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ISBN-13:

9781453274262

Publisher: Open Road Media
Publication date: 10/23/2012
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 392
File size: 4 MB

Dorris Alexander “Dee” Brown (1908–2002) was a celebrated author of both fiction and nonfiction, whose classic study Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is widely credited with exposing the systematic destruction of American Indian tribes to a world audience. Brown was born in Louisiana and grew up in Arkansas. He worked as a reporter and a printer before enrolling at Arkansas State Teachers College, where he met his future wife, Sally Stroud. He later earned two degrees in library science, and worked as a librarian while beginning his career as a writer. He went on to research and write more than thirty books, often centered on frontier history or overlooked moments of the Civil War. Brown continued writing until his death in 2002.
Dorris Alexander “Dee” Brown (1908–2002) was a celebrated author of both fiction and nonfiction, whose classic study Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is widely credited with exposing the systematic destruction of American Indian tribes to a world audience. Brown was born in Louisiana and grew up in Arkansas. He worked as a reporter and a printer before enrolling at Arkansas State Teachers College, where he met his future wife, Sally Stroud. He later earned two degrees in library science, and worked as a librarian while beginning his career as a writer. He went on to research and write more than thirty books, often centered on frontier history or overlooked moments of the Civil War. Brown continued writing until his death in 2002.

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Conspiracy of Knaves

A Novel

By Dee Brown

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

Copyright © 1986 Dee Brown
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4532-7426-2

CHAPTER 1

BELLE RUTLEDGE

Now that most of us have been pardoned and released from prison, the newspaper scribblers keep pestering me for personal stories about the Chicago Conspiracy. The Northwest Conspiracy, some call it, but I think of it as a conspiracy of knaves, three sets of deceivers, each attempting to flimflam the others. Some of the ones who were pardoned are now telling what they know, but none of them knows more than two sides of the triangle, so that what the newspapers are printing is never more than two-thirds of the truth.

Perhaps I am the only one who moved through the three sets of knaves and knows the whole truth. If the whole truth is to be told, I do not wish it to be done by the likes of any of these grubby newspaper ink slingers who knock on my door almost daily. I shall tell the story myself. After all, I was a participant in or witness to many of the plans and deeds. For those incidents where I was not present, details were supplied me by both Charles Heywood and John Truscott, who confided in me to their sorrow. If you've followed the newspaper accounts, you know their names well, and must think of Heywood as a ruthless plotter and Truscott as a victim. It was not that way at all. Lord! What did I not learn of Johnny Truscott during those miserable last days in Canada!

My birth name was Jennie Gray, of Louisville, Kentucky, but to those who attended theaters before and during the war, I am Belle Rutledge. The name was given me by Mr. Alexander Placides, who managed theaters in New Orleans and Charleston. When the Louisville minstrel show I danced with traveled to Charleston for a series of performances, Mr. Placides offered me an opportunity to take speaking parts in some of the skits and entr'actes. It was also he who had me cut my hair very short so that I could play roles of girls impersonating young men. Audiences were delighted when I appeared transformed near the end of the acts in a dress and wig with long golden curls. For these roles Mr. Placides costumed me in white trousers and jackets. You might have seen me in Black-Eyed Susan before Maggie Mitchell stole my part away from me, but that is another story.

After the minstrel company left Charleston, we played several weeks in Richmond, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. I liked Richmond especially, because the audiences were so responsive. That was in the old Marshall before it became the Richmond Theater. New York was the best place for ambitious actresses, however, and when our engagement concluded there, I did not return to Louisville with the others. I hoped to join Wallack's New York repertory company because they paid their regulars twenty-five dollars a week and supplied wardrobes. I longed for the independence this would give me, making it unnecessary to seek out "patrons" as I had been forced to do on the ten dollars I'd been receiving from the minstrel show.

Although I was unsuccessful in finding a place with Wallack's, one of the assistants there recommended me to a company that was hiring actors for a tour of the larger theaters around the country. I think it was my ability to play girls disguised as boys, and my short hair and white costume, that obtained for me the role of Rosalind in As You Like It. Everywhere we went audiences applauded my speeches with enthusiasm, and I was dreaming of becoming as famous as Maggie Mitchell or Charlotte Cushman or even Laura Keene, when war broke out and spoiled everything.

At the time we happened to be in Washington, playing at the old Washington Theater on C Street—not far from where Mr. John T. Ford was soon to build his famous theater. I was rehearsing every morning for Portia in The Merchant of Venice, but it was not to be. Fearful of the upheaval that was bound to affect theaters both north and south during the first weeks of the war, our manager canceled the tour and disbanded the company. For the next year or so I eked out a living by going back to comic skits in minstrels and varieties, the naughty sort of things that the hordes of Union soldiers crowded into Washington especially liked.

I've always regretted never having the chance to play Portia, but it was during this time that I found my grand patrons, two of them, and so became involved with the Copperheads and the Chicago Conspiracy. But I am getting ahead of myself. None of this might have happened if Captain John Truscott had not succeeded in robbing the Farmers Bank of Mount Sterling in Kentucky.

CHAPTER 2

BELLE RUTLEDGE

Before relating the details of the bank robbery at Mount Sterling, perhaps I should explain my presence at Richmond early in 1864. As I mentioned, it was while I was acting in those risqué music varieties in Washington during the first months after the war started that I found my two grand patrons. My patron in Washington was a Union officer who arranged for me to slip through the lines in northern Virginia. A military pass took me across the Potomac bridge, and a buggy drawn by a big lazy bay mule along back roads soon brought me into Confederate territory. I was thus spared the indignities of body searches and insolent questioning.

My patron in Richmond was Colonel Richard Fennell of the Confederate Army's intelligence service and, as I was soon to learn, a director of secret operations in the Northern states and Canada. He possessed no knowledge whatsoever of my patron in Washington, who had very cleverly contrived to place me in a position to spy for the Union while acting as a spy for the Confederacy.

I will state candidly here and now that my sympathies for the antagonists in this wretched conflict were terribly torn, I being a Kentuckian with friends on both sides. At that time I was a young woman alone in the world, with both eyes opened to the main chance.

Upon arriving in Richmond I went at once to a small shabby building on Broad Street, not far from the New Richmond Theater. The weather was unlovely, one of those dripping rainy days that cause my hair to curl outlandishly in dozens of directions, but I was wearing a wig and my appearance must not have been so frightful as to decide Colonel Fennell against the purpose he had in mind for me.

The floor of his office that day was drabbled with mud that had been tracked in from the street and was in varying states from watery to almost dry. Fennell was seated in a slant-backed chair, facing the entrance door, talking with a nondescript man in a wet overcoat. When he saw that I was a woman, he arose from the chair, brusquely dismissed his visitor, and motioned for me to be seated on a haircloth sofa against the wall. He was in his late forties, I judged, but no trace of gray showed in his rich brown hair or beard. For some reason he shaved above and below his thin-lipped mouth, perhaps to exhibit the firmness of his chin, perhaps to please ladies who objected to prickly mustaches when being kissed. He had a habit of half closing his heavy-lidded eyes when studying a visitor, and he was so regarding me.

As soon as the man in the wet coat was out the street door, the colonel asked: "What is the purpose of your visit, miss?"

"My name is Belle Rutledge," I replied.

He nodded and turned to an ancient and dilapidated table that leaned against the wall opposite from the sofa where I sat. Colonel Fennell had no desk, but the table was equipped with a number of large drawers, and its top was a jumble of papers, envelopes, and folders. From this disorganized mass he managed to extract a crumpled sheet and a carte de visite photograph which he glanced at for only a few moments. "You're the actress from Kentucky who can dress as a man and delude everyone as to your true sex," he said, his voice rising to a querying tone as if testing me.

"I am told that on a stage I can deceive anyone," I replied. "You see, sir, I have this gift of lowering my voice to that of a tenor." As I spoke, I demonstrated, and at the same time removed the wig I wore over my short hair, which was frizzling out of control in the damp weather.

His eyes opened wide for a moment. "Falsetto," he said then, and smiled like a benevolent father.

"I am not certain," I continued, "whether I could carry off the role of a man without the illusion created by footlights—that is, in the cold light of day."

"I think you might. Certainly by candlelight." He leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. "We had thought of arranging work for you in one of the theaters," he said. "Our interference in the matter would draw attention to you, however, and I think it best no one in Richmond be aware of your connection with Confederate States authority. Do you suppose you could find theatrical employment?"

As I had no knowledge of the Richmond stage at that time, I told him I was uncertain of the prospects. He insisted that I make a firm attempt. He thought it would not be wise for me to circulate through certain levels of Richmond society unless I had a manifest source of honest income.

It was Colonel Fennell's conviction that much of the information about Confederate military plans and strategy that was reaching the enemy in Washington was being gathered by female spies in Richmond, and he suspected that some of them were stage performers. "They may also be in the highest ranks of Richmond society," he added, "and certainly some are in houses of ill repute. Bordellos, if I may speak frankly. No man is more vulnerable, more likely to divulge confidences than one who is enjoying the glow of alcohol in the companionship of a courtesan."

As matters turned out, within a week I was employed as an entr'acte dancer in the New Richmond and was promised parts in a forthcoming minstrel show at the less respectable Metropolitan Hall. These small parts required little rehearsing, leaving me sufficient time for the main enterprise.

My spying assignment in Richmond was a multivaried one. Colonel Fennell expected me to move not only in the drawing rooms of the higher social circles, but also in the gambling halls and bordellos along Cary and Seventeenth streets, amidst the surging crowds at the railroad stations, and in the wards of various military hospitals. At times I was my honest self, Belle Rutledge, actress. At other times I was the wife of an absent Confederate officer, or I was disguised as a male that I modeled after a foppish character I had once played in a melodrama. He was Calvin Blacklock, recuperating from a wound or illness, frequenting the sitting rooms of the better hotels or placing bets in the gambling establishments, conversing briskly, and listening, always listening. Spies and deserters were my quarries. Although I found none of the former, I reported several of the latter. During that last full year of the war, deserters were attracted to Richmond, perhaps because of its constantly changing mass of harried human beings, its turbulence, and growing licentiousness. Several of these fugitives from the Confederate Army were from prominent families of the South, unused to any sort of labor or hardship, and after the glory of the first victories over Union armies, they had been unable to face the realities of battle or camp life, the filth and disease, disfigurement and death.

At other times, quite unknown to Colonel Fennell, I visited a confectionery store known as Pizzini's to all of Richmond. The owners I believe were loyal to the Confederacy, but a little silver-haired man who worked there as a clerk was an agent of the Union's Secret Service. Through him I received instructions from my patron in Washington, and I was supposed to supply him with any useful information I might obtain. Except for very general matters of the sort that often could be read in newspapers, I found little to relay until on one pressing occasion, and then, as we shall see, I was unable to reach the little confectionery clerk.

In my role as a woman of the stage, I was expected to attract suspected deserters and identify them for Colonel Fennell. Like many nontheatrical people, Colonel Fennell held the belief that actors and actresses are of easy virtue, especially actresses who performed in tights as I sometimes did. In his directions to me, he implied that I was to go to any lengths to gain the confidence of men I might suspect of being spies or deserters, even to taking them into my bed. Although during the following months I reported several dozen suspected deserters to Colonel Fennell, I never gave him any indication as to the methods I used to obtain grounds for my suspicions, nor do I see any need for such details to be revealed in this narrative.

One evening after I had finished performing my last entr'acte jig dance at the New Richmond, I went back to the dressing room and was surprised to find the little silver-haired clerk from Pizzini's waiting outside the door. He was carrying a tin box wrapped in scarlet ribbons. At about the same time several of the young vocalists who performed in the last act of the musical show came hurrying out of the dressing room, jostling my friend from the confectionery so that he looked positively unstrung.

He handed me the box and peered into the now empty dressing room. "A present for you, Miss Rutledge," he said. "May I come in?"

"Yes," I replied, certain there was some urgent reason for his presence.

He closed the door behind him. "There's nothing in the box," he said, dropping it on a chair. "I wanted to give the appearance of being a messenger." His voice was soft, barely audible. "The Washington people ordered me to risk coming here. They want a close watch put on all of Colonel Fennell's visitors immediately."

"You know I seldom see Colonel Fennell," I protested. "Only when he summons me to come there."

"They believe Fennell is preparing some sudden action in Chicago. The Copperhead conspiracy, you know. They want names of agents coming and going. Especially any who have been to Chicago."

"The Copperhead conspiracy," I repeated. "What is the Copperhead conspiracy?"

He looked surprised. For one so frail of body, he managed to keep a deliberate balance of energy in his voice: "The Washington people should have informed you. Copperheads are Confederate sympathizers in the North. With aid from Richmond and Canada they are conspiring to take the Northwestern states out of the Union."

I recalled overhearing some talk in the Richmond hotel sitting rooms of a movement in Illinois and Indiana and perhaps some other states to secede from the Union and end the war, but I had paid little attention, considering it to be mere wishful gossip. I said as much to my visitor and assured him that I would do my best to learn all that I could about Colonel Fennell's plans for the Copperheads.

"I'll await your reports," he said.

For the next several days, dressed in my Calvin Blacklock male costume, I hung about the opposite side of the street from Colonel Fennell's office, watching those who were coming and going, and sometimes following departing visitors to their places of abode, determined to learn if they had come to Richmond from the North. Also I invented excuses for visiting Colonel Fennell, hoping to overhear something about the Copperheads or perhaps meet an agent from Chicago or some other city beyond the lines. I learned virtually nothing of value, however, and was forced to prepare a spun-out report for my friend in the confectionery store.

Among the places that I frequented in the course of my duties were the railroad depots—the Virginia Central and the Danville. At almost any hour of the day or night we could hear the whistle and rumble of passenger cars bringing fresh troops from the southwest, or Yankee prisoners and Confederate wounded from the north. Among the arrivals was always a sprinkling of deserters, a few spies, no doubt, and human vultures who included double-dealing traitors and blackguard lawyers to prey upon the dying capital of the Confederacy. As railroad trains could no longer maintain any semblance of regular arrival and departure schedules, I simply made it my habit to visit the stations when I was free of other prospects.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Conspiracy of Knaves by Dee Brown. Copyright © 1986 Dee Brown. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

1 BELLE RUTLEDGE,
2 BELLE RUTLEDGE,
3 EXCERPTS FROM A RICHMOND SCRAPBOOK MAY-JUNE 1864,
4 CHEER, BOYS, CHEER, WE'LL MARCH AWAY TO BATTLE,
5 TO HORSE! TO HORSE! THE BUGLE CALLS,
6 BELLE RUTLEDGE,
7 TRAMP, TRAMP, TRAMP, THE BOYS ARE MARCHING,
8 BELLE RUTLEDGE,
9 EXCERPTS FROM A CINCINNATI SCRAPBOOK JUNE 1864,
10 IN THE PRISON CELL I SIT,
11 WE ARE A BAND OF BROTHERS,
12 BELLE RUTLEDGE,
13 EXCERPTS FROM A CHICAGO SCRAPBOOK JULY 1864,
14 BELLE RUTLEDGE,
15 LET THE WIDE WORLD WAG AS IT WILL,
16 CHEER UP, COMRADES, THEY WILL COME,
17 BELLE RUTLEDGE,
18 WE'LL RALLY 'ROUND THE FLAG, BOYS,
19 BELLE RUTLEDGE,
20 TRAITORS IN OUR MIDST WE'VE FOUND,
21 BELLE RUTLEDGE,
22 AVENGE THE PATRIOTIC GORE,
23 EXCERPTS FROM A CHICAGO SCRAPBOOK AUGUST-DECEMBER 1864,
24 BELLE RUTLEDGE,
A Biography of Dee Brown,

Conspiracy of Knaves: A Novel of Civil War Espionage

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Conspiracy of Knaves: A Novel of Civil War Espionage

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Conspiracy of Knaves

A Novel

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