Unlike most of the women arrested in Missouri by Federal authorities during the Civil War, whose stories we know almost exclusively from Union sources, Elizabeth "Lizzie" Powell kept a diary during her confinement, and it survives. The journal clearly shows Lizzie's feisty personality and her tenacious devotion to the Southern cause.
Born and reared in northeast Missouri, Lizzie was about 24 years old when she first ran afoul of Union authorities in the fall of 1862. She and a friend, 29-year-old Maggie Creath, borrowed a carriage in Monroe County and drove to Hannibal in neighboring Marion County, where, "under the protection of the Petticoat Flag," they brought out a quantity of gun caps and other items important to the guerrillas. Both young women, being quite attractive and articulate, were accused of influencing young men to support the Confederacy.
Lizzie was arrested on September 29 at her sister's home in Monroe County and taken to a nearby Federal camp. The officer in charge of the arresting party offered to introduce Lizzie to some other Union officers, but Lizzie demurred, telling her diary she had no desire "to be introduced to those whose acquaintance [she] had not sought and did not expect to cultivate."
A Union order had recently been handed down requiring all able bodied young men to either enroll in Federal service or declare their disloyalty, and Lizzie was told she had been arrested for "discouraging enlistment." Taken at first to Macon, she was moved after one or two days to Palmyra and held under guard at a hotel. Later she was moved to the Palmyra home of Jacob Creath, her friend Maggie's father. There she and Maggie passed the time by talking, playing chess, and other diversions. Toward the end of the first week of October, Lizzie was officially charged with violating the laws of war, and it was recommended that she be banished from Missouri. Meanwhile, Lizzie continued to vent her anger in her diary against the "vile tyrants" infesting the state.
By early December, Lizzie's health was failing, and she was granted a leave to return on parole to her Hannibal home. In late December, Lizzie was on the verge of being banished from Missouri when, instead, she was suddenly released from her parole altogether. Within a matter of two weeks, however, she was again in trouble for discouraging enlistments and telling her friends to join the Rebel army. She was re-arrested on January 12, 1863, but she refused the order of banishment that was drawn up against her. Since there was not good place to keep female prisoners, Union authorities paroled her to her sister's home in Hannibal until they could figure out what to do with her. A couple of days later, she was confined under guard in a Hannibal hotel. After another month and a half of debating what to do with Lizzie, authorities finally released her unconditionally in late February.
In late April, Lizzie traveled to the West, where she met and married a young lawyer, and they later moved to Colorado. Lizzie died in 1877 after being thrown from a vehicle she was traveling in with the wife of the Colorado governor.
My latest book, Lady Rebels of Civil War Missouri, contains a much more detailed account of Lizzie's story.
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