Pretty Miss Jane Hancock

   Saying that the Civil War often pitted neighbor against neighbor has become a cliche, but the statement’s frequent use makes it no less true. It applies especially to Missouri, a border state that was occupied by the Union throughout most of the war but where Southern sympathies remained strong, particularly in the rural areas. Not only did people clash over divergent political opinions, but they sometimes used the war as an excuse to discharge personal grudges. That may have been what happened in the case of Miss Jane Hancock of Mississippi County.
   Twenty-two years old in 1864, Jane lived in Twapitty Township of Mississippi County, about mile a from the Mississippi River opposite Cairo, Illinois. One of her friends or acquaintances, Mary “Polly” Ann Bryant, lived in the same vicinity. However, on August 18, 1864, Polly Ann appeared at the Union post in Charleston, the seat of Mississippi County, to give a statement against Jane.
   Exactly what caused Polly Ann to turn against her friend is not clear, but she said had been at Jane’s home about a year earlier, during the month of August 1863, when Jane came home from Cairo. Mr. Hancock asked his daughter whether she had gotten caps and powder, and she replied that she had about a gross of caps and four pounds of powder. Jane’s clothes were muddy from riding horseback, and her father told her she should go change.
   Polly Ann accompanied Jane into the bedroom and saw her undress. Polly Ann saw a piece of calico fastened around Jane’s waist containing percussion caps and four calico sacks fastened to her hoops containing gunpowder. Polly Ann asked who they were for, and Jane replied that they were for her sweetheart, James Fugate, and another friend. She cautioned Polly Ann not to tell anyone or she would know who did. Miss Bryant kept her peace for a year, but now she’d decided to tell what she knew.
   Fugate was a suspected bushwhacker, who was on parole after a run-in with Union authorities. In late August, both he and Jane Hancock were arrested and questioned. Charged with smuggling, Jane was sent to St. Louis, and she was committed to Gratiot Street Prison on the evening of September 1. Griffin Frost, held prisoner at the same location, noted her arrival in his journal, saying, “She is rather good looking, and seems to be intelligent.” Frost heard the black man who cooked for the prison officers say about Jane, “When they get to be putting such pretty young ladies as she in prison, they must be nearly played out.”
   Jane was interrogated on September 2, the day after she was committed to the prison. Se denied smuggling supplies across the river from Cairo for the use of bushwhackers. In fact, she didn’t even know any guerrillas. She had known some young men before the war whom she’d heard had become bushwhackers, but she had not seen them since they left home. The only things she’d ever brought back from Cairo were items for her own family and friends like sugar, calico cloth, needles, and shoes. She admitted she had one brother in the Confederate army, but she said she herself was a Unionist and wanted to see the South whipped.
   After learning that Jane Hancock had been arrested and sent to St. Louis as a prisoner, over thirty citizens of Cairo signed a petition asking for leniency for the young woman. The men said they believed Jane to be a loyal citizen and that the charges against her were false, having been made “through malice, hatred, and ill-will.” They thought that Jane should be released and “returned to her friends.” The petition reached St. Louis on September 3 and was added to her file.
   It was almost a month later, however, before Union authorities took any action in her case. On September 28, judge advocate Lucien Eaton, noting that the charge against Jane was an old one and was “hardly sustainable” in view of her apparent good character, recommended her immediate release. The provost marshal general seconded the recommendation, and on October 1 General William Rosecrans ordered Jane released upon her taking an oath.
   Jane walked out of prison the same day and presumably returned home, but what happened to her after that has not been traced. Some of her relatives, however, still lived in Mississippi County years later.

 

Emily Weaver: Sentenced to Hang

   The story of Emily Weaver, the young woman who escaped from the St. Charles Street Female Prison with Missouri Wood (see last week’s post), is even more intriguing than Mrs. Wood’s. In the fall of 1862, twenty-two-year-old Wilson L. Tilley, a former Rebel soldier, came to Batesville (AR), where Emily lived, took up residence there, and made Emily’s acquaintance. He became a government contractor, and he and Emily were both on friendly terms with many Federal officers.
   In late May 1864, the Federals abandoned Batesville, and part of Confederate general Joseph Orville “Jo” Shelby’s command occupied the place. A couple days after the Confederates came, Emily, her fifteen-year-old cousin Charles, Tilley, and a friend of Tilley’s named Eleanor King left Batesville and traveled to St. Louis.
   Arriving in early June, Charles continued east to go to school, while Mrs. King went home to Rolla. Meanwhile, Emily and Tilley moved back and forth between various places, staying mainly at the home of Mary Jane Lingow, an acquaintance of Tilley, who lived in the St. Louis suburb of Carondelet.
   Emily and Tilley were arrested at the Lingow home in late June and charged with spying. Asked to account for her movements, Emily said she was traveling to Memphis but had come by way of St. Louis so that she could accompany her young cousin and to have the protection of traveling in a group. She had gone to Rolla with Mrs. King just to keep her company and because Tilley was temporarily in Illinois on business.
   Not much incriminating evidence was found at Mrs. Lingow’s, and the testimony taken in the first few days after Emily’s arrest did not yield a lot of solid evidence either. However, after Emily was lodged in the St. Charles Street Female Prison, a woman named Mary Ann Pitman was imprisoned there under an alias. Calling herself Molly Hayes, Pitman was actually a captured Confederate spy who had recently been cooperating with Federal authorities and had been placed in the prison as an undercover agent.
   When Ms. Pitman gave her testimony in mid to late-July, it was very damning. She claimed Emily had admitted to being a spy, said she’d been sent into Missouri by General Shelby, and that she would “hang higher than Haman” if Union authorities knew everything she’d done.
   Arraigned for trial by military commission on August 2, Emily was charged with being a spy and with violating the laws of war by coming within Federal lines and lurking about Missouri for the purpose of obtaining military information for the rebel enemies of the US. Specifically, she had spied on Union forces at Pilot Knob and St. Louis. Emily pleaded not guilty to both charges and to the specifications. The St. Louis Daily Missouri Democrat called Emily at the time “a deceiver of the gayest kind.”
   At Emily’s trial, Mary Pitman was the star prosecution witness, testifying largely to the same facts she’d related in her earlier statement. The defense attorney, on the other hand, blamed Emily’s arrest on “a stupid detective” and called Mary Pittman a “traitor of the worst type” whose testimony was unworthy of credit. If Emily, an admitted Southern sympathizer, actually said the things Pitman claimed, she only did so to try to impress someone she might have looked up to. Far from being a spy, Emily was just a naïve girl.
   On August 9, Emily was found guilty and sentenced “to be hanged by the neck until she is dead.” Brigadier General Thomas Ewing, Jr., commanding the District of St. Louis, approved the proceedings but with a recommendation to department commander General Williams Rosecrans that the verdict be mitigated. However, Rosecrans did not immediately act on the case, and, as opposing forces continued to spar over the question of Emily Weaver’s guilt, something happened that rendered Rosecrans’s looming decision almost irrelevant. Emily, following Missouri Wood’s lead, escaped from the St. Charles Street Prison on the morning of September 25.
   The verdict condemning Emily to death was finally promulgated in her absence in early November, but General Rosecrans immediately disapproved the proceedings. “The evidence of the guilt of the accused is not sufficiently conclusive,” he declared. “The prisoner will be released from prison under the direction of the Provost Marshal General.”
   Of course, Emily couldn’t be released, because she’d already released herself. Her father, who had come to St. Louis to try to help her and had been arrested, was released, however, on the condition that he report Emily’s whereabouts if and when he learned it.
   Note: The chapter in my book Lady Rebels of Civil War Missouri on Emily Weaver is by far the longest one. So, this is a greatly condensed version or summary of that chapter.

Missouri Wood Buys Her Way Out of Prison

   Union justice in Civil War Missouri wasn’t always blind. Beautiful or charming women sometimes received preferential treatment. So, too, did women from well-to-do families. Perhaps in no case was a woman’s wealth more influential in winning her freedom than that of Mrs. Missouri Wood, who simply bought her way out of prison.
   Thirty-seven-year-old Missouri first came to the attention of Union authorities in late February 1864 for helping her friend Mary Doyle, an accused Rebel spy, get out of St. Louis undetected. The previous summer, Mrs. Doyle had gone south at her own request with a group of banished St. Louis citizens. She’d returned to St. Louis without a pass in early February and stayed initially with a friend. Mary’s four sisters also lived in the city, but they did not share her political sentiments. However, after a few days, she went to stay with one of them, and somewhere along the line, Mary and Missouri, who had known each other since before the war, also re-united.
   Union authorities somehow learned of Mary Doyle’s presence in the city, but before they could locate and arrest her, she left St. Louis on February 17 aboard a steamboat headed back to the South. On Saturday, February 20, Union authorities questioned a number of people, including three of Mary’s sisters, from whom they learned that Missouri Wood had helped procure Mary’s passage through her acquaintance with the boat clerk. When Missouri was arrested later the same day, she denied even knowing Mary Doyle, her sisters, or anyone on the steamboat. She suggested she was a victim of mistaken identity, and she was released after questioning.
   Now that she was under suspicion from Federal authorities, though, she had to do something about the stash of money she had hidden at her house. It amounted to over $5,000, money her husband had given her for safekeeping a couple of weeks earlier before leaving for New Orleans. She decided to deposit the cash in a bank, but on Monday morning Missouri was re-arrested at her home as she was getting ready to start downtown with the money. She had it in her pocket as she was taken to the police office for additional questioning. She again denied any knowledge of Mary Doyle, but Mary’s sisters, brought to the office for re-examination, confirmed that Missouri was the same woman who had helped Mary leave St. Louis. Missouri was officially charged with harboring a spy, and she was taken under guard to an unspecified place of detention. During the trip, she mentioned to the officer escorting her that she had some money and asked whether she could take it with her. Without asking the amount, he replied that she could. Little did the officer know that she was carrying $5,300, a small fortune in 1864!
   Once inside the lockup, Missouri hid the money in the folds of her skirt, and a few weeks later, she was transferred to the St. Charles Street Female Military Prison. The file containing the evidence gathered against Missouri when she was first arrested was lost, delaying the proceedings against her, and she had still not come to trial by mid-September 1864.
   Tiring of life inside the St. Charles Street Female Prison, Missouri decided to leverage her wealth to try to gain her freedom. Around the first of September, she’d watched another young woman escape, and, based on conversations she’d overheard, she thought the prison keeper, William Dickson, was corrupt and might have been in on the escape. Although Dickson didn’t know Missouri had a slew of money on her person, he knew she was wealthy, and she let him know she was willing to pay him if he could help get her released. According to Missouri’s later story, Dickson told her he might be able to help but that it would cost her $4,000. She soon produced the $4,000, but a week or so later he told her he’d been unsuccessful in swaying the authorities. However, if she could come up with another $1,000, he might find a more direct way for her to get her freedom.
   On the evening of September 24, she handed over the additional $1,000, and he slipped her a key to an alley door. Missouri let herself and fellow inmate Emily Weaver out of the prison early the next morning, just after the overnight guards had gone off duty. Hastily making her way through the streets, Mrs. Wood immediately crossed the Mississippi River into Illinois and started north, reaching Windsor, Canada, four days later.
   In a letter written from Canada a couple of months after her escape, Missouri maintained that she had escaped because of the deplorable conditions in the prison and because she despaired of her case ever coming to trial, not because she was guilty of any wrongdoing. She claimed not even to know why she’d been arrested.
   Several women who’d previously sworn to Missouri Wood’s involvement in procuring passage south for Mary Doyle gave additional statements after Missouri’s escape reiterating her participation, but it hardly mattered since Missouri remained out of reach of Union military authority and did not return to Missouri until after the war. She and her husband later moved to Colorado, and she died there in 1894 but was brought back to St. Louis for burial.
   This post is condensed from a chapter in my book Lady Rebels of Civil War Missouri.

Martha Cassell: A Very Rank Rebel

   On the morning of February 6, 1864, a long list of names to whom unclaimed letters at the St. Louis Post Office were addressed was published in the Daily Missouri Democrat. One of the names was Martha Washington, an alias that twenty-three-year old Martha Cassell had adopted to communicate with Confederate prisoners and soldiers. After reading the notice in the newspaper, the black-eyed, black-haired Miss Cassell headed for the post office later that morning. Unbeknownst to her, she was walking into a trap.
   Martha was born in Marion County, Missouri, about 1840 to dentist John F. Cassell and his wife, Ann. Shortly after Martha’s birth, the family returned to Maryland, where Martha’s older siblings had been born, but they came back to Marion County in the late 1840s and took up residence near Palmyra, where Dr. Cassell had his dental practice.
   Martha, or Mattie as she was often called, went to St. Louis in late 1863 to live with an older sister, Mary Squire. During her stay in St. Louis, Martha began sending and receiving letters to and from several Confederate prisoners and soldiers, but it wa her correspondence with Lewis Rogers, alias F. M. Kaylor, that got her into serious trouble.
   A native of Boone County, Rogers had served in the Missouri State Guard early in the war, but he later took to the bush as a guerrilla. He stayed with his uncle in Marion County in 1863, at which time he likely became acquainted with Martha Cassell. He was captured in St. Louis in mid-September 1863, accused of being a notorious guerrilla and a “hard case,” and lodged in the Myrtle Street Prison. At the request of Rogers’ uncle, Martha began a correspondence with the young man. Rogers escaped sometime in November, roamed into northern Missouri, and then ventured into Clark County, Illinois, where he tried to incite “an insurrection among Copperheads.” (Copperhead was a pejorative term for a Northern citizen who nominally favored the Union but who opposed the war.) While Rogers was on the lam, he resumed writing to Martha Cassell. Their exchange of letters while he was in prison was through legal, military channels, but by corresponding with a Rebel fugitive, Martha was now breaking the law.
   What Martha didn’t know was that Union authorities had already been alerted that someone in St. Louis had apparently been corresponding with the fugitive Rogers under the name Martha Washington, and they were waiting her her on the morning of February 6 when she called at the post office. Although the content of the letter Miss Cassell picked up that day was relatively harmless, she was arrested, charged with corresponding with the rebel enemies of the United States, and committed the St. Charles Street Female Prison.
   Miss Cassell protested that she had picked the suspicious letter up for a friend, but Union officials did not believe her, especially after she was unable to identify Martha Washington, her supposed friend. After her arrest, other, more incriminating letters from Rogers came to light. In the most damning one, he told Martha about the uprising he'd help instigate and said he was proud of his exploits. He said he wanted to “see a Civil War and wild desolation sweep the North.”
   Martha remained in prison for several months, with her health deteriorating, before her case was finally tried by military commission in late June 1864. Described as “a very rank rebel” by one Federal officer, Martha was found guilty and sentenced to imprisonment in the Missouri State Penitentiary for the duration of the war. It was late August, however, before she, along with Pauline White (see last week’s post), were sent from St. Louis to Jefferson City.
   Influential allies, including Missouri Supreme Court justice John D. S. Dryden, soon got involved in Martha’s case, and President Lincoln pardoned her in late October, while her friend Pauline spent another eight months in the state prison. After the war, Martha went home to Marion County, where she married Washington West in 1868. She apparently died shortly afterwards (a demise hastened perhaps by the unhealthful conditions she experienced in prison), because there is no trace of her after the marriage and her husband was back home living with his parents in 1870
   This post is condensed from a chapter in my book Lady Rebels of Civil War Missouri.