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.