“He Is a Noble Fellow, a Most Valuable Man to Us”
TO PROVINCIAL OFFICERS such as Captain Saunders, Timothy Webster was still the brave rebel mail carrier who relayed letters between Richmond and the North. Saunders’s acquaintance with Webster was fleeting, and he had no reason to doubt he wasn’t who he said he was. Yet in Richmond, General John Winder and his military police had started to harbor doubts about Webster.
So many of Webster’s fellow secessionists in Baltimore had been arrested and imprisoned, yet he continued to move freely without molestation. Despite Webster’s claims to be a gentleman of leisure, a few discreet inquiries had failed to unearth anyone who knew him prior to 1861.
Then the unmasking in Washington of James Howard, the clerk in Provost Marshal Porter’s office, seemed to lead inextricably back to Captain Tim Webster. The woman who had smuggled the map of the capital’s Federal defenses arrived in Richmond distraught at its loss, and her misery deepened when she learned it had fallen into Union hands. The Confederates retraced her movements to discover the likely mole.
She and her children had departed in a wagon from Washington with the map carefully concealed about her person. At Leonardtown she had spent the night in the hotel before continuing on to Cobb Neck and then the voyage across the Potomac when Webster had been a passenger. She recounted how she and her children had arrived cold and wet on the other side, and they and the other passengers had gone to the Virginian safehouse, where she’d removed her damp clothes and helped the children out of theirs. She must have lost the packet then, and someone else must have picked it up soon after. Webster was the most likely suspect.
If Webster was a double agent the damage he’d inflicted on the Confederacy was immense. He’d sat in the bar of the Spottswood Hotel drinking whiskey with the city’s military police; he’d been shown around military camps; he’d even delivered letters on behalf of Judah Benjamin, the secretary of war.
But the Confederates needed proof, not speculation, if they were to bring Webster to justice. The problem was how to get the proof. He’d outfoxed them for a year, and he’d do so again if given the chance. Then Webster fell ill, and an idea came to the rebels. If Webster really was a Union agent, the longer he and his wife—for that’s who they believed Hattie Lawton to be—remained incommunicado in Richmond, the more anxious his handlers would become.
Before long they would try to make contact with him; so all the Confederate military police had to do was keep a constant watch on Mr. and Mrs. Webster. Discretion didn’t matter; in fact, the more Webster felt the net closing, the more likely he was to break cover.
Though sick with fever, Webster remained lucid. It wasn’t delirium causing him to imagine the worst; he sensed it in Samuel McCubbin’s demeanor. Webster told Hattie Lawton not to try to leave Richmond with a message for Pinkerton as it was too dangerous. She was to act as his devoted wife, to nurse him back to health, and the moment he was well enough they would flee. One week passed, then two, then three, and Webster was still too frail to stand. The weather that winter was singularly disagreeable, a succession of cold, wet days, with Saturday, February 22, particularly grim. From first light “a cold rain fell in sheets, turning the streets into seas of mud, the gutters into rushing torrents.” Webster lay in bed listening to the rain drumming at his window, but the buzz of excited chatter soon drowned out the rain as people from across the Southern states filed past the Monumental Hotel toward Capitol Square to witness the inauguration of President Jefferson Davis. The square was “black with spectators … [and] the parade, the soggy footpaths and saturated grassplots, even the streets far back beyond the great iron gates of the entrance, were packed with people.” Rain dripped from the bronze statue of George Washington upon his horse as nearby Davis mounted the covered podium to address his people who were huddled under oil clothes and umbrellas. Webster heard the crowd fall silent, and a short while later a the cry went up: “God Save Our President!”
Four days later, on Wednesday, February 26, Webster had been bedridden for almost a month, yet still Samuel McCubbin prowled the hotel, waiting, waiting, waiting for his perseverance to be rewarded.
For the first-time visitor Richmond was best viewed from the south. A passenger entering the city across the railroad bridge in the spring of 1861 wrote how “Richmond burst beautifully into view, spreading panorama-like over her swelling hills, with the evening sun gilding simple houses and towering spires alike into a glory. The city follows the curve of the [James] river, seated on amphitheatric hills retreating from its banks; fringes of dense woods shading their slopes, or making blue background against the sky. No city of the South has a grander or more picturesque approach.”
The railroad from Fredericksburg entered Richmond from the north, a route less pleasing to the eye. As the train passed through the city line, just south of Shockoe Creek, the first buildings the passengers saw were the ramshackle houses of Richmond’s poor. Most of these men and women—many of whom were German or Irish immigrants—worked in either the iron industry or in one of the city’s dozens of flour mills or tobacco factories.
The average wage for these employees was approximately $1.25 a day, a pittance for their productivity. Each year Richmond’s tobacco factories processed around fifteen million pounds of the weed, while the twelve flour mills brought in over three million dollars annually. The biggest industry was iron, the employer of 1,550 workers, 900 of whom worked at the Tredegar Iron Works. Among other things, they manufactured the tracks for the five railroads that serviced Richmond.
The train headed south for a mile, toward the heart of the city, before a ninety-degree turn at Sixteenth Street took it west along Broad Street. Now passengers sitting on the left-hand side of the train had a wonderful view of the capitol building, the centerpiece of the eight acres of Capitol Square, that sprang from Shockoe Hill. In 1862 the New York Herald described how Richmond consisted of “twelve parallel streets, nearly three miles in length, extending northwest and southeast [they] were originally distinguished by the letters of the alphabet, ‘A’ street being next to the river; but other names, however, are now generally used. The principal thoroughfare of business and fashion is Main, formerly ‘E’ Street. The cross streets, or those which intersect the streets, just mentioned, are designated by numbers such as First, Second and so on.”
The train carrying Pryce Lewis and John Scully pulled into the Fredericksburg railroad depot, on the north side of Broad Street near Eighth, at one o’clock on the afternoon of Wednesday, February 26. They walked out of the depot to see “the long, gaily-painted buses from the hotels stood hub to hub” waiting to ferry passengers to their destination. The buses, like the cabs and hacks, threw up a fine spray of filth from the unpaved streets. All up Broad Street gangs of laborers worked to repair the damage caused by a recent storm; the roof of the Methodist Church needed three hundred slates replaced, and scaffolding was being erected outside Trinity Church. Colonel Biggar, meanwhile, was barking instructions at the workmen rebuilding the fence outside his home.
Lewis and Scully had no need of a bus or cab. They headed south with the brisk stride of men who knew where they were going, toward the Spottswood Hotel on the corner of Main and Eighth streets, a route they had rehearsed over and over in their minds. Beneath the confident exterior the men’s senses worked furiously to absorb everything around: the sights, the sounds and, above all, the smells that were generated in a city of thirty-eight thousand inhabitants.*
One odor in particular unsettled all first-time visitors, as it had Sarah Jones, the English governess, who upon her arrival fifteen months earlier wrote in her diary that “the atmosphere of Richmond is redolent of tobacco. The tints of the pavements are those of tobacco. One seems to breathe tobacco, and smell tobacco at every turn, the town is filthy with it; not so much because it abounds in warehouses, and tobacco cases stand in every corner, but because it abounds in people’s mouths.”
The two spies passed the United Presbyterian Church, one of thirty-three places of worship in the city, and approached the Spottswood Hotel. Leave the talking to me, Lewis told Scully under his breath. The lobby was full of Confederate army officers, none of whom took any notice of the newcomers. Lewis asked for two rooms. The clerk consulted the guest book, then apologized: there was nothing available. He suggested they try either the American or the Monumental. Which was closer? asked Lewis. The American, replied the clerk, it was two blocks farther up Main Street. As an afterthought, Lewis asked if there was a Mr. Webster staying in the hotel. The clerk searched the register but found no Webster. They walked up Main Street past Archer & Daly, the steel engravers, past the Farmer’s Bank and the next-door bank of Virginia, past the store of George Bidgood, who sold books and stationery, and past Pizzini’s, the confectioners, where the ice cream was legendary. They stepped to one side when “gay ladies and grande dames, bedecked in their silks or cashmere,” approached, and they avoided eye contact with military men who might have wondered why two such strapping specimens were not in uniform.
The American Hotel was full. The clerk was most contrite, but the inauguration had brought so many visitors to town and most were making a week of it. Lewis and Scully were directed to the Exchange and Ballard Hotel on Franklin Street at the corner of Fourteenth Street. Lewis gave a heavy sigh. How far? Four blocks east, the clerk replied.
The hotel was Richmond’s most prestigious, despite what Theodore Hoenniger of the Spottswood might have said to the contrary. Certainly no other hotel boasted such an illustrious guest book; among the names were those of Charles Dickens, who had sat in his room at the Exchange in 1842, perspiring, longing to return to the North and cooler climes; William Makepeace Thackeray rated Richmond “the merriest little place and the most picturesque I have seen in America!” during his visit in 1856, and wrote to a friend from the Exchange with a gold fountain pen he had bought in the city for four dollars, “which is really very ingenious and not much more inconvenient than a common pen.”
It was in the parlor of the Exchange that Edgar Allan Poe had lectured on “The Poetic Principle” on his final visit to Richmond in 1849, and the following year P. T. Barnum and his circus troupe checked in during their tour. Ten years later, in 1860, the establishment had hosted its most distinguished guest, Edward, Prince of Wales, an occasion that, as the Richmond Dispatch reported, was marred by the crowd who let excitement get the better of them. “During all the night of the arrival, every room and stairway in the Ballard Hotel was crammed with a low, wretched mob, each striving and hurtling to get some look into the apartments where his Royal Highness was staying. There were cat-calls, shouts and whooping, with cries for him to show himself—invitations with which I need scarcely say, his Royal Highness did not comply, for the rough, howling, brutal mob that had swarmed round his carriage on arriving at the hotel, had given him a pretty good insight into the general tendencies of a Richmond crowd.”
As Lewis and Scully walked toward the Exchange and Ballard Hotel, they could see that it was two separate buildings linked by a raised and covered walkway above Fourteenth Street. From the outside the Exchange was the grander of the two with a colonnaded façade and turreted corners. Inside it was equally imposing. Brass gas lamps hung from the ceiling of the lobby illuminating the polished black-and-white marble floor beneath.
A bellboy took the pair’s valises the moment they entered, and guided them to the reception desk. There were rooms available. Only the very wealthiest could afford the Exchange and Ballard Hotel, such as messieurs Lander, Gaither, Bonham, Arrington, Batson, Royston and the ten other senators who had taken up residence since the Confederate government relocated to Richmond from Montgomery.
Lewis and Scully registered in their own names and were relieved to learn they weren’t too late for a spot of lunch. In the splendid dining room they studied the menu with mounting excitement; the rest of Richmond might have been suffering a shortage of food, but not the Exchange and Ballard Hotel. Senators needed nourishment if they were to lead their people to victory. Guests could choose from “rounds of beef, saddles of mutton, venison, whole shoats, hams, sausage of country make, rich with sage and redolent with pepper, turkies [sic], geese, ducks, chickens, with vegetables, such as potatoes, turnips, large as cannon balls, and beets like oblong shells.”
In between courses Lewis and Scully spoke softly to each other, preparing for their visit to the offices of the Richmond Dispatch. They had passed the building on their way to the Exchange and Ballard Hotel. It was on the corner of Main and Thirteenth streets, a four-story block known as the “Dispatch Building.”
When they arrived at the offices of the Richmond Dispatch, they were shown straight to the office of the editor, James Cowardin, a portly man in his early fifties who had founded the newspaper twelve years earlier. Like the editors of the city’s other three daily newspapers,* Cowardin had been forced to downsize because of the shortage of paper. And what paper remained was of an inferior quality to that of the prewar days; it was coarse, vaguely brown, the sort of paper that a year earlier wouldn’t have been deemed good enough to wrap presents.
Nevertheless, Cowardin’s Dispatch still outsold its rivals: the Whig, Examiner and Enquirer. Its circulation figure of eighteen thousand was sustained “by the accuracy of its reporting and the moderation of its editorial policy,” not something that could be said of the Whig or the Examiner. This pair were virulent in their denunciation of the Yankees, particularly the Examiner, which was edited by John Moncure Daniel, a man with “the qualities of the scimitar of Saladin and the battle-ax of Couer de Lion.” In his eyes Abraham Lincoln was a “ferocious old Orang-Outang from the wilds of Illinois,” while Jefferson Davis was too timid for a wartime leader. The Confederacy required “a dictator,” wrote Daniel, someone who would do whatever necessary to win the war.
The interview with Cowardin was cordial but brief. It was the middle of the afternoon, and he was rushing to finish the next day’s issue. Lewis handed him the letter, and Cowardin read it, then told him matter-of-factly he “would find Captain Webster at the Monumental Hotel laid up with rheumatism.”
Lewis and Scully walked out of the Dispatch Building, crossed Main Street and approached the southern corner of Capitol Square. They passed the state courthouse and found themselves in the middle of the square, with the capitol building in front of them. Up close they realized that the beauty of the building was best beheld from afar. The nearer one was to the capitol, the more one saw that “the rough brick walls had been covered with stucco in a way that gave them a look of cheapness.”
Richmonders in fine clothes promenaded under the linden trees and around the fountains, and they sat on the steps at the foot of George Washington’s statue, gossiping about the war, about the weather and about the cost of food. Imagine, bacon at twenty-five cents a pound and butter twice as much! Beef was up from thirteen to thirty cents a pound, but the quality of the meat was down. The price of fish, even a pair of shad or a rockfish, was exorbitant, and coffee was $1.50 a pound. Ladies swapped tips on coffee substitute—roasted rye or roasted corn were favorites—while others extolled the virtues of dried willow leaves as a tolerable replacement for tea. “Dutch treats” were arranged, dinner parties where guests contributed to the meal with rare luxuries such as sardines, brandied peaches and French prunes. At least the women could be thankful that rich silks and laces not only were affordable but had actually dropped in price thanks to the number of merchants who had moved to the city from other parts of Virginia.
As Lewis and Scully walked north, they saw to their left the tall thin steeple of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, the place of worship for Jefferson Davis and General Robert Lee, and to their right, partially obscured by some linden trees, the Monumental Hotel.
It was four o’clock when Lewis and Scully strolled up to the desk and inquired after Mr. Timothy Webster. Yes, replied the clerk, Mr. and Mrs. Webster were guests of the Monumental. As a bellboy was summoned, Lewis glanced around and wondered what Webster was doing in “a second-rate house.”
The bellboy led the pair upstairs to Webster’s room, and Lewis entered “a long, narrow room [and] near the entrance on the right side of the door was a bed upon which Webster lay.” Hattie Lawton sat in a chair close to Webster, and a man Lewis didn’t recognize was also in the room. Lewis advanced and shook the clammy hand of Webster, who propped himself up and welcomed “old friends of his from Baltimore.” Gesturing toward the man, Webster introduced Lewis and Scully to P. B. Price, a staunch member of Richmond’s Young Men’s Christian Association.
They exchanged pleasantries and swapped banalities, and then Lewis said he’d like a word with Webster in private. Lawton and Price invited Scully to observe Richmond through the window, and while they did so Lewis gave the letter to Webster, who read it with a look of “utter astonishment.” Soon Lawton, Scully and Price returned to Webster’s bedside, and some coffee was ordered as Lewis and Scully “remained for an hour or more,” chatting to Mr. and Mrs. Webster, and hoping that Mr. Price might leave and allow old friends to catch up in private. But he didn’t, and when Lewis declared it was time for Webster to get some rest, Price insisted the two visitors accompany him to the theater that evening.
Lewis and Scully departed with a promise to return the following morning. Look forward to it, replied Webster, who sank back into his pillow when he was alone with Lawton. He was scared, he told her, scared that the “unheralded appearance of his companions might lead to their being suspected.”
Lewis and Scully had an early supper at the Exchange and Ballard Hotel and met Mr. Price in the lobby. There was no need to take a cab to the theater, he explained, as it was just across the street. It was a chill night, but the Metropolitan Hall was warm and snug. Price refused to let his guests pay for their fifty-cent tickets. On me, he told them, adding that they were in for a treat tonight. It was Harry Macarthy, not only the most celebrated entertainer in the Southern states but an Englishman turned Confederate. Like themselves.
The theater was busy when the curtain went up, and a “small, handsome man … brimful of humor” strolled onto the stage. The London-born Macarthy was a comic, a mimic, a musician and a songwriter. The Richmond Enquirer reckoned that “all who wish to enjoy a hearty laugh and hear a good song should not fail to see Macarthy.” The song the audience wanted to hear, particularly those in uniform, was the “Bonnie Blue Flag,” a battle anthem written by Macarthy after he’d witnessed delegates at the Tennessee Secession Convention waving a blue flag.
Macarthy knew how to work his audience, making them roar with laughter as he began with a few jokes about the Yankees. Then a song, another joke, some impressions—a Negro, a German, an Irishman—and more songs, with Macarthy joined on stage by his pianist (and wife), Lottie Estelle: “Missouri,” “O the Sweet South,” and “Let the Bugle Blow.” Lewis tapped his feet to the music as all around “soldiers, free and easy in their ways … applauded the rebel songs of the actors vigorously.” The climax would be a lusty rendition of “The Bonnie Blue Flag,” but before that was another song guaranteed to get the crowd on their feet, “The Stars and Bars.” Soldiers whooped and hollered and punched the air with their fists as they joined Macarthy in the song.
Come, hucksters, from your markets,
Come, bandits, from your caves,
Come, venal spies; with brazen lies
Bewildering your deluded eyes,
That we may dig your graves;
Come, creatures of a sordid clown
And driveling traitor’s breath,
A single blast shall blow you down
Upon the fields of Death.
Lewis and Scully allowed themselves the luxury of sleeping late the following morning, Thursday, February 27, enjoying the soft splendor of the hotel linen and their hair mattresses.
They met for breakfast and afterward retired to the large barroom with its French-plate mirrors and gas chandeliers, where they read the day’s papers and listened to their fellow guests lament the fall of Nashville.
After an hour Scully got to his feet and told his companion he was going for a stroll. Lewis nodded and continued reading the paper, aware that Scully was heading to the Monumental and a rendezvous with Webster. Lewis would visit later in the day, and then first thing the next morning he and Scully would check out of the hotel and head their separate ways.
Lewis heard the brazen lunch gong and went to enjoy another extravagant meal. Afterward he climbed the stairs to the hotel’s observatory and gasped at the view. He counted the hills, seven in total, and observed the capitol from a different angle. Over in the southwest he could make out the melancholic walls of the giant Hollywood Cemetery, and to the east was the Confederate navy yard. But the vista to the south was most stunning, beyond the flour mills, tobacco factories, cotton mills and ironworks that lined the banks of the James River. There, far away, Lewis watched “the river winding along and losing itself amongst undulating hills.” For a moment he could have been back in Newtown.
By three o’clock Scully still hadn’t returned, and Lewis was becoming concerned. He left the hotel and started to walk in the direction of the Monumental. Up ahead he saw Scully coming the other way. Lewis let him know he had been gone too long, but Scully assured his colleague that “there was no occasion for uneasiness.” He then explained that Webster had asked him to carry some letters from his Richmond friends to their contacts in Maryland, and he would return in the evening to collect the letters. Lewis told his accomplice to return to his room and wait there; he wouldn’t be long. He was going to call on Webster and check that all information had been communicated.
Lewis entered the Monumental and went directly to Webster’s room. Hattie Lawton opened the door, and Lewis saw the unease in her eyes. Her “husband” was propped up in bed, talking to a squarely built gentleman with a dark complexion. The man looked up at the visitor and then turned to Webster in anticipation of an introduction. Webster explained that Lewis was “an old friend, an Englishman from Manchester.” Pleased to meet you, said Lewis, extending a hand. The man got to his feet as Webster presented Captain Samuel McCubbin, head of the city’s secret police. McCubbin smiled and informed Lewis “that he occupied the room adjoining that of Webster.”
For a while the three men “had a pleasant chat upon indifferent subjects.” Then Lewis pulled his watch from his pocket and declared it was time he was on his way. Suddenly McCubbin asked the Englishman if he had “reported to the military governor.” Was that necessary? asked Lewis, with an innocent smile. He had been led to believe by the soldiers at Westmoreland that such protocol was superfluous.
Unfortunately not, said McCubbin, who explained that all persons who crossed the Potomac must report to General Winder’s headquarters. But it’s not a problem, he quickly added, flashing a grin at Lewis. If he and Mr. Scully would be good enough to visit General Winder’s headquarters at four o’clock, the matter could be quickly dealt with. Most kind, replied Lewis, who said that as it was already nearly four o’clock he’d best go and fetch Scully right away.
McCubbin was waiting patiently when Lewis and Scully arrived a little after four at the general’s headquarters on the corner of Ninth and Broad streets. McCubbin led his guests into Winder’s office and introduced them to Richmond’s provost marshal general. John H. Winder was sixty-two years old, a veteran of the Florida and Mexican wars and an instructor of Jefferson Davis when he had been a callow West Point cadet. Winder was “short and compact in frame and curt in act and speech,” and despite his correct appearance he reeked of menace the way Richmond stank of tobacco. Among the Union soldiers languishing in Richmond’s prisons, a visit by Winder was “a feared and fearful thing … leading to an inevitable roughening of our confinement.” Winder’s punishments were cruelly creative. There was the old favorite, the lash, whereby a prisoner would receive upwards of fifteen strokes on his bare back, sometimes as many as fifty, at which point the miscreant would be either unconscious or crying for his mother. If Winder ordered a man to be “trysted up,” the prisoner was “tied up by the thumbs to a cross-piece overhead” and suspended with his feet above the floor for however long Winder thought fit. To be “bucked” and “gagged” entailed a long period lying on the damp stone floor with a wooden gag in the mouth and the elbows tied, or “bucked,” to the knees. Then there was the ingenious “barrel shirt,” reputed to be a trick Winder picked up from an old naval friend. The shirt was “made by sawing a common flour barrel in twin and cutting armholes in the sides and an aperture in the barrel head for the insertion of the wearer’s head.” A couple of days wearing the “barrel shirt” was enough to reform the most recalcitrant of men.
Even among his own people, the name Winder made men tremble. A careless remark about the government, a thoughtless joke about a general, and a man was liable to find himself festering in the cells, a plaything of Winder and his military police. John Beauchamp Jones, the diary-keeping clerk to the secretary of war, was aghast at the antics of Winder and his “Plug-Ugly Gang,” his name for men such as Samuel McCubbin, the worst of the lot in Jones’s caustic opinion. Not only was McCubbin “wholly illiterate,” wrote Jones, but he was also “a Scotch-Irishman though reared in the mobs of Baltimore.”
Jones considered them all to be unfit for the job, just “petty larceny detectives, dwelling in barrooms, ten-pin alleys, and such places. How can they detect political offenders, when they are too ignorant to comprehend what constitutes a political offense? They are illiterate men, of low instincts and desperate characters.” They even seemed incapable of catching Richmond’s pro-Unionists who crept out in the dead of night to daub the walls of buildings with slogans such god bless the stars and stripes and union men to the rescue.
Unfortunately for Jones, life was about to become a great deal more unpleasant under Winder and his Plug-Uglies. On the day Lewis and Scully arrived in Richmond—February 26—Congress had sat in a secret session at the capitol and “authorized the declaration of martial law in this city and at some few other places.”
President Davis was still putting the finishing touches to the proclamation that would come into effect on March 5, but Winder had been told its main points: the suspension of habeas corpus; the prohibition of liquor and the closure of all distilleries; the surrender of all private sidearms; a curfew from ten o’clock at night until dawn and the requirement of a passport for all journeys outside the city line.
This last order brought an ironic smile to the face of Jones, the man who two months earlier had refused to issue a passport to Tim Webster. Webster had still obtained a passport, and Jones suspected it had come from Winder and his Plug-Uglies. He had told his diary that they “seem to be on peculiar terms of intimacy with some of these [letter carriers], for they tell me they convey letters for them to Maryland, and deliver them to their families.”
Winder was a Marylander; so too McCubbin and a couple of his colleagues. They had given private letters to Webster to carry north, including correspondence between Winder and his son, William, a Union artillery officer, who was in Washington waiting to be posted. Winder Junior had just returned from duty in California and was reluctant to become a combatant but realized nonetheless where his duty lay. The letters revealed that General Winder was urging his son “to resign his commission if he could not find the means of certain escape by desertion and come south.” In the end the young Winder neither deserted nor fought; McClellan posted him back to California. The thought that Webster had read this intimate exchange was painful enough for General Winder, but the realization that he had been fooled was too much to bear. The desire to nail Webster was personal as well as professional.
Winder shook hands with Lewis and Scully, telling them with a broad smile that he was “very glad to meet any friends of Captain Webster’s as he is a noble fellow, a most valuable man to us.”
Lewis agreed, adding that that was why he was in Richmond, to pass a letter to Webster “warning him if he ever came north again, not to go by Leonardtown for, if he did, he would be captured [as] United States detectives were watching for him.”
Winder nodded gravely and thanked the pair for undertaking such a perilous task. The three men talked for a while longer. Winder was eager to hear their impressions of the North. What was their opinion of the government? Would Great Britain come to the Confederacy’s aid? For his part Winder made it plain “he regarded Lincoln as a mere figurehead” and instead charged William Seward “as most to blame for … the ‘war on the South.’”
When Lewis asked Winder “for something from you to show that we have reported here and are all right, so to avoid interference from the guards,” he was told that no pass or permit was required, not for two such stalwart friends of the Confederacy. In fact, said the general, as he escorted Lewis and Scully to the door, “call and see me whenever you feel like it.” He was determined to make their brief sojourn in Richmond as pleasant as possible.
Lewis and Scully breathed a sigh of relief as they left General Winder’s headquarters. The Monumental Hotel was only one block away, but they agreed to make their final call on Webster in the evening. First, now that they were “perfectly secure from any mishap,” they would return to their hotel, freshen up and then enjoy a generous supper.
It was dark when Lewis and Scully walked out of the Exchange and Ballard Hotel. The banks and stores were closed, but Richmond’s nocturnal business was about to begin. Behind the pair’s hotel was a row of houses “occupied by parties of a dubious and uncertain character,” with the “sinful abode of Ella Johnson” particularly notorious. Meanwhile in among the linden trees in Capitol Square the two men were subjected to what James Cowardin’s Dispatch described as the “smirks and smiles, winks, and, when occasion served, remarks not of a choice kind … of the prostitutes of both sexes.”
Lewis and Scully politely declined all services on offer and strode across the square and up to Webster’s room. There was no Captain McCubbin, but there was the irritatingly solicitous Mr. Price, insisting once more on a trip to the theater. Mary Partington was playing in The Hunchback at the Franklin Hall. It would be a crime to miss it. Price suggested supper first, but Lewis told him they’d just eaten. In that case, said Price, he would nip out for a quick bite and return in half an hour.
Alone with Webster, Hattie Lawton and Scully, Lewis explained that he intended “to leave the following day and carry out my instructions to go to Chattanooga.” Webster agreed and “said Scully, too, ought to be off as soon as possible.” Unfortunately the letters from his friends had yet to arrive, but he expected them to be ready for Scully to collect in the morning.
They had been “conversing in low tones for perhaps fifteen minutes when there was a knock at the door. Webster called ‘come in’ and a gentleman, a stranger to Scully and [Lewis] entered, followed by a young gentleman about nineteen years of age.” The light by the door was gloomy, and it wasn’t until the second man had stepped forward that the gaslight revealed his face. It was Chase Morton.
Scully got to his feet, mumbled something incoherent and rushed out of the room leaving behind his overcoat. Lewis made a weak joke at his friend’s expense and “betrayed no sign of recognition” as Webster introduced him to George Clackner, another one of General Winder’s men.
Clackner shook Lewis’s hand but didn’t turn to introduce his companion. Instead he and Webster “began a commonplace talk, like old acquaintances,” with Lewis chipping in the odd comment from time to time. Morton contributed nothing to the conversation. He stood and watched.
Lewis had an urge to ask Morton how the family was, just to see his reaction, perhaps surprise him with his nerve. Now that he “knew the game was up,” Lewis felt strangely relieved, unshackled of suspense. His only concern “was to avoid being arrested in the room with Webster, for in his feeble state it would be a great shock.”
After a few minutes Lewis got to his feet, put on his soft felt hat, collected Scully’s overcoat and wished everyone a good evening. At the top of the stairs he found a fretful Scully. “The dog is dead,” said Lewis, handing him his coat. He heard a door open, then a voice say “excuse me.” Lewis turned. Clackner asked him and Scully to confirm their names. Then Clackner said their presence was required in General Winder’s office. But we saw the general in the afternoon, replied Lewis. Too bad. Clackner’s orders were to escort the pair to his chief’s headquarters.
Lewis and Scully were led downstairs and into the hotel bar, where Samuel McCubbin and four other policemen were leaning against the counter drinking whiskey. Lewis asked McCubbin what was going on. The detective shrugged and said that all would soon be revealed.
*This was the figure recorded in the 1860 census, making it the country’s twenty-fifth-largest city, but with the outbreak of war and the influx of soldiers, and civilians from other parts of Virginia, the population increased by several thousand.
*Richmond also had the Täglicher Anzeiger, a German-language newspaper, popular with the city’s Jewish population, and in 1863 a fifth English-language daily, the Sentinel, was published.