Double Death

“It Was Not War, It Was Murder”

MOST OF THE NORTHERN PAPERS carried the belated news of Webster’s death, the first execution of a spy by either side in the war. The New York Post noted the fact and asked the rhetorical question: “What if the federal government should commence hanging spies?” The Burlington (Iowa) Hawk Eye related the facts surrounding the case, boasting that Timothy Webster was well known in Iowa, having helped solve many cases over the years, and that some people might remember his charming wife and children. With breathtaking irresponsibility the paper then told its readers that “the report that he had his wife with him, and that she was in Richmond with him at the time of Webster’s execution, is a matter very easily understood and explained by those who understand the workings and intricate machinery of the secret police service. We doubt not that some female, passing as his wife, was with him, and that when it became known to him that his fate was sealed, he revealed his true name, that his friends would know him.”

The New York Times and Chicago Tribune reprinted the report from the Richmond Dispatch, the same one in which Webster was alleged to have imprecated all manner of curses on the heads of every Southerner. Contained toward the end of the Dispatch’s spurious article—and also reproduced by the Northern papers—was a paragraph concerning the fate of the other three detainees. Mrs. Webster, “arrested along with her husband as a spy,” was still in Castle Godwin but would “no doubt be sent out of the Confederacy” before long. Not so Pryce Lewis and John Scully whom, the paper said, could expect to remain imprisoned for a good many more months. The Dispatch mocked the two poltroons, claiming that they were to blame for Webster’s death because “they let the cat out of the bag on him after their conviction.”

In the same week that the Northern newspapers were publishing news of Webster’s death, a copy of the Boston Herald dated April 16, 1862, reached the pretty market town of Shrewsbury, just inside England’s border with Wales. It had been six years since Elizabeth Lewis last saw her favorite son, Pryce, but she exchanged the occasional letter with him and knew he was working as a detective. Nevertheless, she had no idea as to the exact nature of his work, even less that he was actively engaged in the Civil War. And now she read the crushing news that, according to the Boston Herald, Pryce had been executed.

She had lived in Shrewsbury for a couple of years, just her and Thomas, who had risen above his rank to become a solicitor. It was Thomas who, on May 14, wrote on his mother’s behalf to Charles Adams, the United States’ minister to Britain. On a sheet of paper banded in black as a sign of mourning, Thomas Lewis repeated the erroneous claim made in the Boston Herald of April 16 that his brother had been executed and pleaded for more information. He then asked Adams to “kindly inform me how I am to act in the matter and if my poor brother has left any personality [sic] behind him (which I have no doubt he has), how I am to obtain it. He has left a poor broken-hearted (widow) mother to lament his loss. Hoping you will excuse me for the liberty I have thus taken.”

John Scully’s brother was closer at hand when he heard that his sibling was in rebel hands. From his home in Carlisle, Indiana, P. B. Scully wrote to Lord Lyons, the British ambassador in Washington. Lyons forwarded the letter to Frederick Cridland, along with a note instructing him to “inquire into the matter and make a report to me upon it.” It took two months for Lyons’s note to reach Cridland, but the acting consul replied in detail, apologizing first that “the arduous duties at this office and the innumerable cases involving the liberty of British subjects prevented my reporting the case at the time.” Cridland then elaborated on the arrests, his interview with Mr. Benjamin and Mr. Randolph, and the subsequent commutation of the sentences. As far as he was aware, Cridland concluded, “the prisoners are still confined in jail.”

Lewis read with disgust the “grossly prejudiced” accounts of Timothy Webster’s execution in the Richmond papers. He knew them to be untrue because George Freeburger had delivered a detailed description of the hanging that same afternoon. Of course Webster had been afraid, but he’d gone to his death like a man. Lewis attached no blame to himself for what happened, nor did he harbor much rancor toward John Scully, with whom he was reunited a couple of days after Webster’s death. Scully was young and not particularly bright. He should never have been sent South. Instead Lewis reserved his vehemence for Father McMullen, whom he believed had pressured Scully “to make a full confession to save himself,” and for the man he blamed most of all, the fool who had landed them “deep in the mud.” As Lewis and Scully sat in their cramped cell, sweating in the stifling May heat, the Englishman turned to his companion and laid the blame for their plight squarely at the feet of Allan Pinkerton, “for it was his downright lack of judgment, or worse, that brought us here.”

A little more than a week after Timothy Webster’s execution, May 8, John Beauchamp Jones penned a plaintive entry in his diary: “Norfolk and Portsmouth are evacuated! Our army falling back! The Merrimac is to be, or has been, blown up!”*

Every day rumors swept through Richmond that the Yankees would soon be at the city’s gates. People promenading among the linden trees in Capitol Square wore creased brows and asked one another if there was any truth in the report that General McDowell’s army was coming south to reinforce George McClellan’s already vast force. The pessimistic professed solemnly that it was only a matter of time before the bell in the tower on Capitol Square tolled to warn of the enemy’s arrival. Some inhabitants began to flee Richmond, at least those who could, the wealthy and the influential. John Beauchamp Jones packed off his family to Raleigh, North Carolina, on Friday, May 9. Jones admitted he was ashamed at this “flight from the enemy … [but] no one scarcely supposes that Richmond will be defended.”

That same evening, a courier delivered a message to President Jefferson Davis as he hosted a reception at the Confederate White House on Clay Street. He read the message in his office, then returned to the drawing room and his guests. He passed his wife, Varina, en route and whispered, “The enemy’s gun-boats are ascending the [James] River.”

The next morning Davis ordered his wife to North Carolina. John Beauchamp Jones’s family and Mrs. Davis were among the first to leave, the first drops of a summer shower that soon became a deluge. “The panic began some days later,” wrote Mrs. Davis, “and it was pitiable to see our friends coming in without anything except the clothes they had on, and mourning the loss of their trunks in a piteous jumble of pain and merriment.”

For Richmond’s poor there was no alternative but to remain in a city that seemed to be disintegrating before their eyes. The chins of profiteers doubled, tripled, quadrupled as they grew fat on the misery of others; few people could afford either meat or fish, so most grew thin within their summer clothes.

People took to the street to demonstrate at the injustice, but it had no effect; nor did General Winder when he tried to curtail the profiteering with the imposition of a maximum tariff for various foods. The farmers and fishermen responded by refusing to come to market, forcing Winder to back down.

Some found solace in black humor, and a favorite joke of the day was that shoppers left home with their money in their baskets and returned with their goods in their purses. In public Jones bore a look of stoic fortitude, like the others who refused to run. Men and women took their lead from John Letcher, Virginia’s governor, who told his people he would never surrender Richmond. He feared no Yankee, be he McClellan or Lincoln.

Each morning Richmonders woke wondering if today would be the day the Yankees came. Every afternoon after work scores of men and women—John Beauchamp Jones included—trooped up the top of Hospital Hill, north of the city, from where the guns could be heard. Sometimes as they stood on the hill listening to the sound of battle they saw the Union observation balloon, Constitution, ascending in the distance. Inside the basket was twenty-nine-year-old Thaddeus Lowe, the pioneer of aerial military espionage.

Lowe had been fascinated with aeronautics since childhood, and his first ascent in a balloon was in 1856; by the time war broke out he was rivaling John Wise as America’s preeminent balloonist. On June 18, 1861, Lowe had risen from the grounds of the Columbian Armory (present-day site of the National Air and Space Museum) and from a height of five hundred feet above Washington telegraphed the White House from his basket, telling Lincoln he was indebted to him for his ENCOURAGEMENT FOR THE OPPORTUNITY OF DEMONSTRATING THE AVAILABILITY OF THE SCIENCE OF AERONAUTICS IN THE MILITARY SERVICE OF THE COUNTRY. That evening Lowe spent the night at the White House explaining to the president the potential of balloons as a reconnaissance tool. By the end of July 1861 Lowe was the chief aeronaut in the U.S Army Balloon Corps (the corps would have seven balloons, each with a mobile hydrogen gas generator), and the following month he made the first of twenty-three ascents in a thirty-four-day period, gathering intelligence on the Confederate positions on Upton’s Hills and around Fairfax Courthouse, as well as the roads to Arlington and Alexandria.

McClellan was one of the first officers to go aloft with Lowe, and he made sure the Balloon Corps was used during the Peninsula Campaign. The Confederates hadn’t the resources to launch their own aeronautical rival, but their reaction to the innovation was to produce one of their own: military camouflage. They disguised military encampments so they couldn’t be seen from the air, and in other cases they painted logs black to look like cannons.

Toward the end of May Richmond braced itself to be invaded. The Dispatch did little to allay people’s fear, warning in its edition of May 24 that “our Northern brethren are now engaged in an assiduous endeavor to restore the Union and set the Stars and Stripes afloat in Richmond, by laying plans to murder and rob all of our people who may wish to prevent the consummation of their dearly-cherished project.” Women sat in their drawing rooms sewing sandbags, or they “gathered at St. Paul’s Church to prepare bedding for the hospitals.” Plans were drafted for the evacuation of all women and children should the city come under bombardment; it was agreed to burn all tobacco and cotton stocks to prevent their falling into Yankee hands. On May 28 George Randolph, secretary of war, ordered the removal of official documents to the railroad depot, and the following day General Winder had the temerity to close the city’s gambling houses to prevent the soldiers straying from their posts.

The information given to President Jefferson Davis on the evening of May 9 had been erroneous. The Union gunboats that were reportedly steaming up the James River didn’t appear until six days later. And when they did, a Confederate artillery battery at Drewry’s Bluff, seven miles below Richmond, repulsed the vessels in a fierce exchange. But McClellan’s army continued to edge closer to the city until it was six miles distant, close enough to hear the Reverend Dr. Woodbridge’s church bells.

General Robert Lee had been absorbing the gravity of the situation since the moment McClellan had landed on the Virginia Peninsula at the start of April. McClellan had one hundred thousand troops at his disposal, with a further thirty-five thousand to come when General McDowell arrived. Lee had approximately seventy thousand. McClellan, he could handle, but McDowell had to be prevented coming south.

Lee ordered General Stonewall Jackson into the Shenandoah Valley, instructing him to harry and hound the enemy, stretching them this way and that so they wouldn’t know if they were coming or going. Jackson was the ideal man for the job. He led by tyranny, pushing his men to the limits of their endurance, punishing them severely if they erred. He was pious and cheerless, but he inspired respect because he demanded of himself what he demanded of his men. He endured their hardships, and he shared their danger. He was also a master strategist. Throughout May Jackson tore through the Shenandoah, winning victories against General Frémont’s army at McDowell (a hamlet in Virginia), Front Royal and Winchester.

The moment President Lincoln heard of the defeats he suspended General McDowell’s move south and ordered him to crush the impertinent rebels. McDowell protested, but obeyed, and led his army west instead of south. For a fortnight they chased Jackson’s exhausted army all the way to the Blue Ridge Mountains, where, on June 9, there was a bloody but indecisive clash at Port Republic. Then Jackson withdrew through the mountains, out of the reach of the Union troops.

While the seventeen thousand soldiers of Stonewall Jackson’s army were causing trouble for the Yankees in western Virginia, those troops belonging to Joseph Johnston went on the offensive at Seven Pines. (The Union army called this battle Fair Oaks, after the nearby railroad station.) Not only had McClellan taken an inordinate amount of time to move up the Virginia Peninsula, but once he got within striking distance of Richmond “Little Mac” foolishly split his army. Two corps were ordered to establish positions on the southern bank of the Chickahominy, and these were the troops attacked by Johnston.

As John Beauchamp Jones and others listened to the battle from the top of Hospital Hill, seven miles to the east young American men fought each other to the death among the Judas trees and white dogwood flowers close by the Chickahominy. A Union lieutenant in the Twentieth Massachusetts Regiment, Henry Ropes, who fought at Seven Pines, later recalled how “we again took the double quick step and ran through deep mud and pools of water toward the battle. The whole field in the rear of the line of firing was covered with dead; and wounded men were coming in great numbers, some walking, some limping, some carried on stretchers and blankets, many with shattered limbs exposed and dripping with blood. In a moment we entered the fire. The noise was terrific, the balls whistled by us and the shells exploded over us and by our side; the whole scene dark with smoke and lit up by the streams of fire from our battery and from our Infantry in line on each side.”

When the fighting stopped, neither side could celebrate a resounding victory. Among the six thousand Confederate casualties was Johnston himself, shot in the shoulder. Robert Lee replaced Johnston as commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, and the first half of June was spent stiffening Richmond’s defenses and reconnoitering the enemy’s positions. By the middle of the month Lee had his plan: he would attack the Yankees head on and hit their right flank north of the Chickahominy. Lee ordered Stonewall Jackson south, and on June 25 the offensive began. It raged for seven sanguinary days, leaving thirty thousand Americans dead and wounded.

On July 1, the final day of the slaughter, at the Battle of Malvern Hill, General Daniel H. Hill watched six thousand of his men destroyed by Union artillery, and later wrote that “it was not war, it was murder.” McClellan’s army triumphed at Malvern Hill, but the general quailed at the thought of pushing on to Richmond. He still put faith in Pinkerton’s reports that the rebel army was “near to 200,000 men.”*

Richmond had been saved, for now, at least, and while McClellan’s army tended to its wounds, dysentery, malaria and typhoid began to ravage his men throughout the hot and humid July. At the end of the month, an exasperated Lincoln instructed McClellan to withdraw his army north from the Virginia Peninsula.

By the beginning of July Richmond reeked no longer of tobacco but of death. When Varina Davis returned to her husband she wrote how “the odors of the battlefield were distinctly perceptible all over the city.” More than five thousand wounded soldiers were brought to one of Richmond’s sixteen army hospitals that were “crowded with ladies offering their services to nurse.” Many of the ladies fastened purple calycanthus flowers on their chest to combat the stench, and they propped up their gallant menfolk on cushions taken from the city’s churches.

When the army hospitals overflowed six private hospitals and thirteen emergency hospitals received the stricken soldiers, and when they were full citizens opened up their houses and looked on impassively as young men dripped blood over their carpets. Even the basement of the Spottswood Hotel, where once eager volunteers of the Richmond Howitzers had been initiated into the art of soldiering, became a temporary hospital.

The lucky ones, the able-bodied, staggered into town with wild eyes and black lips from the powder of the cartridges that they had bitten off in their haste to kill McClellan’s Yankees. They were greeted “by a string of girls, children and Negroes, each carrying dishes, trays of popcorn, buckets and pitchers of sorghum and vinegar and water, the ‘Confederate lemonade.’” There were shrieks of delight and tears of joy as “mothers found sons, and sisters brothers, whose fate had for days been uncertain.” Other women ran among the ranks of the returning, looking frantically for the face they loved. “Some were not found,” recalled one bystander, “and, oh, the woe of it.”

One woman who didn’t deign to dirty her hands in Richmond hospitals was Rose Greenhow, who had been deported from Washington on May 31. She had expected to be released in April, and when she hadn’t been she sent a truculent letter to Washington’s military governor demanding to know the cause of the “unnecessary delay.” The reason was the sentence of death hanging over Lewis and Scully; the Federals weren’t going to release a woman who had caused far more harm to the enemy than either of their two spies if there was any chance of their being executed. (Webster had been a different matter. His life wasn’t exchangeable. He was a double agent, and the Confederates were in a position to claim that they were hanging a traitor, one of their own.) What brought about Greenhow’s eventual release was an assurance that in return for her freedom, she would work to secure the release of Pryce Lewis and John Scully the moment she reached Richmond.

Greenhow never kept her promise. She arrived in the city on June 4 and “was taken to the best hotel in the place, the Ballard House, where rooms had been prepared for me.” She was then visited by General Winder, who, if Rose was to be believed, prostrated himself at her feet and swore to the sparkling heroine that he would “dispense with the usual formality of my reporting to him.” The procession of male pilgrims continued late into the day, and Greenhow was particularly humbled when “the President did me the honor of calling 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.”

In the ensuing weeks and months Greenhow embroidered herself into the pattern of Richmond life, dancing regally at “Starvation Balls,” gracing the theater with her presence and promenading in Capitol Square. She did nothing for Lewis or Scully, ignoring their letters petitioning her to intervene. Instead she began to write a book about her life as a prisoner of Abraham Lincoln.

The news of McClellan’s withdrawal north confirmed to Lewis and Scully that their release might be a long time coming. It also had the effect of canceling a proposed transfer from Richmond to Salisbury Prison in North Carolina, a far more salubrious establishment than Henrico County Jail or Castle Godwin. In Salisbury the prisoners’ food was prepared by captured cooks from the Union army and consisted of boiled beef, rice and wheat bread. Vendors from local stores were allowed to visit the camp and sell such luxuries as sweet potatoes, onions and coffee, and a large wall enclosed sixteen acres of grounds on which the prisoners amused themselves with games of baseball. Lewis and Scully were told they would be transferred to Salisbury on May 15, but the order was rescinded, as was a second command on June 5, when it became clear the Union army wouldn’t be marching into Richmond.

There was, however, one face familiar to Lewis and Scully in the city that month, though they only discovered his presence when they read the Richmond Whig on Wednesday, June 18. The paper described how a Yankee spy named Dennis had been relaxing in the parlor of the Exchange and Ballard Hotel when “he was recognized by the little daughter of Mrs. Greenhow … [but] the shrewd rascal, it seems, recognized the little girl at the same time that she discovered him and when she ran to give the intelligence to her mother he disappeared.” This was the Paul Dennis who had disarmed little Rose’s mother when she pointed a pistol at Lewis on the day of her arrest in August 1861.

That Pinkerton had sent him to Richmond, presumably to ferret out information about his captured colleagues, was incredible, particularly as the Greenhows had been released only a fortnight earlier. Pinkerton had not learned his lesson, and only the cunning of Dennis in eluding his pursuers and returning North prevented another of his agents falling into enemy hands.

*The Merrimac or Merrimack was a United States’ ship converted by the Confederates in 1861 to their first ironclad and rechristened the CSS Virginia. It was blown up by its crew on May 11 after a dramatic battle with the USS Monitor.

*Pinkerton arrived at this figure through a combination of inexperience and incompetence, and his touching naïveté in putting faith in the accounts of escaped slaves whom he interviewed. As James Horan wrote in his biography of the Pinkertons, “Though [the slaves] were incapable of giving realistic information about what was happening on a grand scale behind Confederate lines, it is evident that Pinkerton believed everything they told him.” If Pinkerton learned of a presence of a rebel regiment, he assumed it was at full strength and part of a division, also at full strength. Such was his devotion to McClellan that he preferred to err on the side of caution.