Her secret messages changed the course of the Civil War. After she was arrested by the famed detective Allan Pinkerton, an enraged President Lincoln had her thrown in prison with her 8-year-old daughter. She defied her captors until, fed up, the Union banished her to the South, where President Jefferson Davis gave her a huge cash reward, then dispatched her on a desperate mission to Europe to try to save the Confederacy. Racing for home in the closing days of the war, her blockade runner ran aground within sight of the last open port in the South, and she drowned, weighed down by $2,000 in gold she was carrying home for her beloved rebels. The dramatic story of Rose O’Neale Greenhow is told in astonishing detail in a new book, Wild Rose, Civil War Spy, by Washington author Ann Blackman. Civil War historian James McPherson writes, “The story of Rebel Rose, told here with great skill and lucidity, illustrates yet again that truth is stranger than fiction.
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