During the early days of May, Rose sequestered herself in her room, refusing all callers—even her beau, Lord Granville—and declining all invitations. She declared herself “sick with anxiety,” waiting for word of the fighting back home. The first two days of battle in the Wilderness, a seventy-square-mile patch of gnarled underbrush about fifty miles north of Richmond, had cost General Grant seventeen thousand men, and at night he wept in his tent as brush fires raged, burning some two hundred of his wounded alive. The armies met again closer to the city, near Spotsylvania Court House, attacking and counterattacking, bodies piling up four layers deep, the soldiers stuffing their nostrils with leaves to insulate themselves from the stench. Lee telegraphed triumphant reports to the Confederate secretary of war, boasting that he’d “handsomely driven back” Grant’s men, and Rose received the news by steamer. “Thank God it is good,” she wrote. “Lee repulsed the enemy . . . if Grant is routed, I believe the time proper to press recognition.”
She resumed her rigorous social schedule, accepting a congratulatory visit from Lady Abinger, lunching with the Countess of Chesterfield, dining with Earl and Countess Hilton (“he 60, she 24,” she noted), and attending a party hosted by Edward Montagu Granville Stuart Wortley, better known as Lord Wharncliffe. After dinner Wharncliffe stood and raised his glass. “I am going to propose a sentiment which will be acceptable to everyone here, I am sure: the success of the Confederate cause and Mrs. Greenhow.”
The woman curtsied and the men bowed, the entire room sinking in one cohesive movement, bright cravats peeping out from jackets, sprigs of flowers bobbing atop hats. She held the moment still, imprinting it in her mind, recalling her life back in Washington before it was ruined by death, and more death, and war. She did not know how many such moments she would have left, and found herself responding with an uncharacteristic economy of words: “Thank you all, for my country and for myself.”
The fighting raged just twelve miles from Richmond, so close that Jefferson Davis listened from his office and Elizabeth watched from the parapet of her mansion, peering through binoculars and asking one servant, Uncle Nelson, if he could distinguish between Yankee and Confederate guns; “Yes Missis, them deep ones,” he replied, leaving her to guess which one he meant. Benjamin Butler sent large numbers of troops to reinforce Grant while Lee waited for men from the Shenandoah Valley. “Confederate loss is heavy,” Rose wrote. “God grant that this is the last of the bloody fighting.” It only got bloodier when the two armies met at Cold Harbor east of the city. Union troops engaged in a hapless frontal assault against fortified Confederate troops and suffered nearly thirteen thousand casualties, a throttling of such magnitude that one Richmond diarist quipped, “Grant intends to stink Lee out of his position, if nothing else will suffice.”
The good news inspired Rose to write, regarding the Yankees, “God grant that those vandals may be destroyed, exterminated so that the vile race may no longer cumber the earth. Impatiently I wait to see the bitter chalice placed at their lips, the assassin’s knife at their throats and the torch of the incendiary applied to their homes.” The Confederate victory failed to change Europe’s position on recognition, but she had one last chance to serve her country abroad when Confederate envoy Mason summoned her for a meeting. He told her that Raphael Semmes, captain of the CSS Alabama, a rebel warship that had been trapped by a Union sloop-of-war off the coast of Cherbourg, France, needed her help. The captain was concerned about the mental state of third lieutenant Joseph D. Wilson, one of the Alabama’s officers who’d been taken prisoner.
“The very person we want,” Mason remarked to the captain as Rose approached. “She can get him off if anybody can.” He stood and shook her hand. “Good morning. Madam, we want somebody to do something.”
“I’ll do it—what is it?” Her tone was flat, all business, hiding her pleasure at the flattery. All of those meetings and parties and arguments had amounted to nothing, but there was a still a task suited only for her.
They explained: she needed to go to Charles Francis Adams, the son of John Quincy Adams and the US minister to the Court of St. James’s, and “get this poor fellow off his parole, so that he can be taken care of.” Since both Mason and Semmes held official positions in the Confederacy, Adams would refuse to see them; but Rose, having no title, would be at an advantage. She took a carriage straight from the meeting to the American embassy and presented her card: “MRS. ROSE GREENHOW, of Richmond.”
Adams received her with “great courtesy,” and refrained from mentioning a long-ago testy exchange between Rose and his wife, Abigail. During a dinner party at Rose’s home in 1859, the conversation turned to abolitionist John Brown, who had just been hanged for inciting a slave revolt at a Federal armory in Virginia. Abigail leaned across the table, stared pointedly at her hostess, and called him a “holy saint and martyr.” Rose didn’t hesitate with her retort: “He was a traitor, and met a traitor’s doom.” An awkward silence settled over the gathering, and prominent Washingtonians gossiped about the incident for months.
Rose sat across from Adams, surmising his thoughts. While it was true that his wife had displayed poor manners at Rose’s dinner party, there was also the obvious and pertinent fact that his government had imprisoned her as a spy and sent her into exile. He could either feel compelled to make amends or deny and dismiss her. She reminded him that Captain Semmes had taken more than 250 Union prisoners and pardoned all of them for exchange, and she hoped that Mr. Adams would follow this humane precedent.
Four days later, Joseph “Fighting Joe” Wilson was released, and he called on Rose to thank her. “Poor fellow,” she said. “So happy and grateful for his release.” He was just twenty-two years old and striking, with a small, beautiful mouth and a sweep of feathery dark hair. Rose forgot both their nearly thirty-year age difference and Lord Granville. She spent many of the rest of her days with Fighting Joe, even sitting with him for a formal photograph in a pose typically reserved for married couples: she in a chair and he standing behind her, one arm grazing her back. She wanted him to accompany her when she sailed back home.
The time had come, and she applied the same fervor to saying good-bye as she did to everything else. She received the sacrament of Confirmation (something she’d never gotten the chance to do as a child), considered a last-ditch effort to enlist the help of Pope Pius IX, and met with Lord Palmerston who made the argument she was so tired of hearing: recognition would only hurt the South by uniting the North, bringing together various factions—Copperheads, Irish Catholics, and about half the Democratic Party—who currently opposed the war.
Rose retorted, “Does it never occur to you that you probably bring upon yourself the very evil which you deprecate?”
She bade farewell to Mason, who consoled her by saying she had aided in “stimulating the slim English mind.” She was reunited with her oldest daughter, Florence, who had arrived unexpectedly on a ship from New York. They hadn’t seen each other since before the war, when Florence warned her against becoming a spy. “O how sad has been this terrible war in its effect upon families,” Rose lamented. “Mine has been torn asunder.” She was struck and saddened by her daughter’s appearance—the sunken cheeks, the blade-edged bones, the veins shooting through the milk of her skin—but Florence was still so “very lovely.” She went to Paris one last time to visit Little Rose, her heart growing “sorely tired” when the girl begged her not to leave. “Alas,” Rose wrote, “inexorable destiny seems to impel me on. My heart yearns to stay and also to go. . . . The desperate struggle in which my people are engaged is ever present, and I long to be near to share in the triumph or be burned under the ruins.” She embraced her youngest daughter as if for the very last time.
She packed her ball gowns, a leather money belt stuffed with $2,000 in gold, and her European diary, in which she made one final entry on August 10: “A sad sick feeling crept over me, of parting perhaps forever, from many dear to me.” Her ship would leave that day from Greenock, Scotland, and she prayed that the journey back would be without incident. The business of blockade running had grown increasingly treacherous, with the Union Navy capturing or destroying nearly 92 percent of the South’s blockade vessels, sending entire crews to prison, using deadly force if faced with resistance.
Rose made a pact with herself: she would sooner die than lose her freedom again.