Rose Greenhow: Bull Run Spy Drowned by Gold Off Wilmington in 1864

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Rose Greenhow, born Maria Rosetta O'Neal around 1813 on a Maryland plantation, lost her father in 1817 when his valet killed him. Around 1830 she and her sister Ellen moved to Washington to live with their aunt, Maria Ann Hill, who ran a fashionable boarding house in the Old Capitol building where congressmen lived in mess groups. In 1835 she married State Department official Dr. Robert Greenhow Jr. with Dolley Madison's blessing. Widowed in 1854, she hosted a salon for Southern sympathizers and admired John C. Calhoun, and Captain Thomas Jordan handed her his spy network and a 26-symbol cipher.

In July 1861 she obtained General Irvin McDowell's marching orders, and courier Betty Duvall carried them to General P.G.T. Beauregard woven into her hair, before the Confederate victory at Bull Run. Allan Pinkerton put her under house arrest in August, then moved her and her eight-year-old daughter to the Old Capitol Prison, the same building where she grew up. Exiled south in 1862, she traveled to Europe as a Confederate envoy. Returning in October 1864, her blockade runner Condor ran aground off Wilmington while chased by the USS Niphon, and her rowboat capsized.

• Pinkerton's raid found burned cipher scraps, fortification maps and love letters attributed to Senator Henry Wilson, though biographers doubt he wrote them.
• Her home became a makeshift prison called Fort Greenhow, where she kept smuggling notes in dress hems and guards' boots.
• At the Old Capitol Prison she signaled couriers by arranging candles and blinds in her window, and flew a Confederate flag from the bars.
• In Europe she was received by Napoleon III and Queen Victoria and published the bestselling My Imprisonment and the First Year of Abolition Rule at Washington.
• She drowned weighed down by about $2,000 in gold sewn into her clothes, and her grave in Wilmington calls her a bearer of dispatches.