The Darling Dahlias and the Confederate Rose Page 23

  “I do believe it does.” Charlie Dickens drew himself up and looked around the table. “Has anyone here ever heard of the Confederate Rose?”

  There was a babble of voices, all speaking eagerly and at once.

  “The Confederate rose?” Bessie asked, puzzled. “Why, certainly. We know that flower. But I don’t know what that has to do with—”

  At the same time, Beulah said, “I have one growing beside my back fence. It’s just gorgeous. But what—”

  And Fannie said, “The Confederate rose is a favorite of mine, as well. However, I don’t quite see—”

  Miss Rogers raised her hand and the others stopped speaking, in deference.

  “The Confederate rose? We’re all familiar with it, Mr. Dickens—a beautiful shrub, with blossoms that are white when they first open. Then they turn pink, then red, and then a deep, bloodred. Confederate ladies planted it in honor of their brave fallen soldiers, who shed their blood for the Cause. But it isn’t a rose at all, you know,” she added in a reproving tone. “It’s an hibiscus, and we should pay it the honor of using its real name. Hibiscus mutabilis.”

  “And that’s not all,” Bessie put in. “Tell him, Miss Rogers. Tell him about your project.”

  Miss Rogers smiled proudly. “Of course. I am happy to tell you, Mr. Dickens, that our Darling Dahlias have propagated and raised fourteen new Hibiscus mutabilii, one for each Dahlia. We intend to plant them in the cemetery before Confederate Day, so everyone can see them when they come for the celebration. We’ll be glad to give you all the details, if you’d like to print a story in the paper.”

  But while everyone was speaking, Charlie Dickens had been shaking his head and frowning, trying to get a word in edgewise. When Miss Rogers finally finished, he spoke up.

  “I am sure your flowers will be very beautiful, but that’s not what I am talking about.” He picked up the paper that lay on the table in front of Miss Rogers. “This is a letter from the woman that people in the South, in Richmond, particularly, called the Confederate Rose—Rose Greenhow. She spied for the Confederacy during the first months of the War Between the States, until President Lincoln had her locked up.”

  “The Confederate Rose, a spy?” the Dahlias exclaimed, their voices rising in a babble of astonishment. “A spy!”

  “A spy,” Charlie Dickens confirmed. “A very valuable spy who was responsible for the South’s success at the First Manassas.”

  “Manassas!” An awed murmur went around the table. “Manassas!” As daughters of the Confederacy, each of the Dahlias understood the sacred significance of what the North called the Battle of Bull Run, the South’s first and most memorable victory.

  “Yes, Manassas,” Charlie Dickens repeated. He unfolded the other papers he held in his hand. “These are letters to President Jefferson Davis and General P. G. T. Beauregard and to Rose Greenhow’s daughter. And these”—he held up several pages covered with indecipherable symbols and letters—“appear to be coded materials, perhaps copies of reports she managed to smuggle to Confederate officials during the months that she was imprisoned.”

  “Astonishing,” Bessie exclaimed.

  “Incredible,” Fannie said, and Beulah murmured, “Imagine that. A woman spy!”

  “But . . . but what does it all mean, Mr. Dickens?” Miss Rogers whispered, fanning herself with her white hanky.

  “It means,” Charlie Dickens replied, “that your grandmother, Rose Greenhow, made this pillow and used it as a hiding place to conceal some of her Confederate correspondence. And unless I miss my guess, the symbols embroidered on the cover are a key to her cipher—the one she used to encode her messages, that is. I haven’t had time yet to work it all out, but that’s my initial impression.”

  “You’re saying that my grandmother was a Confederate spy?” Miss Rogers asked uncertainly. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes were wide.

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying,” said Charlie Dickens, drawing a chair up to the table and sitting down. “I’ve been doing some reading this afternoon, and I’ve learned quite a lot. Let me tell you about her.”

  Bessie pushed back her chair and stood up. “If we’re going to do that,” she said decidedly, “we are must have refreshments. I’ll bring them over to the table and we’ll eat while we listen.” And to Miss Rogers, she said sternly, “And I don’t want to hear a word of objection, Miss Rogers. Not a single word.”

  SIXTEEN

  The Confederate Rose: “A Dangerous Character”

  This is the story that Charlie Dickens told the Dahlias that evening about Miss Rogers’ grandmother, Rose O’Neale Greenhow. He acknowledged that he had read hastily and that there were many gaps yet to fill in. But he would do his best to learn more details, and he promised that when he had collected all the facts—or as many as he was able to get—he would write up a more complete account for the newspaper. For now, he read part of the story from notes he had taken during his afternoon’s research.

  Rose O’Neale was born in Port Tobacco, Maryland, in 1813 or 1814. Her father owned a small plantation and grew tobacco and wheat until he was murdered by his slaves, leaving his wife with four daughters, five hundred sixty acres, and very little money. Rose, the youngest, was intelligent, pretty, and quick to learn. When she became a teenager, she was sent with her sister to Washington, D.C., to live with her aunt, Maria Hill. Mrs. Hill and her husband ran a fashionable boardinghouse in the Old Capitol building, where Supreme Court justices, congressmen, and senators lodged while the Court or Congress was in session. The Hills were Southerners and their boardinghouse (which had been the home of Congress for eleven years after the British burned the capitol in 1814) was especially popular with Southern politicians.

  Young Rose blossomed in this highly politicized social milieu, where everyone (especially the men) thought her beautiful. And she was. She had a pale olive complexion, shiny black hair parted down the middle and pulled back from her oval face, and an hourglass figure. Bright, well-read, and a lively, opinionated conversationalist, she loved the intrigues and conspiracies of Washington politics and learned to navigate them very well. She was mentored by Dolley Madison, the widow of the former president, considered the queen of Washington society. Mrs. Madison took an interest in the young girl, whose coquettish, flirtatious manner earned her the nickname Wild Rose. She was said to be bold, brave, and brazen, ready for any adventure, the more exciting the better.

  In 1835, Rose married Dr. Robert Greenhow, an urbane Virginian who worked in the State Department and pursued an avocation as an historian. They bought a house on K Street, across from the home of former president John Quincy Adams. Through her husband, Rose gained a wider knowledge of the inner workings of the government and a greater acquaintance with government officials, for the Greenhows entertained often. Rose bore her husband eight children. The last, a girl born in 1853 and named for her mother, was called Little Rose. Robert Greenhow died the following year. At forty, Rose was a grieving but strikingly handsome widow, widely recognized as a lady of influence—and still as bold and brazen as the Wild Rose of her youth.

  Over the years, Rose had strengthened her social and political contacts with the South. Her sympathy for state’s rights, her conviction that slavery was constitutionally protected and morally sound, and her belief in the right to secession continued to grow after her husband’s death. She was strongly influenced by her friendship with John C. Calhoun and particularly with James Buchanan, whom she advised to run for president in 1856 and with whom she corresponded and met frequently during his presidency. When Lincoln was elected in 1860 and talk about secession turned into calls for action, a Southern colonel named Thomas Jordan asked Rose to organize her friends and Confederate sympathizers into a ring of spies. Colonel Jordan gave her a cipher and asked her to encrypt all her messages to him. She spent many hours practicing with the cipher, until she could us
e it quickly and accurately.

  Hostilities began in April 1861 when the South attacked Fort Sumter and Lincoln called up troops, intending to quickly put down the Southern rebellion. The two sides were at war, and Rose was listening to a variety of informants. Some shared military secrets straight from the War Department, while others simply reported what they saw and heard around the city, where the Union troops were gathering, arms and munitions were being stored, and blockade plans were being discussed.

  In July, Rose learned that the Union army was preparing to attack General Beauregard’s headquarters a few miles outside of Washington, near a small river called Bull Run. She sent two secret messages via courier alerting Beauregard to the plan and giving him enough time to summon General Joseph E. Johnston, who brought his army by train from the Shenandoah Valley. Joining forces, the two Southern armies surprised the Yankees with the ferocity of their defense, and the forces of the North were utterly routed. It was the first battle—and the first victory—of the war. When it was over, Confederate President Jefferson Davis was happy to give Mrs. Greenhow the credit for the South’s success. “She is,” he said, “our Confederate Rose.”

  From April through July, Rose continued to use her cipher to send coded messages about the activities of General McClellan and General McDowell, reporting the number of troops, their movements, and their artillery. She sewed these notes into various pieces of clothing that she gave to her female couriers. Women crossing the lines were rarely searched, so it’s likely that a fair amount of information was conveyed.

  But suspicions were raised in Lincoln’s War Office when it became known that Rose was entertaining far into the night. Her guests included several important federal officials, notably Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, the powerful chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs. Pillow talk, exclaimed the War Office, and called in Allan Pinkerton, who was directing counterintelligence operations in Washington.

  “Mrs. Greenhow must be attended to,” the assistant secretary of war told Pinkerton. “She is becoming a dangerous character.” Pinkerton began to watch Rose’s house, taking note of the comings and goings of her many male visitors, and on August 23, he placed her under house arrest. Upon searching her home for further evidence, he found thirteen love letters from Senator Wilson, as well as maps of Washington fortifications and notes on military movements. But while he was convinced that she was communicating in code, he was unable to find the key to her cipher.

  Rose was confined to her home for five months. During this time, she took every opportunity to send the Confederacy as much information as she could gather. Finally, in January 1862, with her eight-year-old Little Rose, she was sent to Old Capitol Prison—ironically, the very same building that had once been her aunt’s fashionable boardinghouse. She was held there until May, when she and her daughter were released and deported to Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederacy.

  In Richmond, the Confederate Rose was hailed as a heroine and feted throughout the city. But Jefferson Davis had need of her diplomatic skills and soon dispatched her to Europe. For the next two years, she traveled through France, attempting to enlist the aid of European countries on behalf of the South. In France, she was received by Napoleon III. In Britain, she had an audience with Queen Victoria and wrote a memoir titled My Imprisonment and the First Year of Abolition Rule at Washington. Meanwhile, she found a Parisian school for Little Rose, the Convent du Sacré Coeur, where she felt that the girl would gain a good education.

  In September 1864, Rose left Europe to return to the Confederate States, carrying official dispatches and two thousand dollars in gold earned from the sale of her memoir and intended for a Southern relief fund. She sailed on the Condor, a British blockade runner that ran aground near Wilmington, North Carolina. Rose fled the grounded ship by lifeboat for the nearby shore. But the skiff capsized, and Rose, weighted down by the gold she carried, was drowned.

  As the word spread, the Confederate Rose was mourned across the South. When her body was recovered, she was given a state burial in Wilmington, where her coffin rested on a bier covered with a Confederate flag and every civic leader praised her heroism and patriotic devotion. The Wilmington Sentinel had the last word:

  At the last day, when the martyrs who have with their blood sealed their devotions to liberty shall stand together, firm witnesses that truth is stronger than death, foremost among the shining throng, coequal with the Rolands and Joan d’Arcs of history, will appear the Confederate heroine, Rose A. Greenhow.

  SEVENTEEN

  Charlie

  When Charlie finished, he leaned back and glanced around the table, satisfied that he had told the story well. The Dahlias, who had been listening to him with rapt attention, let out their collective breath in one long, tremulous sigh of mingled amazement, regret, and bone-deep satisfaction. Bessie Bloodworth was blinking as if someone had just turned on the lights after a movie show. Fannie Champaign was gazing at Charlie with an unreadable expression on her face. Miss Rogers was weeping into her white lace-edged hanky, and Beulah Trivette was leaning toward her, patting her arm gently and murmuring, “There, there. You just have a good cry, Miss Rogers. We feel for you, we purely do.”

  All four women, as Charlie could see, were deeply affected by the story of the Confederate Rose. He, on the other hand, was much more interested in investigating the puzzle of the cipher than in the emotional theater of Rose Greenhow’s melodramatic life, which read like a Hollywood movie script. In fact, he had to suppress a sardonic smile when he considered the Sentinel’s praise of Rose Greenhow as a martyr who had been devoted to liberty. The woman had done all she could on behalf of slavery, and the “liberty” the Sentinel praised was the freedom to own slaves. But Charlie wasn’t going to call attention to this significant irony, and if the Dahlias noticed, they didn’t speak of it. They had been utterly captivated by the story.

  “I . . . I don’t know how to thank you, Mr. Dickens,” Miss Rogers finally managed through her tears. She gulped back a sob. “It’s . . . it’s just so overwhelming. I have spent my whole life not knowing who my family was, and now I discover that my grandmother was a legendary Confederate heroine and my mother was educated in France and—”

  “Your mother?” Fannie asked in a wondering voice.

  “Your mother was Little Rose, wasn’t she?” Bessie said, remembering that Miss Rogers had told her that her mother’s name was the same as her grandmother’s.

  “Yes,” Miss Rogers said. “Yes! My mother told me that my grandmother was a very brave woman, and that she died by drowning. And now I know that it happened when she was in the service of our dear Confederacy!” She looked up at Charlie Dickens. “It’s so hard to believe, but that . . . that book you borrowed this afternoon—My Imprisonment.” Her tone was tremulous. “It was written by my grandmother, wasn’t it?”

  “It was,” Charlie replied, thinking that it had been quite a remarkable coincidence to discover Rose Greenhow’s book in the little Darling library. He would have to find out how it got there. “I’ll return it to the library tomorrow, Miss Rogers, so you can read it for yourself. You’ll probably want to try to do more work on your family tree to confirm the little I’ve been able to dig up so far, and of course to learn more. Rose Greenhow was apparently survived by several children and—”

  “So I may have cousins!” Miss Rogers exclaimed, clapping her hands excitedly. “I may have whole families of cousins, all over the country, and perhaps even living aunts and uncles! Oh, Mr. Dickens, how can I thank you? How can I ever thank you for all your wonderful investigative work!”

  Charlie grinned at Bessie. “You should thank Miss Bloodworth,” he said, “for bringing me the cipher and suggesting that it was a secret code.” He paused. “I wonder—would you mind if I borrow the documents that I took out of the pillow? I’d like to send copies to a friend who teaches at the University of North Carolina. H
e might be able to shed more light on them. And perhaps he knows of other materials that are available. Of course I’ll be very careful with them.”

  “Please take them,” Miss Rogers said, and blew her nose. “I’ll appreciate anything else you can find out about my . . . my grandmother.” She gave a dainty little hiccup. “My grandmother, the Confederate Rose.”

  “The Confederate Rose, our heroine,” Fannie murmured, her eyes on Charlie.

  A ripple of laughter ran around the table and everyone seemed to relax.

  “I’ve never known anybody whose grandmother was a spy,” Beulah said enviously, shaking her head. “Just think of all the good she did for our boys at Bull Run! Oh, Miss Rogers, you must be very proud.”

  “I’d love to know more about her,” Fannie said. “And to think that she and your mother were sent to prison together!” She lifted her eyes, sighing. “Such a romantic story. The Confederate Rose.”

  Her glance shifted to Charlie, and he thought, with some surprise, that it was an appreciative glance. He wondered whether he had inadvertently stumbled across the key to Fannie Champaign’s heart—and having done so, whether he truly wanted to open it.

  Bessie Bloodworth was looking straight at Miss Rogers, one eyebrow cocked. “This will give us a whole new perspective on you, Dorothy.” Charlie caught the slight emphasis on Dorothy and wondered at it.

  Miss Rogers looked straight back. “I should certainly hope so, Bessie.” Another emphasis. Then she smiled. “Isn’t it lovely that we have already agreed to plant all those Confederate roses in the cemetery for Confederate Day?” She pulled in her breath and said tentatively, “Perhaps . . . perhaps we could mention Rose Greenhow at our ceremony?”

  “I think we can do better than that,” Bessie replied. “I think the Confederate Rose ought to be the main feature of our program. Liz is organizing the event. I’ll talk to her and see what we can work out.”