. White Caps. Please give me some of your blood to write letters with.
Without thinking, Lizzie crumpled the paper in her fist, tore open the front door, and dashed out onto the portico, where she glanced wildly up the street and down—but she saw no one, not even the smallest glimpse of a telltale white hood the members of the new vigilante group donned whenever they committed their acts of intimidation and violence. Whoever had left the malicious note was long gone.
“Cowards,” she muttered to the empty street. Glaring defiantly into the darkness, she turned stiffly and strode back inside, where with trembling hands she shut the door and locked it firmly.
. . .
A week after President Lincoln was re-elected, General Sherman set out from Atlanta with roughly sixty-two thousand troops and marched toward Savannah on the Atlantic coast. As the army moved inexorably to the sea, they laid waste to plantation and farms; destroyed rail lines; confiscated cattle, horses, and provisions; and utterly demoralized and infuriated civilians across Georgia and throughout the Confederacy. When Savannah fell to General Sherman’s forces on December 21, a wide swath of devastation seared his route into the earth behind him. Richmond’s newspapers bitterly reprinted a story that their Northern counterparts had reported with unrestrained jubilation: On Sunday, December 25, General Sherman had sent President Lincoln a telegram declaring, “I beg to present to you, as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah, with 150 heavy guns and plenty of ammunition, and also about 25,000 bales of cotton.”
Morale in the Confederate capital had plummeted as Christmas approached, but on that holy day, the citizens tried to make merry. In the streets, boys fired pistols into the air and set off firecrackers, and tipsy carolers sang boisterously in hopes of gifts of food or drink. Jefferson Davis had been ill so often throughout the autumn that occasionally rumors had sped through the city that he was dead, but on Christmas Day, he attended morning services at Saint Paul’s and returned in the afternoon to play Santa Claus for the city’s orphans. Later that evening, when Mary Jane stopped by the Church Hill mansion bearing holiday greetings and gifts of preserves, her voice was wistful as she described the Davis family’s Christmas tree, a Virginia holly decorated with candles and clever little dolls made of flannel and hickory nuts. Their guests had enjoyed cakes, gingersnaps, real coffee, and eggnog, and after Mrs. Davis had passed out gifts, the children had played hide-and-seek in the mansion. “Mrs. Davis was a gracious and pleasant hostess,” Mary Jane reported, “but when Mr. Davis came down from his office to put in an appearance, he looked tall and thin and sickly and sad. I’ve never see such a contrast between husband and wife.”
Lizzie’s mouth watered at Mary Jane’s description of the feast—turkey, beef, mince pie, and plum pudding, delicacies the servants had hoarded for days. Later that night, Mr. and Mrs. Davis planned to attend a neighbor’s “starvation party,” where there would be dancing and singing but nothing to eat. Such parties had become quite the fashion in the Confederate capital, for spirits needed lifting in direct proportion to the scarcity of food.
Richmond’s farm markets were nearly bare, and with the Shenandoah Valley laid to waste, railroad lines severed, the Union army dug in on three sides, and winter setting in, no family escaped the gnawing pangs of hunger. Some Church Hill ladies realized that if their families had scarcely enough to eat, the soldiers huddled in the vast arc of trenches spanning more than thirty miles from Richmond to Petersburg surely struggled to survive on even less. The compassionate women vowed to provide a New Year’s feast for the soldiers, and they appealed to merchants, farmers, and ordinary citizens for donations. Mother contributed several loaves of bread that Lizzie was sorry to see given for that purpose, as she had hoped to distribute them at Libby Prison, but Provost Marshal Doswell’s investigation had reminded her anew that they must perform a role for a critical public.
Nor, truly, did she want anyone to starve, whether rebel or Union.
Later Lizzie heard that the weary, ravenous soldiers had risen early and eagerly on New Year’s morning, and while the Van Lews and their servants dined on ham and black-eyed peas and coarse bread and made wishes and spoke prayers for better days to come in 1865, the rebel soldiers waited expectantly for the promised feast. They waited with dwindling hopes all day and into the night, and shortly before dawn on the morning of January 2, the long-anticipated feast arrived—each man received a sandwich with a thin slice of ham. The soldiers were sorely disappointed, but one corporal from Georgia reportedly said aloud what all were thinking: “God bless our noble women! It was all they could do. It was all that they had.”
Whether the incident had indeed occurred or was but a sentimental, apocryphal tale, it rang true every time Lizzie heard it repeated, in the streets and in the churches, and in the nearly empty markets.
As the New Year commenced, the mood in Richmond was utterly bleak and wretched. Food was scarce. Confederate money was all but worthless. Frigid rains had turned the streets to mud, which froze overnight into hard ruts that made for teeth-rattling carriage rides and turned more than a few ankles. Beggars in rags had become so commonplace that neither merchants nor police officers bothered to drive them away anymore. The oppressive, unrelenting anxiety kindled worrisome rumors, which circled about and provoked more anxiety. The rumor that stirred the most fear in the hearts of the rebel citizens also seemed the most likely to be true: Now that he had subdued Savannah, General Sherman intended to march north and join his forces to General Grant’s. There were also rumors of clandestine peace negotiations going on at the highest levels of government, but Lizzie suspected these were probably nothing more than wishful thinking to a populace weary of war. Other murmurs on the street claimed that the government knew the end was near and was already drafting plans to evacuate Richmond, schemes that included measures to destroy the city’s warehouses full of tobacco, alcohol, and provisions before the government took flight rather than allow them to fall into Yankee hands.
The most preposterous tale of all said that Mr. Davis and the Congress were seriously considering the creation of colored regiments composed of slaves who would be granted their freedom in exchange for military service. Lizzie could not imagine the Confederates allowing such a thing, for once colored men fought in the trenches side by side with white soldiers, it would be nearly impossible to ignore their humanity, their inherent equality, and that was a philosophical point she was convinced the rebels would never concede. She also could not fathom how any colored man could take up arms to support a regime that had kept him, his family, and all his race enslaved. If colored men wanted to fight for freedom, they could cross over to Union lines and enlist in the United States Colored Troops, and a great many slaves had done exactly that.
But even though she personally found the rumor about colored Confederate regiments dubious, enough people in important places had mentioned it for her to decide it warranted inclusion in her dispatches to City Point, where General Grant had established his headquarters. Lizzie diligently reported verified facts and only the most plausible rumors to Colonel Sharpe, who in turn informed General Grant, who was undoubtedly satisfied to know that his siege was working, even if it meant that innocents suffered alongside his enemies.
As if fearing that the Confederacy’s weakened state would inspire Richmond’s Unionists to mount a killing blow, the rebel authorities struck first. On January 20, Lizzie was badly shaken by the news that Mr. F. W. E. Lohmann, who had so valiantly helped with the exhumation and burial of Colonel Dahlgren, had been arrested at his home, although his brother had eluded capture. Soon thereafter, she learned that several other members of the loyalist underground had also been snatched up in a scattering of swift, simultaneous arrests, like traps springing all over the city. The next day more accused Union men were taken into custody, and later that week, detectives arrested Samuel Ruth at the RF&P Railroad office on Eighth and Broad Street. Mary Jane’s husband had witnessed his arrest, but the detectives apparently had not suspected Wilson of any wrongdoing, for they questioned him briefly at the station about Mr. Ruth and then told him he was free to go. Wilson brought the devastating news straight to Lizzie, who soon confirmed that the men had been taken to Castle Thunder.