The Spymistress (21 page)

Lizzie hung on every word the papers offered about the captured spies, sickened by the thought of their impending executions. “Why did Mr. Pinkerton send Northern agents south?” she asked her mother. “Why did they not recruit among Richmond’s loyalists, people who are known here, who don’t have to explain their presence in the city?”

“Perhaps these were men he knew well and trusted. Perhaps he couldn’t send anyone here to do the recruiting.”

“If he could send agents to spy, he could send agents to recruit.” Lizzie wondered what would become of Mrs. Webster, who had not yet been sentenced, but remained in prison. Surely they would not hang a woman. Surely the same government and press who had condemned the Union’s imprisonment of Rose O’Neal Greenhow would not be so hypocritical and cruel as to execute a woman.

On the day John Scully and Pryce Lewis were scheduled to hang, the road from Castle Godwin to Camp Lee, where the gibbet had been erected, was thronged with curious onlookers. No one had been hanged for spying on American soil since Nathan Hale was executed by the British in 1776, and many people couldn’t quite believe it would happen that day either. Lizzie could not bear to be a spectator at such a horrifying event, so she stayed well away. Only later did she learn that the crowds seeking a novel entertainment were disappointed. At the last moment, Mr. Scully and Mr. Lewis were granted a reprieve and returned to prison.

Perhaps the Confederate government did not want to hang
anyone
for spying, not only women—but although Lizzie searched the papers every day for an announcement that Mr. Webster’s death sentence had been commuted, she never found one.

The first few months of 1862 brought reports of Union victories in Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina, and of Union troops massing and preparing to march under their new young leader, General George McClellan. At Yorktown, General Magruder’s Confederate line was stretched thinly, but holding, as they awaited reinforcements. General Joseph Johnston was determined to bring them swift support, and so he decided to march his troops through Richmond and down the Peninsula. It was almost noon on a Sunday when word of the first arriving regiments swept through the city, passing from church to church: Three trainloads of soldiers had come from Fredericksburg, famished and weary, having had nothing to eat for twenty-four hours. While the ministers preached on, young wives and elderly matrons alike began stealing quietly from the pews, determined to share their family’s dinners with the passing soldiers.

Soon Broad and Ninth Streets were lined with women, children, and servants carrying baskets of food—loaves of bread and hams and apples and hunks of cheese, anything they had been able to seize in a hurry. As the regiments marched past, the citizens of Richmond passed out food to the ravenous soldiers, until it seemed that every man among them was eating and stuffing his haversack. As soon as a woman emptied her basket, another stepped forward with more foodstuffs to take her place.

Beckoned from Saint John’s by the distant commotion, Lizzie stood in the churchyard amid a crowd of curious worshipers and looked down upon the scene from atop Church Hill. While some of her fellow parishioners promptly raced off to carry more provisions to the troops, Lizzie could only stand and watch, shocked by the contrast between these ragged, hungry, sunburnt, filthy soldiers and the bright, grinning, untested young recruits in spotless uniforms who had marched through those streets less than a year before. “Poor fellows,” Lizzie murmured. “What they have seen, and what they have suffered these past months.”

“God bless and protect them,” said Mother, beside her. “Come, Lizzie. We should do our part.”

Lizzie tore her gaze away. “Mother,” she protested in an undertone, mindful of the people around them, any one of whom could be an informant. “Are you really suggesting that we aid and abet the enemy army? Do we want them well fed and strong?”

“Lizzie,” Mother chided her gently. “What if Cousin Jack were marching off to battle through a town full of strangers? What if John were?”

Not for the first time, Lizzie thanked God that John was not enlisted in either army, but she knew her mother was right. She was ashamed that she had considered even for a moment to refuse to feed hungry men.

“Let’s make a good impression on the neighbors,” she said, linking her arm through her mother’s. “We’ll burden the rebels with so much food that the suspicious citizens of Richmond will never doubt us again.”

That was not her only reason, but she did not need to explain that to her mother.

Soldiers from all corners of the South had filled the capital in the early months of the war—so many that some of them had been sent home, to be called upon if needed later. So Lizzie was startled by new rumors that the troops were spread too thin, and that recruitment must be drastically and swiftly increased. In mid-April, the Confederate Congress passed a conscription act requiring all healthy white men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five to join the military for three years, and all soldiers currently serving one-year terms to have their enlistments extended to three years. Men engaged in certain essential occupations—ironworkers, railroad laborers, telegraph operators, civil officials, miners, nurses, and teachers, among them—were exempt, for they were considered more valuable on the home front than on the battlefield.

Lizzie clutched the arms of her chair, dizzy with relief—the Confederate ranks were thinning, but John, at thirty-eight, would not be conscripted.

“I don’t believe a draft will make any difference,” said Mother. “All Southern men of that age are already harassed and coerced into the service by friends and neighbors and lovely young ladies they want to impress. Where are these enormous throngs of idle, healthy young men they hope to drive into the army?”

“Not every man craves battlefield glory,” said Lizzie. “The men who have refused to be intimidated into enlisting will be outraged if they’re forced to by law, and I don’t mean only the secret Unionists among them. Perhaps they’ll mount a second rebellion against their own Confederacy.”

Mother looked dubious. “It seems unlikely that men who aren’t disposed to fight would mount a rebellion.”

“I am going to hope for it all the same.”

“As long as it is not a false hope.”

“Hope is never false. One’s hopes may not be fulfilled, but that does not mean it was wrong to hope.”

Sometimes hope was all that kept Lizzie from sinking into despair and abandoning her mission to help the imprisoned Union soldiers. Hope was what drove her to gather information about troop movements and Confederate defenses from recently captured prisoners and send it to the North. Hope compelled her to smuggle money into the prisons so the captives could bribe their way out and escape to Union lines. If she allowed herself to consider that perhaps she harbored nothing more than
false
hope, she might give up altogether.

Around the same time that the conscription act was announced, Mr. Botts was finally brought under guard from Castle Godwin to the court house to appear before a military tribunal. Though he had hired three lawyers, he represented himself in the trial, and over the course of several days he argued that although his objections to secession were well known, he had never been part of any conspiracy against the Confederate government; that he had been falsely accused; and that he was being wrongly prosecuted for his beliefs rather than any crime he had committed or intended to commit.

At first the tribunal seemed not to know what to do with him, but eventually they released a general order stating that it seemed compatible with the public safety to release him on parole, but it was not practicable to allow him to return to his home at Elba Park. Instead, until the Department of War declared otherwise, he would retire to the interior of the state at a place approved by the department; he would proceed to the approved destination “without unnecessary delay”; he would not leave that place or travel more than five miles from his residence; he would do nothing to injure the Confederate government while on parole; and—a requirement Lizzie thought would be impossible for him to obey—he would not “express any opinion tending to impair the confidence of the people in the capacity of the Confederate States to achieve their independence.” The tribunal would have better luck, Lizzie thought, asking the wind not to blow or water not to be wet. Almost as an afterthought, the tribunal had added, “Mr. Botts’s family will receive passports to join him, if desired.”

So Mr. Botts was to be banished to the interior of Virginia, but at least he would not face exile alone.

He had not been sentenced to death, Lizzie reminded herself when she grew melancholy thinking of Richmond without its most outspoken Unionist, the last great Whig in the city, the man she most admired in politics. He had not been sentenced to spend the duration of the war locked in the gloom of Castle Godwin, subjected to the cruel whims of the odious Captain George W. Alexander. He would not even have to leave Virginia.

Within a few days, she was reminded anew that it was never false to hope.

Mr. Botts had agreed to the terms of his parole, but moments before he was going to be released, he requested an interview with the secretary of war. When the meeting was granted the following morning, he strongly remonstrated against being sent from his home and asked to read a formal protest for the official record. Secretary Randolph was either persuaded by his lengthy argument or simply wanted to be done with the matter, for he agreed that Mr. Botts could spend his parole confined to a family farm in Hanover County, a mere ten miles northeast of the center of Richmond.

There was always reason to hope, Lizzie thought with satisfaction as she read Mr. Botts’s letter informing her of his parole, the first he had written to her from the farm. “I know you will be tempted to visit,” he warned, “and I do have much to tell you, but I beg you to choose the hour carefully. I am still closely watched, and I would not have you deemed guilty by association. If you seek interesting conversation in my absence, I encourage you to make the acquaintance of Lieutenant Erastus Ross, the nephew of my good friend Franklin Stearns. He is a clerk in the War Department under Captain Godwin, and you should feel welcome to call on him there.”

Mr. Botts’s strange turn of phrase told her that he suspected that his letter might be intercepted before it reached her. Lizzie knew of Franklin Stearns, the prosperous whiskey distiller and staunch Unionist who had been arrested the same day as Mr. Botts, but she knew nothing about the nephew. Surely Mr. Botts was trying to tell her that Lieutenant Ross was a Unionist too, and a potential friend, despite his place of employment.

Lizzie visited the prisoners at the Henrico County Jail as often as she was allowed, bringing them food, books, money for bribes, and, she hoped, encouragement, but she had not yet been allowed to set foot in the new prison, Libby, named after the tobacco merchant who had once owned the warehouse, and whose sign yet remained above the door.

The rule was not devised specifically for her, General Winder explained when she protested that the impertinent sentinels would not permit her through the gates. No civilian ladies were allowed.

“My visits did no harm at the old prison,” Lizzie reminded him. “In fact, I recall you yourself saying that I did quite a lot of good.”

“If I make an exception for you, I will have to permit everyone,” General Winder replied, coolly rational and utterly unlike him. He had become strangely vengeful, obdurate. She hardly knew how to bargain with him anymore.

A few days after receiving Mr. Botts’s letter, Lizzie invented an errand with Captain Godwin’s office at the War Department in order to take the measure of Franklin Stearns’s nephew, Erastus Ross. “We have a mutual acquaintance, I believe,” he said as he welcomed her into his office. He was tall and likely no older than twenty-two, with pleasant features, neatly parted fair hair, and a long mustache that followed the curve of his mouth and cheeks and tapered at the ends. “Mr. Botts has spoken highly of you.”

“He speaks well of you also,” said Lizzie, and then, mindful of other clerks and officers passing in the hallway, she turned the conversation to her errand, a small matter of a servant found at large with an expired pass. Although she was obliged to choose her phrases carefully to avoid entrapping herself, Lieutenant Ross’s remarks and responses convinced her that he was no ardent rebel. Thus satisfied, after concluding her business, she invited him to take tea with her and her mother the following afternoon.

He arrived five minutes early, smartly attired in civilian clothes and looking wary as she escorted him to the library. He fidgeted through tea and cakes and a bit of chat about the weather until Lizzie decided to have mercy on him and get to the point.

She began by showing him numerous fond letters from Mr. Botts to prove herself worthy of his trust, and then she confided what he surely already suspected—she was as loyal to the Union as Mr. Botts, as loyal as President Lincoln. After that, Mr. Ross confessed his own Unionist sentiments in a flood of words constrained too long behind a dam of prudent reticence.

“I trust that Captain Godwin is convinced of your loyalty, despite your uncle’s arrest?” Lizzie queried, pouring her guest another cup of tea.

“Yes, he is,” replied Mr. Ross. “General Winder’s own son is a captain in the Union army, so how can anyone condemn me for my uncle’s misplaced loyalties?”

Lizzie set down the teapot and offered him sugar and cream. “But he is not so satisfied with the quality of your work that he would refuse to let you go if you requested a transfer?”

Mr. Ross stirred his tea slowly—to buy himself time to think of a response, Lizzie suspected. “I’m a good clerk to him, but not exemplary. I lack the impetus to be any more productive than absolutely necessary to keep my job. Where would you have me go?”

Lizzie drew herself up, interlaced her fingers, and rested her hands in her lap. “Libby Prison has a vacancy for a clerk.”