A Treasury of Foolishly Forgotten Americans (8 page)

How surprised, then, would that writer have been had he known that one day Edwin Forrest, and the riot he inspired, would be a mere footnote. To Forrest, though, it was entirely expected. “The actor's popularity is evanescent,” he once said; “applauded today, forgotten tomorrow.”

Allan Pinkerton found himself in an awkward position outside the home of Rose O'Neale Greenhow, one of the most prominent hostesses in Washington, D.C. The head of the famed detective agency—imported from Chicago by the Union to track and capture rebel subversives operating around the capital—stood barefoot in the pouring rain, balancing himself on the shoulders of two associates, trying to see and hear what he could through a second-story parlor window.

American counterespionage was in its infancy in 1861, but Pinkerton's quarry was no beginner. From her home on Sixteenth Street, which was noted by Confederate General P. G. T. Beauregard as being “within easy rifle-range” of the White House, Greenhow was running a spy ring meant to undermine the Union war effort. “To this end,” she later wrote, “I employed every capacity with which God had endowed me, and the result was far more successful than my hopes could have flattered me to expect.”

While she may have overestimated her achievements, her efforts on behalf of the South were relentless. “She did a better job than most in infiltrating the political and military elite of Washington,” Tyler Anbinder, associate professor of history at George Washington University, said in 1999. “She flattered men into revealing sensitive information.”

The nation's capital has been home to plenty of covert operatives, as well as highly connected grandes dames. But Greenhow, “the Rebel Rose,” managed to unite the two professions within herself; in the process she added a unique chapter to the city's long history of deeply held Southern sympathies. As a young girl, she was sent from Rockville, Maryland, to live at the Old Capitol with an aunt who ran an inn there. This building, on the site now occupied by the U.S. Supreme Court, was constructed as a temporary home for Congress after the original Capitol was burned during the War of 1812. Years later, after the Old Capitol was converted to a prison during the Civil War, Greenhow would reside there again—this time as one of the Union's more celebrated captives.

With her charm, intellect, and ambition, as well as through her husband, Robert, a State Department official whom she married in 1835, Rose Greenhow came to know virtually everyone of importance in Washington. Dolley Madison, Daniel Webster, and President James Buchanan were among her many friends and intimates. No one was closer to her, however, than John C. Calhoun, the powerful statesman from South Carolina who served as senator, secretary of state, and vice president. As one of the great intellectual progenitors of the Southern Confederacy, he won Greenhow's eternal admiration and devotion. “I am a Southern woman,” she wrote, “born with revolutionary blood in my veins, and my first crude ideas on State and Federal matters received consistency and shape from the best and wisest man of this century.” As her idol suffered through his final illness at the Old Capitol in 1850, Greenhow was in constant attendance. Calhoun's memory remained sacred to her, and fueled her increasingly fanatic devotion to the Southern cause as the Civil War approached.

An uncomfortable chill swept through one of her dinner parties in the winter of 1859 when Abigail Adams, wife of presidential scion Charles Francis Adams, professed sympathy and admiration for the radical abolitionist John Brown, who recently had been hanged. With sectional feeling festering just below the surface, polite society in Washington assiduously avoided the topic of John Brown as simply too hot for discussion. Greenhow, however, had no hesitation in challenging Adams. “I have no sympathy for John Brown,” she snapped. “He was a traitor, and met a traitor's doom.” While Greenhow later professed to have regretted this breach of gracious hostessing, she would never temper or compromise her fierce Southern loyalties.

It was this fervor, along with her many intimate connections in the capital, that made the forty-four-year-old and widowed Greenhow a prime rebel recruit in April 1861, when the Civil War finally broke out. She proved her worth as a spy in a very short time, supplying to General Beauregard the information that Federal troops would be advancing on Manassas, Virginia, in mid-July. Her courier, a young woman named Betty Duvall, rode out of Washington dressed as a country girl. Meeting General Milledge L. Bonham at the courthouse in Fairfax County, Virginia, Duvall advised him that she had an urgent message for General Beauregard. “Upon my announcing that I would have it faithfully forwarded at once,” Bonham later recalled, “she took out her tucking comb and let fall the longest and most beautiful roll of hair I have ever seen. She took then from the back of her head, where it had been safely tied, a small package, not larger than a silver dollar, sewed up in silk.” As author Ishbel Ross noted in her book
Rebel Rose,
“Greenhow had ciphered the message. Greenhow had sewn it in silk. Greenhow had obtained the information.”

Though historians debate the ultimate impact of her messages on the First Battle of Bull Run, both Beauregard and Confederate president Jefferson Davis honored her for her contribution to the rout of the Northern army in this opening conflict of the Civil War. “Had she not leaked word [of the Northern advance], I don't think anything would have happened differently,” said Anbinder. Beauregard had a number of sources of information, he said, “but it served to embarrass the North that a woman could obtain such sensitive information.” Indeed, Greenhow's covert activities did attract unfavorable attention in Washington, and soon enough Allan Pinkerton was peeping into her windows. “She has made use of whoever and whatever she could as mediums to carry out her unholy purposes,” the detective reported. “She has not used her powers in vain among the officers of the Army, not a few of whom she has robbed of patriotic hearts and transformed them into sympathizers with the enemies of the country which made them all they were…. With her as with other traitors she has been most unscrupulous in the use of means. Nothing has been too sacred for her appropriation so as by its use she might hope to accomplish her treasonable ends.”

Despite the fact that she was being watched, and was well aware of it, Greenhow continued to operate with bold defiance. She soon found herself under arrest. “I have no power to resist you,” she declared grandly after challenging Pinkerton's authority to seize her, “but had I been inside of my house, I would have killed one of you before I had submitted to this illegal process.” The dramatic flair she demonstrated when captured would characterize much of her time in captivity.

Under house arrest, she grew indignant that her home was being ransacked in the search for incriminating evidence and that she was subject to constant surveillance. “She wants us to know how her delicacy was shocked and outraged,” Civil War diarist Mary Chestnut recorded. “That could be done only by most plainspoken revelations. For eight days she was kept in full sight of men—her rooms wide open—and sleepless sentinels watching by day and by night. Soldiers tramping—looking in at her leisurely by way of amusement…. She says she was worse used than Marie Antoinette when they snatched a letter from the poor queen's bosom.”

Other female prisoners were sent to Fort Greenhow, as Rose's home came to be known—most of them “of the lowest class,” as she called them. During her home confinement, Greenhow managed to continue her secret communications with the South. A letter she had sent to Secretary of State William H. Seward complaining of her mistreatment, in fact, was published in a Richmond newspaper. Because of all the leaks, Fort Greenhow was closed in early 1862, and Rose was transferred to the Old Capitol Prison, along with her eight-year-old daughter, Little Rose. Ironically, they were confined in the very same room in which Greenhow had comforted her dying hero, Senator Calhoun, more than a decade earlier.

Unpleasant as it was, Rose's imprisonment was ultimately her greatest service to the South—far more useful than the information she secretly provided. “They made her a martyr in the eyes of the Southern people,” said historian James McPherson. “The brutal Yankees who would imprison a mother and child provided ammunition for the Confederate propaganda mills.” In the squalid (yet hardly brutal) confines of the Old Capitol, Greenhow played the role of martyr for all it was worth. Mary Chestnut commented sardonically on this in her diary, while a fellow prisoner named Augusta Morris wrote, “Greenhow enjoys herself amazingly.”

“This is the gloomiest period of my life,” Rose wrote. “Time dragged most heavily. I had absolutely nothing to occupy myself with. I had no books, and often no paper to write on, and those who approached me appeared entirely oblivious of the mental as well as physical wants of a prisoner…. [I was] chafing against my prison bars, with the iron of the despot eating into my soul.”

In March 1862, Rose was brought up on charges of espionage. The prisoner was defiant throughout the hearing. “If I gave the information you say I have,” she taunted, “I must have got it from sources that were in the confidence of the government…. If Mr. Lincoln's friends will pour into my ear such important information, am I to be held responsible for all that?” With little accomplished at the hearing, and a formal trial thought to be too incendiary, the judge decided it would be best to exile the prisoner from Washington. He sent her south with the pledge not to return during the course of the war. She left the Old Capitol Prison draped in a Confederate flag, and when she arrived in Richmond, she was greeted as a hero by the local elite. “Had Madame Greenhow been sent South immediately after her arrest,” opined
The New York Times,
“we should have heard no more of the deeds of Secesh women which she has made the fashion.”

After a brief stay in Richmond, Greenhow was sent to Europe by Jefferson Davis to generate vitally needed support for the Confederacy. “It was highly unusual, perhaps unprecedented, for a president to send a woman to represent her country in a foreign land, even in an unofficial capacity,” writes Rose's biographer Ann Blackman. Napoléon III and Queen Victoria both received her, and, according to Blackman, she “buttonholed anyone who would listen to her arguments for recognition and her defense of slavery.” Her book,
My Imprisonment and the First Year of Abolition Rule at Washington,
was published in Britain, where it became a bestseller.

Tragedy struck, however, as Greenhow returned home in 1864. Her ship ran aground along the North Carolina coast, and Rose, fearing capture by Union ships blockading the area, demanded that she be taken ashore in a smaller boat. The ship's captain reluctantly agreed to let her go, despite a raging storm, and she carried with her several small mailbags, presumed to be secret dispatches from Europe, as well as a large quantity of gold. But the little boat capsized in the darkness and rough surf, and Rose Greenhow was lost. Her body subsequently washed ashore and was found by a Confederate soldier, who discovered the gold and snatched it before pushing the body back into the water. When the corpse was rediscovered and identified, the soldier was reportedly overwhelmed by guilt and returned the gold.

Rose O'Neale Greenhow was buried with full Confederate military honors in Wilmington, North Carolina. The inscription on her tomb reads in part: “A bearer of dispatches to the Confederate Government.”

“Her death,” wrote Ishbel Ross, “had the epic touch in which she herself would have gloried.”

Several hours past midnight on May 4, 1863, a contingent of soldiers from the 115th Ohio made their way along the darkened streets of Dayton to the home of Clement L. Vallandigham, two-term U.S. congressman and relentless critic of President Abraham Lincoln. Three days earlier, Vallandigham had appeared at a Democratic rally in Mount Vernon, Ohio, where, before a wildly cheering crowd, he denounced the tyrannical rule of “King Lincoln” and his aggressive war policies that were designed, he claimed, to liberate the black man and enslave whites. By delivering the fiery speech, the former congressman deliberately defied an order recently issued by General Ambrose Burnside, which stated in part that “the habit of declaring sympathies for the enemy will no longer be tolerated in this department [Ohio].” Now Burnside's men were about to deliver the general's response to Vallandigham's remarks.

Upon reaching the residence at 323 First Street, the soldiers quickly cordoned off the property. Captain Charles G. Hutton then rang the doorbell. Vallandigham appeared at an upstairs bedroom window in his nightshirt and demanded to know what the soldiers wanted. Hutton informed him that he was to be arrested under orders from General Burnside and suggested that he surrender peacefully. “If Burnside wants me,” Vallandigham shouted scornfully, “let him come up here and take me.”

Several more requests to come downstairs were ignored. Instead, Vallandigham shouted for the police and insisted he wasn't properly dressed. Hutton assured him that he would be given time to make himself presentable, but still Vallandigham resisted. Finally the captain ordered his men to force open the front door. As they attacked it with bars and axes, Vallandigham fired three pistol shots out of his window in a final attempt to alert the police or sympathetic neighbors. It was in vain. Hutton and his men succeeded in entering the home through the back door and felt their way in the darkness to the second floor, where Vallandigham had barricaded himself behind two bedroom doors. After smashing through both, the soldiers found the former congressman standing in the middle of the room, his wife and sister-in-law both cowering behind him and shrieking in terror.

“You have now broken open my house and overpowered me,” Vallandigham said sarcastically, “and I am obliged to surrender.” With that he was led away to face trial and a most unusual sentence, decreed by Lincoln himself: banishment to the Confederate States of America.

 

Vallandigham's arrest came at a time when Lincoln faced fierce resistance from many Democrats in the North, the most rabid of whom were known derisively as “Copperheads.” They vigorously opposed the president's prosecution of the war, his emancipation policies, and the powers he took upon himself to suppress rebellion, such as the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. Lincoln despaired of these malcontent Copperheads, who, he believed, undermined the Union and in some cases actively conspired against it. “The enemy behind us,” he said in frustration during the grim winter of 1862–63, “is more dangerous to the country than the enemy before us.”

Of all the president's foes within the Union, Vallandigham was among the most prominent. His sharp attacks against Lincoln and the war began while he still served in the U.S. House of Representatives. “The Richmond Government could not have planted a readier spokesman than it had in Congress at Washington in Clement L. Vallandigham,” wrote Lincoln's biographer Carl Sandburg. The new president had barely taken the oath of office before Vallandigham pounced on his inauguration speech. “It was not written in the straightforward language expected from the plain, blunt honest man of the Northwest,” he declared, “but with the forked tongue and crooked counsel of the New York politician [William H. Seward], leaving thirty millions of people in doubt whether it meant peace or war.”

Civil conflict was an anathema to the congressman, even in the face of secession. The Union could never be preserved by bloody coercion, he stated repeatedly, and insisted that he would never “vote one dollar of money whereby one drop of American blood should be shed in a civil war.” In a blundering effort to avoid war and preserve the Union, Vallandigham proposed to amend the Constitution by dividing the nation into four sections, giving each area a veto on the passage of any law or the elections of presidents or vice presidents, and allowing each state the right of secession on certain specified terms. It was a supremely unworkable solution, worthy of a man who, according to his biographer, Frank L. Klement, “possessed a self-confidence bordering on audacity.” With his silly idea shelved and the nation violently divided, Vallandigham's only recourse was to prick the government at every opportunity.

On January 14, 1863, after nearly two years of civil conflict and shortly before he left office in defeat, Vallandigham took to the floor of the House and delivered his most impassioned speech yet against the war and the president who waged it. “Tall, bearded, sonerous, he was,” Sandburg wrote, “his self-righteousness gave him personal exaltation; he was chosen to be the vocal instrument of absolute justice.” For nearly two hours the Chosen One spoke, declaring that Lincoln's effort to restore the Union by force was an “utter, disastrous, and most bloody failure,” and insisting that immediate peace, with the aim of eventual reunion, was the only solution.

“On the 14th of April [1861] I believed that coercion would bring on war, and war disunion,” he told the assembled congressmen and other observers. “More than that, I believed, what you all in your hearts believe today, that the South could never be conquered—never. And not that only, but I was satisfied…that the secret but real purpose of the war was to abolish slavery in the States…and with it…the change of our present democratical form of government into an imperial despotism…. I do not support the war; and today I bless God that not the smell of so much as one drop of blood is upon my garments…. Our Southern brethren were to be whipped back into love and fellowship at the point of the bayonet. Oh, monstrous delusion!”

Reaction to Vallandigham's speech was ferocious, both in Congress and in many Republican newspapers. “The people of the Northwest spurn him,” wrote Isaac Jackson Allen of the
Ohio State Journal,
“and spit upon his detestable dogma.” But there were some, particularly in Vallandigham's home state of Ohio, who celebrated what he had to say. “It is a speech,” wrote James J. Faran in the Cincinnati
Enquirer,
“which would add to the fame of a Clay, or a Webster, or a Burke, or a Chatham.”

The enthusiastic response to Vallandigham in the Midwest reflected the discontent many of its Democrats felt about the war, which had taken an enormous human and economic toll on the region, and especially about the Emancipation Proclamation that they feared would result in a disastrous influx of freed slaves. “Ohio,” one Copperhead wrote, “will be overrun with negroes, they will compete with you and bring down your wages,
you
will have to work with them, eat with them, your
wives
and
children
must associate with theirs and your families will be degraded to their level.” The anti-administration sentiment ran so strong in the region that John A. McClernand, a leading Illinois Democrat, warned Lincoln in 1863 of “the rising storm in the Middle and Northwestern States,” and predicted “not only a separation from the New England States but reunion of the Middle and Northwestern States with the revolted [Southern] States.”

The president was inclined to believe such threats and moved to suppress dissent he considered dangerous. It was in this unsettled atmosphere that General Burnside, commander of the Department of the Ohio, issued General Order No. 38—an ill-conceived measure made by a man still smarting from his crushing defeat at the Battle of Fredericksburg and suffering from a scorching case of diarrhea. The order prohibited not only acts that benefited the enemy, which was reasonable enough, but also stated that treason, “express or implied,” would not be tolerated. This was a far-reaching clause that, Lincoln biographers John Nicolay and John Hay wrote, “may be made to embrace, in its ample sweep, any demonstration not to the taste of the general in command.” The order, with its disturbing constitutional implications, caused an immediate uproar—even among loyal Republicans. One of Burnside's own staff officers warned President Lincoln that the general's order had “kindled the fires of hatred and contention.” Clement Vallandigham was determined to defy it.

On May 1, 1863, he delivered the speech that doomed him to exile. Along with his usual rhetorical lashes against Lincoln, the war, and abolition, Vallandigham declared that Burnside's General Order No. 38 was a base usurpation of arbitrary power that he despised, spat upon, and trampled under his feet. Standing among the crowd roaring its approval, two of Burnside's men, dressed as civilians, took careful notes on the address. Three days later Vallandigham was arrested at his home in Dayton and taken by train to a military prison in Cincinnati. From his cell he issued a widely published statement to the Democrats of Ohio:

While Vallandigham wrote from Cincinnati, riots broke out in Dayton. The offices of the
Dayton Journal,
a Republican newspaper, were torched; in the resulting inferno a number of other businesses were also destroyed. And the outrage wasn't limited to Ohio. Editorials across the nation condemned the arrest. The
New York Atlas,
a Democratic paper, asserted that “the tyranny of military despotism” exhibited in Burnside's actions demonstrated “the weakness, folly, oppression, mismanagement and general wickedness of the administration at Washington.” A huge protest rally was held in New York, during which one speaker warned that if Vallandigham's arrest wasn't rebuked, “free speech dies, and with it our liberty, the Constitution and our country.” Another pointedly noted that Vallandigham hadn't spoken out against the war nearly as vociferously as Lincoln had against the Mexican-American War when he was a congressman.

Several days after his arrest, Vallandigham was brought before a military commission that he insisted had no right to try him. He was not part of the land or naval forces of the United States, he said, nor in the militia; therefore he was subject only to the civil courts. Furthermore, he asserted that the alleged offense itself was not known to the Constitution, or to any law. “The Vallandigham case did indeed raise troubling constitutional questions,” writes historian James M. McPherson. “Could a speech be treason? Could a military court try a civilian? Did a general, or for that matter a president, have the power to impose martial law or suspend habeas corpus in an arena distant from military operations where the civil courts were functioning? These questions went to the heart of the administration's policy for dealing with fire in the rear.”

The military tribunal was seemingly untroubled by these constitutional concerns. Vallandigham was convicted and sentenced to close confinement in a fortress of Burnside's choosing. His lawyers immediately applied to the U.S. Circuit Court for a writ of habeas corpus, which was denied. Burnside himself had sent a written statement to the court in which he argued against the writ and defended the actions he had taken against Vallandigham: “If I were to find a man from the enemy's country distributing in my camp speeches of their public men that tended to demoralize the troops, or to destroy their confidence in the constituted authorities of the Government, I would have him tried and hung, if found guilty, and all the rules of modern warfare would sustain me. Why should such speeches from our own public men be allowed?”

The quick succession of Vallandigham's arrest, trial, and sentence took President Lincoln “somewhat by surprise,” according to his biographers Nicolay and Hay, “and it was only after these proceedings were consummated that he had an opportunity to seriously consider the case.” The historians concluded that the president would probably not have allowed the events to go forward had he been consulted in advance. As it stood, though, Lincoln was determined to support Burnside; to do less, he believed, would only encourage the subversive elements in the Northwest. The president declined the general's offer to resign in the midst of the uproar surrounding the case. “When I shall wish to supersede you I will let you know,” he wrote to Burnside. “All the Cabinet regretted the necessity of arresting…Vallandigham, some doubting there was a real necessity for it; but, being done, all were for seeing you through with it.”

Though Lincoln upheld Burnside, he went against the general's advice and commuted Vallandigham's sentence from imprisonment to banishment behind enemy lines. This, he believed, would remove an irksome martyr around whom the Copperheads could rally. Thus, under order of the president, Vallandigham was escorted to the headquarters of General William S. Rosencrans in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and from there into the hands of the Confederates.

“Why, sir, do you know that unless I protect you with a guard my soldiers will tear you to pieces in an instant?” Rosencrans reportedly said to Vallandigham.