She looked up at the sky as the little boat turned over, and then the gold she carried for the Confederacy pulled her beneath the water of the Cape Fear River. Rose O’Neal Greenhow, the woman northern newspapers had called the princess of treason, drowned within sight of the North Carolina shore she had risked everything to reach. She was carrying two thousand dollars in gold, meant for the Confederate treasury, and the weight of it ended her life before any rescuer could reach her. Her body would be pulled from the river, brought into Wilmington, and buried as a martyr.
But how a Maryland widow who had once charmed the most powerful men in Washington came to die in the surf off New Inlet is a story that begins more than three decades earlier, in a small county north of the capital. Rose O’Neal was born in Montgomery County, Maryland, into a family of relatively low status. As a girl she moved to Washington City, where she eventually met Robert Greenhow, a federal librarian. He seemed out of her league socially, but she charmed him, and in 1835 they married.
The match lifted her into the world of the capital’s political elite. Robert’s career then took the couple to California, where Rose lived for a time before returning to Washington without him. Not long after, Robert died in an accident out west. Rose was left a widow, drawing a federal pension.
With that pension she bought a house four blocks north of the White House and began to build a circle of influential friends. Among them was John C. Calhoun, the fiery South Carolina senator and champion of states’ rights, and through such connections Rose Greenhow moved easily through the highest reaches of Washington society. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, she might have been expected to leave the capital and head south.
She had strong Southern sympathies, and she was a woman of means who could have gone anywhere. Instead, she stayed in Washington and became a Confederate spy. Her espionage bore fruit almost immediately. In July 1861 she passed word to Confederate officers about the movements of Union General Irvin McDowell’s troops as they marched toward Manassas Junction.
The Confederates, forewarned, met the Federals at Bull Run and won an overwhelming victory. The defeat stunned the North and made Rose Greenhow’s intelligence a matter of the highest value to the Confederacy and the gravest concern to the Union. Her network grew from there, eventually stretching across several states and encompassing some forty-eight women and two men. That kind of operation could not stay hidden forever.
Allan Pinkerton, head of the Union intelligence service, put a bead on her. In his first attempt to arrest her, Pinkerton himself was detained in a moment of comic misstep, but he talked his way out of it. The authorities pressed on, and eventually Union soldiers arrested Rose Greenhow. They placed her under house arrest in her own home, which became known among the Federals as Fort Greenhow, because it held not only Rose but her young daughter, Little Rose, and a number of her accomplices.
Even under guard in her own house, she kept spying. Colored handkerchiefs were smuggled in to her. She waved them out the window, sending signals to whoever needed to receive them. The War Department finally concluded that this woman could not be safely held in her own parlor, and it ordered her transferred to the Old Capitol Prison in Washington.
That building is gone now; the Supreme Court building stands on its site. But in 1862 it was the place where the Union held its most dangerous political prisoners. The journey across Washington gave Rose one last chance to needle her captors. She rode in a carriage with a Union guard, and just as they approached the prison gates, she stuck her head out the window and called out: “Thank you for your kindness, but I hope that Union soldiers in the future have a more honorable task than guarding defenseless women and children.
” Then she was delivered into the hands of Superintendent William Wood, a man who would later in the war become famous for breaking up a massive spy ring in the West. For now, Wood seemed impressed with the assignment of guarding so noted a rebel. As she waited to be taken to her cell, Rose looked around the old building and reflected. She knew that when the United States government first moved to Washington, Congress had held its sessions in this very structure.
But that was not why she remembered it. The room where she now sat, waiting, was the room where John C. Calhoun, right before his death in 1850, had given a speech declaring that the federal government could not endure. He had warned that it was becoming too centralized, and that the Constitution could only survive if the nation returned to states’ rights.
Rose Greenhow, a prisoner of the very government Calhoun had condemned, sat in that room and felt the weight of his words. Finally she reached her cell. She and her accomplices were placed under a guard of six men, kept in close confinement, and forbidden to communicate with anyone. She communicated anyway.
Letters moved in and out of the prison, and in her memoirs she noted that the police detectives had to subject them to a chemical process to extract the treason from them on their way out. The espionage continued even from behind bars. But imprisonment wore on her. She grew restless, desperate to be free.
She attempted an escape and failed. The months dragged by. Her close confinement at the Old Capitol Prison lasted from January 18 to May 31, 1862, and on that final day the War Department decided it had had enough of her. She was taken out of the prison and exiled to the South, under orders not to leave.
Rose O’Neal Greenhow had never been one to obey orders she disliked. She went to Richmond, where she was hailed as a heroine. She met with Jefferson Davis. Then, in the summer of 1863, she set out on a diplomatic mission to England and France, hoping to win support and money for the Confederacy.
While in England she wrote her memoir, titled “My Imprisonment and the First Year of Abolition Rule in Washington. ” She became engaged. And in August 1864, she boarded the Condor, a British blockade runner, and turned back toward the war she had left behind. The Condor steamed for the Cape Fear River and the port of Wilmington, the last great lifeline of the Confederacy.
As the ship approached New Inlet, the captain believed he spotted a Union vessel, and he tried to escape. In the attempt, the Condor ran aground. The ship was stuck, and Rose Greenhow and two Confederate agents knew they could not wait for rescue. They requested a rowboat.
Rose was carrying two thousand dollars in gold, intended for the Confederate cause, and she was not about to let it fall into Union hands. She and the agents climbed into the small boat and began rowing furiously toward shore. The boat was very small. It capsized.
Rose, weighed down by the gold strapped to her, sank and drowned. Her body was taken from the Cape Fear River and placed on a steamer bound for Wilmington. When the steamer arrived, it was met by hundreds of women who had come to see the Confederate heroine. The Soldiers’ Aid Society took charge of the funeral arrangements.
Her body lay in state, open for viewing for a period of time, and on a Sunday it was carried to Wilmington’s Catholic Church of St. Thomas. There the Reverend Corrin delivered the funeral oration. He applauded Rose Greenhow’s exploits and hailed her as a heroine, but he also warned against any human endeavor, even one undertaken for a noble cause, as Rose had done for the Confederacy.
Even in honoring her, he cautioned that the cause itself could not justify everything done in its name. When the service ended, her casket was draped in a Confederate flag and taken to Oakdale Cemetery. The Wilmington Sentinel, reporting on the funeral in its October 1, 1864 edition, noted something that was probably rhetorical flourish: that it had rained all day, until the very moment Rose Greenhow’s casket was lowered into the ground. Then the sun came out, and a vivid rainbow appeared in the sky.
In the introduction to her memoirs, Rose had wondered whether a chronicle of her long and humiliating imprisonment would prove interesting to the public, as her friends insisted it would. She acknowledged that it was common for people who had suffered imprisonment during the Civil War to exaggerate the importance of their own cases. But she asserted that she had not written her memoir to draw attention to herself. She wanted her readers to understand the intolerance with which the United States government had tried to cajole the Confederacy into staying part of the Union against its will.
Her own espionage demonstrated her intolerance toward the United States government beyond any doubt. And in death, as in life, she divided the nation she had worked to break apart. In the North, she was remembered as a traitor. In the South, she was buried and mourned as a martyr.
The Sentinel, in the article that covered her funeral, likened her to the martyrs of old, among them Jonah. She had given everything she had, including her life and the gold in her pockets, to the Confederate cause, and Wilmington gave her a grave beneath a sky that cleared, the story went, just for her.
