In August 1864, Amanda determined to come back to St. Louis, because, according to her story, she’d heard that Cranwill was dead and she wanted to check on any inheritance she might be entitled to. She crossed into Federal territory without a Union pass, laid over in Memphis a while, and arrived in St. Louis in mid to late October.
During her five-week sojourn in St. Louis, Amanda stayed first in the Planter’s Hotel and later at a boarding house. She rented a piano and practiced playing it, and she took voice lessons from Madame Carlotta Pozzoni, a nationally known operatic performer, who was a St. Louis resident. She also found time to go shopping and purchased a number of articles, including a pistol.
Sometime in early November, Amanda hired a St. Louis carpenter to make a secret compartment in the bottom of her trunk. After doing the work, the shopkeeper reported the suspicious job to Union authorities, and they began keeping an eye on Amanda. On November 28, Amanda went to see Judge John Crumm and learned, according to her story, that she had no settlement forthcoming from her husband’s estate. About the same time as her visit to the judge, she attempted to obtain a pass to return south, but Colonel Joseph Darr, Jr. was “very busy and excited” when she called at the provost marshal general’s office. She also went to General William Rosecrans’s office but was unable to see him. Nevertheless, on November 30, she had her luggage sent to the steamboat Graham. When she boarded later the same day, US policeman Augustus Coring was there waiting for her.
Coring searched Amanda’s trunk and discovered the false bottom containing the pistol, some Confederate money, and other items of contraband. Considering the circumstances of her arrest, Union authorities obviously did not believe her story that she’d come to St. Louis only to check on property she might be entitled to from her husband, and she was immediately lodged in the Gratiot Street Female Prison on suspicion of smuggling.
In describing Amanda’s arrest the next day, the Daily Missouri Democrat called her “a fair and buxom widow of the South.”
Amanda was examined on November 30 and again on December 19. During the first interview, she told her examiner she had lost her husband, letting him assume that she was a widow but, when pressed, finally admitted that her husband had sued her for divorce and she’d gone to Judge Crumm to see whether the divorce was final. She’d heard her estranged husband was dead, but she didn’t know for sure. Amanda said she could not take an oath of allegiance to the United States because it would mean “forswearing the country of my birth.” During the second examination, Amanda explained that she’d bought the gun so that she would have it for personal protection when she got to the South and gave somewhat plausible explanations for the other suspicious circumstances of her stay in St. Louis and her arrest.
On December 19, Amanda’s estranged husband, who was very much alive, wrote to Judge Crumm from Canada offering to help Amanda in any way he could, despite the “disgrace” she’d brought on him, because he thought she might truly be innocent of the charges against her.
Amanda didn’t help her case, however, by her actions on January 14, 1865, when she knocked down a US flag that had been suspended from the window of her cell at the female prison.
The star witness against Amanda at her trial by military commission on December 23 was Augustus Coring, the policeman who’d searched her belongings aboard the steamboat. The defense argued that Amanda had not been uncooperative, as Coring suggested, and that she had tried repeatedly to get a pass and only decided to start south without one because she was running low on money. Little swayed by her arguments, the commission found her guilty and sentenced her to imprisonment for the duration of the war. In mid-January 1865, however, General Grenville Dodge disapproved the sentence and banished her to Dixie.
Once the war ended, Amanda Cranwill promptly resumed her artistic pursuits, performing in concert and teaching music throughout the South. In the late 1800s, she wrote a book of poetry entitled Scattered Leaves.
This is a condensed version of a chapter in my book Lady Rebels of Civil War Missouri.
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