***
At times I was nearly convinced that I was not cut out to be a spy. But in a sense, like a young private, I had to keep marching, following the ruts of wagons before me. Clearly, I was involved too deeply to leave and my destiny was woven into a bigger plan, still uncharted. Gathering useful information was the part of the job that I liked best. When I was assisting other informants by giving them safe harbor and food, I rarely considered the risks involved. But the times in between, when my work slowed down and I had just the mundane tasks of daily life to tend to, those were the days and often weeks when loneliness swept me up and wrung me out in its dry, bitter wind. War deprived me of close friends and personal comforts, fine foods and wines, good books and shows. Routine was my fast friend. The patterns of chopping wood and hauling water measured time and filled the gaps between housing and feeding other spies who crossed my doorstep.
Clearly, the only thing that kept me sane and somewhat steady was the depth of my convictions and the sheer will to believe there could be good days ahead without the human tragedy that was all around me. I knew in what I believed. First and foremost I believed in the abolishment of slavery. That’s why I was here and not living in relative comfort back in Massachusetts. Other reasons were given for the War’s cause, but my cause was to abolish slavery and in so doing, restore the Union.
Having grown up in the same community as William Lloyd Garrison I had located and reread his first editorials and columns on abolition. I’d also read every article on report I could find on the Women’s Convention of 1853 where Garrison spoke. Even while Lincoln insisted that resolving the War Between the States was about reunification and not the slave issue, I knew that slavery was an institution of denial and hypocrisy. Documents outlining our independence from the British Empire had been circulated to the continent modeling our new government, and served to underscore our infancy as only a semi-civilized, independent nation because of our dependence on the insidious institution of slavery.
Beliefs born out of the dignity of the Abolitionists and the Quakers gave me both motivation and comfort. I believed that my daily personal sacrifices and my work as a spy had an impact on the war effort.
Though the ugly war found me at a young age, I had strong convictions against slavery even then. I wished, by my work, to be an Abolitionist. I could not just stand by watching one race of people being forced to give their lives generation after generation over to humiliation, indignity and bondage. It was all I could do to maintain my composure when I saw slaves at work in a field or on the street and not scream at their overseers and rant at the injustices suffered each day by a populace beaten, starved and sold into submission. The Southern economy was based on counting slaves as property or capital. Trade in humans was a chief commodity and to me what was called “states’ rights” seemed merely a rationalization for cruelty and profit.
The North wasn’t clean of slavery either. Though not institutionalized, it was a subtle yet ugly presence in many wealthy households. The wealthy households of coastal New England enjoyed the profits of the triangle trade of rum production and sales so the northern states were by no means pure. Then there were the laborers working in city factories in dangerous jobs without protections, and many of them, just children. Not truly enslaved, they were free to leave their hideous jobs but were often too poor and depleted to do so. There was no purity in either North or South but clearly slavery, unaccepted by European nations on the continent had to go, and swiftly.
It was way past dark when I finally put my feet up to relax with a book. Settling back into a soft chair, I found my old bound friend hidden under the flattened cushion of the chair: Whittier’s Poetry. I had to read the book’s preface every time I picked it up. It was about John Greenleaf Whittier, the Abolitionist poet. He was a Quaker who expressed in his poetry a love for humanity and held strong sympathies for the war on slavery. Hence, my reason for hiding the book. Even the smallest details could give away my true identity sending me off to a humid southern prison rank with vermin and wormy hardtack. Or,worse. Though no female spy had been hanged, the assumption was that the punishment was not ruled out.
Reading my favorite poems, reminded me of the importance of my work to free the Union from slavery wherever it was found, north or south. I must admit,I loved Whittier’s poetry because it reminded me of everything I loved about New England. When reading his work I drifted off in my imagination to the waters of northern Massachusetts, where the Merrimack River meets the sea with its roughhewn coastlines and steeple-clad town squares. I read a few stanzas in soft whispers to the cat on the cushion next to me as she purred contentedly, but honestly, I wished that cat could have been my sister Sarah sitting there instead. Sarah and I never hesitated to tell each other everything – from our thoughts on politics to fashion. As children we often read to each other before falling asleep. We shared stories of the American Revolution and its heroes who outsmarted British sea captains, pretending to direct them into the port of Boston, but instead seizing the ships for the colonies. Sarah made up bedtime stories for me —stories that told of her working with the original Underground Railroad and hiding slaves as they escaped from their cruel masters. In fact, we were very much aware of the work of the Railroad all around us, and we kept our secrets to ourselves. Mother wondered how we could eat so much food and stay slender, when in actuality we were sneaking it to the neighbors who harbored runaway slaves. Theirs was just one house in a long line that connected the farms and safe houses from southern plantations, all the way north to Canada.
When the war came, Sarah and I did not need to be convinced that the Union was worth fighting for, but it was the social causes more than the political ones that drove us to enter the new spy network, a very risky undertaking.
Shortly after our brother Joe died, our father, Seth Cunningham, had withdrawn wholeheartedly into his business affairs. He was a hatter and with a prosperous business to be had in Boston, he moved his shop there. He liked to be “in the thick of it,” as he often said. The small town had gotten too close and there were too many reminders of Joseph, his youngest child, whom he had encouraged to stay home a few more years before he enlisted.
Sarah continued the work in association with what remained of the Underground Railroad. She preferred to stay north rather than move into the Confederacy as I had chosen to do. She had two reasons for this: her thick accent could give away her identity and become a source of curiosity for Southerners, and she had worked hard to establish means to pass information and guard the old safe houses of the Underground Railroad. The grand homes of sea captains that dotted the eastern seaboard, homes with multiple parlors, back stairways and attic rooms made hiding escaped slaves much easier. Many fine mansions lined the streets of port villages and towns up and down the coast of New England leading like a trail of breadcrumbs to safe harbor.
A dog barked in the distance, horse hooves clomped outside the window on the packed earth, and I drifted off from my book to dreamlike memories and back again, fighting sleep. When the clock over the mantle chimed two, I jumped up having heard a light rapping sound that came from the back door.
Pulling a blanket from my shoulders, I stuffed the book down into its cottony cavern and carried a lamp to the door. “Yes?”
“Radishes are coming up in gardens all around here,” came the cryptic voice behind the door.
“So they are, by the dozen,” I replied, not opening the door but standing just beside it.
Then I heard the instruction.
“Look for the peddler coming by in the early morning. He may need to trade with you.”
Then the voice left like an apparition dissolving into moonlight. With only the ticking of the clock to meter my breath, I knew that I had one last chance to write a note and send it before it was too late.
Would anyone believe me that McClellan could take Richmond in the spring of 1862? All our information confirmed it, now someone just had to convince the General himself.
CHAPTER SIX