A Southern Lady & Rebel Spy!

In my previous posts of Pioneering Women of Civil War America (Eleventh Installment, Part A) and Pioneering Women of Civil War America (Eleventh Installment, Part B) about Elizabeth “Miss Lizzie” Van Lew, I promised I’d feature another woman of Civil War times who was “A Southern Lady & Rebel Spy.” Let me now present to you:

Rose O’Neal Greenhow (1813 or 1814 – 1864)

Although she was born Maria Rosetta *O’Neale, she went by Rose, which was suitable for her nicknames: “Wild Rose” because of an ever-excitable flush to her youthful olive complexion and “Rebel Rose” after she was caught spying on the Union during the American Civil War. *(The family dropped the “e” at the end of their surname sometime after Rose’s birth).

Rose’s spy network was impressive; it boasted an expanse across several states with recruits of nearly fifty women and a few good men. But I don’t find proof in my research that hers outperformed in daring and incredulousness the feats of Miss Lizzie’s—Rose’s counterpart in the South who spied for the Union with only a dozen or so recruits. I urge you, however, to click on the links in the opening paragraph above and read my two-part blog about Miss Lizzie. Then, may you be the judge!

Within weeks after the firing upon of Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, guided by Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Jordan, assistant adjutant general on the staff of Pierre Gustave Toutant (P. G. T.) Beauregard, Rose set up her spy network. Then, she got down to business!

The beautiful and charming Rose cunningly coaxed information from high-profile politicians and high-ranking military officers, whom she’d befriended long before the outbreak of the American Civil War. Unwary of her disloyalty to them as a friend and her fervent loyalty to the South, her powerful Unionist confidantes freely discussed military matters with and around her, and she smuggled the intelligence out in code to her Rebel compatriots. Her cipher chart is pictured below.

Contemporary scholars challenge the significance of Rose’s missives in doing any real harm against the Union, but there is documentation to support that, on one occasion, Rose turned the tide of battle in favor of her beloved South:

Through casual conversations with her unsuspecting military and political friends in Washington City (as it was then called), Rose gathered intelligence about the secret plans of General Irvin McDowell to advance upon the Rebels amassed at Manassas Junction/Bull Run in July 1861. She had her coded message smuggled out by her cohort, Betty Duvall, in a knot of her hair, tucked beneath a bonnet to match the rest of her disguise as a simple farm girl. Even though Confederate president Jefferson Davis was friends with Rose, he failed to heed her warning. Fortunately, Confederate General Beauregard did, especially the second more-persistent warning by Rose. Knowing he was in jeopardy of being crushed by the Union army, he recruited help from Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston, stationed in nearby Shenandoah Valley, just in time to rout the Yankees in the first major battle of the American Civil War. Later, President Davis ardently shook Rose’s hand for coming to the South’s aid, and General Beauregard testified to the truthfulness and significance of Rose’s military intelligence.

Unfortunate for Rose, her act inadvertently got General McDowell demoted and General George B. McClellan promoted. The new commander of the Army of the Potomac was convinced that a traitor was amongst them in order for the Confederates to have impossibly anticipated the highly-confidential movement of Union troops toward Manassas Junction. So, he assigned his head of intelligence to investigate. The shrewd private detective Allan Pinkerton went to Washington and followed a trail of breadcrumbs right to Rose. So. . .

. . .after only four months of providing military intelligence to the Confederacy, “Rebel Rose” was put under house arrest, imprisoned, and then banished from the federal capital!

Upon inspection of Rose’s Washington residence, Allan Pinkerton found all manner of traitorous material, including her cipher chart, coded and un-coded messages, and maps of Union fortifications encircling the federal capital. Amazingly, none of it was concealed. To me, this makes Rose’s carelessness appear arrogant. Did she deem her Unionist male friends to be sufficiently enamored with her to be duped by her? I would shout from the rooftops, “Yes!”

Or did her friends deem her too obvious to be spying on them? When the Southern states began seceding from the Union, Rose did not hide her loyalty to the Confederacy. However, she did make it a point to be seen around town with her niece, who was married to Stephen A. Douglas, a Democratic proponent of President Abraham Lincoln—a ploy probably to stay in the good graces of her Northern Republican friends.

Anyway. . .

. . .nothing—not even confinement—could stop Rose!

During her five months under house arrest, she still managed to send messages out past her guards to Rebel leaders, including a lengthy letter for publication in Richmond newspapers about her wrongful detention without a warrant and formal charge concerning violation of any law. This trickery got her and her youngest daughter, Little Rose, transferred to Old Capitol Prison (pictured below).

While there for four months, Rose continued to find the means to smuggle out dispatches to Confederates and letters to Secretary of State William Seward and an editor of a New York newspaper, again, about the injustice of her incarceration. And she had smuggled in to her a Confederate flag, which she waved from her cell window.

Rose was becoming a nuisance to federal authorities. They refused to put her on trial for the capital offense of treason, purely to avoid her embarrassing the federal government by exposing what she’d done right under their noses and the military secrets that she’d wormed out of high-profile officials.

Yet, they couldn’t set her free to resume her spying in the capital city. Right?

So. . .what to do with “Rebel Rose,” then?

A brilliant solution:

Exile her to the South!

This was accomplished, but only after Rose relented to pledging by pen never to leave Confederate borders.

On June 2, 1862, Rose’s career in espionage ended a little over a year after it had begun. However, she soon found a new role to support the war against the Union. Whether or not it was sanctioned by President Jefferson Davis, Rose defied her promise not to leave the South in traveling to Europe, where she attempted to gain support and raised money for the South’s cause. She even secured audiences with England’s Queen Victoria and France’s Napoleon III. During her stay in London, she wrote and published her memoir, My Imprisonment and the First Year of Abolition Rule at Washington.

A perfect title for retaliation against federal authorities, who’d banished her from the city in which she’d lived most of her life! Don’t you think? Well, it certainly drew attention as it sold well throughout Britain.

In her memoir, she wrote:

“I had a right to my own political opinions. I am a Southern woman, born with Revolutionary blood in my veins. Freedom of speech and of thought were my birthright, guaranteed, signed and sealed by the blood of our fathers.”

After two years in Europe, Rose decided to return to the South by way of a British ship carrying supplies for the Confederacy and built to outrun the Union’s blockade of ships along the Atlantic coast. Unfortunately, the Condor was run aground by the U.S.S Niphon off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. As she’d done in recklessly leaving visible proof of her espionage all over her house, she made another poor decision: Against the pleas of the captain, she boarded a small lifeboat in rough waters and capsized. She might have been able to swim to shore had it not been for $2,000.00 in gold sewn into her undergarments and carried in a bag strung around her neck dragging her under. After her body washed ashore, she was draped in a Confederate flag and buried in Oakdale Cemetery (Wilmington, North Carolina).

Rose’s Legacy:

She was buried with full military honors by the Confederacy, and I would guess that this makes her the first female citizen of the United States to achieve this.

The epitaph on her headstone above reads:

Mrs. Rose O’N. Greenhow
A Bearer of Dispatches to the Confederate Government

She was also the very first resident of the nation’s capital to be banished from the United States.

In 1993, the Women’s Auxiliary of the Sons of Confederate Veterans changed their title to Order of Confederate Rose in her honor.

What in Rose’s background made her a staunch Rebel and influenced her to spy against the Union?

Very simply, Rose was born on a small plantation in Montgomery County, Maryland, which employed slaves, and she inherited her family’s pro-slavery and anti-abolitionist views. Could her father’s murder by the hands of one of his enslaved have deepened her Southern convictions? Either way, even her many longtime friendships with Northern Republicans of Washington City’s high society failed to alter her beliefs, and she used her late husband’s wealth and personal and professional connections to aid the South’s cause.

I’ll end here with the hopes that you’ve enjoyed this post and that I’ve whet your appetite to learn more about Rose O’Neal Greenhow at the following places, besides the link to her memoir provided above:

Video on My Complimentary Civil War Women Website.

Article at American Battlefield Trust.org:
Civil War Biography: Rose O’Neal Greenhow

Book on Amazon:
Wild Rose: The True Story of a Civil War Spy by Ann Blackman

Stay Tuned for the Next Installment of Pioneering Women of Civil War America, Which Promises to Feature. . .

. . .A Southern Woman with a Calling!