Read an Excerpt
From the Introduction
The stories of women spies are filled with suspense and seduction, treachery and trickery, romance and bravery. Women took enormous risks and achieved remarkable results—often in ways men could not. A quiet Quaker schoolteacher reported information to a Union commander that led to an important victory. Two women provided intelligence that prevented Confederates from breaking the Northern blockade of Southern ports. A teenage girl rushed intelligence to a marching army. Those with social connections invited enemy officers to parties where loose lips let slip critical information. Others galloped on horseback through enemy lines with information concealed in their bodices. They used disguises. They created ciphers. They intercepted military dispatches. They carried secret messages, medicines, and supplies on the rings of steel wires that puffed out a hoop skirt. And they provided accurate information about the enemy's fortifications, plans, troop size, and movements.
But the most potent tools in their arsenals were physical charms, flirtations, and the powers of feminine persuasion.
A twenty-three-year-old lady cultivated a sweet and subdued voice and hired a phrenologist to help enhance her ability to win friends and influence powerful figures. Spies charmed cabinet-level secrets out of lovesick admirers and bewitched countless officers. Allan Pinkerton, head of the Union Intelligence Service, wrote of the "almost irresistible seductive powers" of Confederate spymaster Rose Greenhow, a widowed mother of four. Pinkerton said that her "forceful, compelling style and abiding attractiveness to men were the underpinnings of her success." They made her an extremely dangerous enemy of the Federal government.
Not all of the women and teenage girls who spied in the Civil War were sexy and gorgeous, but many of them were. And that gave them a huge advantage in fulfilling their clandestine missions. Of course, they also were clever, devious, daring, and passionately committed to a cause.
Another advantage female spies initially had over their male counterparts was that they were less likely to be searched. It was a time when men prided themselves on being chivalrous, but as the war went on, women were searched more completely, even strip-searched. Mary Chesnut, a prominent Southern diarist, wrote: "Women who come before the public are in a bad box now. False hair is taken off and searched for papers. Pistols are sought for. Bustles are suspect. All manner of things, they say, come over the border (across the lines) under the huge [hoop skirts] now worn. So they are ruthlessly torn off. Not legs but arms are looked for under hoops."
Unlike soldiers, spies are defined as criminals in military law. A captured soldier becomes a prisoner of war, but a captured spy usually faces death. Captured women usually were confined in decrepit, unsanitary prisons for several months, and then ordered never to return to enemy soil. At first, a gentleman could not bring himself to order a teenager or a prominent socialite to be shot or hanged, and so women escaped such punishment early in the war. Later on, at least two women were sentenced to hang. One was rescued at the last minute; the other's sentence was commuted.
Despite the danger, women spies stayed active. The fate of more than one battle was decided, not by the valor of the soldier, but by movements generals were able to make through information these spies furnished. Several commanding officers testified, in hearty terms of approbation, to the efficiency and fidelity of the women spies who aided them.
To their credit, they had broken out of the confines of "a woman's place" in nineteenth-century America to participate in a profession perilous in the extreme. As the grave marker of Union spy Elizabeth Van Lew states, female spies "risked everything that is dear to man—friends, fortune, comfort, health, life itself."
