The Spymistress (41 page)

It was a bold, aggressive strategy, meant to trap the rebels in the grip of a closing vise, but the people of Richmond were more concerned with the battle on their doorstep than the broader scope of the coordinated assaults. Lizzie watched the distant fighting from the rooftop, but she had been disappointed too often to allow herself to hope that liberation was at hand. When she thought back to the exhilaration she had felt racing on horseback with Eliza and her cousin on the road to Mr. Botts’s farm, she could scarcely believe she had once found battle thrilling. Now nothing elated her, not the approach of the Union army, not the novel audacity of General Grant’s campaign. She felt only a calm hope, but with much sadness in it.

On May 6, the fighting was so close that the smoke of battle hung heavy in the air. All the stores were closed and few people ventured out onto the streets. Before long, word trickled into the capital that in the two days of savage fighting, the Confederacy had lost about eleven thousand men and the Union more than eighteen thousand. Lizzie was sickened to learn that many of the Union fatalities included wounded soldiers who had been unable to flee when fire broke out, and had been consumed alive by the burning woods.

The next day, Lieutenant Ross reported that an uprising at Libby had begun around midnight, when about one thousand officers had been ordered to prepare to be transported to Danville. The prison walls could not keep out the sounds of battle, and the men concluded that their captors believed the city would soon be taken, and were determined to move them to a more secure location where they could not be liberated. The prisoners swore they would not go and refused to have their names registered, but when confronted by several hundred Confederate bayonets, they submitted with bad grace. While most lined up for roll call, some of the officers slipped away and set fire to a lot of boxes on the second floor, intending to destroy the prison, but the blaze was extinguished before any damage was done. Furious, the prisoners spent their last moments in Libby dumping precious sugar and coffee and cutting up blankets and books that had recently been sent to them from the North, refusing to leave them for the benefit of their jailers. “As they were marched out to the depot, they swore they would escape from the train on the way to Danville,” Lieutenant Ross told her, “but I haven’t heard if they made good on their vow. They left on the Danville train at three o’clock this morning.”

“Let us hope they manage to escape,” said Lizzie wearily, with little hope that they would find the chance. However many hundreds the Confederates shipped south, she had no doubt that Libby Prison would soon be full again.

From the Wilderness the fighting moved on to Spotsylvania Court House, where the slaughter intensified. Assessing the city’s fortifications, Lizzie sent a dispatch by her most trusted courier to inform General Butler that a great number of Richmond’s defenders had been sent to reinforce General Lee. “The city is rarely so lightly garrisoned,” she emphasized. “Now is the time to strike at the heart of the Confederacy.”

General Butler’s dogged advances over the next few days seemed a deliberate, methodical, affirmative reply to her summons.

On the night of May 12, Lizzie was awakened by the roar of cannons, and with John, William, and Nelson, she watched from the rooftop, her hopes and fears and prayers intermingling as she strained to glimpse the fighting, which seemed astonishingly close. “Uncle Nelson, can you tell the Yankee guns from the Confederate?” she asked the aged man.

“Yes, Miss Lizzie,” he said, squinting off into the distance. “Them deep ones, they’re the Yankee cannon.”

“Are they coming closer?”

“It seems so.”

Lizzie smiled despite her worry and fatigue. She had thought so, but she wanted to be reassured.

She needed more reassurance in the week that followed, as General Butler’s advance seemed to grind to a halt. On May 16, Confederate General Beauregard launched a fierce counterattack on the army of Butler the Beast, driving him back to a narrow strip of land between the James and the Appomattox and holding the Union forces there while he dispatched reinforcements to General Lee.

And then the war truly did strike home: John was ordered to report to the field.

The Van Lews had expected the summons, and from the moment the campaign had begun, they had waited with dread for the inevitable. Richmond had never been in greater danger. The federal army coming up the James was much stronger and faster than government officials had anticipated, and Confederate defense forces were sent out to the north, south, and east to meet them. In the city, every man was called to arms, and in the streets none was without his musket and cartridge box. The hospitals braced themselves for another onslaught of wounded, and with the railroad lines to the South destroyed, anxious politicians scrambled to find horses to carry them to safety. Lizzie heard stories of ladies who sat up all night dressed in their best clothes and all their jewelry, ready to flee at a moment’s notice, although where they thought they might find refuge and how to travel there, Lizzie could only wonder. At a time of great distress, when even the city’s newspapermen had formed a company and prepared to fight off the enemy, John could not have hoped to avoid service.

Nevertheless, Lizzie fought to have his medical deferment extended, but the surgeon in charge refused to speak with her. She tried to arrange to smuggle him out of the city, but the raging battles had rendered her most reliable routes impassable. In desperation, although she knew it was risky, she decided to appeal to General Winder. She reminded him that he himself had confirmed John’s disability and had blamed the military’s relentless pursuit of him to a particular bias against the Van Lew family.

“I am sorry, Miss Van Lew,” the general replied. “The last time we spoke on this matter, I told you I could do nothing more for him.”

“But surely there is something else.”

“The cause needs every man.”

“Perhaps John could serve in another role,” she proposed. “As a prison guard, perhaps. A clerk. He is an excellent businessman. He can serve the cause better using his brain rather than his brawn.”

The general regarded her wearily. “Many gentlemen in worse physical repair than your brother are fighting and dying while he takes his leisure in your gardens.”

Lizzie felt her heart pound heavily in her chest. She had one last card, and she intended to play it—although if it failed, she could never come to him again. “General Winder,” she said quietly, “I know what answer I want. Perhaps I have been asking the wrong questions.”

She reached into her bag, withdrew a thick wad of Confederate bills, and placed it on the general’s desk.

He stared at it for a long moment, silent and still. “What, may I ask, is this?”

“Six thousand dollars,” she said. “There was a time when this would buy dozens of substitutes.”

“That time has long passed.” The general looked up and held her gaze, his face reddening with fury. “Miss Van Lew, I strongly urge you to remove that offensive bribe from my sight before I forget you are a lady.”

“General Winder,” exclaimed Lizzie, feigning injured innocence. “I think you forget yourself, or you have forgotten who
I
am. This is no bribe. This is a fee. I am paying for a substitute—for several substitutes. Granted, I did not find them myself, as I believe is the custom, but time is of the essence, and as you said, I am a lady and hardly familiar with how one arranges such transactions.”

“Enough,” he barked, shoving his chair back from the desk and glowering. “Remove your property from my desk, and remove yourself from my office before I dispatch you to Castle Thunder.”

“But, General—”

“Not another word,” he said, his voice blistering.

Quickly Lizzie snatched up the money, returned it to her bag, and swept haughtily from the room, her chin lifted in a pose of offended dignity. She quickened her pace as she made her way down the hall to the exit, so that by the time she reached the sidewalk, she was nearly running.

Her error had cost her dearly, she knew. She had not saved her brother, and she had almost certainly destroyed whatever trust yet remained between her and the general.

She had made a terrible mistake, but there was no undoing it.

And so John reunited with his regiment at Camp Lee, and he marched off to battle as the fighting moved to the North Anna River and beyond. Lizzie and her mother had no idea where he might be as skirmishes were reported in all directions and reports became more confusing and contradictory. The only certainty was that casualties were massive on both sides, disproportionately so for the Union, although the rebels suffered the devastating loss of their revered, daring cavalry commander General J. E. B. Stuart, who died at the Richmond home of his brother-in-law after being shot in the abdomen at Yellow Tavern.

General Stuart’s death was a great blow to the Confederacy, bringing a feverish anxiety upon the people at a time when nature, indifferent to their suffering, was at its loveliest. While cannon rumbled and long lines of wounded soldiers straggled into the city, green leaves unfurled overheard, songbirds twittered, and flowers bloomed, though their perfume could not mask the stench of death. Nor could it divert the people from a newly stirring sense of apprehension as they weighed rumors and reports from the battlefield. Although some of the battles had proven tactically inconclusive, they revealed something significant about General Grant each time he failed to destroy General Lee’s army: In circumstances where his predecessors had always chosen to retreat, General Grant invariably regrouped and moved his army forward, again and again, keeping General Lee on the defensive and inching ever closer to the Confederate capital. The citizens of Richmond realized then that General Grant possessed a very different military mind from what they had yet witnessed from any Yankee leader.

Mary Jane sent word from the Gray House that President Davis and General Lee were determined to destroy the Army of the Potomac before it could reach the James River. If they failed, General Grant could lay siege to Petersburg, the most important supply base and railway depot for the entire region. General Lee requested reinforcements, but when General Beauregard scathingly refused to provide one of his divisions, General Lee had appealed to President Davis, who immediately ordered the transfer. Lizzie prayed that the generals’ squabbling would buy the Union precious time to prepare.

When the forces finally met at Cold Harbor, everywhere there was a sense that this would be the final struggle. On June 1, General Lee’s forces halted a Union attack that had nearly turned the Confederate flank. The next day the armies positioned themselves on opposite sides of a six-mile-long front stretching from the northwest to the southeast, and early in the morning on June 3, General Grant drove his forces into General Lee’s well-entrenched divisions. The attack failed utterly. Shortly after midday, as thousands of Union troops lay dead or wounded between the lines, General Grant broke off the assault.

In mid-June, in the last major battle of the bloody campaign, General Grant surprised General Lee—and everyone else, for that matter—by directing his engineers to construct a pontoon bridge twenty-one hundred feet across the James, and then stealthily crossing the river and threatening Petersburg, a mere twenty-five miles south of the Confederate capital. If General Grant could capture Petersburg, Richmond would inevitably fall.

The Union troops settled in for the siege.

Shortly after the Battle of Cold Harbor, General Winder was ordered to report to Americus, Georgia, to assume command of the forces in the city and the prison post at Andersonville. It was a prestigious post, for Andersonville had become known as the “grand depot” of all the prisoners taken in the war. Just as she had when Captain Gibbs replaced Lieutenant Todd, Lizzie felt a curious mixture of triumph that she had outlasted his reign and trepidation that she would have to learn the ways of a new adversary. She considered delivering General Winder a farewell ginger cake for old time’s sake, but by the time she learned of his transfer, he had already gone.

Later in June, Lizzie received word from her Northern contacts that Colonel George H. Sharpe, the intelligence chief for the Army of the Potomac, would be taking over for General Butler as the primary patron of her network. Soon thereafter, she was overjoyed to receive, tucked carefully in with one of the colonel’s dispatches, a letter from John.

Shortly after the Battle of Cold Harbor, her brother had managed to slip into Union lines, where he presented himself at General Grant’s headquarters. “They tried to recruit me as a scout,” John wrote, “but I demurred, and explained that I was en route to Philadelphia. I did reassure them that you are in a position to furnish them with valuable information, a claim they can verify with General Butler.” He sent his love to Mother, Annie, and Eliza, and promised to kiss Anna for them.

It took several weeks for word of John’s desertion to reach the Richmond press, but when it did, the response was withering:

GONE TO THE YANKEES.

—J. Newton Van Lew, for many years a hardware merchant of this city, has gone to the Yankees, and is said to have been taken by Beast Butler as a special detective. Van Lew, notwithstanding an incurable disease, which rendered him unfit for anything, we should think, being conscribed about the time Grant made his flank movement to the Southside, one evening rode out in his buggy in the direction of Malvern Hill, and has not been seen since. If he displays any brains in his new character of detective, it will be for the first time in his life.

Lizzie would have expected nothing less than an
ad hominem
attack from the
Whig
, but John’s many friends would not let it stand. They promptly wrote to the editor protesting that John had not deserted at all but had been captured by a Yankee raiding party. The editor grudgingly printed several of their letters, but could not resist adding a remark from the chief of the Confederate police, who flatly stated, “Van Lew rode out with a colored man in a buggy. The man and the buggy came back, but Van Lew didn’t. It is d—d strange if the Yankee raiders took Van Lew that they didn’t take the colored man and buggy, too.”