Rose O'Neal Greenhow (1813-1 October 1864) was a Confederate spy during the American Civil War who notably warned P.G.T. Beauregard of the Union invasion of Virginia in 1861, leading to the Confederate victory at the First Battle of Bull Run.
Biography[]
Maria Rosetta O'Neal was born in Montgomery County, Maryland in 1813 to a Catholic slave-owning family. In 1830, she moved in with her aunt in Washington DC, and she later married a State Department employee, moving with him to Mexico City in 1850 and then to San Francisco, California. In 1852, she returned east with her children, and her husband died in an accident in 1854. Greenbow became a notable Washington socialite, and she advocated for secession to preserve the Southern way of life, having been influenced by her friend John C. Calhoun. Confederate general Thomas Jordan recruited her as a spy at the start of the American Civil War, and, on 9 and 16 July 1861, she passed on secret messages to the Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard, warning him of a Union invasion of Virginia, which was subsequently met and decisively defeated at the First Battle of Bull Run. Union detective Allan Pinkerton arrested her on 23 August 1861, she was released on 31 May 1862 on condition she stay within Confederate boundaries. She moved to Richmond, where she was hailed by Southerners as a heroine, and President Jefferson Davis enlisted her as a courier to Europe. From 1863 to 1864, she built support for the Confederacy among the aristocracies of Britain and France, and she had an audience with Napoleon III and with Queen Victoria. On 19 August 1864, she left Europe with dispatches, but her ship ran aground at the Cape Fear River near Wilmington, North Carolina while being pursued by a US Navy gunboat. She fled the grounded ship by rowboat, but a wave capsized the boat, and, weighed down by gold in her clothing, she drowned.