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.