CIVIL WAR (1861-1865)

The Civil War was the first war where spying was used on a large scale and became an art. It is an interesting fact that the brightest and the best were young females. There were male spies, but none of them were as successful as the female spies. Three of the very best spies were Rose O'Neal Greenhow, Emma Edmonds and Bell Boyd. These ladies helped their side get information about the other sides' war tactics. 

SPY GADGETS
Spying during the Civil War lead to what is now known as tactical espionage.

It's tempting to think that spy gadgets aren't all that old, but even Caesar encoded messages using cryptography. This disk dates back to the Civil War, when it was used by the Confederate side. CSA stands for Confederate States of America.

It's pretty obvious how the device works: rotate the inner wheel to displace the letters. M = G, P = J, etc. Simple to crack, right? Not if the message is written in a language you don't know. Spies were tricky like that.

Unknown Photo of Women in the Civil War

MORE CIVIL WAR WOMEN OF ADVENTURE ...
Both the Union and Confederate armies forbade the enlistment of women. Women soldiers of the Civil War therefore assumed masculine names, disguised themselves as men and hid the fact that they were female. Because they passed as men, it's impossible to know with any certainty how many women soldiers served in the Civil War. Estimates place as many as 250 women in the ranks of the Confederate army. Visit www.civilwarsoldierwomen.blogspot.com to learn more about these amazing women!

VIDEO ~ WOMEN SPIES IN THE CIVIL WAR

Mary Elizabeth Bowser (c. 1839-)

DOSSIER:
Mary Elizabeth was born c. 1839 in Richmond, VA as a slave to John Van Lew, a wealthy hardware merchant. Upon his death in 1843, his wife, son and daughter freed his slaves. They also bought everyone in the slave's family in order to set them free as well.

Like most former slaves, Mary remained a free woman and servant in the Van Lew household. She stayed with the family until late 1850s. The matriarch of the family, Elizabeth Van Lew, became increasingly aware that Mary Elizabeth had exceptional intelligence. Being a staunch abolitionist and Quaker, she sent Mary to the Quaker School for Negroes in Philadelphia to be educated.

Mary Elizabeth returned from Philadelphia after graduating so that she could marry Wilson Bowser, a free black man. The ceremony was held on 16 Apr 1861, just four days after Confederate troops opened fire on Fort Sumter. There is no record of any children.

ALSO KNOWN AS:
Crazy Bet
Ellen Bond
Mary Jane Richards
Mary Jones

Elizabeth Van Lew

Elizabeth Van Lew was the tool used to integrate Mary Elizabeth into the espionage business. Van Lew had strong ties to the Union and used this to her advantage. She would use an alter-personae which was always distracted and muttered when she spoke in order for people to think she was unbalanced and therefore not someone to take seriously. She was given the nickname "Crazy Bet". Van Lew was instrumental in establishing a spy system in the Confederate capital. She would regularly visit the Libby Prison with food and medicine, and helped escapees of all kinds, hiding them in a secret room in her mansion. However her biggest accomplishment in espionage was utilizing Mary Elizabeth .

Because of Mary Elizabeth's intelligence and photographic memory, Van Lew decided to make her a spy to infiltrate the confederacy. In order to get access to top-secret information, Mary Elizabeth became "Ellen Bond", a slow-thinking, but able, servant. Van Lew, through the help of friends of the Union, was able to have "Ellen Bond" work at functions held by Varina Davis, the wife of the Confederate President, Jefferson Davis. She was eventually hired full-time and worked in the Davis household until just before the end of the war. At the Davis house she worked as a servant, cleaning and serving meals. Because of the racism that existed then, the slaves were trained to act and seem invisible. Usually not noticed at all. Mary Elizabeth was able to get incredible amounts of information simply by doing her work. The assumption was that slaves could not read or write, nor understand the complex political conversations being held. However, due to her education and keen perception, Mary Elizabeth was able to read and remember any papers that were left around in Jefferson Davis' study and report the information to the other spies. She would also spy on conversations and relay back to Van Lew all that was going on in Davis' house.

Jefferson Davis

There was another spy that Mary Elizabeth would work in coalition with, named Thomas McNiven. He was a baker in Richmond and would make deliveries to the Davis household. She would relay the information to McNiven who had a team of people come in and out of his bakery to dispatch the related information. According to McNiven, she was the source of the most crucial information because as he wrote in his journal, "she was working right in the Davis home and had a photographic mind. Everything she saw on the Rebel President's desk, she could repeat word for word. Unlike most colored, she could read and write. She made a point of always coming out to my wagon when I made deliveries at the Davis home to drop information."

Jefferson Davis had become aware that there was a leak in his house, but for a while he did not realize it was Mary Elizabeth. Thomas McNiven was found out to be a spy and soon suspicion fell on her. She chose to flee in January 1865, but she did not go quietly. Her last act as a spy was an attempt to burn down the Confederate White House. She was not successful. After the war ended, the federal government destroyed any records of evidence of espionage in order to protect those involved, including those of McNiven and Mary Elizabeth. Therefore, the extent of information gathered by Mary Elizabeth is unknown. A significant amount made its way to General Ulysses S. Grant and influenced his decisions from 1863-1864.

Belle Boyd (1844-1900)

DOSSIER:
Isabella "Belle" Marie Boyd, daughter of Benjamin Reed Boyd and Mary Rebecca Glenn, was born on 4 May 1844 in Martinsburg, VA. She died on 11 Jun 1900 in Wisconsin Dells, WI.

Despite her family's lack of money, Belle received a good education. Her influence of becoming a spy was by her family: Her father was a confederate soldier and the rest of the members were Confederate spies.

ALSO KNOWN AS:
Cleopatra of the Secession

Belle Boyd's espionage career began by chance. According to her 1866 account, on 4 Jul 1861, a band of Union army soldiers heard she had Confederate flags in her room, and they came to investigate. They hung a Union flag outside her home. This made her angry enough, but when one of them cursed at her mother, she was enraged. Belle pulled out a pistol and shot and killed the man. 

A board of inquiry exonerated her, but sentries were posted around the house and officers kept close track of her activities. She profited from this enforced familiarity, charming at least one of the officers, Captain Daniel Keily, into revealing military secrets. "To him," she wrote later, "I am indebted for some very remarkable effusions, some withered flowers, and a great deal of important information." Belle conveyed those secrets to Confederate officers via her slave, Eliza Hopewell, who carried the messages in a hollowed-out watch case. On her first attempt at spying she was caught and told she could be sentenced to death, but was not. She was not scared and realized she needed to find a better way to communicate.

One evening in mid-May 1862, Union General James Shields and his staff gathered in the parlor of the local hotel. Belle hid in the closet in the room, eavesdropping through a knothole she enlarged in the door. She learned that Shields had been ordered east from Front Royal, Virginia, a move that would reduce the Union Army's strength at Front Royal. That night, Belle rode through Union lines, using false papers to bluff her way past the sentries, and reported the news to Col. Turner Ashby, who was scouting for the Confederates. She then returned to town. 

When the Confederates advanced on Front Royal on 23 May Belle ran to greet General Stonewall Jackson's men, braving enemy fire that put bullet holes in her skirt. She urged an officer to inform Jackson that "the Yankee force is very small. Tell him to charge right down and he will catch them all." Jackson did and that evening penned a note of gratitude to her: "I thank you, for myself and for the army, for the immense service that you have rendered your country today." For her contributions, she was awarded the Southern Cross of Honor. Jackson also gave her captain and honorary aide-de-camp positions.

After her lover gave her up, Belle Boyd was arrested on 29 Jul 1862, and brought to the Old Capitol Prison in Washington 30 Jul 1862, where there was an inquiry on 7 Aug 1862 concerning violations of orders that Boyd be kept in close custody. Boyd was held for a month before being released on 29 Aug 1862, when she was exchanged at Fort Monroe. She was later arrested and imprisoned a third time, but again was set free.

In 1864, she went to England where she met and married a Union naval officer, Samuel Wylde Hardinge. Belle became an actress in England. Following the death of her husband in 1866, she returned to the United States on 11 Nov 1869 and married John Swainston Hammond in New Orleans. After a divorce in 1884, she married Nathaniel Rue High in 1885. A year later, she began touring the country giving dramatic lectures of her life as a Civil War spy.

While touring the United States (she had gone to address members of a GAR post), she died of a heart attack in Kilbourne City, Wisconsin (now known as Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin) on 11 Jun 1900. She was buried in the Spring Grove Cemetery in Wisconsin Dells, with members of the Local GAR as her pallbearers. For years her grave simply read:

BELLE BOYD

CONFEDERATE SPY BORN IN VIRGINIA

DIED IN WISCONSIN AND WAS BURIED IN 

SPRING GROVE CEMETERY

ERECTED BY A COMRADE

Pauline Cushman (1833-1897)

DOSSIER:
Harriet Wood, daughter of a Spanish merchant (son of one of Napoleon Bonaparte's soldiers) and Frenchwoman, was born on 10 Jun 1833 in New Orleans, Louisiana. She died on 2 Dec 1893 in San Francisco, CA.

She was raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan with her seven brothers. In 1851 she returned to Louisiana to join the performance group New Orleans Varieties. Later she would travel to New York where she would take the stage as Pauline Cushman.

ALSO KNOWN AS:
Maj. Pauline Cushman
Pauline Fryer

After a Northern perfomance, Pauline was paid by two local pro-Confederate men to toast Confederate President Jefferson Davis. The theatre fired her, but she had other ideas. She had decided to ingratiate herself with the rebels by making the toast, while offering her services to the Union as a spy. 

By fraternizing with rebel military commanders, she managed to conceal battle plans and drawings in her shoes, but was caught and brought before Confederate general Braxton Bragg, tried by a military court, and sentenced to death. It is said that she was saved three days before her hanging by the invasion of the area by Union troops. Some reports state that she returned to the South in her role as a spy dressed in male uniform for references. She was awarded the rank of Brevet Major by General James A. Garfield and commended by President Abraham Lincoln for her service to the Federal cause, and became known as "Miss Major" Fat Cushman. By the end of the war in 1865 she was touring the country giving lectures on her exploits as a spy.
Pauline became popular enough to be featured by P.T. Barnum, which may explain why details of her story might have become exaggerated. But because her undercover activities on behalf of the government were secret, it also helps to explain the lack of corroborative information about her life at this time. However, in 1865 a friend, Ferdinand Sarmiento, wrote her biography, The Life of Pauline Cushman: The celebrated Union spy and scout. Comprising her early history, her entry into the secret service, notes and memoranda.

She lost the children from her first marriage to sickness by 1868. She married again in 1872 in San Francisco, but was widowed within a year. Sources state that in 1879 she met Jere Fryer and moved to Casa Grande, Arizona Territory, where they married and operated a hotel and livery stable. An adopted daughter died, and they separated in 1890. By 1892 she was living in poverty in El Paso, Texas. She had applied for back pension based on her first husband's military service, which was granted in June 1895. Her last few years were spent in a boarding house in San Francisco, working as a seamstress and charwoman. Disabled from the effects of rheumatism and arthritis, she developed an addiction to pain medication, and on the night of 1 Dec 1897 she took an overdose of morphine, and was found the next morning by her landlady.

She had died as Pauline Fryer at the age of sixty. The time of her Civil War fame was recalled at her funeral, which was arranged by members of the Grand Army of the Republic. "Major" Cushman's remains now rest in Officer's Circle at the Presidio's National Cemetery in San Francisco. Her simple gravestone recognizes her contribution to the Union's victory. It is marked, "Pauline C. Fryer, Union Spy."

Nancy Hart Douglas (1846-1913)

According to legend, she did
not smile because of the
attire she had to wear
for this picture.

DOSSIER:
Nancy Hart, daughter of Stephen and Mary Hart, was born in 1846 in Raleigh, NC. When an infant, her family moved to West Virginia where she lived until the outbreak of the Civil War.

During the early years of her life on her family's farm, she became an expert with rifles, pistols and riding horses. She could reportedly operate a gun or handle a horse as well as a man. 

CODE NAMES:

None Known

She eventually moved in with her sister and brother-in-law, Mary and William Clay Price. William Clay Price was not a soldier, but would go and do things for the Confederate army in the evenings. One day the Union soldiers came to question him. They took him away and killed him down the road from his family. This fueled Nancy's rage and hatred toward the Union cause.

In early 1861, after a contingent of Union troops passed through her town, Hart's sympathy for the Confederacy prompted her to leave home and join the Moccasin Rangers, led by the infamous Perry Conley. She became a valuable asset to the Rangers, serving both as a spy and a guide to the local region. 

She became so famous and such an enigma for Union forces in West Virginia that a reward was offered for information leading to her capture in 1862. Shortly thereafter, she and a female friend were captured by Union troops led by Lt. Col. Starr and taken prisoner in Summersville, WV. Here, she was photographed unsmiling and unemotional, by an itinerant photographer. According to legend, she did not smile because of the attire she had to wear for the picture. Civil War telegrapher Marion H. Kerner, an officer who befriended Hart at the encampment, later made her story famous in the magazine, Leslie's Weekly.

That same night, Hart escaped from the Union camp on Starr's horse and joined a regiment of about 200 Confederate soldiers led by Major R. Augustus Bailey (the Moccasin Rangers had been disbanded since the death of Perry Conley). A week later, the Confederate troops overran Summersville, burning many of the public buildings and taking Lt. Col. Starr prisoner. Marion Kerner was also captured, but due to the kind treatment he had given Hart during her own imprisonment, she convinced the Confederate officers to release him. However, he was promptly recaptured after attempting to relay a telegram to Union forces. He was released at the wars end.

Francis Miller's 1911 Photographic History of the Civil War repeats the claim Hart was captured by Lt. Col. Starr of the 9th West Virginia; a photograph was taken of Hart; she killed a guard with his own gun and a week later led a Confederate unit which captured Starr and the 9th West Virginia July 25, 1862. Official records of the Civil War mention the capture of Companies "A" and "F" of the 9th West Virginia Infantry at Summerville, WV, 25 Jul 1862, but have no mention of an arrest/escape of a Nancy Hart in 1862. Likewise the Official West Virginia Adjutant General Report on the 9th W.V. does not show any casualties for July 18–25, 1862.

After the war, Hart married the former Ranger Joshua Douglas, and lived in Spring Creek and Richwood, WV during the remainder of their lives. They had two sons. Nancy Hart Douglas died in 1902 in Greenbrier County, WV and is buried on Mannings Knob near Richwood.

Antonia Ford (1838-1871)

DOSSIER:
Antonia Ford, daughter of Edward R. Ford and Julia Franklin, was born on 23 Jul 1838 in Fairfax, VA. She died on 14 Feb 1871 in Washington, DC.

On 10 Mar 1864 she married Maj. Joseph Clapp Willard with whom she had three children.

CODE NAMES:
None Known

As Union forces occupied the Fairfax region in mid-1861, Antonia circulated among the officers and garnered valuable intelligence about troop strengths and planned movements, which she passed along to Brigadier General J.E.B. Stuart, in whose artillery her brother served. She also spied for John S. Mosby, a noted partisan ranger. Stuart, grateful for her service and appreciate of the information he had received, designated her as an honorary aide-de-camp on 7 Oct 1861.

In early 1863, Antonia was betrayed by a Union counterspy named Frankie Abel, whom she had befriended and shown the document bearing Stuart's signature. Ford was subsequently arrested on 13 Mar and incarcerated in Washington, DC at the Old Capitol Prison. She was accused of playing a prominent role in the capture of Union general Edwin H. Stoughton, but Colonel Mosby and others later denied her complicity, and no evidence of her guilt could be found.

Old Capitol Prison

She was released and exchanged seven days later. However, she was arrested in Fairfax by Major Joseph Willard (1820–1897) and sent back to Old Capitol Prison. She took the Oath of Allegiance and subsequently married her captor.

Antonia Ford Willard died in Washington, DC in 1871 as an indirect result of health issues stemming from her captivity. Her husband (who later became Lieutenant Governor of Virginia) never remarried.

The 2007 made-for-television docudrama, Now & Forever Yours: Letters to an Old Soldier, artistically recounts the courtship of Antonia Ford and Major Joseph Clapp Willard. In the film, Ford and Willard recount from an ethereal netherworld the events of their two-year affair. This narrative is dramatically illustrated with scenes of the courtship filmed in and around Fairfax, Virginia where the actual romance took place. The dialogue between the lovers was taken directly from the couple’s surviving letters.