If some of the dialogue and writing is over the top, just too good to be true, Abbott assures us that “nything that appears between quotations comes from a book, diary, letter archival note, transcript, or, in the case of Elizabeth Van Lew, from stories passed down from her descendants.” Fair enough: There is plenty of room in Civil War studies for Abbott’s kind of narrative method. Miss Belle, is this you?” you can practically hear the rustle of crinoline and clink of tea cups. Abbott, weaving together her four story lines across five parts chronicling each year of the war starting in 1861, does her best Margaret Mitchell - men say things like “Good God!. Rose Greenhow also hated the Union and used her spy ring in Washington DC, to feed intelligence to Confederate forces on the eve of the war’s first big battle at Bull Run.ĭry, academic history this is not. There is Belle Boyd, a coquettish Confederate courier and spy who relied on brazen charm and plain old fashioned guts to help Stonewall Jackson fight off the hated Yankees who invaded her home ground in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. In the lively “Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War,” best-selling author Karen Abbott showcases a quartet of such figures. Still others, several hundred on each side, disguised themselves as men and made it to the front lines. Their weapons were guile, charm, seduction, and the repertoire of being a lady.
One Lincoln official decried a plague of “fashionable women spies” working to subvert the Union. During the Civil War, women may have officially been relegated to the home front (and denied the vote), but this didn’t stop them from fighting the war on their own terms.
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