Rose O'neale Greenhow
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Page 1 of 157 Table of Contents TABLE OF CONTENTS 2 INTRODUCTION 4 ROSE O’NEALE GREENHOW – A BRIEF HISTORY 8 BACKGROUND 10 CHAPTER I: THE ADVENTURE BEGINS - RUNNING THE BLOCKADE 16 CHAPTER II: THE VOYAGE 18 CHAPTER III: ROSE ARRIVES IN BERMUDA 20 CHAPTER IV: THE TOWN OF ST. GEORGE 21 CHAPTER V: A CORRESPONDENCE WITH HIS EXCELLENCY , THE GOVERNOR OF BERMUDA 24 CHAPTER VI: ROSE LEAVES BERMUDA ON THE HARRIET PINCKNEY 31 CHAPTER VII: ROSE ARRIVES IN LIVERPOOL , ENGLAND 33 CHAPTER IIX: ROSE ARRIVES IN LONDON 35 CHAPTER IX: ROSE ARRIVES IN FRANCE 38 CHAPTER X: ROSE VISITS NAPOLEON 43 CHAPTER XI: ROSE RETURNS TO LONDON 48 CHAPTER XII: ROSE DEBATES WITH LORD DERBY 51 ILLUSTRATIONS 55 Rose and Unknown Man ..........................................................................................................55 Little Rose ................................................................................................................................56 Rose seated...............................................................................................................................57 Rose’s Granddaughter, Mary Lee (Duvall) Marie ..................................................................58 Rose’s Son in Law, Seymour Tredwell Moore.........................................................................59 Squailes....................................................................................................................................60 Mother Carey’s Chicken’s .......................................................................................................60 CHAPTER XIII: ROSE RETURNS TO PARIS 61 CHAPTER XIV: ROSE RETURNS TO LONDON 64 CHAPTER XV: THE ENTRANCE OF GIUSEPPE GARIBALDI 65 CHAPTER XVI: SIGHTSEEING AND NETWORKING 67 CHAPTER XVII: BACK TO LONDON AND TO WORK 72 CHAPTER XVIII: ROSE MEETS THE GREENHOW FAMILY 75 CHAPTER XIX: ROSE GETS INVOLVED IN A CEASE FIRE NEGOTIATION 76 CHAPTER XX: THE TEMPEST 82 CHAPTER XXI: FLORENCE ARRIVES 84 CHAPTER XXII: THE ALABAMA & THE KEARSARGE 87 CHAPTER XXIII: ROSE RECEIVES COMMUNION 90 CHAPTER XXIV: ROSE ’S LAST DAYS 96 CHAPTER XXV: GOODBY TO EUROPE 104 EPILOG 105 KEY PLAYERS 106 Beauregard, General J. P. T..................................................................................................106 Page 2 of 157 Boteler, Alexander A..............................................................................................................107 Gwin, Senator William...........................................................................................................108 Granville, 2nd Lord ...............................................................................................................110 Mason, James Murray ...........................................................................................................111 Palmerston, Lord ...................................................................................................................112 Slidell, John............................................................................................................................114 Stowe, Harriet Beacher..........................................................................................................115 Walker, Georgiana Gholson ..................................................................................................116 KEY HISTORICAL EVENTS 119 The Trent Affair......................................................................................................................119 The Battle of The Kearsarge & Alabama ..............................................................................121 BIBLIOGRAPHY 123 ON – LINE RESOURCES 125 THANKS TO: 127 ILLUSTRATIONS 128 FOOTNOTES 129 OTHER LETTER WHILE ROSE WAS IN EUROPE 148 Rose sends a letter home........................................................................................................148 Rose sends a letter to Alexander Boteler ...............................................................................148 Rose receives a letter from home...........................................................................................150 Rose sends another letter to Alexander Boteler.....................................................................151 INDEX 153 Page 3 of 157 Introduction When Rose drowned in 1864 her diary was nearly lost forever. According to Cornelia Phillips Spencer, who published “The Last Ninety Days Of The War” in 1866,… “found among the effects of Mrs. Rosa Greenhow, which floated ashore from the wreck in which she perished. Among such of her books as were recovered, much damaged and stained with sea-water, was her narrative of her imprisonment in Washington, just published in London, and the MS. of her private journal kept during her visit to London and Paris.” We learned about the existence of Rose’s European Diary through Washington author Ann Blackman in her book, Wild Rose, Civil War Spy, A True Story, published by Random House in June 2005. According to what we read there, this is a brief history of the diary: “The diary ended up in the hands of David L. Swain, a North Carolina State Supreme Court Judge, Governor of North Carolina, and President of the University of North Carolina, who died in 1868, four years after Rose. Upon Mr. Swain’s death the diary sat among his voluminous collection of papers. One hundred and one years later, Dr. H. G. Jones, former state archivist and curator emeritus of the North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was going through Mr. Swain’s papers and cataloging them when he came across a diary. It was unsigned and untitled. But the woman's bold, black script made an impression on the archivist. "I read the first page and saw that it was a woman leaving Wilmington," Jones said. "It was 1863, and I thought it was odd that a woman would be leaving Wilmington in the middle of the Civil War." One night Jones awoke, certain he had seen the handwriting in a published work. He went to his bookcase, retrieved his copy of Ishbel Ross's "Rebel Rose" and turned to a photograph of a page from Greenhow's address book. He compared the two scripts and recorded the following entry in his journal on Nov. 17, 1965: "I found the diary of Rebel Spy Rose O'Neil Greenhow in the archives unidentified. Apparently never used." In the academic world of history, it was a good find -- one Jones planned to keep to himself for a while. "It was my secret because I wanted to publish it," Jones said. But to publish the Greenhow diary would take a lot of work. Not only would Jones have to go through the laborious process of transcribing the barely legible entries, he would need to do a lot of research for annotations that put into context her comings and goings through the palaces of Great Britain and France. Unknowingly, the last year of her life -- from the time she slipped past Union blockade runners at the height of the Civil War until her drowning at sea in 1864 off the Wilmington shore. At a manual typewriter, Jones deciphered the European journey of Greenhow and her daughter "Little Rose,” and then Jones decided to share his secret with one other person -- Haskell Monroe, a Civil War specialist who agreed to provide the annotations for a jointly Page 4 of 157 edited publication. In March 1972, 6 1/2 years after the discovery, Monroe wrote Jones, saying his work would be done by summer's end…” ……But the annotations never arrived and today, some 40 years later, the diary remains unpublished. Hoping to read the long lost diary of my ancestor, I decided that I should attempt to transcribe it myself. My cousin, Bev Crowe, in Gibson City, Illinois offered to help with the transcription, so in October of 2005, I drove to Raleigh, North Carolina and obtained photo copies of the diary pages from The North Carolina State Archives. I photographed each page of the 128 page diary at high resolution, using a Canon EOS Digital Rebel camera and a Canon Flat Field 2X macro lens. I mailed the Xerox copies and digital images to Bev and we began the long process of transcription. The first thing that we noticed was that Dr. Jones was correct when he said there was no handwriting he had ever seen like this. The diary was indeed quite difficult to read. We’ve transcribed letters of Rose’s in the past, including those housed at Duke University, but the handwriting in the diary seemed much more difficult to decipher than most of her writings; And upon reflection this makes perfect sense. The letters Rose sent to others needed to be intelligible, so she wrote them neatly. The diary, on the other hand, was meant for no eyes other than her own. The purpose of the diary was to log daily events while in Europe and act as a mnemonic device for her personal use at a later date. When I’m writing, I do the same thing. When I write a letter to someone, I use my very best “Sunday go to meeting” script. It’s time consuming, but pretty, and gets my point across. When I write articles and/or notes for myself, I hurriedly scrawl cryptic looking lines of text, which my wife says appear to be written in Greek, but serve my purposes. If one or two words in a sentence are legible upon my rereading the notes, the rest of the thought just seems to jump back into my mind and I can sit and type from my notes as if they were perfectly clear. While even I may not be able to read every letter or word in my notes, I am able to use my notes to recall the thought that prompted the scrawling on the paper. And I believe that’s what