Rose arrived in Richmond—the capital of her country—on June 5, just after the Battle of Seven Pines, along with railcars, wagons, and hacks carrying thousands of Confederate casualties bound for the city’s forty-two hospitals or Oakwood Cemetery. Coffins piled up faster than gravediggers could bury them, and the heat caused dozens of bodies to swell and burst the wood. The finest stores on Main Street had been transformed into hospitals, with cots of wounded men pressed up to the entrances, a macabre stretch of window displays. “The weather was very warm, the doors were open and no curtain or screen shielded them from the gaze of passersby,” Elizabeth wrote. “So sickeningly fetid was the atmosphere that we could not sit in our grounds.”
Union officials released Rose under two conditions: she had to sign an oath vowing not to “return north of the Potomac River during the present hostilities,” and also promise to use her influence to secure the release of two Pinkerton detectives, Pryce Lewis and John Scully, both of whom had guarded her at her home and who were now languishing in Castle Godwin. The Richmond newspapers celebrated her arrival, declaring her name had been “rendered historic” by her work for the Confederacy, and by her defiance of “the monsters” at Washington.
A carriage dropped Rose and Little Rose off at the Exchange and Ballard Hotel at Franklin and Fourteenth Streets, two buildings—one a four-story Greek Revival, the other a five-story Italianate—joined by a cast-iron pedestrian bridge. The hotel was the city’s most prestigious, with a guest book signed by Charles Dickens in 1842, when he sat perspiring in his room and longing to return to cooler climes. Edgar Allan Poe, during his last visit to Richmond in 1849, lectured on “The Poetic Principle” and “Philosophy of Composition” in the hotel’s parlor and spent his nights at the nearby Swan Tavern. A few months earlier, in January, John Tyler, the former president and Rose’s cousin by marriage, had died of a stroke in his room. A bellboy took Rose’s valise up to her quarters and delivered letters from the Pinkerton detectives, both of them imploring her to intervene. Rose ignored these and other pleas to come.
Instead she began working on her memoir, focusing on her imprisonment and the horrors of the Lincoln administration, and took Little Rose for walks, shielding the girl’s eyes and nose from the sights and smells of the wounded soldiers. She noted approvingly that “all was warlike preparation and stern defiance and resistance to the invader.” McClellan’s campaign had stalled but the city was still on edge, expecting an attack at any moment. In anticipation, Jefferson Davis sent his wife and children temporarily to Raleigh, North Carolina, a day’s journey by train and still in Confederate hands. “I belong to the country but my heart is ever with you,” he told Varina, and taught her how to load and shoot a pistol. Elizabeth, too, was so certain the Union would take Richmond that she prepared a “charming chamber” for McClellan in her home, fixing it with “new matting and pretty curtains” and calling it “General McClellan’s room.”
Despite her efforts on behalf of the Confederacy, Rose knew she wouldn’t be accepted by the proper ladies of Richmond, all of whom had heard the gossip about her late-night callers; “She must not come handicapped with her old life,” Mary Chesnut admonished. But the city’s leading men had no such judgment. General John Winder, the provost marshal, and Jefferson Davis both came to her suite at the Ballard to pay their respects. Rose gave the Confederate president a gift of jelly and three oranges, one of which he promised to give to the wounded general Joe Johnston. Little Rose inquired about Davis’s seven-year-old daughter, Maggie, and wondered “if there were any Yankees where she was.”
The Confederate president was struck by Rose’s appearance, the lovely face that was now deeply lined and sallow. “The Madam looks much changed,” he confided to his wife, “and has the air of one whose nerves were shaken by mental torture.” He avoided talk of her time in prison and thanked her for her service, telling her, “But for you, there would have been no Battle of Bull Run.” For Rose, hearing such praise from the Confederate president was “the proudest moment of my whole life.” Davis would soon have another assignment for her, one that would prove vital to the Confederacy’s attempts to gain legitimacy, and one that would cost her more than she could have ever imagined.