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开 本: 32开纸 张: 胶版纸包 装: 平装是否套装: 否国际标准书号ISBN: 9780812970456
For sheer bravado and style, no woman in the North or South
rivaled the Civil War heroine Rose O’Neale Greenhow. Fearless spy
for the Confederacy, glittering Washington hostess, legendary
beauty and lover, Rose Greenhow risked everything for the cause she
valued more than life itself. In this superb portrait, biographer
Ann Blackman tells the surprising true story of a unique woman in
history.
“I am a Southern woman, born with revolutionary blood in my
veins,” Rose once declared–and that fiery spirit would plunge her
into the center of power and the thick of adventure. Born into a
slave-holding family, Rose moved to Washington, D.C., as a young
woman and soon established herself as one of the capital’s most
charming and influential socialites, an intimate of John C.
Calhoun, James Buchanan, and Dolley Madison.
She married well, bore eight children and buried five, and, at
the height of the Gold Rush, accompanied her husband Robert
Greenhow to San Francisco. Widowed after Robert died in a tragic
accident, Rose became notorious in Washington for her daring–and
numerous–love affairs.
But with the outbreak of the Civil War, everything changed.
Overnight, Rose Greenhow, fashionable hostess, become Rose
Greenhow, intrepid spy. As Blackman reveals, deadly accurate
intelligence that Rose supplied to General Pierre G. T. Beauregard
written in a fascinating code (the code duplicated in the
background on the jacket of this book). Her message to Beauregard
turned the tide in the first Battle of Bull Run, and was a
brilliant piece of spycraft that eventually led to her arrest by
Allan Pinkerton and imprisonment with her young daughter.
Indomitable, Rose regained her freedom and, as the war reached a
crisis, journeyed to Europe to plead the Confederate cause at the
royal courts of England and France.
Drawing on newly discovered diaries and a rich trove of
contemporary accounts, Blackman has fashioned a thrilling, intimate
narrative that reads like a novel. Wild Rose is an unforgettable
rendering of an astonishing woman, a book that will stand with the
finest Civil War biographies.
From the Hardcover edition.
“Tales of Civil War spies are often full of embellished and
romanticized derring-do. Not so with Ann Blackman’s thoroughly
researched biography of Rose O’Neale Greenhow, whose remarkable
life needs no embellishment. The story of Rebel Rose, told here
with great skill and lucidity, illustrates yet again that truth is
stranger than fiction.”
–James McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom
“This is a fascinating tale of intrigue and suspense. Blackman
has discovered some truly remarkable, never-before-published papers
that reveal how deeply involved Rose Greenhow was in the
Confederate cause.”
–Cokie Roberts, National Public Radio commentator, author of
Founding Mothers
“The first comprehensive story of a remarkable woman whose
passion for the Southern cause was equal to that of any soldier who
fought for southern independence. Well worth reading.”
–Jim Lighthizer, President, Civil War Preservation Trust
“For anyone wondering what role women played in shaping the
course of history of the United States, Ann Blackman has an answer:
Rose Greenhow. The story of Wild Rose has everything: power,
intrigue, passion, and a clever, determined woman at the center.
This is a great read.”
–Judy Woodruff, CNN anchor, Judy Woodruff’s Inside Politics
“Sexy, audacious, determined–Rose O’Neale Greenhow finally gets
her due as a power player in American history. Relive the Civil War
through the exploits of this Southern patriot, who dazzled
Washington and Europe long before women were supposed to behave so
boldly.”
–Lynn Sherr, ABC News correspondent, 20/20
“Ann Blackman has brought all the skills she honed as a
Washington journalist to tell the story of a fascinating woman of
the nineteenth century. Here is the Confederate spy–a courtier, a
savvy Southerner, a rebel in her own right–shown with all her
strengths and flaws.”
–Ellen Goodman, syndicated Boston Globe columnist
From the Hardcover edition.
Chapter 1
Rose’s Game
The summer sun beat down on a wooden milk cart rumbling along a
dirt road that stretched up the Washington side of the Potomac
River. A long, lazy cloud of yellow dust trailed from the wheels
and hung in the heavy summer air. The driver, wearing a frayed gray
frock, passed one sprawling Union army encampment after another. To
soldiers moving supply wagons upriver to reinforce newly dug-in
positions, the slender figure seemed but a simple farm girl
returning home from a morning of selling sweet cream and buttermilk
at the city market.
She was, in fact, not a country girl at all, but a beautiful,
well-bred sixteen-year-old named Bettie Duvall, on a secret mission
to Confederate territory. It was Tuesday, July 9, 1861, and the
untested troops of North and South were spoiling for their first
real fight.
Heading out of the Federal City through Georgetown, Miss Duvall
rode by Camp Banks at Georgetown Heights, headquarters of the First
Massachusetts Infantry. Some of the soldiers had left that morning,
trudging up the road to Great Falls to relieve another unit that
had lost two men, shot by rebels from across the river. The two
were among the first casualties of war, and the city was in
mourning. The Union troops occupied themselves as best they could.
“We have received some new pants today, dark blue,” one wrote in
his diary. “Are to have blue jackets, I believe.”1 When he was
hungry, the soldier sneaked out of camp to look for apples,
gooseberries, and currants. He also picked a rose from the garden
of a departed secessionist and sent it to his parents. A few
soldiers beat the heat by taking a dip in the river. They had been
told to be ready to march at a moment’s notice.
All around camp, thin wisps of dark smoke curled up from cooking
fires, carrying the smell of burnt sugar to hungry soldiers. Boiled
rice with sugar sauce was being prepared for dinner. It was a
simple meal, but the men liked the sweet taste, and it was
certainly a step up from skillygalee, hard bread soaked in cold
water and fried brown in pork fat. “I must say that Uncle Sam don’t
feed his soldiers as he ought,” wrote a soldier who signed his
letter “C.B.L.” “Hard crackers and salt junk is not the thing for a
man to fight on.”
Farther up the road, the cart passed Camp Winfield Scott,
headquarters of the Second Michigan Infantry, “Richardson’s
Brigade.” It was, in the words of soldier Charles B. Haydon, “a
beautiful location,” that rose “almost to the dignity of
mountains.” There had been some fighting upriver two days before,
and the infantrymen were eager for more action. “I for one am ready
to work & give if need be all I am worth which is very little,
til the last secessionist is dead or subdued,” Haydon wrote.
The men’s provisions were poor, and theft was a problem. Disease
was worse. Measles had broken out, and the sick list lengthened
daily. Many were also suffering from severe diarrhea and bloody
flux, or dysentery, the result of their insufficient diet. When the
surgeon expressed bafflement about how to cure it, some men took to
doctoring themselves by drinking the juice of boiled blackberry
root. They knew they had to get better quickly, because they had
been ordered to pack their knapsacks and expected to move out that
night.
A mile beyond the camp, the cart turned sharply left and rattled
onto the loose old boards of Chain Bridge. Union artillerymen at
Battery Martin Scott, a new, two-tiered stone-and-turf
fortification overlooking the bridge, could see the cart and driver
from their outpost with its commanding, panoramic view of the
Potomac. Twelve-pounder guns mounted at the end of the bridge could
sweep the span, and one hundred feet up the hill, three big
forty-two-pounders could rake not just the bridge, but the heights
beyond. The Union cannoneers used an old stone mill on the opposite
side of the Potomac to get their range. But the cart made its way
peacefully across. No one stopped the driver.
Bettie Duvall continued up the road. She had left the city hours
earlier and had not even gone halfway to her uncertain
destination.
Despite regular reports of Confederate soldiers lurking around
their camps, Union troops controlled both banks of the river,
including the northern edge of Virginia from Alexandria below the
capital to encampments all along Arlington Heights and up to Chain
Bridge. Colonel William Tecumseh Sherman had command of the three
New York regiments and the Second Wisconsin Infantry assigned to
protect the far side of the river.
The weather had been intensely hot, interrupted only by severe
afternoon thunderstorms. During those brief, violent downpours,
water rushed through the soldiers’ tents like a river, soaking
knapsacks and forcing them to sleep on raised boards. Confederate
patrols fired across the river at Union encampments at night, and
the Union forces returned fire, reporting some casualties. Everyone
was on edge.
Bettie Duvall drove her cart up a steep hill into the Virginia
countryside. The road was narrow and badly cut by wagon wheels,
slowing her progress. While most of the Union wagons and artillery
were behind her, the young Southerner had to look out for Yankee
scouts and pickets.
Not wanting to travel after nightfall, which would increase the
danger, she stopped at Sharon, a plantation on the Georgetown &
Leesburg Road just west of the village of Langley. It was owned by
the family of her friend Lieutenant Catesby R. Jones. Jones had
resigned his post as an officer in the United States Navy and left
to join the Confederate navy when Virginia seceded from the Union
three months earlier, but the family still lived in the ancestral
home. The next morning, Miss Duvall changed into a stylish riding
habit, abandoned her humble cart, borrowed a saddle horse, and
cantered off in the direction of Lewinsville and Tyson Cross roads,
where travelers sometimes stopped in a peach grove to rest.
The dirt road took her past deserted wooden houses and farms with
weathered ox fences and through undulating fields of ripening wheat
and Indian corn. She headed for the village of Fairfax Court House,
some twenty miles west of Washington and only ten miles north of
Manassas Junction, the Confederate headquarters of General Pierre
Gustave Toutant Beauregard. The Louisiana native, hero of Fort
Sumter, had just arrived at Manassas from Charleston to take
command of the Confederate Army of the Potomac.
Near Vienna, Miss Duvall came upon a Confederate outpost and was
ordered to halt. The Confederate soldiers, whose gray jackets had
already faded to butternut by the relentless sun and yellow dust,
had dug trenches in the road and felled thick trees to slow the
Union army’s expected advance. At last, she had reached friendly
territory.
Miss Duvall told the pickets she had come to see Brigadier
General Milledge Luke Bonham, a South Carolina politician who days
before had been ordered to relinquish his command of the army to
Beauregard, a professional soldier. Bonham, who remained as the
general’s top aide, was at Fairfax Court House, about five miles to
the south. The soldiers escorted their charge to Bonham’s
headquarters, where she tied her horse to the bough of a tree. But
when the general learned of his visitor, he at first refused to see
her, fearing she was yet another lady spy dispatched by the
Federals to assess the strength of the Confederate army. Told that
the young woman was prepared to take her message to Beauregard
herself and also, perhaps more important, that she was “very
pretty,” Bonham relented. “I was very much startled,” he wrote, “at
recognizing the face of a beautiful young lady, a brunette, with
sparkling black eyes, perfect features, glossy black hair.” Bonham,
who seven months before had been a congressman from South Carolina,
remembered seeing Bettie Duvall in the spectator gallery of the
House of Representatives, a frequent gathering spot for Southern
ladies.
When she told him the content of her message and he agreed to
forward it to his commander, Miss Duvall reached back, took a tuck
comb from a chignon of long, silky hair that had been wound
gracefully around her head, and shook loose her locks. Bonham
watched spellbound as a tiny bag fell out. It was not larger than a
silver dollar and had been carefully stitched out of a torn piece
of glossy black silk, the kind used in the finest of mourning
clothes. The purse contained a slip of white paper with a
combination of numbers and letters written in bold handwriting with
black ink: 054 1 7 3. It was code for “Beauregard.”15 With it was a
ten-word message, also in code, with information Beauregard would
find critical: “McDowell has certainly been ordered to advance on
the sixteenth. ROG.”
Bettie Duvall’s mission was complete. The Confederates now knew
that Brigadier General Irvin McDowell, commander of the Union
forces around Washington, would march out to attack them in less
than one week.
The initials ROG belonged to Rose O’Neale Greenhow, a ravishing
and fearless Southerner and grande dame of Washington society. She
operated a Confederate spy ring in the nation’s capital, and Bettie
Duvall was one of her scouts. An engaging widow with three
daughters, including an eight-year-old who carried her mother’s
name, Rose was the heart and soul of the operation.
She had a passion for politics and many friends, both Democrats
and Republicans. She also had an almost reckless disregard for
danger and a fiercely independent streak. She could be manipulative
and headstrong at one moment, dripping warm Southern cha-arm the
next, each syllable melting slowly from her lips like delicate
drops of dew.
Now in middle age, Rose was a handsome woman who carried
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