Defenseless Women

Wherein the Rebel Rose is sent to jail

.....................................................................................................................................

Greenhow and her daughter at the Old Capitol prison

On January 18, Allan Pinkerton's patience ran out. Since the end of August, Rose O'Neal Greenhow had been under house arrest at her house on 16th and K [site of today's Hay-Adams Hotel] for aiding the Confederacy, particularly in the run up to Bull Run. In that time she had been nothing short of a nightmare for Washington's provost-marshal, Brig. General Andrew Porter, responsible for maintaining military security across the expanding area of operations for the Army of the Potomac. Greenhow was alternating charming and haughty, and loved playing the beleaguered Southern woman to the press.

She also was still sending messages to the Confederate Army of the Potomac and her old friend, Thomas Jordan, adjutant to General G.T. Beauregard. On December 26 she had managed to smuggle out a letter to Jordan through a mutual friend and member of his spy ring in Washington.

In a day or two, 1,200 cavalry supported by four batteries of artillery will cross the river above to get behind Manassas and cut off railroad and other communications with our army, whilst an attack is made in front. For God's sake, heed this. It is positive. They are obliged to move or give up.

Recs: The Pickets Unusually Vigilant

The best pieces I read this week

..........................................................................................................................................

Harper's Weekly cartoon from October 14 referring to Rose O'Neal Greenhow and her fellow female spies

October 15, 1861 was most significant to the war along the Potomac because of a seemingly minor event. General G.T. Beauregard at last put the finishing touches on his grandiose official report of the Battle of Manassas and mailed it to General Samuel Cooper. The Confederate commander had not spared Richmond from any of his characteristic purple prose and had also taken the opportunity to grind a few axes, for instance beginning not with the lead up to the battle, but with his own account of the rejection of his strategic proposals by the very people he was submitting his report to. The minute he signed his name to it, it became a time bomb ticking down to detonation.

Gotcha!

Wherein the Rebel Rose is nabbed

................................................................................................................................

On August 23, the somewhat sour-faced Scot took pleasure in a good night's work. He had found the Rebels' leak in Washington and plugged it. Rose O'Neal Greenhow was now his prisoner.

Rose Greenhow

The man was Allan Pinkerton, and he was on temporary absence from his detective firm (the famed Pinkerton National Detective Agency) by special request of Major General George McClellan to found the Union Intelligence Service in Washington to root out spies, especially those that had delivered news to Confederate Brigadier General G.T. Beauregard about the build up and movement of Union forces. In reality, Beauregard probably didn't need their reports since the army had moved so slowly and destructively. But in the paranoia following Bull Run, spies were given undue importance. Besides, there was no area of the defense of Washington McClellan wasn't sure he could improve.

As far as spies went, Greenhow wasn't a particularly a good one. She had been born in Port Tobacco, Maryland around the time of the British raid that burned Washington, but when her father was killed by rebellious slaves in 1817, young Rose went to live with an aunt in the rebuilt Washington City. At her boarding house, Rose grew-up around Washington's social elites and Members of Congress and important national figures came to enjoy being around the high-spirited young woman. She fell in with Dolley Madison's social circle and met the man she would marry (with Dolley's blessing, of course), Dr. Robert Greenhow.

Marching on Manassas

McDowell's map of Northern Virginia from July 1861 (LOC)

"McDowell marched on the afternoon of July 16th, the men carrying three days’ rations in their haversacks," recounted James B. Fry, the assistant adjutant general and chief of staff for the Army of Northeast Virginia. "Provision wagons were to follow from Alexandria the next day." As the top staffer for Brigadier General Irvin McDowell, leader of the army sent by the Federal Government to crush the rebels around Manassas Junction, Fry would barely have slept the night before as he ensured every one of the five division commanders perfectly understood how their men were to get to the rally point at Centreville.

"One day... we received our first order to march to a field of battle," remembered Francis Fiske, the lieutenant colonel (thus second in command) of the 2nd New Hampshire Infantry Regiment in Ambrose Burnside's brigade. Orders traveled from Fry who interpreted McDowell's will, to Second Division commander Colonel David Hunter, whose staff interpreted it into new orders suitable to get his two brigades moving. Those orders then reached Burnside and his Second Brigade, whose staff further refined them for the four regiments. One of these regiments was the 2nd New Hampshire, whose colonel, Gilman Marston, then had his staff further refine them for his companies (as a former Congressman, Marston probably had aides that were volunteers, but the poorer or less famous colonels wrote the next set of orders themselves). Lt. Colonel Fiske received the orders with the company commanders and other officers of his regiment.