The rowboat overturned in the dark churn of the Cape Fear River, and Rose O’Neal Greenhow, weighted down by two thousand dollars in gold sewn into her clothing, slipped beneath the surface. She had survived a year of imprisonment, a diplomatic mission across the Atlantic, and a desperate flight from a grounded blockade-runner, only to drown within sight of the North Carolina coast she had risked everything to reach. When her body was pulled from the water and brought to Wilmington, the women of the city came by the hundreds to see her. The Wilmington Sentinel would call her a martyr, ranking her alongside figures like Joan of Arc.
But how a Maryland widow, once a Washington socialite, came to die for the Confederacy in the surf of New Inlet is a story that begins decades earlier, in the drawing rooms of the capital she would one day betray. Rose O’Neal was born in Montgomery County, Maryland, into a family of modest standing. As a girl she moved to Washington, D. C.
, where she made her way into society through charm and a fortunate marriage. Her husband, Robert Greenhow, worked as a librarian for the federal government, a man of some learning and position who seemed above her station. Yet Rose charmed him as she charmed so many others, and in 1835 they married. Robert’s career took the couple to California, where Rose lived for a time before returning alone to Washington.
Robert remained behind and died there in an accident, leaving Rose a widow with a pension. She used that pension to buy a house four blocks north of the White House, and it was there that she began to cultivate the friendships that would shape her fate. Her circle included some of the most prominent figures in American politics, among them John C. Calhoun, the fiery South Carolina senator and champion of states’ rights.
Calhoun was an old man by then, and in his final years he made a lasting impression on Rose. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, a woman of her strong Southern sympathies might have been expected to leave the Union capital and head South. She did not. She stayed in Washington and became a Confederate spy.
In July 1861, Greenhow passed information to Confederate officers about the movements of Union General Irvin McDowell’s troops toward Manassas Junction. The Confederates, forewarned, won the First Battle of Bull Run in an overwhelming victory. Her espionage continued from there, spreading across several states and eventually involving a network of about forty-eight women and two men. Such activity could not escape notice forever.
Allan Pinkerton, head of the Union intelligence service, put her under surveillance. In the first attempt to arrest her, Pinkerton himself was detained and had to talk his way out of it. Union soldiers finally arrested Greenhow and placed her under house arrest in her own home, which became known as Fort Greenhow. There she remained with her daughter, little Rose, and a number of her accomplices, still managing to conduct espionage even from confinement.
Handkerchiefs in varying colors were smuggled into her house, and she waved them from the windows to send signals to those who needed them. The War Department, frustrated by her continued activity, decided she needed to be held somewhere more secure. She was transferred to the Old Capitol Prison in Washington, a building that once housed Congress and now stood on the site where the Supreme Court building sits today. The journey from her home to the prison was made by carriage, with a Union guard for company.
As they neared the Old Capitol, Rose stuck her head out of the carriage and called back to the soldiers who had treated her with courtesy. She thanked them for their kindness, she said, but she hoped that in the future Union soldiers would find a more honorable task than guarding defenseless women and children. At the prison gates, the entire guard turned out under arms to receive her, and she was introduced to Superintendent William Wood, a man who would later in the war be responsible for breaking up a massive spy ring in the West. For the moment, Wood was impressed with the assignment of guarding so noted a rebel.
As she waited to be taken to her cell, Rose reflected on the building around her. The Old Capitol had housed Congress when the federal government first moved to Washington, but that was not what she remembered. She sat in a room that held a particular significance for her: it was the room where John C. Calhoun, shortly before his death in 1850, had delivered a speech warning that the federal government could not endure.
It was becoming too centralized, he had said, and the Constitution could only survive if power returned to the states. That memory stayed with her as she was led away. She and her accomplices were placed under a guard of six men, kept in close confinement, and prohibited from communicating with anyone. Yet Greenhow continued to pass letters in and out of the prison.
In her memoirs she noted that the police detectives had to subject the letters to a chemical process to extract the treason from them on their way out. Sitting in her cell, Greenhow grew restless. She wanted out. She attempted an escape, but the attempt failed.
The War Department eventually investigated her case. She remained in close confinement at the Old Capitol from January 18, 1862, until May 31, 1862. On that day, the department exiled her South, ordering her not to leave. Rose, of course, had no intention of obeying.
She went to Richmond, where she was hailed as a heroine. She met with Jefferson Davis. Then, in the summer of 1863, she embarked on a diplomatic mission to England and France, hoping to gain support and money for the Confederacy. While in England, she wrote her memoir, titled My Imprisonment and the First Year of Abolition Rule at Washington.
She also became engaged. But her work abroad done, she set sail for home in August 1864 aboard the Condor, a British blockade-runner steaming for the Cape Fear River. The Condor was approaching its destination when the captain spotted what he believed to be a Union ship. He tried to escape and ran the vessel aground at New Inlet.
With the boat stuck fast, Greenhow and two Confederate agents requested a rowboat, hoping to save themselves. Rose was carrying two thousand dollars in gold on her person, money she intended to deliver to the Confederacy. She climbed into the rowboat with the agents and they began rowing furiously toward shore. But the boat was very small, and it capsized in the rough water.
Rose, weighed down by the gold she carried for the Confederacy, drowned. Her body was taken from the Cape Fear River and placed on a steamer bound for Wilmington. When the steamer arrived, it was greeted by hundreds of women who had come to see this Confederate heroine. The Soldiers’ Aid Society took charge of her funeral arrangements.
Her body lay open for viewing for a time, and on a Sunday it was transported to Wilmington’s Catholic Church of St. Thomas, where the Reverend Corrin delivered the funeral oration. He applauded 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. When the service was complete, her casket was draped in a Confederate flag and taken to Oakdale Cemetery.
The Wilmington Sentinel reported, perhaps with some rhetorical flourish, that it had rained all day until the moment Greenhow’s casket was lowered into the ground. At that instant, the sun came out and a vivid rainbow appeared in the sky. In the introduction to her memoirs, Greenhow had wondered whether a chronicle of her long and humiliating imprisonment would interest the public as her friends insisted it would. She acknowledged that people who suffered imprisonment during the Civil War often exaggerated the importance of their cases.
But she asserted that she had not written the memoir to draw attention to herself. She wanted her readers to understand the intolerance with which the U. S. government tried to cajole the Confederacy into remaining part of the Union against its will.
Her espionage had demonstrated her own intolerance toward the U. S. government beyond any doubt.
To this day, she is remembered as a traitor in the North and a martyr in the South, a woman who gave her life for a cause and died carrying its gold, within sight of the shore she never reached.
