Rose knew the South would be different from what it was when she’d left it, a country damaged and diminished and yielding itself piece by piece, just as it had been formed. The Yankees closed the vital port of Mobile Bay, Alabama, completing the blockade east of the Mississippi River. Atlanta had fallen, and now Sherman was conducting his relentless march toward Milledgeville, where women hid jewelry inside their dresses and took advice from the few haggard rebel soldiers who remained: “Lock your doors. Keep inside. If the Yankees come, unlock the door, stand in the doorway, be polite, and ask for a guard. You will not be mistreated, I hope.” In the Confederate capital, Lee’s army was hindered by a spy system so “complete and efficient,” fretted the Enquirer, that “the Richmond evening papers reach Grant’s headquarters before 3 o’clock the next morning.” President Davis embarked on a publicity campaign, appealing to every man able to bear arms to rally to the front. In Palmetto, Georgia, he reviewed Confederate troops, drawing obligatory salutes from the soldiers but not one cheer.
But Rose was anxious to reach Southern soil, to shed the “cold isolation” that had enveloped her during her final days in Europe, and by 3:00 a.m. on Saturday, October 1, she had almost made it. The Condor drifted toward the entrance of the Cape Fear River, a two-hundred-mile black-water river that flowed into the Atlantic Ocean. She was a sleek, elegant, 270-foot iron-hulled sidewheeler, painted “elusive white” to make her difficult to spot and built for tremendous speed; the British company that built the Condor believed she had no superior among blockade-running steamers. This was her maiden voyage.
She had a crew of forty and a few notable passengers, including James Holcombe, a judge and onetime Confederate spy in Canada, and Joseph D. Wilson, the young rebel officer whom Rose had saved from imprisonment and vowed to take home with her. A thirty-year-old British naval officer named William Nathan Wrighte Hewett served as captain, hoping to make a fortune running military supplies and coal through the Union blockade. The pilot, twenty-six-year-old Thomas Brinkman, had brought along his Newfoundland puppy. Rose carried a valuable cargo of her own: her European diary (which contained no mention of her burgeoning romance with Lieutenant Wilson); dispatches from Henry Hotze, the Confederate propagandist, for Richmond; a letter from Confederate emissary James Mason to President Davis praising her diplomatic efforts abroad; and four hundred British sovereigns, worth about $2,000—book royalties she planned to donate to a Southern relief fund. She kept the gold coins in a bag and fastened its chain around her neck.
The sky opened and dropped a hard rain, long, cool needles stabbing the deck. The Condor crept noiselessly toward New Inlet, taking the northern approach to Cape Fear, a strong wind at its back. The waves thrashed and churned. Two lines of Federal vessels skulked in the dark, patrolling just out of range of the Confederate guns of Fort Fisher. Rose was in her quarters, seasick again, her stomach feeling like a separate and defiant thing inside her, disobeying orders to stay still. They were almost there, only three hundred yards from shore.
There was a hard, long jolt, the whole ship shuddering. She was heaved from her bunk. The floor quivered beneath her knees, and then silence, stillness. She scuttled to her wardrobe and dressed in haste, panicked. She gripped her leather pouch, full of dispatches. The bag of gold swung low, pulling against her skin; she wore it even to bed.
Up on the deck the rain soaked her skin and veiled her eyes. The wind howled and whipped the surf into great white billows that broke across her feet. The Newfoundland puppy ran in frantic circles. She demanded to know what was happening. She strained to listen to Captain Hewett, his words coming in staccato bursts: he’d realized he was being trailed by a Yankee ship, the Niphon. Rockets flared and shots cracked, tearing up the water around the Condor. Momentary relief as he evaded them. Then he saw what he thought was another Union ship looming ahead and he swerved to starboard. A mistake: the ship was actually the wreck of the Night Hawk, another blockade runner that had been driven onto the bar two nights before. Now the Condor was stuck on the shoals, immobile and helpless.
She heard enough to understand. The Yankees were out there, and they would get her. They would toss her back into the Old Capitol Prison, where those emissaries of Lincoln would force her to live in filthy quarters with Negroes, taking away her sun and air and dignity. This time they might leave her there until she died.
She grasped Captain Hewett’s arm and pulled him close, yelling in his ear over the crush of the waves. She had to go ashore, she said. She had no choice.
No, the captain said. It was far safer to remain on board. The shoal water and the Confederate guns would keep the Yankees at bay. If the Condor could withstand the pounding of the waves, she should be freed with the morning tide.
Rose insisted and the captain refused. She insisted again. Two sailors volunteered to row, and at last he agreed.
She climbed into a lifeboat on the leeward side, squeezing next to Lieutenant Wilson. Judge Holcombe, the Condor’s pilot, and the pilot’s puppy joined them. She clutched her leather satchel of dispatches and stroked the bag of gold at her neck, making sure the cord was fastened. The boat dropped, inch by inch, the water rising to meet them. As they touched down a great swell gathered and lashed at her. Rose sensed herself tilting, tipping. The boat flipped and let her go. The other passengers swam away from her, struggling back to the capsized boat and clinging to the keel. Even the puppy made it.
She was sideways, upside down, somersaulting inside the wet darkness. She screamed noiselessly, the water rushing in. She tried to hold her breath—thirty seconds, sixty, ninety—before her mouth gave way and water filled it again. Tiny streams of bubbles escaped from her nostrils. A burning scythed through her chest. That bag of gold yanked like a noose around her neck. Her hair unspooled and leeched to her skin, twining around her neck. She tried to aim her arms up and her legs down, to push and pull, but every direction seemed the same. No moonlight skimmed along the surface, showing her the way; there was no light at all.
At dawn, a sentry named J. J. Prosper For Me D. Doctor Duval Connor—at three feet eleven inches, said to be the shortest man with the longest name in the Confederate army—was patrolling along the beach at Fort Fisher. Something shiny caught his eye along the water’s edge: the metal buckle of a leather pouch. Opening it, he couldn’t believe his luck—gold coins, fistfuls of them, more money than he had ever seen. He glanced around, made sure he was alone, and buried it in the sand under a piece of burned log, planning to come back for it later.
As the morning sun slanted across the water, Thomas Taylor, the captain of the grounded blockade runner Night Hawk, found Rose’s body washed up on the beach. She wore heavy black silk, as if in mourning for herself. Dark ribbons of wet hair reached below her knees. “A remarkably handsome woman she was,” Taylor wrote, “with features that showed much character. Although one cannot altogether admire the profession of a spy, still there was no doubt that she imagined herself in following such a profession to be serving her country in the only way open to her. Surely in war the feelings of both men and women become blunted as to the niceties of what is right or wrong.”
Taylor ordered a group of slaves to carry Rose to Colonel William Lamb, commander of Fort Fisher, who admired her “lovely face, that graceful form in pure development of womanhood.” Lamb’s wife, Daisy, wiped the sand and silt from Rose’s body and detangled her hair, preparing her for one final journey: a ride aboard the steamer Cape Fear, heading upriver to Wilmington. Hundreds of female admirers lined the wharf, awaiting its arrival. One, Eliza Jane De Rosset, president of the Soldier’s Aid Society, had the body brought back to her mansion, where she clipped a lock of Rose’s hair to send to her daughters. “She was an elegant woman,” Eliza wrote, “not at all changed by death.” When Doc Connor discovered that the gold had belonged to a Confederate hero, he turned it in.
The wake was held in the chapel of Hospital Number 4. Rose’s body lay on a bier, draped with a Confederate flag, surrounded by a phalanx of candles and flowers arranged in crosses. A stream of women, children, and soldiers approached with bent heads and hushed steps. They followed her to the Roman Catholic church of St. Thomas the Apostle, where the presiding priest spoke of “the uncertainty of all human projects and ambition,” and followed her again in a procession to Oakdale Cemetery. It rained all the way, stopping only as the pallbearers lowered her into the ground beneath a wilting canopy of magnolia blossoms. A local reporter noticed a rainbow streaking the horizon and took it as a sign: “Let us accept the omen not only for her, the quiet sleeper, who after many storms and a tumultuous and checkered life came to peace and rest at last, but also for our beloved country, over which we trust the rainbow of hope will ere long shine with the brightest dyes.”
They called Rose a heroine and compared her to Joan of Arc, but they were still mostly strangers, mourning a symbol more than a person.