Rose O’Neale Greenhow
Rose O’Neale Greenhow was a Confederate Spy. She had lived most of her years in Washington D.C. and was quite the social butterfly. Rose had 5 children with only 3 surviving and was married to Robert Greenhow who worked as an agent of the United States deliberating land claims in the west. He later died of an accident while on assignment in San Francisco California. While in Washington D.C. Rose would entertain influential congressman and senators with parties at her house. She was also very well known in the chambers of the Capitol during debates of political issues. Her heart was always with the Southern traditions and felt that the northern states were overstepping their boundaries to abolish slavery.
At the beginning of the Civil War she was instrumental in providing the leading General of the Confederate Army in Manassas with Union troop movements and numbers before they were to attack. She provided these secret messages in code. She was later discovered after being investigated and imprisoned by the renowned Allan Pinkerton. She was imprisoned for 11 months with her daughter Little Rose serving the first part of the sentence at her home which was converted to a jail for women of this demeanor and then sent to the Old Capitol Jail. She was exiled by trial to never return to the south and was sent to Richmond. She spent nearly a year there before she was asked by the Confederate President Jefferson Davis to try to win support of the Confederacy in France with important messages written by his hand. She took her daughter Lil Rose with her, and after nearly a year in France she was not successful in winning over the government of France and Britain to support her cause monetarily. She was returned to America to relay this information back to Jefferson Davis. While in Europe she did publish her memoirs that she had kept while imprisoned and made a decent sum from those sales which were to be used for the cause. Before her return to America she enrolled Lil Rose in a Catholic school and left her there for an education and would return to retrieve her daughter at a later time.
On her return trip from Europe, the vessel she was aboard had run aground on a shoal while trying to run the Federal Blockade at Fort Fisher. She ordered the Captain to lower a life boat and get her ashore so that she could relay these important messages to the powers to be. With hesitation it was done and she boarded the small craft with a few other men and shortly after it left the vessel the craft was hit by a wave and capsized. The satchel containing these messages and nearly $400 in gold was strapped securely around her neck, and when the boat capsized she drowned as a result. She had washed up on shore the following day and was quickly brought to Wilmington. She was relatively and unknown person to Wilmington having no relations to the citizens. She was known to a select few who have read of her accounts in Washington and soon became the talk of the town. Rose was given a full honors ceremony by the Confederate forces and buried in Oakdale Cemetery in 1864.