Confederate spy Antonia Ford sat quietly in her parlor when Union soldiers searched her house in Fairfax Court House, Virginia. Even if he suspected a woman of carrying more than she should be, he was probably too embarrassed to say so. In an age that was so conscious of respecting a lady’s modesty, it was unlikely that a soldier on picket duty was going to do a thorough strip search. “…and many an officer, looking about everywhere for the missing weapons, little dreamed who it was that had taken them.” “I had been confiscating and concealing their swords and pistols on every possible occasion,” she wrote later. In Virginia, famed Confederate spy Belle Boyd brazenly snuck into Union camps at night, picked up lonely sabers and pistols, and hid them in the woods, where other girls would come along and tie the stolen goods onto their crinolines. This illustration from 1862 shows how a woman’s clothes became increasingly suspect as vessels for hiding and transporting secrets, but also how men strove to protect women’s modesty, making it easier for female spies to hide secrets in their clothes. A Kentucky girl made the papers for managing to smuggle 200 Colt revolvers under her skirts over the course of two weeks. One managed to get a bolt of cloth, several pairs of boots, sewing silk, and some packages of gilt braid across the lines in one outing. Their huge circumference and sturdy frames allowed for all manner of things to dangle unnoticed next to their underclothes, which meant a lady could smuggle all sorts of things over the picket lines – and did. The fashionable, bell-shaped hoop skirt was held aloft by a bell-like cage called a crinoline, whose steel bands were perfect for tying things onto: from quinine and ammunition to clothes and gun parts. While the clothes of the era are often viewed as constricting and limiting, they provided some of the lady spy’s prime hiding places of choice. Even their clothes seemed designed for smuggling secrets across enemy lines.
They wielded the era’s prejudice like weapons, using it to help win battles, save generals, and hide prisoners. Hundreds of women flirted, cajoled, and tricked men into giving up top-secret information. It was these perceptions about a lady’s place and capabilities that made them perfectly poised to become some of the war’s most successful spies. Nineteenth-century notions about women having chaste and guileless hearts meant that few men saw them as a threat during the Civil War.
Dangerous Embellishments: Women Spies in the Civil War Posted on: October 15th, 2018
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