In March, Colonel Orlando Poe, the commander of the 2nd Michigan, relieved Emma of her nursing duties and appointed her regimental mail carrier; soon she would be promoted to postmaster for the entire brigade. Poe would later say he chose her for the job because, “as a soldier, Frank Thompson was effeminate looking,” and he wanted to “avoid taking an efficient soldier from the ranks.” She got a new horse and privately named him Frank, as if to reinforce her own secret identity, an extension of herself over which she had complete control.
Emma relished her new role, riding Frank from camp to camp to Washington and back, knowing hers was the face everyone most wished to see. “The mail was even more heartily received than other things,” she wrote. “It was nothing short of a calamity for a heavy mail to be captured by the enemy.” Occasionally she encountered Jerome Robbins along her route but they maintained a cool distance, avoiding all talk of the past, and he receded further from her mind when word came that they were finally to advance on the Confederates.
On March 14, General McClellan issued an announcement to be read to all troops at roll call. “I will bring you now face to face with the rebels,” he told them. “Ever bear in mind that my fate is linked with yours. . . . I am to watch over you as a parent over his children; and you know that your General loves you from the depths of his heart.” Instead of marching through northern Virginia, where he feared a massive Confederate force lay waiting, the Union commander planned to ship his Army of the Potomac to the southern tip of the Virginia Peninsula by sea, and then fight his way west to Richmond.
McClellan’s strategy for his Peninsula Campaign required one of the most ambitious maritime movements in American military history. It would take three weeks and four hundred vessels—steamers, barges, sloops, and canal boats—to ferry the Army of the Potomac to Fort Monroe: 121,500 men, 14,594 horses and mules, 1,150 wagons, 44 batteries of artillery, 74 ambulances, pontoon bridges, tons of provisions, tents, telegraph wire. One British observer likened the feat to the “stride of a giant.” Emma’s regiment boarded a steamer called the Vanderbilt, a process that took several hours. Company after company clustered together on board until every foot of space was occupied. They disembarked three days later during a ferocious rainstorm, marching twenty-three miles in what Emma called “a fair specimen of Virginia mud,” sinking, in some spots, all the way to their knees.
They set up camp, bivouacking on the marshy ground, short on provisions, horses starving. The rebels found them soon enough, lobbing shells and thirty-two-pound cannonballs that burst over their heads or fell within feet of their tents. A party of fugitive slaves—“contrabands,” they were called—also made their way to camp, having escaped from rebel territory where they worked on fortifications at the James River. They arrived late one night in the midst of a relentless rain, falling to their knees and shouting, “Glory! Glory to God!”
The commotion awakened Emma, and she emerged from her tent to investigate. “There they were,” she wrote, “black as midnight, all huddled together in a little group, some praying, some singing.” She watched as Jerome rushed to help the regimental surgeon tend to one man, who had been shot by the rebels as he fled. Her heart clenched at the sight of her old friend, lost in his work, winding a bandage with delicate precision.
Other soldiers built a fire and served hot coffee and bread. Emma sat down with the contrabands, and was struck by how intelligently they could converse about Christ. “Why should blue eyes and golden hair,” she wrote, “be the distinction between bond and free?” The issue of slavery became real to her in a way it hadn’t been before; she understood, to a lesser degree, what it meant to feel vulnerable inside your own skin.
Emma was often sent to procure supplies for the hospitals and food, seeking local citizens willing to exchange butter, eggs, milk, and chicken for Federal greenbacks. The area of the Peninsula around Fort Monroe remained under Federal control, but between the fort and Richmond sprawled sixty miles of strange and hostile territory, the land a swampy patchwork of gullies, creeks, and ravines. Emma kept watch for both rebel pickets and “rebel vixens of the slave states,” whom she compared to Parisian women during the Reign of Terror. She carried her Moore seven-shooter revolver at all times.
One morning she set out for a five-mile ride to an isolated farmhouse and was surprised to find it in good condition—a rarity for any home in the Peninsula—with the fences still standing and cornfields thriving as if there were no war at all. She rode up to the house and dismounted, hitching her horse and ringing the bell. A tall woman, about thirty years old, invited Emma inside with a gracious sweep of her arm. Within the past three weeks she had lost her father, husband, and two brothers in the rebel army and was now in “deep mourning,” which lasted up to two and a half years and required an all-black ensemble: dress, veil, bonnet, cape, and jewelry made of polished coal, containing small photos of the deceased and locks of their hair.
The woman spoke in a languorous murmur, unfurling each vowel: “To what fortunate circumstance am I to attribute the pleasure of this unexpected call?”
Emma said she was a Union soldier and willing to pay for food. She noticed agitation creep across the woman’s face, a nervous shift of expression. The woman directed her to sit in another room while she prepared the items, but Emma declined, wanting to remain in a position where she could watch every movement. Her hostess seemed to be stalling, walking around in her stately way without clear purpose, and Emma feared “her ladyship” was contemplating the best mode of attack.
Emma stood and asked if her things were ready.
The woman smiled. “Oh,” she replied, “I did not know that you were in a hurry. I was waiting for the boys to come and catch some chickens for you.”
“And pray, madam, where are the boys?”
She paused, glanced toward her door. “Not far from here.”
Emma took a step backward. “Well,” she said, “I have decided not to wait; you will please not detain me any longer.”
The woman nodded and began packing eggs and butter into a basket. She was “trembling violently,” Emma saw, “and pale as death.” With shaking hands she gave Emma the basket and refused to accept a greenback, insisting it was “no consequence about the pay.”
Emma thanked her and started for the door. The woman followed a pace behind. Emma unhitched Frank, climbed into the saddle, and set off. She had ridden just a few yards when she heard the snap of a gunshot behind her, the ball hurtling just above her head.
She whipped back around as the woman fired again. The bullet veered wide, missing her by inches. She found her seven-shooter and considered where to aim: “I didn’t want to kill the wretch, but I did intend to wound her.” The woman dropped her gun, raising her arms in a tentative surrender, and Emma sent a bullet through the meat of her left palm.
The rebel woman dropped to the ground, keening, transfixed by the hole in her hand. Emma took the rebel’s pistol, cinched a halter strap tight around her wrist, and tied her to her saddle. Remounting her horse, she dragged the woman fifty feet along the road, her black dress grinding against the dirt, her legs flailing under a froth of crinoline. Over the pounding of hooves Emma heard her begging for release, and worried that she might draw the attention of any rebels nearby.
Emma halted, turned around in the saddle, and raised her revolver.
“If you utter another word or scream,” she said, “you are a dead woman.”
Emma hoisted her captive into the saddle, fashioned a tourniquet from her handkerchief, and took her to the hospital. She was unnerved at the ease with which she’d pulled the trigger, especially since her target was a woman.
In order to advance to Richmond via the York River, McClellan had to drive the Confederates from Yorktown—no easy feat, as the rebels had built earthworks on top of positions abandoned eighty years before, when the British surrendered to George Washington and ended the American Revolution. He also had no idea how many enemy troops had dug in at Yorktown, a lapse in intelligence that Confederate general John Magruder rushed to exploit. A flamboyant, dramatic Virginian (during the Mexican War he had staged a performance of Othello in which a young Ulysses S. Grant, dressed in crinolines, tried out for Desdemona), Magruder executed a masterly display of special effects, frantically shifting his eight thousand soldiers around from one part of the line to the next, parading them in an endless circle. As an added touch, he kept up a sporadic barrage of artillery and ordered his bandsmen to play well into the night.
The charade worked. McClellan believed that Magruder’s force numbered one hundred thousand, an overestimation supported by both Allan Pinkerton and Dr. Thaddeus Lowe, an aeronautical expert who pioneered the use of hydrogen balloons to gather intelligence. Emma watched the professor in action, “making balloon reconnaissances, and transmitting the results of his observations to General McClellan by telegraph from his castle in the air, which seemed suspended from the clouds.” McClellan in turn telegraphed President Lincoln: “It seems clear I have the whole force of the enemy on my hands.” He asked for reinforcements and proposed to embark on “the more tedious but sure operations of siege.”
Lincoln implored him to advance: “I think you had better break the enemy’s line. . . . The country will not fail to note—is now noting—that the present hesitation to move upon an entrenched enemy is but the story of Manassas repeated . . . you must act.”
Once again McClellan ignored him. “The President very coolly telegraphed me yesterday that he thought I had better break the enemy’s lines at once,” he wrote to his wife. “I was much tempted to reply that he had better come and do it himself.” Instead the general oversaw the construction of ever more imposing earthworks and sent Thaddeus Lowe back up in his balloon. Confederate general Joseph Johnston took advantage of the lull, moving his army from Richmond down to the Peninsula. “No one but McClellan,” he said, “could have hesitated to attack.”
Pinkerton began reassessing the Confederate forces when he received tragic news: three of his top detectives in Richmond, including Pryce Lewis, who had helped apprehend Rose Greenhow, had been captured and sentenced to death. Another, Timothy Webster, would be hanged imminently, the first American to be executed as a spy since Nathan Hale in 1776. Still, Pinkerton inexplicably failed to recruit Union sympathizers already living in Richmond, people who were intimately familiar with its politics and personalities, people who might have connections in the nascent Confederate government—or the wherewithal to recruit and place such connections.
As word of the spies’ fate spread throughout the camp, Emma received a visit from the 2nd Michigan’s chaplain.
“I know of a situation I could get for you,” he said, “if you have sufficient moral courage to undertake its duties. It is a situation of great danger and of vast responsibility.”
She understood that she was being asked to take Webster’s place, and contemplated the reasons why she, above all other men, had been chosen. Aside from Jerome, the chaplain knew her better than anyone else in her regiment. He had stood with her on the field at Bull Run, prayed with her at hospital beds, accompanied her to watch the skirmishing pickets, helped her dig graves for the dead. He knew she had the admiration and respect of her regiment, that her fellow soldiers considered her “brave, willing and cheerful” and a person of good moral character. He knew, too, that Colonel Poe wished to keep his most efficient soldiers in the ranks to prepare for battle, and that her particular brand of valor could be used in other ways. Her lack of experience wasn’t a disadvantage; Pinkerton had a history of hiring detectives and spies who had never worked in law enforcement, including the men who had guarded Rose.
Emma figured that Poe—who had done secret service work for McClellan earlier in the war, outside of Pinkerton’s auspices—had approved the idea and recommended Frank Thompson for the job. She told the chaplain she would have to give it some thought. “The subject of life and death was not weighted in the balance,” she wrote. “I left that in the hands of my Creator, feeling assured that I was just as safe in passing the picket lines of the enemy, if it was God’s will that I should go there, as I would be in the Federal camp. And if not, then His will be done.”
She accepted, and reported to Washington for an examination.