Hibernian Chronicle: Confederate spy Rose O’Neal Greenhow detained

Outside stood several secret service agents bearing papers placing her under house arrest. The charge was conducting espionage for the Confederacy. Greenhow became an instant celebrity and, despite her confinement under armed guard, continued to transmit vital secrets to the Confederate government for another six months.
Rose O’Neal Greenhow was born in 1817 in Montgomery County, Md. Her ancestors the O’Neals migrated from Ireland to the Chesapeake region in the late 1600s. She received only a limited formal education but by all accounts was smart. She was also attractive and impetuous, leading many to call her “Wild Rose” when she was young.
As a teenager, Rose O’Neal moved to Washington, D.C., with her sister and moved in with an aunt who ran a boarding house. This arrangement allowed them to befriend many ambitious politicians who boarded in the house and by the time they were in their 20s the sisters were active in the capital’s social scene. At age 26, Rose married Robert Greenhow, a prominent Virginian who worked for the State Department. They had four daughters before Robert died in the early 1850s. As a widow, Rose had both wealth and powerful friends to rely upon.
When the Civil War broke out in the spring of 1861, Greenhow, known for her pro-South sympathies, was recruited into a Confederate spy ring. As a woman she was initially above suspicion. This allowed her to ask questions of her high-placed friends in the Lincoln administration and Congress without raising an eyebrow. But what appeared to her powerful friends as the excited chatter of an attractive southern belle was in fact the calculated secret gathering of an expert spy. Perhaps her most indiscreet source of information was Sen. Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, who may have been her lover.
Greenhow not only proved adept at gathering information, she also managed to recruit dozens of spies and devised several ingenious methods for transmitting the information she gathered.
Her greatest success came in the weeks leading up to the war’s first major battle, Bull Run. On July 10, 1861, Greenhow sent one of her recruits, a young woman named Betty Duvall, into Confederate lines. Carefully hidden in her clothing were coded massages detailing the Union Army’s plan of attack. These were forwarded to Confederate Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard. Six days later, Greenhow sent additional details to Beauregard outlining, the general later wrote, that “the enemy — 55,000 strong, I believe — would positively commence that day his advance from Arlington Heights and Alexandria on to Manassas [near Bull Run].” Beauregard sent this information to President Jefferson Davis, who responded by ordering Gen. Joseph Johnston to move his army 50 miles to reinforce Beauregard. On July 21, in what was a confusing clash of inexperienced armies, the Confederacy handed the Union a humiliating defeat. Days later Greenhow received a note from the head of the spy ring: “Our President and our General direct me to thank you. . . . The Confederacy owes you a debt.”
Despite a mounting counterintelligence effort by the Lincoln administration that increased the likelihood that she would be exposed as a spy, Greenhow continued to gather and transmit information. In late July, however, suspicion over her activities began to mount and government agents began surveillance of her home. Three weeks later, on Aug. 23, 1861, they placed her under house arrest. A search of the premises turned up eight intelligence reports concerning Union military plans. Several of the reports mentioned her high-placed sources by name, including Sen. Wilson.
House arrest did not stop Greenhow from continuing her work. As she later wrote, one of her most successful means came by way of an Irish woman and man. The latter, one of her guards, was, she wrote, “a burly Irishman, with a smooth tongue, professing the religion of my ancestors, that of the Holy Catholic faith.” When Greenhow realized that he was taken with one of her maids, “Lizzy Fitzgerald, a quick-witted Irish girl,” she took advantage of the situation. Lizzy agreed to lead the Irishman on and accepted his frequent invitations to stroll through the city. The lovestruck Irishman never suspected that Lizzy was using these walks to sneak information in and out of the Greenhow house.
The Lincoln administration decided the best course of action for dealing with a female spy was to exile her to the South. So Greenhow was released in the spring of 1862 and sent to Richmond. One year later she accepted an assignment and sailed for Europe to lobby the governments of France and England on behalf of the Confederacy. There she wrote a book about her experiences, “My Imprisonment and the First Year of Abolitionist Rule at Washington,” which became a bestseller. But on the return voyage in September of 1864, Greenhow’s vessel ran aground off the coast of North Carolina and she was drowned.

HIBERNIAN HISTORY WEEK
Aug. 19, 1920: Lord Mayor of Cork Terence MacSwiney begins his hunger strike to protest his arrest by the Royal Irish Constabulary. His death on Oct. 25 boosts popular support for the War of Independence being waged by the IRA.
Aug. 24, 1969: The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association begins a protest march from Coalisland to Dungannon in County Tyrone.

HIBERNIAN BIRTHDATES
Aug. 20, 1778: Bernardo O’Higgins, father of Chilean independence, is born in Chile.
Aug. 23, 1785: War of 1812 naval hero Oliver Hazard Perry is born in Kingston, R.I.
Aug. 23, 1912: Dancer and actor Gene (Eugene Curran) Kelly is born in Pittsburgh.