ELIZABETH LEONARD

All the Daring of the Soldier

Women of the Civil War Armies

"The Ladies Were Terrific" — A Handful of Civil War Women Spies

"[At first] it was not deemed possible that any danger could result from the utterances of non-combatant females. . . . That this policy was a mistaken one was soon fully proved. . ." — Allan Pinkerton, The Spy of the Rebellion, 1883

Lydia Barrington was born in Ireland in 1729.2 In 1753, at the age of twenty-four, she married William Darragh, the son of a clergyman and himself a teacher. Not long thereafter the couple immigrated to colonial Pennsylvania, where they produced nine children, four of whom died in infancy. In Philadelphia, Lydia Barrington Darragh established not only her family but also her career as a combination midwife, nurse, and undertaker, by means of which occupations she served as her family's primary wage earner. Throughout her four decades in Philadelphia, Darragh provided important personal services to the members of her community, particularly its women; she also provided important services of a different sort to the army of George Washington during the American Revolution.

In 1827, almost forty years after Lydia Darragh's death in 1789, an anonymous author published in the new historical journal, the American Quarterly Review, what amounted to a summary of direct testimony received from Darragh and others regarding her activities on behalf of the patriot cause during the Revolutionary War. According to the article-whose segment on Darragh in turn became the core of most later published treatments of her story-once the British army occupied Philadelphia in September 1777, Darragh began on a regular basis to provide her son Charles-an officer in Washington's Continental army-with bits and pieces of information regarding the enemy army's plans, which she gathered primarily from eavesdropping on the conversations of the several officers who were stationed at the headquarters of the British commander, General William Howe, near her home. These items of information were written in a simple code on scraps of paper that Darragh then typically hid inside the large buttons of the garments she and her trusted messengers wore, to be conveyed at strategic moments to the proper authorities.

Several weeks after she had taken up the role of a regular intelligence operative serving the patriot army, the significance of Darragh's surreptitious activities increased exponentially when she and her family became unwitting hosts to Howe's chief administrative assistant, the Adjutant General. One evening in early December 1777, the Adjutant General informed Darragh that her family must retire early as he needed the back room of her house for an extended private conference with other British army luminaries. As ordered, Darragh sent her husband and children to bed. But her own curiosity had been aroused by the apparent seriousness of the meeting, and she positioned herself outside the door of the conference room, where she overheard a plan for a surprise attack on General Washington's troops, stationed about ten miles north of town at a place called White Marsh.

Determined to convey this information to the general as quickly as possible in order to save not only her son's life but the lives of many others, Lydia Darragh returned to her own room, where she remained in bed until the officers knocked at her door to let her know they were leaving. When they knocked, Darragh rose slowly in order to convince them that she had been deeply asleep all the while. Then, on the following day when the time seemed right, Darragh told her family that she had to go to a mill some distance away to purchase flour-a trip for which she persuaded General Howe to grant her a pass through the British lines. Once beyond the pickets, Darragh hastened towards the Americans' encampment, encountering one of Washington's subordinate officers-a Lieutenant Colonel Craig-to whom she disclosed what she had heard. Craig then saw to it that Darragh was fed while he himself proceeded to transmit the information to Washington, who gave it full credence and set about undermining the plot. Back home, Darragh anxiously awaited the consequences of her deed. When the British troops returned to Philadelphia, she quickly learned that her efforts had successfully foiled their plans. The Adjutant General's suspicions fell for a time on members of the Darragh family, but they fell most lightly on Lydia, who, he recalled, had been sound asleep when he and the others had concluded their conference. In the end, he remained mystified and frustrated, and Darragh escaped detection.

It is not known whether Darragh continued to provide information to Washington's army in the wake of this incident, or whether she instead counted herself lucky for not having been caught and subsequently retired for the duration of the war to care for her family and pursue her own work. An obituary from January 1790 suggests the latter, for it pays no attention to Darragh's wartime espionage activities, focusing instead on her many contributions to her community's health and welfare, particularly in her capacity as a midwife. Still, it is beyond question that Lydia Darragh had at a crucial moment performed dangerous service as a spy on behalf of the patriot cause. Even in the early twentieth century, one source fondly lifted her up as "the Brave Quakeress" whose timely act "Saved Washington's Army from Destruction."

Whether or not they personally knew the story of Lydia Darragh's intelligence activities on behalf of the Continental army during the American Revolution, an untold number of women of both the North and the South bravely upheld the tradition of American women's engagement in spy work during the Civil War. Undoubtedly the most famous of these female Civil War spies-in her own time and in historical memory-was Maria Isabella ("Belle") Boyd, born near Martinsburg, Virginia (now West Virginia), in 1843. By 1861 this childhood tomboy-known for climbing trees, racing her horse through the woods, and relentlessly bossing her playmates around-had grown into a compelling young woman whom many considered beautiful, and who many more insisted had an uncanny knack for making the most of her numerous charms to win the hearts and confidence of men. At least as important, when the Civil War broke out, the teenage Boyd (whose family, although not wealthy, was well connected to the Confederate leadership) proved herself, in the words of one contemporary Northern journalist, "insanely devoted to the rebel cause." For this reason above all others, Belle Boyd dedicated herself immediately to doing what she could on the Confederacy's behalf.

On July 3, 1861, prior to the Union and Confederate armies' first real engagement at Bull Run later that month, federal troops occupied Martinsburg. Soon after, a number of drunken soldiers barged into her family home and attempted, among other things, to hoist a United States flag on the roof. In the process, one of the soldiers seems to have insulted Boyd's mother, who refused to see the Stars and Stripes raised over her home. In response to the soldier's rudeness, Boyd took out a pistol and shot him. Whether or not Boyd killed the young soldier is unclear, but her violent action nearly provoked a riot, and the Union forces' commanding officer subsequently demanded that she appear before him in connection with the incident. However, persuaded by powerful cultural notions that prevailed throughout most of the war deeming it unchivalrous to adopt, unless absolutely necessary, any "resolute measures . . . toward those of the weaker sex" regardless of the odiousness of their activities, the officer failed to find Boyd guilty of any punishable offense. The only significant consequence of Boyd's action was the posting of a guard at her home to forestall similar occurrences in the future.

If he hoped to encourage the eager young Boyd to take an early retirement from her prosecession activism, the federal commander at Martinsburg was destined for disappointment. Instead, Boyd's attack on the Union soldier marked the beginning of her career as a Confederate operative determined to provide the Southern army with whatever information she could obtain about the movements and plans of the enemy's troops. In her 1865 memoir, Belle Boyd in Camp and Prison, Boyd recalled that her residence within the federal lines and her acquaintance with so many federal officers gave her easy access to important strategic intelligence. "Whatever I heard I regularly and carefully committed to paper, and whenever an opportunity offered I sent my secret dispatch boy . . . [to] some brave officer in command of the Confederate troops." Working initially without a cipher and apparently without even trying to disguise her handwriting, Boyd almost immediately found herself in trouble again when one of her notes ended up in Union hands. This time federal authorities promptly took Boyd into custody and warned her that her actions were treasonable. Once again, however, traditions of chivalry-combined with a general shortage of prison facilities considered appropriate for housing a woman with even a modicum of social standing-led authorities to release her, thereby unavoidably allowing Boyd to continue her spy work. Gradually learning the use of a cipher, Boyd continued to ride through the countryside on horseback transmitting her encoded messages until March 1862, when she was again arrested. This time frustrated federal officials in Martinsburg held her for a week in a converted hotel while they pondered her case. As before, however, at the end of the week she received her release from General John A. Dix, the commander of the Union's Middle Department. Dix sent Boyd to join her family at Front Royal, about forty miles south, with nothing more than a stern admonition to cease and desist.

At Front Royal over the next several weeks, Boyd continued to operate in opposition to the Union army, eavesdropping-like her Revolutionary predecessor Lydia Darragh-on federal war councils being held at her aunt's hotel in town or even in her own home, and compiling bits of information from seemingly informal conversations with federal officers and soldiers who were as yet both unfamiliar with her face and growing reputation and perhaps also foolishly naove about the curious young woman's motives. Whatever information she gathered over the course of the early spring Boyd faithfully transmitted to significant figures in the Confederate military.

It was in late May 1862, in connection with Confederate General Thomas J. ("Stonewall") Jackson's campaign to defend Virginia's Shenandoah Valley against further Yankee encroachment, that Boyd performed what has come to be known as her most important piece of work for the Confederacy. Having accumulated, through various channels, a cache of information she believed relevant to Jackson's strategy, on May 23 Boyd raced out on horseback to notify the general in person at his headquarters several miles away. Major Henry Kyd Douglas later recalled Boyd's daring venture, in which he became an unexpected but enthusiastic participant. Boyd, Douglas wrote, was dressed in white as she hurried in his direction, and she "seemed, when I saw her, to heed neither weeds nor fences, but waved a bonnet as she came on, trying, it was evident, to keep the hill between herself and the village." Under orders, Douglas rode out to meet this "romantic maiden whose tall, supple, and graceful figure struck me as soon as I came in sight of her." Boyd, he wrote, was nearly breathless as she gasped out her message for Jackson: "Go back quick and tell him that the Yankee force is very small-one regiment of Maryland infantry, several pieces of artillery and several companies of cavalry. Tell him I know, for I went through the camps and got it out of an officer. Tell him to charge right down and he will catch them all." With that, she was gone. Moments later Douglas conveyed her words to Jackson, noting that even as he spoke with his commanding officer, "I saw the wave of her white bonnet as she entered the village and disappeared among its houses."

As tradition has it, Boyd's maneuver allowed Stonewall Jackson and his men to claim an important victory that day, driving the Yankees garrisoned in Front Royal back across the Potomac River towards Washington. For her timely deed the general expressed his gratitude by rewarding Boyd with a note of acknowledgment that became one of her most treasured possessions. "I thank you," Jackson wrote, "for myself and for the Army, for the immense service that you have rendered your country to-day." Indeed, as a result of this and her other exploits, by the summer of 1862 Boyd's reputation as a spy was well established. "You have heard or read of 'Belle Boyd,'" wrote one federal officer to a relative towards the end of June; "a lady of considerable notoriety all over the valley. . . . [T]hat she is a precious rogue I think no one questions though no one can prove it." The troublesome Boyd, wrote another, had a flair for crossing federal lines "with perfect ease and impunity, whenever she wished, in spite of their efforts to the contrary. They say," he added, "she is a wonderfully keen intriguer."

At the same time that word of her deeds was spreading, federal officials were growing weary of treating Boyd's interference in their plans for the region as nothing more than a minor inconvenience. In late July 1862, following one of Boyd's expeditions to carry dispatches, they took her into custody again, this time with the intention of bringing a halt to her activities. On July 30 Brigadier General Julius White, at Winchester, Virginia (about twenty miles north of Front Royal and the same distance south of Washington, D.C.), wrote to Assistant Secretary of War C. P. Wolcott to inform him of Boyd's arrest and to request further orders. "Mr. [Alfred] Cridge is here with Miss Boyd as prisoner," wrote White. "What shall be done with her?" Later that day Wolcott responded succinctly: "Direct Cridge to come immediately to Washington and bring with him Belle Boyd in close custody, committing her on arrival to the Old Capitol Prison. Furnish him with such aid as he may need to get her safely here."

Formerly a boardinghouse, the Old Capitol Prison was a three-story building made of "dingy brick," which one Washington provost marshal, William E. Doster, later described as "one of the many makeshifts to which an unexpected war had driven the authorities," where the "real walls were necessarily the bayonets, the bullets, and above all the incorruptibility of the soldiers who guarded the premises. . . ." There, nineteen-year-old Boyd underwent a brief investigation, culminating in her bold refusal to take the oath of allegiance. Boyd then began a monthlong imprisonment, during which she enjoyed the admiration and affection of many of her fellow inmates. On August 1 fellow prisoner William F. Broaddus described Boyd in his diary as a "graceful" person and a "remarkable character," whose dress was "simple," whose manners were "easy," and whose "style of conversation" was "interesting." Of her secessionism Broaddus noted approvingly that "she spoke in the most fearless manner [of] her determination to work while she lived for the Southern cause, and to die, if need be, in its defense."

Sometime later D. A. Mahony-a Northern journalist imprisoned at the Old Capitol for his own secessionist proclivities-similarly described Boyd's defiant attitude towards the Yankees. This she displayed, among other things, by her frequent singing of the anthem "Maryland, My Maryland," whose words, "stirring enough to Southern hearts, were enunciated by her with such peculiar expression as to touch even sensibilities which did not sympathize with the cause which inspired the song." According to Mahony, Boyd was kept confined in her room most of the time, but had permission to keep both her door and her window open. Her appearance at either the door or the window simultaneously exposed her to the worshipful gazes of her admirers and the abuse of her detractors. Federal prison guards and soldiers stationed near the prison in particular treated Boyd rudely, as if to suggest that her imprisonment in and of itself placed her beyond the pale of chivalry's protection. Treating her instead as a "common woman," soldiers and guards taunted her with pretended jabs with their bayonets and with "coarse jests, vulgar expressions and the vilest slang of the brothel . . . made still more coarse, vulgar and indecent by the throwing off of the little restraint which civilized society places upon the most abandoned prostitutes and their companions." Boyd refused to break down in the face of such defamatory behavior, and instead responded in kind, "hurrahing for [Confederate President] Jeff[erson] Davis and Stonewall Jackson," mocking those who insulted her with comments such as "How long did it take you to come from Bull Run?" and indicating her disdain for soldiers who were stationed on guard duty rather than at the front: "Go meet men, you cowards. What are you doing here in Washington?" By the time she left the Old Capitol, Mahony recalled, Boyd's irrepressible nature had won over many of her sworn enemies, so that there was "not one, Federalist or confederate, Prisoner of State, officer of the Old Capitol, as well as prisoner of war, who did not feel that he was about to part with one for whom he had at least a great personal regard." As if to confirm the truth in Mahony's words, former provost marshal Doster-who knew her while she was imprisoned at the Old Capitol-later recalled Boyd with fondness. "During the whole stay," he wrote, "she was never, to my knowledge, found in ill-humor, but bravely endured a tedious and companionless imprisonment."

Her irrepressible nature aside, evidence suggests that the challenges of her captivity-not least of all the oppressive late-summer heat in the capital-wore Boyd down physically. Late in August, in part, apparently, because of her physical suffering, federal officials decided to release Boyd, banishing her to Richmond, where they hoped she would leave her spy career behind once and for all. On August 29 Brigadier General James S. Wadsworth, stationed in Washington, wrote to General Dix at Fortress Monroe-the headquarters of the Union's Department of Virginia, located on the tip of the Virginia peninsula-directing him to place Boyd beyond the federal lines at the first opportunity. Shortly thereafter, Boyd enjoyed a rousing welcome in the Confederate capital, where her exploits on the nation's behalf had become well known.

Determined not to let enemy officials restrict her movements in any way, however, Boyd soon left Richmond for an extended tour of the South, ending up in occupied Martinsburg again sometime in early 1863. By the late summer she was arrested anew for being within federal lines in contempt of the orders pertaining to her banishment. She was subsequently returned to Washington and imprisoned at the Carroll Prison-an annex of the Old Capitol-this time for three months. As before, Boyd's health declined under the stress of her confinement, and again she was sent south. When doctors in Richmond suggested that she take another long trip to improve her health, Boyd conceived what became the final work of her espionage service to the Confederate military: bearing dispatches from the Confederacy to its supporters in England. According to one source, Jefferson Davis provided her with five hundred dollars to cover her expenses.

In May 1864, at Wilmington, North Carolina, Boyd boarded a blockade runner called the Greyhound and set sail for Europe. Her venture and her spy career, however, were cut short by the Greyhound's swift capture by the USS Connecticut and its forced return to Fortress Monroe hundreds of miles up the Atlantic coast. As it turns out, the incident did not prove a total loss to Boyd: among the Connecticut's crew was a young ensign named Samuel Harding who seems to have fallen in love with her on the journey back to Fortress Monroe. On August 25, 1864, the two married in England, having found their way there by separate routes following Boyd's final release from federal custody and Harding's dismissal from the navy "for neglect of duty." In England, Boyd composed and began to market her memoir, in part to raise funds to support herself after Harding returned to the United States-possibly carrying Confederate dispatches-where he was arrested and imprisoned as a Southern spy. The two reunited briefly, only to be torn apart again by Harding's sudden early death.

After the war, the young widow took up a theatrical career in England and America, centering many of her performances on her exploits as a Confederate spy. Boyd supplemented her income by giving lectures at veterans' gatherings across the United States where, according to one source, "many an old soldier remembered her as the most daring woman in the Confederacy." In addition, Boyd bore three children over the course of two subsequent marriages-first to a former officer of the British army named John S. Hammond, with whom she went to live in California, and, after their 1884 divorce, to the son of a Toledo, Ohio, clergyman named Nathaniel R. High, with whom she lived until her death. In the early 1870s a tired and careworn Boyd briefly spent time in a mental hospital in Stockton, California, her unexpected disappearance from the public eye leading to the publication of a number of false reports of her untimely death. On November 12, 1874, the New York Times reprinted an article that had originally appeared in the Atlanta News a few days earlier, describing a woman who was traveling the country posing as Belle Boyd and giving lectures. This article alleged that Boyd's "stormy career" had landed her in a California lunatic asylum in 1872, where she had died. "It is cruel," the article lamented, "this attempt to drag from her grave in California the poor woman whose many faults were more than atoned for in her tragic end, and whose unwomanly career deserves forgiveness and forgetfulness in its really ardent and patriotic devotion to the South." Boyd's actual death came in 1900, at the age of sixty-seven, in Kilbourne, Wisconsin, apparently the result of a heart attack. In 1929 the United Daughters of the Confederacy arranged to have her remains removed from the cemetery in Kilbourne and transferred to the town of her birth.

Boyd was by no means the only American woman during the Civil War to take up the sort of spy work that Lydia Darragh had performed during the American Revolution. Rather, she was joined in her Civil War espionage operations by a host of other women, among them four who left sufficient records for us to flesh out their stories in some detail: Rose O'Neal Greenhow, Antonia Ford, Elizabeth Van Lew, and Pauline Cushman.

Born in 1817 in rural Montgomery County, Maryland, Rose O'Neal-like Belle Boyd-came from a family of limited financial resources and little education. Far more so than was the case with Boyd, however, O'Neal's humble beginnings failed to inhibit her climb up the social ladder. As a teenager Rose O'Neal traveled with her sister Ellen Elizabeth to Washington, D.C., where they stayed with an aunt who maintained a boardinghouse in the Old Capitol building (later, ironically, to become the Old Capitol Prison). There, the attractive young sisters had the opportunity to associate with a number of their aunt's male boarders, many of them up-and-coming politicians, and Rose in particular developed a taste for living an active social life and rubbing shoulders with people in power. Some years later, when, at the age of twenty-six, she married forty-three-year-old Dr. Robert Greenhow, Rose O'Neal demonstrated her determination to leave behind what she considered the dull country life of her childhood. Dr. Greenhow, a Virginian, was both wealthy and socially well placed; marriage to him promised Rose continued access to the sort of world to which earlier visits to her aunt's boardinghouse had accustomed her.

Indeed, by the time she was in her mid-thirties, the mother of four daughters, and living with her husband and family in the nation's capital, Rose O'Neal Greenhow had not only established strong connections with the Washington political elite but had herself become a person of significant social influence-and cunning. Surrounded by the many advantages that her prestigious husband could offer her, wrote one contemporary, Greenhow became well known for "her beauty, the brilliance of her conversation, her aptitude for intrigue, the royal dignity of her manners, and the unscrupulous perseverance with which she accomplished whatever she set her heart upon." In 1850 Greenhow and her husband left Washington for four years, heading west, where the doctor thought he saw the opportunity for great financial gain. Instead, an injury led to his early death in San Francisco. His widow returned to Washington, moved with her daughters into a small home near the White House, and resumed all the valuable contacts that she had established prior to the family's western sojourn, presumably living off her late husband's wealth. As the 1850s gave way to the 1860s, Greenhow enhanced her independent status as a premier Washington hostess and socialite, as well as her reputation as a woman to be reckoned with, thanks to her ability to obtain favors, influence members of Congress, and advance her friends' careers

As sectional tensions increased, Greenhow, like Boyd, openly revealed herself to be a woman of "pronounced rebel proclivities," and at the war's outbreak she immediately became an activist on the Confederacy's behalf. She linked up with Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Jordan (alias Thomas John Rayford) of Virginia, a former quartermaster in the United States Army who was in the process of developing an elaborate Confederate spy network in the federal capital. From Jordan, Greenhow learned the use of a simple, twenty-six-symbol cipher, and she began to exploit her connections with prominent Unionists for the purpose of eliciting information that she then transmitted in code to relevant figures in the Confederacy. Greenhow and Jordan also invented an elaborate system by which she could convey significant information to him or to their trusted assistants by raising and lowering the shades of the windows on one side of her house. Over time, Greenhow and Jordan enlisted the regular help of various others, forming an extensive spy ring that included both men and women.

Greenhow became most famous for her spy work that gave the Confederate army the edge in its first major confrontation with the soldiers in blue at the battle of Bull Run in July 1861. An 1863 letter written by General P. G. T. Beauregard-second in command to the Confederate army's ranking officer, General Joseph E. Johnston, in the summer of 1861-confirms that on July 10 Greenhow sent an attractive young woman named Betty Duvall to Beauregard's post at Fairfax Court House, just a few miles from Bull Run, bearing-tightly wound in her chignon-a message concerning Union commander Irvin McDowell's preparations to advance on the Confederacy six days later. General Milledge L. Bonham of South Carolina received the message and transmitted it directly to Beauregard, who notified President Davis and then immediately began preparations to undermine McDowell's advance. On the sixteenth, Greenhow communicated a second time with Beauregard, who was now encamped with his army near Bull Run. With the help of George Donellan, a former Interior Department clerk, Greenhow sent Beauregard an encoded dispatch containing the news that, as Beauregard later wrote, "the enemy-55,000 strong, I believe-would positively commence that day his advance from Arlington Heights and Alexandria on to Manassas [near Bull Run], via Fairfax Court-House and Centerville." This news Beauregard also forwarded by telegraph to President Davis, who ordered General Johnston, stationed fifty miles away, to bring his troops into the area as reinforcements. While awaiting Johnston's arrival, Beauregard shifted his own troops to meet the advancing federals, and on July 21 the Union suffered a stunning and humiliating defeat. The following day Greenhow received from Thomas Jordan an expression of Jefferson Davis's gratitude for her loyal service, similar to that which Boyd later received from General Jackson. Wrote Jordan: "Our President and our General direct me to thank you. We rely upon you for further information. The Confederacy owes you a debt."

Over the next several weeks Greenhow continued to gather and transmit information to her contacts in the Confederate army. "I was urged to leave the city by more than one," she later wrote, "and an escort offered to be furnished me if I desired; but, at whatever peril, I resolved to remain, conscious of the great service I could render my country, my position giving me remarkable facilities for obtaining information." With relative ease Greenhow seems to have gotten her hands on valuable military secrets, including details about Union military strength in and around Washington. However, even as Greenhow moved about with apparent impunity, federal officials were growing determined to put an immediate halt to all leakage of strategic military information. In connection with this goal, they reached the conclusion that the influential and outspoken Greenhow must be a key player in the suspected ring of prosecession intelligence operatives functioning in the capital. By late July the head of the federal government's newly formed secret service organization, Allan Pinkerton, ordered the close surveillance of the Greenhow home and-despite his wariness about angering Greenhow's many powerful friends in the United States Congress-the investigation and arrest, where appropriate, of any and all persons entering or leaving the house. Finally, on August 23, having gathered what he believed to be sufficient evidence of her treasonable behavior, Pinkerton placed Greenhow herself under house arrest. He immediately stationed a number of men inside the house as guards, authorizing them to arrest any of her coconspirators who might unsuspectingly come to call.

The thorough search of the house that followed initially produced little incriminating evidence, thanks to Greenhow's timely destruction of a number of relevant papers. Over the next few days, however, the men who tore apart her clothes, furniture, and other personal belongings found copies of eight intelligence reports dating from July and August which clearly demonstrated the extent of Greenhow's knowledge about Northern military plans and fortifications. "No more troops have arrived," Greenhow had written on August 21. "Great activity and anxiety here, and the whole strength concentrating around Washington, and the cry 'The Capital in danger,' renewed. I do not give much heed to the rumors of [Union General Nathaniel] Banks' command arriving here, although he has advanced this way." Greenhow's reports also implicated a number of her cohorts and heaped suspicion upon some decidedly prominent Unionist figures who had come under her sway, not the least of whom was the powerful senator from Massachusetts, Henry Wilson, who seems to have been one of Greenhow's primary-if foolishly unwitting-sources and perhaps even her lover. (Many interpreters of Greenhow's papers believe that Senator Wilson was the author of a stack of love letters also found in her home.) Although the evidence on this score is not conclusive, that Wilson provided Greenhow with important military information is indisputable. "Wilson told me last night," Greenhow mentioned in her August 21 report, "that they had . . . fifty guns of heavy calibre,-confirmed by my scouts. Wilson goes on [Union General George B.] McClelland's [sic] staff today as aid and adviser. I regret this. . . ." Meanwhile, Greenhow was outraged by the intruders' treatment of her things. "Everything showed signs of the contamination," she wrote later. "Those unkempt, unwashed wretches-the detective police-had rolled themselves in my fine linen; their mark was visible upon every chair and sofa. . . . Every hallowed association with my home had been rudely blasted-my castle had become my prison."

Word spread quickly that federal agents had captured a major figure in Confederate espionage, and a woman. On August 26 both the New York Times and the New York Herald smugly reported Greenhow's arrest, and many-as in Boyd's case-cheerfully cast aside traditions of chivalry when faced with the spectacle of a woman actually being taken prisoner for spying. Some suggested that she would soon be tried for treason. Instead, Greenhow remained under house arrest with her youngest daughter, "Little Rose," and two of her female couriers, Lillie Mackall and Betty Hassler (Betty Duvall had been removed from service in the wake of her delivery of the July 10 dispatch to General Beauregard: she was considered too attractive not to be noticed a second time). Over the weeks ahead, federal officials confined at "Fort Greenhow" a number of other women also suspected of intelligence work on behalf of the Confederacy, but none of the prisoners achieved Greenhow's level of celebrity. According to one source, "Crowds passed the house hoping for a glimpse of the lady, and thousands talked of the new prison. . . . An official assured her that he could have made a great deal of money by charging the public ten dollars for each peep at her." Greenhow attempted to make good use of both her political connections and the popular interest in her case. In November she wrote to United States Secretary of State William H. Seward complaining of the conditions of her imprisonment and comparing her situation to that of Marie Antoinette. Needless to say, the letter failed to bring about her release. In the meantime, however, the disgruntled Greenhow continued to serve as a conduit of information to the Confederacy. Federal officials made various attempts to stop the flow of information in and out of the house, searching the rooms on a regular basis, restricting Greenhow's use of writing materials, sealing the windows, and denying her any opportunities for communication with suspected coconspirators. But Greenhow was doggedly persistent (she even claimed to have put her hands on the minutes of President Abraham Lincoln's cabinet meetings), and as a result, on January 18, 1862, authorities transferred her, with Little Rose, to a more secure spot, namely the Old Capitol.

For about five months Greenhow and her daughter remained at the Old Capitol, now prisoners in the same spot where as a teenager Greenhow had acquired her first taste of the whirl of life in Washington. During this time Greenhow continued to try to provide information to Southern loyalists whenever the opportunity presented itself. She also continued to write angry letters to political contacts and family members on the outside complaining about the conditions of her imprisonment. On March 15, 1862, she wrote to one of her daughters, now living in California, grumbling about the filth and vermin she contended with daily, and also about the presence on the prison grounds of contraband slaves, whose growing numbers left Union army officials scrambling for places to house them. "We cannot open our windows without the stench from over 100 negroes," Greenhow wrote with predictable racist contempt towards those she considered subhuman, adding nastily, "If you have ever been in the neighborhood of a negro meeting-house in summer you can fancy what odors reach us when our door opens. . . ." That same month, perhaps as a result of the intervention of some of her prestigious connections, Greenhow underwent not a trial for treason but an appearance before a commission consisting of General John Dix (who later examined Belle Boyd) and United States Secretary of the Treasury Judge Edwards Pierrepont. As officials would later do with Boyd, Dix and Pierrepont decided that Greenhow should be banished south, where presumably she could do less harm and also draw less attention to the whole project of Confederate espionage. Still, it was June 2 before the New York Times recorded her release and her removal, under close custody, to Baltimore. There, supporters of the Confederacy greeted her with the same enthusiasm that Richmond residents would accord Boyd a year later.

Traveling on to the Confederate capital, Greenhow enjoyed further adulation from various dignitaries, including President Davis and General Beauregard, who praised her for her contributions to the cause of the South. Wrote Greenhow:

"In the evening after my arrival our President did me the honour to call upon me, and his words of greeting, "But for you there would have been no battle of Bull Run," repaid me for all that I had endured, even though it had been magnified tenfold. And I shall ever remember that as the proudest moment of my whole life, to have received the tribute of praise from him who stands as the apostle of our country's liberty in the eyes of the civilised world."

From that point on, Greenhow continued her activities on behalf of the South as best she could, in the last resort assuming the role of a blockade runner, in connection with which she traveled, with Little Rose, to England and France. There, she socialized, tried to drum up foreign support for the Confederacy, and produced her memoir, My Imprisonment, and the First Year of Abolition Rule at Washington, a provocative work that brought the loyalty and good sense of a number of important Union men into question. As the months passed, however, Greenhow yearned to return to America, where she still owned property, and where she could feel more connected to the events of the war and possibly serve the Confederacy more effectively. With this in mind, and with two thousand dollars in gold in her possession, in September 1864 Greenhow boarded a blockade runner, the Condor, bound for North Carolina.

Greenhow failed to make it home to the Confederacy alive. Spied by a Union gunboat in the waters just off the coast near Wilmington, North Carolina (the site of Belle Boyd's embarkation for England in 1864), the Condor raced ahead up the Cape Fear River, the captain hoping to avoid confrontation. Instead, he ran the Condor aground on a sandbar. Desperate to escape, Greenhow demanded that she be allowed to board a lifeboat, although the weather was ominous. Against the captain's wishes and advice, Greenhow and two other passengers struck out for shore. Their lifeboat capsized in the rough water, and within moments Greenhow, weighed down by her cache of gold, drowned. When her body, which washed up on the shore the following day, arrived by steamer in Wilmington, she was laid out in state in a hospital chapel with a Confederate flag for a shroud. On October 1 Greenhow was buried. Sometime later a monument was erected to commemorate her deeds on the Confederacy's behalf.

Belle Boyd and Rose O'Neal Greenhow dedicated themselves to the Confederacy and served it by gathering and transmitting information relevant to their nation's military operations whenever and by whatever means they could. Federal officals during the war clearly considered both women sufficiently dangerous to the Union cause and sufficiently accomplished in their efforts against it to merit incarceration-despite strong Victorian resistance to the use of such action against women. They felt much the same about Antonia Ford, a young Virginia native whose espionage services, like those of Boyd and Greenhow, contributed significantly to one of the Union's more embarrassing, and costly, military misadventures.

Antonia Ford was born in Fairfax Court House, Virginia-the site of General Beauregard's headquarters prior to the first battle of Bull Run-in 1838. Unlike Boyd and Greenhow, Ford came from a wealthy family: her father was a well-known and prosperous local merchant. Like Boyd and Greenhow, however, as soon as the war broke out, the decidedly prosecessionist twenty-three-year-old Ford-whom contemporaries universally described as beautiful, refined in her manners, and widely courted-proved herself to be spunky, independent, and determined to lend her many talents to the cause of the South. By the fall of 1861, Ford's patriotism and loyalty had carved out a place for her in the affections of J. E. B. Stuart, already a well-respected general in the Confederate cavalry thanks to his courageous performance in leading a crucial charge on the federal forces at Bull Run in July. On October 7 of that year, Stuart issued a document naming Ford an honorary member of his staff. "She will," wrote Stuart, "be obeyed, respected and admired by all the lovers of a noble nature." One Confederate soldier who witnessed Stuart's presentation of the commission to Ford later insisted that the document "was not only signed but it bore the impression of the General's signet ring, and there is no sort of doubt as to its genuine character." Still, he noted that General Stuart's intentions were more lighthearted than serious-that the commission was "meant to produce good humoured laughter from a young lady" and was handed to Ford with only "mock formality," as might be expected given standing proscriptions against women's formal connection to the army. Whether issued in jest or in earnest, however, Stuart's commission to Ford would later figure prominently in the trajectory of Ford's spy career.

Though numerous bits of evidence tie Ford loosely to both the first and second battles of Bull Run (the second encounter of the armies occurred there in August 1862), her name and her reputation as a Confederate intelligence operative are most closely linked to the humiliating capture of the Union's General Edwin H. Stoughton in March 1863, the event that in turn led to her arrest and imprisonment. In the early months of 1863, to fortify the federal capital, the Union command began sending an increasing number of troops to Fairfax Court House, under Stoughton's authority. Lieutenant John Singleton Mosby, a talented and dangerous Confederate guerrilla fighter whom General Ulysses S. Grant would-in vain-later order hanged without trial if captured, greeted the federals' arrival with his typical tactics, harrassing the enemy with raids and assaults while effectively eluding all attempts to apprehend him or his men. Evidence suggests that Mosby made the Ford home his base of operations and colluded with Antonia Ford in particular to keep the federals off-balance. She brought him vital information gained by means of her seemingly innocent associations with admiring men in blue and her independent observations of goings-on about town. Mosby then utilized the information Ford conveyed to him to formulate his strategy. Ford seems to have cultivated a particularly friendly relationship with Stoughton himself, riding so often with him on horseback through the countryside that their relationship became the source of considerable gossip and concern among Stoughton's troops. One of his soldiers wrote a prescient letter to a friend in New York, which was subsequently published in the New York Times, warning that "if Stoughton gets picked up some night, he may thank her for it." As it turns out, on the rainy night of March 8, 1863, John Mosby and more than two dozen of his raiders captured General Stoughton, along with close to forty of his soldiers, over fifty of his horses, and all of his weapons, while he was asleep-and possibly drunk-at his headquarters.

The reaction of the Union's Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, was intense. Stanton instructed Lafayette Baker, the United States Secret Service's chief detective at this point, to investigate the conditions of the capture and to arrest whoever was responsible. For his part, Baker quickly became convinced that a spy was to blame: "The time, circumstances, and mode of this attack and surprise," he wrote in his report, "the positive and accurate knowledge in possession of the rebel leader, of the numbers and position of our forces, of the exact localities of officers' quarters, and depots of Government property, all pointed unmistakably to the existence of traitors and spies within our lines, and their recent communication with Confederate officers." Indeed, for Baker, the trail of evidence led directly to Antonia Ford. Acting on his suspicions, Baker sent a woman employed in his agency to the Ford home to test his theory. Baker's operative, posing as a Confederate sympathizer, stayed only long enough at the Ford residence to win her subject's confidence and to provoke her, in a moment of bravado, to display her commission from General Stuart. This document, Baker wrote, provided sufficient evidence of Ford's treasonable activities, especially when supplemented by Ford's admission to her houseguest that she had, as the Union spy later reported it, "made herself acquainted . . . of all the particulars relating to the number of our forces there [at Fairfax Court House] and in the neighborhood, the location of our camps, the places where officers' quarters were established, the precise points where our pickets were stationed, the strength of the outposts, the names of officers in command, the nature of general orders, and all other information valuable to the rebel leaders," and that she had, moreover, communicated all this information to Mosby prior to the attack on Stoughton. Baker immediately ordered Ford's arrest and transfer, first to Centreville, Virginia, a few miles west of Fairfax Court House, and then to Washington about fifteen miles to the northeast, where on March 16 she was searched and found in possession of a stash of contraband correspondence and a handful of Confederate money. Baker relieved her of these items and ordered her into confinement in none other than the Old Capitol Prison. Word of Ford's arrest spread quickly, and on March 18, as it had done in the case of Rose Greenhow in August 1861, the New York Times condemned her without trial. "Miss Ford of Fairfax," read the article, "was unquestionably the local spy and actual guide of Capt. Mosely [sic] in his late swoop upon that village." As before, now that Ford had been captured, northerners seemed happy to dispense with Victorian notions of female frailty and incapacity in order to pin the responsibility for yet another embarrassing federal defeat on a crafty and daring female enemy.

During her imprisonment at the Old Capitol, Ford had an apparent advantage that neither Boyd nor Greenhow had enjoyed, namely a federal officer willing to lobby feverishly for her release. Prior to her delivery to the prison, while undergoing an interrogation at the headquarters of General Samuel P. Heintzelman, the Union commander in charge of the defense of Washington, Ford encountered the young and handsome Major Joseph C. Willard, who, according to more than one source, immediately fell in love with her. Early in 1864 Ford herself fondly recalled their first meeting in a letter to Willard. "I think fate," she wrote, "has a good deal to do with us. . . . It seems I was literally thrown in your way by a power above us-call it Destiny. . . ." Still, "fate" did not move too quickly, and even the intervention of others besides Willard could not force the bureaucratic wheels to move any faster. No less a figure than her earliest supporter, Confederate General Stuart, rose to Ford's defense, on March 25 requesting from John Mosby a statement exonerating Ford from complicity in the raid on Stoughton. In the meantime, Willard steadily pressured the federal authorities, at the same time encouraging Ford to take the oath of allegiance. In return, she urged him to resign from the Union army.

It is unclear precisely how long Ford remained in jail. On May 30 the popular journal Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper reported that she had recently been sent south with a group of exchanged prisoners, but an August 15 article in the Southern Illustrated News indicated that Ford was still in Union hands. Certainly by the fall she was free, and the following spring, almost exactly one year from the date of Stoughton's capture, Ford married Joseph Willard, who a week earlier had resigned his Union army commission. A relative later recalled Ford's response to the question of why she had chosen to marry a Yankee. "I will tell you truly, Sallie," Ford replied, "I knew I could not revenge myself on the whole nation, but felt very capable of tormenting one yankee to death, so I took the Major." In the next few years Ford bore three children, two of whom died in infancy. Far from tormenting her husband to death, it was Ford herself who died young, possibly as a consequence of her third pregnancy and delivery. In 1871 she left Willard a widower. He never married again.

In their time, Belle Boyd, Rose Greenhow, and Antonia Ford made names for themselves as Confederate enthusiasts who boldly and effectively took up the work of Civil War intelligence. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that only the South produced women who were willing to engage in such work. Love for the Union, too, generated female espionage operatives whose names became familiar both during and after the war, and for whom the historical record is substantial. Among these, the two whose lives and wartime activities are easiest to trace are Elizabeth Van Lew and Pauline Cushman.

Once lauded by the chief of the Union's Bureau of Military Information, General George H. Sharpe, for having represented for "a long, long time . . . all that was left of the power of the U. S. Government in the city of Richmond," Elizabeth Van Lew was born in 1818 into a family made wealthy by her father's successful hardware business. Van Lew-who never married-lived her entire life in her family's elegant home high atop Church Hill in Richmond. As a young girl she had traveled for her education to Philadelphia, where her uncle was mayor. She returned to Richmond harboring strong antislavery sentiments which led her, once she was able, to free the family slaves, reunite them with their spouses, and participate in the "Underground Railroad" for fugitives from other homes and plantations. Indeed, it was her long-standing and ardent abolitionism that underlay this middle-aged Virginian's support for the Union during the war. Long before the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, such sentiments had led Van Lew's proslavery neighbors to consider her either daffy or dangerous, or both.

The exact origins of Van Lew's espionage activities are cloudy. Although her career peaked in connection with General Grant's 1864Ð65 siege of her city, other evidence-including two letters written in early 1864 by General Benjamin Butler, then commander of the Union's Army of the James-suggests that Van Lew was already an active and well-respected operative by this point. In the letter he wrote to Grant's adjutant general John A. Rawlins on April 19, 1864, Butler described Van Lew as "a lady . . . of firm Union principles, with whom I have been in correspondence for months, on whose loyalty I would willingly stake my life." As with her Confederate counterparts Boyd, Ford, and Greenhow, Van Lew utilized numerous sources for collecting information. Despite her outspokenness on the slavery issue, her plush home had for some time served as a gathering place for Richmond's prominent citizens (as Greenhow's had in Washington), and it continued to do so during the war. She, along with her elderly mother and her brother John-both of whom seem to have been somewhat more moderate in their pro-Unionism than she, though they did not obstruct her activities-entertained various Confederate military officers and government officials who unwittingly revealed bits of information which she then forwarded faithfully to her Union contacts. Van Lew gleaned additional insights from the Union soldiers imprisoned in the Confederate capital whom she took under her care, she and her mother having gained entry to the prisons by virtue of their being among the few women in Richmond willing to express overt sympathy for the men in blue. Indeed, the Van Lews' attention to the Union soldiers provoked some anger among their townsfolk. Wrote one correspondent to the July 31, 1861, Richmond Enquirer:

"Whilst every true woman in this community has been busy making the articles of comfort or necessity for our troops, or administering to the wants of the many hundreds of sick, who, far from their homes, which they left to defend our soil, are fit subjects for our sympathy, these two women have been expending their opulent means in aiding and giving comfort to the miscreants who have invaded our sacred soil, bent on raping and murder, the desolation of our homes and sacred places, and the ruin and dishonour of our families."

Despite such disapprobation, tending to the men housed in the infamous Libby Prison-which stood at the foot of the hill on which her home was perched-became Elizabeth Van Lew's avocation. There, as in other prisons, she consulted with the inmates about what they knew, making careful mental note of their observations, which she later committed to paper, possibly using the cipher that was found hidden in the back of her watch when she died.

The information Van Lew gathered by such means she then transmitted to her Union contacts via an elaborate series of relay stations and a number of trusted associates-many of whom were slaves and former slaves. "She had a farm in the country on the other side of the James River from us and below Richmond," explained Colonel D. B. Parker, a member of Grant's staff, in an 1883 interview.

"Every day two of her trusty negro servants drove into Richmond with something to sell-milk, chickens, garden-truck, etc. These negroes wore great, strong brogans, with soles of immense thickness, made by a Richmond shoemaker. . . . Shoes were pretty scarce in the Confederacy in those days, but Miss Van Lew's servants had two pairs each and changed them every day. They never wore out of Richmond in the afternoon the same shoes they wore into the city in the morning. The soles of these shoes were double and hollow, and in them were carried through the lines letters, maps, plans, etc., which were regularly delivered to General Grant at City Point the next morning."

Among the assistants Van Lew employed in her work was a former family slave named Mary Elizabeth Bowser, whom she had some years earlier sent north, as she herself had been sent, for schooling. In 1863 a friend of Van Lew's succeeded in persuading President Jefferson Davis's staff to hire Bowser as a maid in his official residence. Bowser's reports from inside the Confederate White House, which Van Lew conveyed to her contacts at City Point, were invaluable. According to Unionist Thomas McNiven, a baker who was also engaged in espionage in the Confederate capital, Bowser had a particularly keen memory, and when he made his regular deliveries to the Davis home, he could always count on her sharing some important information with him.

One of the most interesting aspects of Van Lew's career as a Union spy was her adoption of a persona carefully devised to make her appear incapable of the work that she was in fact performing. Much like her Confederate counterparts, Van Lew paraded her political sentiments about for all to see, but unlike Boyd and Ford, at least, she did so in a context where expressing such sentiments could be extremely dangerous. Thus, she shrewdly cultivated an aura of innocent foolishness, tending towards mental imbalance. Van Lew commonly dressed in odd clothes-sometimes, according to one source, letting herself be seen in "buckskin leggings, a one-piece skirt and waist of cotton, topped off with a huge calico sunbonnet"-and wandered through town singing nonsense songs and muttering to herself. Combined with her spinster status and her long standing (and to many, unfathomable) radicalism on the slavery question, Van Lew's behavior led many observers, who referred to her as "Crazy Bet," to conclude that she was incapable of being devious.

But deviousness was not at all beyond the bounds of Van Lew's nature, regardless of what most of her neighbors thought, and indeed, Van Lews's diary and papers indicate that as a result of her subterfuge, she believed herself to be under constant watch by authorities, and in constant danger. A 1915 New York Times article proclaimed that "there was not a moment during those four years [of Civil war] when Lizzie Van Lew could hear a step behind her on the street without expecting to have somebody tap her on the shoulder and say ÔYou are my prisoner.'" Still, she persisted, transmitting whatever information she could lay her hands on to the federal officials outside Richmond. Van Lew also encouraged the use of a secret room in her home for hiding not just dispatches but also fugitive Union soldiers, possibly including some of those who were part of an elaborate tunnel escape from Libby Prison in February 1864 in which over a hundred federal officers made their way to freedom. Van Lew played a key role, as well, in the theft and secret reinterment of the body of a federal officer, Colonel Ulric Dahlgren, who was killed while participating in a surprise raid on Richmond in March 1864. Learning through her secret channels that enraged Confederates had buried Dahlgren in an unmarked grave, Van Lew, with the help of a man who had witnessed the undignified burial, devised a clever plan that resulted in the rescue of Dahlgren's body and its proper burial beneath a peach tree at the entrance to a local cemetery.

For those who during the war questioned "Crazy Bet's" significance as an intelligence operative for the Union army, the arrival of Grant's occupation troops in April 1865 provided proof. Officials immediately assigned a special guard to Van Lew's home for her protection, the assumption being that her townsfolk might seek revenge against her for Grant's victory. Tradition has it that Van Lew's home was the first to display a large federal flag-perhaps twenty-five feet in length-in recognition of the Union troops' arrival, and that Van Lew hoisted it herself. In any case, in the days to follow, numerous federal officers, and possibly Grant himself, visited the Van Lew mansion to pay their respects. Needless to say, the vanquished residents of Richmond treated Van Lew differently, viewing her as a shameless traitor. Evidence suggests that until her death, resentful townspeople encouraged their children to shower Van Lew with disrespect or to avoid her altogether.

Van Lew's final years were difficult for other reasons as well. Though she had possession of the family home, her financial resources were extremely limited-not least of all because she had spent so much money in connection with her various wartime efforts on behalf of the Union. In recognition of this, shortly after his 1868 election to the presidency, Ulysses Grant appointed Van Lew postmaster of Richmond, a position she held, at some peril to her own safety, throughout his two terms in the White House. Grant urged that his successor, Rutherford B. Hayes, allow Van Lew to continue in this capacity, but thanks perhaps to the lobbying of her many local opponents, Van Lew soon saw her status reduced to clerk and her location changed to Washington, D.C. There, her independent attitude and her unyielding temperament led to further demotions, until she resigned and returned home to Richmond virtually penniless. To the end of her life Van Lew remained financially dependent on others, including the family of at least one Union soldier-a descendant of Paul Revere-who had been housed at Libby Prison and for whom she had cared during his incarceration. Until her death in September 1900, Van Lew continued to fight for various causes-among them woman suffrage-while she coped with her relentlessly hostile community.

Elizabeth Van Lew was an actress of sorts who cultivated the character of a daft, middle-aged spinster in order to cover her tracks as the leader of Richmond's Unionist underground resistance operation. She was joined in the work of spying for the Union by a professional actress, Pauline Cushman. Born in 1833, by the time of the Civil War Cushman shared with Boyd, Ford, and Greenhow a reputation for physical beauty and personal appeal. Although a contemporary journal described her simply as "a handsome young lady," her 1865 biographer, F. L. Sarmiento, presented a more elaborate image of her "entrancing form and flashing eye" and her "overflowing . . . charms of a most wondrous beauty." Cushman spent her early years in New Orleans, then moved with her family to Michigan, where the location of her frontier home allowed her to be in frequent contact with her indigenous neighbors. From early on Cushman, like Boyd, enjoyed the outdoors, and she soon exhibited a range of skills and interests including horseback riding, hunting and target shooting, canoeing, and other tomboyish sports. Out of this context Cushman developed the yearning for adventure that later carried her as a young woman to New York City, where she embarked on a stage career. In early 1863 her career took Cushman to Wood's Theater in Louisville, Kentucky, the site of her first act of subterfuge on behalf of the Union, and the launching pad for her wartime service as a spy for the Union army.

It was while she was appearing at Wood's Theater that a group of admiring (and possibly drunken) Confederate officers dared Cushman to interrupt one of her performances to offer a toast in Jefferson Davis's honor. Promising to consider their proposal, Cushman secretly visited the Union army's local provost marshal, to whom she suggested that she might use the opportunity of such a public toast to convince the town's Confederate sympathizers of her hatred for the Union. Having thus created a smoke screen for her future activities, she explained, she could proceed to provide valuable service as a federal intelligence operative. The provost marshal agreed, asking only that Cushman guarantee her loyalty to the Union with an oath of allegiance. The following night, in the midst of her performance, Cushman spoke out on behalf of Davis and the Confederacy. She was immediately expelled from her Northern theater company and sent to federally occupied Nashville, where she reported to the Union's chief of army police for the Army of the Cumberland, Colonel William Truesdail, and awaited instructions for her first assignment.

Unlike in the cases of Boyd, Greenhow, Ford, and Van Lew, Cushman's name is not tied to any specific military successes or embarrassments. Nevertheless, an article that appeared in the New York Times about a year after her Louisville toast noted that "among the women of America who have made themselves famous since the opening of the rebellion, few have suffered more or rendered more service to the Federal cause than . . . Pauline Cushman, the female scout and spy." During the previous year Cushman had busied herself gathering information about enemy fortifications and operations and, under cover of her reputation as a die-hard secessionist, engaging in effective counterespionage, compiling lists of those in the Nashville area and beyond who harbored dangerous anti-Union sentiments and identifying for Union officials the names of any local Confederate spies whom she could discover. Cushman had also served as a federal courier, and evidence suggests that her range of activities extended through Kentucky, Tennessee, northern Georgia, Ala-bama, and Mississippi as well. In the course of her work, Cushman seems to have assumed a variety of disguises-including, on occasion, men's clothes-to have spent much time on horseback, and to have wielded a pistol fearlessly. Despite her repeated professions of loyalty to the South, however, Cushman's activities had increasingly provoked suspicion among Confederate observers, leading to her arrest, late in the spring of 1863, near Shelbyville, Tennessee, by General John Hunt Morgan, like J. E. B. Stuart one of the Confederacy's leading cavalry commanders. Morgan's arrest of Cushman quickly gave way to a brutal interrogation by his comrade in the cavalry, General Nathan Bedford Forrest, who pronounced a sentence of death by hanging in her case. Although the generally mild treatment of women spies on both sides during the war makes it seem unlikely that Forrest would actually have executed Cushman-no woman was executed by either government for espionage or related activities during the war-the unexpected arrival of Union troops at Shelbyville prevented the setting of any such precedent and secured Cushman's reprieve and the continuance of her work for several more months.

In June 1864 Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper referred to Cushman as "Major Pauline Cushman," and there is evidence that at some point during her loyal service to the Union, Cushman, like Confederate Antonia Ford, received an honorary military commission in recognition of her brave service to her nation's army, possibly from General William S. Rosecrans or General James A. Garfield, then both with the Union's Army of the Cumberland. Cushman's counterintelligence days were cut short, however, as a consequence of the enormous attention she had received in connection with her arrest by Morgan and her condemnation by Forrest. After the war, she returned to the stage, where for a period of time, like Belle Boyd, she presented monologues on the war-sometimes dressed in full military uniform-on stages as far-flung as New York and San Francisco. Eventually, however, interest in Cushman's exploits began to fade and she turned to alcohol and other distractions to disguise the pain of her declining fortunes, and perhaps also to relieve some physical ailment associated with her wartime service. Recalled one Union veteran living in California:

"In 1872 Major Pauline Cushman, the spy of the Cumberland as she called herself, lectured in Watsonville, and there I got my first knowledge of her. She was selling pamphlets that gave a very thrilling account of her adventures in the war. After the lecture she went to a saloon that was kept by Charley O'Neil and became inebriated. This saloon was fitted up with card and billiard tables and had private rooms, and it was a great resort. During the night that Major Pauline was there the shutters were closed, and the occurrences were unfit to talk about, much less to relate in print."

Having been married once before the war-to Charles Dickinson, with whom she had two children who died in infancy and who himself died of camp fever while in the army-Cushman, like Boyd, married twice more, in 1872 to August Fitchner, who died soon thereafter, and in 1879 to Jerry Fryer, from whom she subsequently separated. When the stage no longer welcomed her, Cushman turned to sewing for a living, supplementing her income with a small pension based on her first husband's military service. After falling ill, however, she became addicted to morphine, and on December 2, 1893, she died in San Francisco from an overdose of the drug.

From Boyd to Cushman, the women whose names are most prominently associated with espionage and resistance on behalf of their respective nations during the Civil War performed services which authorities who benefited from their work cheered, and which those on the opposing side deemed worthy of punishment. Contemporary Confederate sympathizers celebrated Boyd as the "Belle Rebelle" while hostile Unionists labeled her the "Cleopatra of the Secession" and condemned her for undermining federal war strategy. In August 1862 an angry journalist from the New York Herald denounced Boyd as the "notorious female spy . . . familiarly known as the betrayer of our forces at Front Royal," and noted that Boyd had "managed in divers ways to recommend herself to our officers," such that she was able to sustain "a pretty regular budget of intelligence" by means of which "the enemy was advised of our favorite designs." In 1864 Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper identified Boyd simply as "the famous rebel spy," and an obituary published in the New York Times in 1900 commented that although Boyd's name had to a great extent already faded from memory, nevertheless "the time was when that name caused many a secret council at army camps and many a plan was hatched to place its owner where she could not add to the harm she had done."

Similarly, contemporaries considered Rose Greenhow a brilliant, "dangerous and skillful spy" and a fierce enemy of the Union, and to many Northerners only Antonia Ford's subterfuge could explain an incident so thoroughly humiliating to the federal forces as the capture of General Stoughton, his men, his horses, and his supplies. (To Southerners, of course, Ford's spy work proved the loyalty and the too-little-tapped cleverness of Confederate women.) Of Unionist Elizabeth Van Lew it is equally true that contemporaries presumed her espionage activities to have been of great significance during the war. Writing to Colonel James Allen Hardie on April 5, 1865, General Benjamin Butler noted that "Miss Eliza [sic] Van Lew was my secret correspondent in Richmond and furnished valuable information during the whole campaign." Two years later he wrote warmly to Van Lew herself: "There is no lady in the Country whom I rather would meet than yourself. I retain a lively sense of your patriotism and fidelity to the Country in her darkest hours." And when General George H. Sharpe wrote to General Cyrus Ballou Comstock in January 1867, he urged that Van Lew be generously reimbursed for her uniformly valiant efforts on the Union's behalf. "I feel bound to recommend," Sharpe noted, "from a very considerable knowledge of the matter that the sum of fifteen thousand dollars be paid to Miss Elizabeth L. Van Lew for valuable information and services rendered to the U. S. Government during the war...." With respect to Pauline Cushman, we know that on December 3, 1893, almost thirty years after Appomattox, the New York Times's notice of her death described her as a "female scout...well known on account of her services" during the Civil War. Even more important, members of a local Civil War veterans group were determined to commemorate her work on the Union's behalf in proper style: they claimed Cushman's body from the local morgue and treated it to a military burial-complete with an honor guard and a gun salute-in the section of the city cemetery reserved for veterans. Cushman's military service was not forgotten, nor was her later reputation as a troubled, dissipated, and perhaps morally debased woman allowed to dim the lights on her final stage exit.