The Confederates executed Timothy Webster at Camp Lee, three miles from Elizabeth’s home, using a defective cotton rope that slid up his neck. He fell on his back to the ground, half hanged, and spoke his final words after they hoisted him again: “I suffer a double death. Oh, you are going to choke me this time.” They did.
That afternoon Elizabeth took her carriage to Castle Godwin, a former “Negro Jail” that now housed anyone suspected of disloyalty. The number of inmates had surged since early March, when Jefferson Davis, acting on a tip that there were “designing men in this City plotting treason against our Government,” declared martial law in Richmond and ordered the arrest of thirty suspected Northern sympathizers, including Franklin Stearns, her friend and fellow Unionist. Stearns owned a distillery on Fifteenth Street that was doing such robust business with Confederate soldiers—$5,000 per day, by one account—that Richmond newspapers called for his execution. “It is the universal conviction,” ranted the Examiner, “that Franklin Stearns, by means of his whiskey, has killed more of our men and done more to disorganize our army than all the balance of the Yankee nation put together.”
As Stearns was led to his cell, Elizabeth heard, he’d thrown his guards a contemptuous look and said, “If you are going to imprison all the Union men you will have to provide a much larger jail than this.” In any event, the authorities, lacking evidence, released him after several weeks.
She was equally unnerved by the imprisonment of several women, all charged with disloyalty and giving aid to the United States government. Elizabeth didn’t know any of them personally, but she took their arrests as a sign that the Confederates now intended to make examples of female traitors.
She decided, nevertheless, to keep to her plans.
Her carriage stopped before the prison, a new brick building along Lumpkin’s Alley. She told the guard she wished to visit Timothy Webster’s widow, who had been found guilty of complicity, a lesser offense, and was housed on the second floor. If only Confederate authorities knew the truth: the presumed widow was actually Hattie Lawton, also a Pinkerton operative, one of the female detectives who had guarded Rose Greenhow and subsequently worked undercover in Richmond. Disguised as “Mrs. Webster,” she insisted she was a Southern woman who wished only to return to her native Maryland. Elizabeth, also unaware of Lawton’s true identity, hoped to convince prison officials to permit her to serve her yearlong sentence at the Van Lew mansion.
Lawton wept real tears over the execution of her partner, whom she had exhorted to “die like a man.” Elizabeth sat with the “poor agonized creature,” offering her prayers and a handkerchief, and was about to look for the prison’s commander, Captain George W. Alexander, when he appeared at the cell door.
Elizabeth forced herself to smile at the “desperate brigand looking villain.” He was dressed all in black: black trousers buckling at the knees, loose black shirt relieved only by a white collar, black whiskers bending into a frown atop his lips. His dog, a black Bavarian boarhound named Nero, snarled by his side. Nero had been imported as a pup and trained to fight, winning three matches against full-grown bears. Rumor had it that he’d been trained to attack anyone wearing blue.
“The body of Webster has been brought back to the prison,” Captain Alexander said. His obsidian eyes shifted to Elizabeth, and he asked, pleasantly, if Miss Van Lew would like to view it.
Hattie Lawton sobbed. Nero let a thick thread of spit fall from his jowls. Captain Alexander watched her, waiting.
The question disturbed Elizabeth, as much for Alexander’s oddly polite tone as for the implication beneath his words: there was a reason, he seemed to be saying, that she should witness what happens to traitors.
Just as politely, she declined, and asked if his widow might be permitted to stay with her.
Alexander refused, and suggested that Elizabeth had visited long enough.
It was probably just as well, she thought on the ride home, what with the ongoing strain between her brother and his wife, exacerbated of late by John’s interest in her work with Union prisoners. While aiding Elizabeth, he, too, maintained a facade of loyalty to the Confederacy, and was even picked as a juror in the murder trial of one rebel guard accused of killing another. And Mary was still abusing the family servants to such a degree that they had begun quitting the household; the Van Lews’ cook left just after the New Year, with others—a washer and ironer and a seamstress—soon to follow.
She thought of Mary Jane Bowser, still adjusting to life without her husband and to her role as a servant for the Confederate first family, her eidetic memory cataloging everything the president said. It was not yet time for Elizabeth to take the next step . . . but it would be soon. She did not want to risk her beloved servant’s life until she had no other choice.
Elizabeth turned her attention to Libby Prison, the city’s newest, converted from a tobacco warehouse on the waterfront. Since the prison occupied its own city block and was separated from the other buildings, Confederate authorities believed it would be relatively easy to guard. In an attempt to secure it further, they’d whitewashed the dark exterior brick wall so that any prisoner trying to escape would make a clear target for the armed sentries roaming below.
Elizabeth heard daily about the horrid conditions within its walls. Inmates were forbidden to go outside for fresh air or exercise and so spent every hour of every day in the prison’s six upper rooms, each one 105 feet long, 44 feet wide, and 8 feet high, and holding more than a hundred men at a time. Every floor had one water closet—literally a closet with a trough used as a toilet. The place was overrun with vermin, which scurried over prisoners’ feet and faces and hands. One man awakened during the night to find a large rat perched on his head. In a desperate attempt at extermination, the men began trapping and cooking the rodents for dinner. Guards would take any opportunity to shoot prisoners, a pastime they called “sporting for Yankees,” killing them for such minor infractions as leaning too close to the windows. “To ‘lose prisoners’ was an expression very much in vogue,” Elizabeth wrote, “and we all understood that it meant cold blooded murder.”
Libby Prison.
(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
She found out what she could about the men in charge of the prison: commander Thomas Pratt Turner, twenty-one, whose “utter depravity,” according to one prisoner, “gained a full and complete expression in every lineament of his countenance”; Dick Turner (no relation), twenty-three years old and second in command, infamous for kicking dying prisoners just for lying on the floor; George Emack, twenty-five, who’d once held a gun to the head of a sick prisoner and threatened to shoot if he didn’t get up; and Erasmus Ross, the twenty-one-year-old clerk, well known for swinging his bowie knife and terrorizing his charges, and known not at all as the Northern-sympathizing nephew of Elizabeth’s friend Franklin Stearns.
The inmates called the clerk “Little Ross,” a nod to his diminutive stature. His main responsibility was keeping track of the prisoners through daily roll calls. “He never called the rolls without swearing at us and abusing us and calling us Yankees,” said Captain William Lounsbury of the 74th New York. “We all hated him.” One evening at roll call Ross struck Lounsbury in the stomach and hissed, “You blue-bellied Yankee, come down to my office. I have a matter to settle with you.”
Lounsbury took note of Ross’s two revolvers, the gleam of his omnipresent bowie knife. He could hear his comrades whisper, “Don’t go—you don’t have to,” and they reminded him that others whom Ross had called out had never returned. But Lounsbury followed the clerk down to his office in the corner of the prison. Ross held the door open for his prisoner and checked up and down the hallway before pulling it shut.
“See here,” Ross said, “I have concluded to try you and see if you can do cooking.” He pointed behind a counter, lifting his eyebrows and speaking his next words in italics: “Go in there and look around. See what you can find.”
Lounsbury backed up to the counter, keeping his eyes on the clerk, and when he looked down he was shocked to see a Confederate uniform. It was a size too small, but he tugged it on, hopping from one leg to another and pulling on the jacket, re-creating himself as the enemy. He walked out of the prison, looking to his right and left and back, wondering if Ross had set him up and was preparing to shoot him for sport. The clerk followed a few steps behind, his rifle down by his side. Only a slim orange peel of sun remained in the sky.
Lounsbury quickened his pace, half skipping. Ross was still behind him, now accompanied by a sentry, both men keeping close watch. He broke into a full run, cutting through a vacant lot clotted with weeds. Out of nowhere a Negro appeared, stepping into his path.
“Come wit me, sah, I know who you is,” the man said.
Lounsbury followed him into the dusk, walking a half dozen blocks and stopping beneath the soaring columns of the Van Lew mansion. The Negro pointed to the front door and without another word scurried around to the back, leaving Lounsbury alone.
Elizabeth answered on the first knock. She had been expecting someone—not Lounsbury in particular, but any prisoner randomly picked by Ross. Franklin Stearns had assured her that his nephew was trustworthy and loyal to the Union, but the operation remained rife with risks: Ross could defect to the Confederacy or, more likely, be discovered and tortured until he named his accomplices. She pushed such fears from her mind and studied the prisoner, out of breath, doubled over in his butternut shell jacket and gray trousers. If sister-in-law Mary happened to rise from bed, the uniform would provide a perfect cover; Elizabeth could say she was merely offering a weary rebel soldier something to eat and a place to rest.
She pulled Lounsbury inside and escorted him upstairs to the secret room, hoping to evade her nieces. In the morning she brought him corn bread and gave him detailed instructions, mapping out the safest route to the James River, the precise path through the woods that would circumvent the rebel pickets; by nightfall he should be safely with Union troops. From her parlor window she watched him leave, dressed in that shabby Confederate coat that stretched tight across his shoulders and ended high above his wrists, swiveling his head like a periscope, making sure no one guessed what he really was. Small, smaller, gone.
She stationed two more of her bravest, brightest servants on the perimeter of Libby Prison. They sent word to employees on the inside, Negro men and women, to take notice of the older white lady who often strolled by, and tell the prisoners that a safe refuge awaited them should they escape. It was dangerous to trust that such knowledge wouldn’t fall on the wrong ears, but her servants were discreet and knew which prison employees stood on the Union’s side. Her next goal was to secure more allies in Confederate uniforms, men with a tenuous devotion to the cause, men who could be paid to ignore her activities or bribed if they threatened to reveal her.
Despite several visits to General Winder, during which Elizabeth rolled out her usual roster of compliments—his generosity, his intelligence, his glorious mane of hair—he refused to allow her into Libby Prison, explaining that such privileges were, at the moment, reserved for ministers and others whose motives seemed unimpeachable. He stressed that last word, letting it rise into a question.
Elizabeth smiled, and replied that there were inmates at several other institutions in need of charity; surely the general, as a fellow Christian, would understand her urgency.
She had ideas about how to circumvent Winder’s rule and gain access to Libby, but in the meantime she increased her visits to Castle Godwin, always cradling an antique French plate warmer in her arms. The device had a double bottom in which she had crammed wads of Federal greenbacks, hundreds of dollars with which soldiers might buy decent food and clothing on the prison black market, or bribe guards to look the other way. Most escapees had cut their blankets into thirds and fashioned them into ropes, lowering them from windows in the middle of the night, the sentry below keeping lackadaisical watch. Others tracked down a fellow soldier who was up for exchange and bribed him to swap identities. During one visit she heard a guard comment to another, “I think I’ll have a look at that the next time she comes in.”
So the next time, before leaving home, Elizabeth filled the double bottom with boiling water and slipped it inside a cloth holder. When he demanded to see the warmer, she handed it over, removing it from its covering. As soon as his skin touched the scalding metal the guard yelped in pain, sucking on his fingers while Elizabeth apologized—how thoughtless and clumsy of her; he should see a nurse at once. Her plate warmer was not inspected again, but the guards kept a hard eye on her, following her as she wandered from cell to cell. Once, as she prepared to leave, she heard two sets of footsteps behind her, one heavy and one light. She turned to see Captain George Alexander and Nero the boarhound, a low growl rumbling in his throat.
The captain bared his teeth when he spoke: “You have been reported several times.”
She looked at him blankly and left without a word.
A few days later she was reading the Richmond papers in her library when a servant led a young man into the room. He wore torn trousers and muddy boots, and nervously kneaded his wool cap.
“I wish to tell you something that will interest you greatly,” he began, “and the government also.”
Her mouth went dry. She felt a twist of dread. Surely this was one of General Winder’s “plug-ugly” detectives sent to entrap her. Maybe her sister-in-law knew this visitor; maybe Mary was the one who had reported her to Captain Alexander.
Elizabeth kept her voice even: “Nothing of that sort would be of any interest to me.”
“Let me board here,” he said—no, insisted. “Let me sleep anywhere. In the library, on the floor . . .”
She demurred, but asked a servant to make tea for the visitor. She was calm and polite, chatting about everything but the war. Afterward she watched him shuffle down Grace Street, hands still working his cap, not once looking back.
“We have to be watchful and circumspect,” she wrote that night in her journal, “wise as serpents and harmless as doves, for truly the lions are seeking to devour us.”
A few days later she saw the same man, marching in a Confederate uniform.