North Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times

Rose O’Neal Greenhow: “Bearer of Dispatches to the Confederate Government”

73 Rose O’Neal Greenhow “Bearer of Dispatches to the Confederate Government” Sheila R. Phipps    At daylight on October 1, 1864, a Confederate soldier overseeing salvaging operations found a woman’s lifeless body washed ashore near Wilmington, North Carolina. The body was that of Rose O’Neal Greenhow, Confederate spy, who had almost reached shore on her return from England when tragedy struck. The Wilmington Soldiers’ Aid Society took charge of the arrangements for her funeral, planning for her body to lie in state at a hospital chapel and for her burial with military honors, according her all the respect reserved for a soldier. Greenhow had not dressed as a man to serve in the army, nor had she ever lived in Wilmington, but the city received her body as it would a war hero for her service to the South during the war. During the American Civil War, Greenhow became the “Bearer of Dispatches,” as her Wilmington grave marker reads, sending information to Confederate generals and being imprisoned for her efforts. The women of Wilmington mourned her death but celebrated the life she had lived as an example for women who supported the southern cause. Southern women throughout the war had served as surrogates for the families of fallen soldiers, performing the last rites as illustrated in a popular painting by William E. Washington, The Burial of Latané. Captain William D. Latané of the Ninth Virginia Cavalry died near Richmond in 1862. His body was taken to the nearby plantation of William Spencer Brockenbrough, where Mrs. Brockenbrough and her friends prepared his body for interment and, with the help of slaves and a visiting minister, gave him a proper burial. Though this is the most famous incident of strangers standing in for a family’s deepest mourning rituals, the scene was replayed throughout the war-torn South. The effect, as Rose O’Neal Greenhow and her daughter Courtesy of the Library of Virginia. Rose O’Neal Greenhow 75 Caroline E. Janney argues, was that women who had never met became connected through letters describing the last moments of soldiers’ lives, assurances about their spiritual condition, and their burials. Women who fed, clothed, and nursed soldiers also buried them. At the end of the war, assuming responsibility for maintaining the memory of the South’s traditions and wartime heroism in “Lost Cause” organizations, the same women also formed memorial associations , funding monuments honoring the war dead. Such were the foundations upon which Wilmington’s women adopted Rose O’Neal Greenhow as one of their own, someone they deemed a fallen hero without family to see to her final needs. Rose O’Neal Greenhow was born in 1817 in Rockville, Maryland. Though her family was not wealthy, they were well connected, related to the Lees and Randolphs of Virginia and the Calverts of Maryland. They also owned slaves, one of whom murdered Rose’s father when she was very young. After her father’s death, she and her sister Ellen Elizabeth were sent to Washington, D.C., to live with an aunt who ran a prominent boardinghouse near the Capitol. From all accounts the girls’ aunt made sure they received a good education and were schooled in the social graces. Clearly, Rose’s aunt must have had difficulty at times reining in her niece’s spirit, since her nickname from childhood was Wild Rose. Described as having a “commanding personality,” “tempestuous ” eyes, and an “aptitude for intrigue,” her nickname remained appropriate throughout her life. She also grew into a beautiful woman, tall and agile with a graceful and dignified carriage. Most accounts describe her as having an olive complexion, with dark eyes and hair and “finely chiseled features.” In 1835 Rose’s sister Ellen married James Madison Cutts, nephew of Dolley Madison. Soon after, Rose married Robert Greenhow Jr., from Richmond, Virginia , seventeen years her senior. Robert had made a name for himself in both medicine and government. After graduating from the College of William and Mary and Columbia University, he spent seven years in Europe studying medicine . In 1825 he returned to the United States and began practicing medicine in New York City. At the same time Robert became involved in Thomas Jefferson’s project to establish a medical school at the new University of Virginia, gathering information from Europe on the materials needed for the school, finding models of organs, skeletons, and “a series of figures . . . representing...