{"product_id":"wild-rose-isbn-9780812970456","title":"Wild Rose","description":"For sheer bravado and style, no woman in the North or South rivaled the Civil War heroine Rose O’Neale Greenhow. Fearless spy for the Confederacy, glittering Washington hostess, legendary beauty and lover, Rose Greenhow risked everything for the cause she valued more than life itself. In this superb portrait, biographer Ann Blackman tells the surprising true story of a unique woman in history. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I am a Southern woman, born with revolutionary blood in my veins,” Rose once declared–and that fiery spirit would plunge her into the center of power and the thick of adventure. Born into a slave-holding family, Rose moved to Washington, D.C., as a young woman and soon established herself as one of the capital’s most charming and influential socialites, an intimate of John C. Calhoun, James Buchanan, and Dolley Madison. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe married well, bore eight children and buried five, and, at the height of the Gold Rush, accompanied her husband Robert Greenhow to San Francisco. Widowed after Robert died in a tragic accident, Rose became notorious in Washington for her daring–and numerous–love affairs.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut with the outbreak of the Civil War, everything changed. Overnight, Rose Greenhow, fashionable hostess, become Rose Greenhow, intrepid spy. As Blackman reveals, deadly accurate intelligence that Rose supplied to General Pierre G. T. Beauregard written in a fascinating code (the code duplicated in the background on the jacket of this book). Her message to Beauregard turned the tide in the first Battle of Bull Run, and was a brilliant piece of spycraft that eventually led to her arrest by Allan Pinkerton and imprisonment with her young daughter. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIndomitable, Rose regained her freedom and, as the war reached a crisis, journeyed to Europe to plead the Confederate cause at the royal courts of England and France. \u003cbr\u003eDrawing on newly discovered diaries and a rich trove of contemporary accounts, Blackman has fashioned a thrilling, intimate narrative that reads like a novel. Wild Rose is an unforgettable rendering of an astonishing woman, a book that will stand with the finest Civil War biographies.“Tales of Civil War spies are often full of embellished and romanticized derring-do. Not so with Ann Blackman’s thoroughly researched biography of Rose O’Neale Greenhow, whose remarkable life needs no embellishment. The story of Rebel Rose, told here with great skill and lucidity, illustrates yet again that truth is stranger than fiction.”\u003cbr\u003e–\u003cb\u003eJames McPherson\u003c\/b\u003e, author of \u003ci\u003eBattle Cry of Freedom\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“This is a fascinating tale of intrigue and suspense.\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eBlackman has discovered some truly remarkable, never-before-published papers that reveal how deeply involved Rose Greenhow was in the Confederate cause.”\u003cbr\u003e–\u003cb\u003eCokie Roberts\u003c\/b\u003e, National Public Radio commentator, author of Founding Mothers\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“The first comprehensive story of a remarkable woman whose passion for the Southern cause was equal to that of any soldier who fought for southern independence. Well worth reading.” \u003cbr\u003e–\u003cb\u003eJim Lighthizer\u003c\/b\u003e, President, Civil War Preservation Trust\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“For anyone wondering what role women played in shaping the course of history of the United States, Ann Blackman has an answer: Rose Greenhow. The story of Wild Rose has everything: power, intrigue, passion, and a clever, determined woman at the center. This is a great read.”\u003cbr\u003e–\u003cb\u003eJudy Woodruff\u003c\/b\u003e, CNN anchor, Judy Woodruff’s Inside Politics\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Sexy, audacious, determined–Rose O’Neale Greenhow finally gets her due as a power player in American history. Relive the Civil War through the exploits of this Southern patriot, who dazzled Washington and Europe long before women were supposed to behave so boldly.”\u003cbr\u003e–\u003cb\u003eLynn Sherr\u003c\/b\u003e, ABC News correspondent, 20\/20\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Ann Blackman has brought all the skills she honed as a Washington journalist to tell the story of a fascinating woman of the nineteenth century. Here is the Confederate spy–a courtier, a savvy Southerner, a rebel in her own right–shown with all her strengths and flaws.”\u003cbr\u003e–\u003cb\u003eEllen Goodman\u003c\/b\u003e, syndicated Boston Globe columnistAnn Blackman is the author of Seasons of Her Life: A Biography of Madeleine Korbel Albright and co-author of The Spy Next Door, about the traitorous FBI agent Robert Hanssen. In her long career as a news reporter with Time magazine and the Associated Press, Blackman covered American politics, social policy, and the powerful personalities that make up Washington society. She is married to Michael Putzel. They have two grown children and live in the nation’s capital.Chapter 1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRose’s Game\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe summer sun beat down on a wooden milk cart rumbling along a dirt  road that stretched up the Washington side of the Potomac River. A  long, lazy cloud of yellow dust trailed from the wheels and hung in the  heavy summer air. The driver, wearing a frayed gray frock, passed one  sprawling Union army encampment after another. To soldiers moving  supply wagons upriver to reinforce newly dug-in positions, the slender  figure seemed but a simple farm girl returning home from a morning of  selling sweet cream and buttermilk at the city market.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe was, in fact, not a country girl at all, but a beautiful, well-bred  sixteen-year-old named Bettie Duvall, on a secret mission to  Confederate territory. It was Tuesday, July 9, 1861, and the untested  troops of North and South were spoiling for their first real fight.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHeading out of the Federal City through Georgetown, Miss Duvall rode by  Camp Banks at Georgetown Heights, headquarters of the First  Massachusetts Infantry. Some of the soldiers had left that morning,  trudging up the road to Great Falls to relieve another unit that had  lost two men, shot by rebels from across the river. The two were among  the first casualties of war, and the city was in mourning. The Union  troops occupied themselves as best they could. “We have received some  new pants today, dark blue,” one wrote in his diary. “Are to have blue  jackets, I believe.”1 When he was hungry, the soldier sneaked out of  camp to look for apples, gooseberries, and currants. He also picked a  rose from the garden of a departed secessionist and sent it to his  parents. A few soldiers beat the heat by taking a dip in the river.  They had been told to be ready to march at a moment’s notice.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAll around camp, thin wisps of dark smoke curled up from cooking fires,  carrying the smell of burnt sugar to hungry soldiers. Boiled rice with  sugar sauce was being prepared for dinner. It was a simple meal, but  the men liked the sweet taste, and it was certainly a step up from  skillygalee, hard bread soaked in cold water and fried brown in pork  fat. “I must say that Uncle Sam don’t feed his soldiers as he ought,”  wrote a soldier who signed his letter “C.B.L.” “Hard crackers and salt  junk is not the thing for a man to fight on.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFarther up the road, the cart passed Camp Winfield Scott, headquarters  of the Second Michigan Infantry, “Richardson’s Brigade.” It was, in the  words of soldier Charles B. Haydon, “a beautiful location,” that rose  “almost to the dignity of mountains.” There had been some fighting  upriver two days before, and the infantrymen were eager for more  action. “I for one am ready to work \u0026amp; give if need be all I am worth  which is very little, til the last secessionist is dead or subdued,”  Haydon wrote.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe men’s provisions were poor, and theft was a problem. Disease was  worse. Measles had broken out, and the sick list lengthened daily. Many  were also suffering from severe diarrhea and bloody flux, or dysentery,  the result of their insufficient diet. When the surgeon expressed  bafflement about how to cure it, some men took to doctoring themselves  by drinking the juice of boiled blackberry root. They knew they had to  get better quickly, because they had been ordered to pack their  knapsacks and expected to move out that night.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA mile beyond the camp, the cart turned sharply left and rattled onto  the loose old boards of Chain Bridge. Union artillerymen at Battery  Martin Scott, a new, two-tiered stone-and-turf fortification  overlooking the bridge, could see the cart and driver from their  outpost with its commanding, panoramic view of the Potomac.  Twelve-pounder guns mounted at the end of the bridge could sweep the  span, and one hundred feet up the hill, three big forty-two-pounders  could rake not just the bridge, but the heights beyond. The Union  cannoneers used an old stone mill on the opposite side of the Potomac  to get their range. But the cart made its way peacefully across. No one  stopped the driver.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBettie Duvall continued up the road. She had left the city hours  earlier and had not even gone halfway to her uncertain destination.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDespite regular reports of Confederate soldiers lurking around their  camps, Union troops controlled both banks of the river, including the  northern edge of Virginia from Alexandria below the capital to  encampments all along Arlington Heights and up to Chain Bridge. Colonel  William Tecumseh Sherman had command of the three New York regiments  and the Second Wisconsin Infantry assigned to protect the far side of  the river.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe weather had been intensely hot, interrupted only by severe  afternoon thunderstorms. During those brief, violent downpours, water  rushed through the soldiers’ tents like a river, soaking knapsacks and  forcing them to sleep on raised boards. Confederate patrols fired  across the river at Union encampments at night, and the Union forces  returned fire, reporting some casualties. Everyone was on edge.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBettie Duvall drove her cart up a steep hill into the Virginia  countryside. The road was narrow and badly cut by wagon wheels, slowing  her progress. While most of the Union wagons and artillery were behind  her, the young Southerner had to look out for Yankee scouts and  pickets.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNot wanting to travel after nightfall, which would increase the danger,  she stopped at Sharon, a plantation on the Georgetown \u0026amp; Leesburg Road  just west of the village of Langley. It was owned by the family of her  friend Lieutenant Catesby R. Jones. Jones had resigned his post as an  officer in the United States Navy and left to join the Confederate navy  when Virginia seceded from the Union three months earlier, but the  family still lived in the ancestral home. The next morning, Miss Duvall  changed into a stylish riding habit, abandoned her humble cart,  borrowed a saddle horse, and cantered off in the direction of  Lewinsville and Tyson Cross roads, where travelers sometimes stopped in  a peach grove to rest.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe dirt road took her past deserted wooden houses and farms with  weathered ox fences and through undulating fields of ripening wheat and  Indian corn. She headed for the village of Fairfax Court House, some  twenty miles west of Washington and only ten miles north of Manassas  Junction, the Confederate headquarters of General Pierre Gustave  Toutant Beauregard. The Louisiana native, hero of Fort Sumter, had just  arrived at Manassas from Charleston to take command of the Confederate  Army of the Potomac.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNear Vienna, Miss Duvall came upon a Confederate outpost and was  ordered to halt. The Confederate soldiers, whose gray jackets had  already faded to butternut by the relentless sun and yellow dust, had  dug trenches in the road and felled thick trees to slow the Union  army’s expected advance. At last, she had reached friendly territory.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMiss Duvall told the pickets she had come to see Brigadier General  Milledge Luke Bonham, a South Carolina politician who days before had  been ordered to relinquish his command of the army to Beauregard, a  professional soldier. Bonham, who remained as the general’s top aide,  was at Fairfax Court House, about five miles to the south. The soldiers  escorted their charge to Bonham’s headquarters, where she tied her  horse to the bough of a tree. But when the general learned of his  visitor, he at first refused to see her, fearing she was yet another  lady spy dispatched by the Federals to assess the strength of the  Confederate army. Told that the young woman was prepared to take her  message to Beauregard herself and also, perhaps more important, that  she was “very pretty,” Bonham relented. “I was very much startled,” he  wrote, “at recognizing the face of a beautiful young lady, a brunette,  with sparkling black eyes, perfect features, glossy black hair.”  Bonham, who seven months before had been a congressman from South  Carolina, remembered seeing Bettie Duvall in the spectator gallery of  the House of Representatives, a frequent gathering spot for Southern  ladies.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen she told him the content of her message and he agreed to forward  it to his commander, Miss Duvall reached back, took a tuck comb from a  chignon of long, silky hair that had been wound gracefully around her  head, and shook loose her locks. Bonham watched spellbound as a tiny  bag fell out. It was not larger than a silver dollar and had been  carefully stitched out of a torn piece of glossy black silk, the kind  used in the finest of mourning clothes. The purse contained a slip of  white paper with a combination of numbers and letters written in bold  handwriting with black ink: 054 1 7 3. It was code for “Beauregard.”15  With it was a ten-word message, also in code, with information  Beauregard would find critical: “McDowell has certainly been ordered to  advance on the sixteenth. ROG.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBettie Duvall’s mission was complete. The Confederates now knew that  Brigadier General Irvin McDowell, commander of the Union forces around  Washington, would march out to attack them in less than one week.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe initials ROG belonged to Rose O’Neale Greenhow, a ravishing and  fearless Southerner and grande dame of Washington society. She operated  a Confederate spy ring in the nation’s capital, and Bettie Duvall was  one of her scouts. An engaging widow with three daughters, including an  eight-year-old who carried her mother’s name, Rose was the heart and  soul of the operation.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe had a passion for politics and many friends, both Democrats and  Republicans. She also had an almost reckless disregard for danger and a  fiercely independent streak. She could be manipulative and headstrong  at one moment, dripping warm Southern cha-arm the next, each syllable  melting slowly from her lips like delicate drops of dew.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNow in middle age, Rose was a handsome woman who carried herself with  an air of elegance. While lines creased the corners of her dark,  deep-set eyes and her waist had thickened slightly—she had given birth  to eight children, five of whom died young—Rose radiated sensuality. In  late evening, when she let down her luxuriant dark hair, it fell below  her waist.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRose also exuded a hint of vulnerability that men found irresistible.  And unlike most well-bred Southern women in an increasingly partisan  capital, she entertained Union and secessionist friends not only at her  table—but, it was whispered, on late night calls as well. Senator Henry  D. Wilson of Massachusetts, an abolitionist Republican, was a frequent  visitor. So was Senator Joe Lane of Oregon, a Democrat. Both  entertained thoughts of higher office.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRose captivated the hearts of even the most proper gentlemen, usually  to their regret and sometimes to their dismay. With flattery and the  finest of feminine wiles, she cajoled military secrets from Union  sympathizers, whose inflated egos blinded them to her clever ways and  loosened their tongues. Skilled at the art of gathering information  from normally tight-lipped officials, she entertained statesmen and  diplomats and charmed their lesser-ranked clerks and aides as well.  Some may have had unimpressive titles, but their access to paperwork,  including military maps, made them vital contacts.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut as with many players on the Washington stage, Rose’s graceful  manner and keen sense of style masked a nagging secret. Since the  accidental death seven years before of her husband, Robert Greenhow,  who had been a high-ranking official at the State Department, she had  no regular source of income and was later forced to rely on a  son-in-law for financial support. That’s never easy, especially for a  proud woman like Rose Greenhow, but over the years it forced her to be  resourceful. She had become a skilled seamstress and could make the  fine black silk dresses with a decorative thread of white lace down the  arm that she wore for years as a sign of mourning. She would have had  no trouble stitching the small black purse Bettie Duvall had concealed  in her hair.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRose Greenhow was a sophisticated lady of many talents, many passions.  When James Buchanan was inaugurated in March 1857, she became one of  the capital’s most prominent and influential women, a close friend and  confidante of the president, whom she had known for years. Although  Buchanan was a lifelong bachelor, there was no suggestion that he and  Rose ever had a romantic involvement, none whatsoever. In fact,  historians have long thought he was asexual.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYet Rose basked in the glow of her friendship with the president. It  offered her entrée to the highest levels of Washington society—to the  White House, the embassies, and the most exclusive salons, where  political gossip was traded over fine Madeira and old port. It also  gave Rose a measure of influence, which in Washington is the coin of  the realm.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere were other men in her life, powerful men of equally great  ambition. They pursued her; she pursued them. It was a game, Rose’s  game, and she didn’t give a damn what anyone thought.[quote] -- James M. McPherson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Battle Cry of Freedom","brand":"Random House Trade Paperbacks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302937022693,"sku":"NP9780812970456","price":25.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780812970456.jpg?v=1767744321","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/wild-rose-isbn-9780812970456","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}