Philsgenes.org

Little Miss Ginnie Moon helped the South's war morale by getting herself engaged to sixteen boys at one time. She justified the risk by means of simple logic: "If they'd died in battle, they'd have died happy, wouldn't they? And if they lived, I didn't give a damn."

Miss Ginnie's sister Lottie made romantic history in another way, because she could not make up her mind. A man, famous years later as a Union general, stood beside Lottie at the altar, and answered Firmly as the minister put the questions. But when asked if she took this man for her husband. Miss Lottie Moon paused to reconsider, and shook her head spunkily: "No-siree-bob!" And lifting her skirts, Lottie marched out of the church.

The jilted man eventually had his chance for revenge. As a commanding general, Ambrose Burnside had sworn that he would "make an example" of any secesh agent within his lines. .Yet when both Moon sisters were brought before him, charged with espionage, the general softened and let them go. As someone said, it paid a girl to jilt Ambrose Burnside.

The two Moons are, as far as I have been able to discover, the South's most authentic sister spy act. They were also distinguished as fervent agents of Dixie who happened to come from Ohio and spent most of their early days along the Western rivers.

Miss Ginnie and Miss Lottie were paradoxes, women of the new day born in the old. They traipsed around in wide skirts and flowered headgear; at the proper times they gazed soulfully at the boys. Yet they also devoted much of their lives to rebellion against custom; specifically, the male dominance in their era. Once, Miss Ginnie, became a chain smoker in the 1880s, and stunned her nephew (a Presbyterian minister) by sitting on his gallery and puffing away while his parishioners gaped. Both of them startled their contemporaries by talking about women's rights, attacking fashionable affectation, and calling their neighbors genteel frauds.

Miss Ginnie toted a gun during most of her life, a pretty pearl-handled revolver that she knew very well how to use. In her late seventies she caused a furor when the proprietor of her hotel discovered what everybody else knew, that Miss Ginnie kept the gun tucked away in the old-fashioned black umbrella that accompanied her everywhere. When the hotel manager protested. Miss Ginnie shrugged and told him, in the old-fashioned phrase, that he could kiss her foot, and she hunted up a new hotel.

They were, everybody said, perfect ladies, and at the same time hellers in their own special fashion. The Moon girls came of good family, but that never kept them from being themselves. All of their lives Miss Ginnie and Miss Lottie invited the world to kiss their feet, and they chuckled happily whenever they heard the whisper: "She was a spy, and people said ..."

The Moon girls shared an air of fragility, for both were small and dark, high-strung, and charming. Born Virginia, Ginnie was the beauty of the pair; long-faced, aristocratic, with big blue eyes, a high forehead, and a small nose. in a favorite family portrait, wearing a tall Spanish comb and dangling earrings, Ginnie looks like the heroine of a novel.

Fifteen years older than Ginnie, Lottie (born Charlotte) was generally described simply as an "interesting" girl. Her apple-round face was not improved by a coiffeur that drew her uncurled hair severely down on the back of her neck. Ophia D. Smith, their Ohio home-town authority on the Moons, said that Lottie had "an 'Ariel' face . . . illuminated by the glow of a scintillating mind." The husband she eventually chose called her, with marked enthusiasm, "the damnedest, smartest, woman in the world."

Despite that intelligence of hers, Lottie achieved twelve simultaneous engagements. Sister Ginnie's total of sixteen fiancees was the result of her margin of additional loveliness. (There was a third Moon girl, who was also a beauty. Mary stayed home, minded her own business, and, as a result, is entirely forgotten.)

Although Ohioans, Lottie and Ginnie came naturally by their interest in the South. Their father, Robert S. Moon, was a native Virginian, of a family dating back to Colonial days. He moved in the early 18305 to Oxford, near Cincinnati, in the southwest corner of Ohio. The Moons established early connections with the strongly Southern town of Memphis on the Mississippi. Anyone who called either of the girls a Yankee did well to step back immediately out of reach.

Robert Moon was a reader, a thinker, a man of gentle and tolerant ways, though some people thought his liberal opinions a bit strong. By contrast his wife was described as "a close lipped, unbending, orthodox Presbyterian." The two spies-to-be inherited their father's originality, their mother's determination. To the astonishment of neighbors, they read science, heavy biography, and eventually (though for a time in privacy, of course) even Darwin. Their interest was always in the underdog.

The Moon girls had the gift of kindness, the considerate word, the quick smile, the small favor for a friend or even an enemy. And they possessed a quality not essential in spying, but one that would inevitably help, an ability to laugh at the Yankees and at themselves as well.

Born in 1829, Lottie soon demonstrated what a contemporary considered her "great power and originality of character." in her teens she shot a pistol at targets, "took dares" to ride bareback through the streets, and spoke her mind about anything that occurred to her. Like other spies-in-the-making, she be-came a fair actress. For amateur theatricals or for the simple amusement of friends, Lottie played many parts, and did clever imitations. She also learned a peculiar trick which would stand her in good stead. In Ophia Smith's words, she could "throw her jaw out of place with a cracking sound," assuming an expression of extreme agony.

Lottie did not seem to crack her jaw when the boys were around, and she gave special attention to Ambrose Burnside of Indiana, a big, heavy, kindly youth. Ginnie remembered that when she was four or five years old, Ambrose was "in love with a sister of mine; and when he came to see her I had sat on his lap. He always brought me candy, and I called him Buttons."

According to several accounts, "Buttons" Burnside proposed to the volatile older sister, and asked her to name the good day. Lottie made an answer that Ambrose might well have pondered at length: "Any days a good day." At literally the last moment, Lottie changed her mind and flounced off at the church, as we have already seen.

This might have seemed calculated to end the man's tolerance for anything that reminded him of the Moons. It did not. The family said that Ambrose Burnside returned to woo Lottie again! He accepted defeat only when that tight-lipped mother sent back his latest letter with a laconic notation on the envelope: "Lottie was married to James Clark last week."

For young attorney, later Judge, Jim Clark, the courtship had been almost as difficult as Burnside's. Another man considered Lottie definitely pledged to him. Some Ohioans insisted that Lottie told the second fellow she would marry him on the day she had set for Jim Clark, "if you get there first"! In any case, that gentleman also showed up at the wedding. Jim Clark made up his mind there would be no jilting this time. Just before the couple went into the parlor, the youthful groom shoved a revolver against Lottie's satiny side and declared: "There'll be a wedding today, or a funeral tomorrow." There was a wedding. . . .

Lottie was twenty, her bridegroom twenty-five. The bride did not grow perceptibly quieter, and Jim Clark demonstrated as much energy in getting ahead in his career as he had in trapping his bride. He won two judgeships, then retired to private practice. During a domestic interlude Lottie Moon Clark won prizes for flower growing, surely a claim which could be made by few spies, American or otherwise!

Before long, however, the Clarks and the Moons had far more than prize dahlias to occupy them. When the war came, the two Moon boys went into the Confederate Army. After Father Moon's death, Mrs. Moon had moved down to Memphis, Tennessee, but had sent the peppery young Ginnie to the Oxford Female College. With the start of war, the teachers revealed their "Northern faith," as one of Ginnie's friends put it, and the girl felt a sense of outrage. Stepping into the principal's office, she announced she wanted to go to Memphis. The principal shuddered. Ginnie was only seventeen. How could she think of such a trip?

Ginnie won her freedom, however. She took out her little pistol and calmly shot every star, one by one, out of the American flag that flew over the school grounds! Packed off to her sister and brother-in-law in their nearby Ohio home, she waited her chance to return to Tennessee.

In the Clark residence Ginnie learned a great deal more about pro-Southern activities. This section of Ohio had a small but fervent branch of the Knights of the Golden Circle, one of the wartime undercover organizations with Confederate tics. Judge Clark himself was described, in a mixed phrase, as "the brains of the butternuts" in that area, butternuts being the common word for Dixie partisans.

One day in 1862 the Clarks received an excited caller. Walker Taylor of the Zachary Taylor clan, from over the line in Kentucky. Taylor was traveling under a false name and telling questioners he was there to "buy mules to restock his farm." Instead, he whispered to Lottie, he carried messages from Confederate General Sterling Price which must be taken at once to General Edmund Kirby-Smith in Kentucky. He couldn't do it; too many people knew him by now. . .. "Could anybody carry them?" Lottie asked. "Oh, yes."

"Then I will." Within a few hours Lottie put her acting skill to a test. From her house there went "a woman, very much bent, an old bonnet tied over her cars and partly concealing her face, toothless and muffled to the cars in a dilapidated shawl." That afternoon the bent figure crossed the Ohio by ferry, and found a transport ready to leave for Lexington—in the precise direction she had to go.

There Lottie turned Irish. "Her husband, poor dear ould man, was . . . dying, in the hospital." Shure, it was little enough to let a poor woman see her darlin' once more. . . . When the officials refused permission, Lottie did not give up. She spied several "fellow Irishmen" and went into her act again, with tears and gestures. To hell with officialdom, said the sentimental boys, and why shouldn't the likes of this good woman be allowed to join her man? They smuggled her aboard.

At Lexington the pathetic creature said good-by with thanks, and walked toward the outskirts of town. What she would do next depended on luck. Hearing hoof beats, Lottie swung around to face Colonel Thomas Scott, a Southerner whom she had once met. Without bothering to see if anybody were watching, the "old woman" straightened up, hailed him, and thrust the papers into his hand: "Colonel Scott, promise on your life you'll give these to Colonel Kirby-Smith, and nobody else."

Scott stared. Who was this creature? Lottie repeated that the important thing was to get the documents to the colonel. Then she walked back to Lexington, and when the train for a point near home left that night, the tiny Irish woman sat mournfully in one of the coaches. Listening, she learned that a warning had just been issued to watch for a "female spy" on the train. A few minutes later Lottie was crying sadly again. In the scat in front of her sat General Leslie Coombs, a former Kentucky governor and a strong Union man. The general turned and Lottie poured out her story of a stricken husband and—a new detail, the hungry children waiting for her.

She was afraid, she sniffled, that with all these war suspicions, somebody would take her for one of those dangerous spies they talked about. . . . General Coombs sympathetically assured her he would look out for her. When the train reached Covington, Kentucky, Coombs himself helped Lottie down. and she rode across the river to safety. Without transportation from that point, she walked home through woods and across fields. Arriving in time for breakfast, she told her story to the delighted butternuts, and young Ginnie, the apprentice spy, listened with even more interest than the others.

One success invited another, and Lottie carried many important messages for the South. Her next major assignment came about because she knew Dr. Stuart Robinson, editor of a Louisville Presbyterian paper. Writing vigorously against the Union, the minister had to escape to Canada, and there he helped in the complex Southern effort to stir uprisings from over the border.

The Canadian Confederates had use for somebody like Lottie Clark. She made the long trip to Toronto, conferred at length with her friends, and devised a plan. Like Pryce Lewis, she would go out as an English subject on her way to Virginia's marvels, in this case to repair her tragically depleted health at the curative springs. The Confederates forged papers, Lottie talked her way through minor difficulties, and arrived eventually at Washington, D.C.

There, under a new name, she asked for a pass into Virginia. She had crossed the ocean, she asserted, in search of some benefit to lier health. Come what may, she could not die content until she had tested the Virginia waters. Please, couldn't the authorities help her? Lottie drooped, sighed, put her lace hankerchief to her pale lips. Though obviously no beauty, the tiny lady had a winning manner, persistence, and an accent which, however stagy, must have convinced her auditors.

Lottie had taken care, too, to concoct a story that held together well. Eventually she was questioned by Secretary Stanton, noted for his suspicions. He asked questions about Canada and the Confederates, and the lady told, or seemed to tell, a great deal. Why, yes, she had met a Dr. Robinson in Canada and she knew one or two others whom Stanton named. She volunteered something about each-not enough to hurt, yet enough to impress the Northerners. By one account, Lottie even went along with President Lincoln's party for a review of the Army of the Potomac at Fredericksburg.

Getting her pass for Virginia, the spy rode quietly off. When Stanton finally got wind of the ruse, it was too late. The little agent dispatched long messages to her Southern employers, and she collected more data on her roundabout way toward Cincinnati and her home base. When she reached the Shenandoah Valley, she had her first serious difficulty. Near Winchester, Federal General F. J. Milroy listened politely as Lottie rattled off a few variations on her story. Lacking information about the location and true nature of American resorts, the confused Britisher said she had gone to the wrong place. Now she realized that she wanted to visit not Hot Springs, Virginia, but Hot Springs, Arkansas. Wouldn't the general give her a pass through the lines?

This time, perhaps Lottie had ad-libbed too glibly. General Milroy answered cunningly that since a question of illness was involved, his surgeon would have to decide. The general summoned a pouter pigeon of a doctor, a man clearly anxious to show his abilities. The English lady became more ill than ever. At the army hospital to which he took her she groaned that she could not leave her carriage. "It would be my death to go up the broad steps." The surgeon snapped his fingers, and two helpers lifted the spy in a chair.

Now, Madame, what was her ailment? Rheumatism, sir, she said; it had also affected her heart. With those words Lottie did the best acting of her life, crying at the doctor's touch, going white with the agony of her arthritis. According to Ophia Smith's account, the spy also called on her old knack of dislocating her jaw. The lady's heart fluttered, her joints seemed to creak, and the pompous doctor nodded. Truly a sad case....

Carried downstairs, the patient received a pass to Cincinnati, and started out for that city, not realizing that she would soon be caught in another spy drama involving her sister Ginnie and also her onetime admirer Burnside.

Ginnie Moon had returned to Memphis and for months had been at work in and about the city. The cotton capital remained in Confederate hands until June of 1862, in spite of increasing Union pressure upon it. Ginnie had helped her mother roll bandages and nurse wounded soldiers. Like Belle Boyd, however, young Miss Moon yearned for more lively doings. The Yankees took the forts upriver, and on a warm summer morning, while several thousand Memphians watched from the bluff, the Federal fleet steamed down to the city itself.

The battle lines shifted still again, and Nathan Bedford Forrest's troops began to make daring raids, striking lightning blows at the Northerners. Unverified stories are told of the way the handsome Ginnie rode out from Memphis with information and supplies needed by the Confederates, and of the way, when once arrested, she coquetted herself free. Again, she supposedly made a twilight tryst, snagged the military facts she wanted from her beau, and hurried away to deliver them.

"She needed no pass to get through the Union lines," said the Memphis Cammercial Appeal. "Her eyes and her way won her permission."

About February of 1863 Ginnic was visiting in Jackson, capital of Mississippi. The Confederate, Sterling Price, had new and vital intelligence for Ohio's Knights of the Golden Circle. It dealt with negotiations for an alliance between Southerners and Western sympathizers, which might bring uprisings against the Union. Hearing of the matter, Ginnie went to the general and asked why she and her mother could not take the message through. With relatives in Ohio, they had an excuse for a trip. "I won't be caught. Let me go," she begged.

Ginnie had never been a girl who could easily be denied, and the general agreed. With an escort of eight soldiers, she went part of the way by government ambulance. At Memphis she picked up her mother, and they made an ostensibly casual journey to her brother-in-law's house near Oxford, Ohio.

Sister Lottie was still away in Canada on her own Confederate duties. Judge Clark took the safely delivered Southern message, conferred with his friends, and prepared an answer- terms under which the Ohio Knights might afliliate strongly with the Southerners. One of the signatures, Ginnie says in the memoir she wrote years later, was that of the Copperhead leader, Vallandigham, that enigmatic figure who might have changed America's destiny.

When Miss Moon and her mother appeared to head back South, they realized the return trip might not be altogether easy. In nearby Cincinnati, Ambrose Burnside, newly appointed head of the Union Department of the Ohio, was making history in his own way, strenuously prosecuting civilian friends of the Confederacy. The burly general was soon to issue an order that created bitterness for years to come. It provided treason trials for all who showed Southern leanings, the death penalty for anyone who helped the Confederacy. Clearly the Moons' old friend was in a harsh mood.

Various Union agents already had their attention trained on Judge Clark and his family. To check on them, the Union now assigned a counterspy, a plausible young Ohioan "whose charm of manner and personal popularity made his entree into any house an easy matter."

The envoy "made himself so agreeable" that the Clarks invited him to spend several days as their guest. The judge expressed his regret that his wife Lottie was absent; she had had to go to Virginia to see relatives, he claimed. The young gallant melted some of the reserve of the untalkative Mrs. Moon and had a brief flirtation with Ginnie, who added him to her string of conquests.

The Union representative found nothing incriminating, for although dark and his in-laws were true to the South, they were very careful in what they said. Still, the young man noted one interesting thing: the ladies "did nothing but quilt," working from dawn to dusk. Judging by the piles of stuff, they must have been doing it even while they slept. When Ginnie and Mrs. Moon declared themselves ready to return to Memphis by boat from Cincinnati, they asked their new friend to help them get passes.

He did. Union officials sent them papers, but at the same time sent a confidential message to the boat captain that the vessel was not to depart without special orders. Judge Clark smilingly accompanied his mother-in-law and Miss Ginnie to the Alice Dean, installed them aboard, and left. Tucked in her bosom Ginnie had the secret dispatch of the Knights of the Golden Circle, rapped in "oil silk." As we shall see, that wasn't all she was smuggling into the Confederacy. Sweating attendants were muttering over her heavy trunks and bags.

The time for the 5 P.M. departure arrived and passed. Mrs Moon remained in their stateroom, watching over the trunks Ginnie was sitting in the cabin when, as she recalled in after years, "I saw a Yankee officer coming through the cabin, looking at the numbers on the doors." He asked the girl to go to her stateroom with him, and when she complied he entered behind her and she heard the lock snap.

He was Captain Harrison Rose of the Cincinnati customhouse, the officer told her, and he had orders to search Miss Moon and bring her to the provost marshal. With a business like gesture he showed a note: "Arrest Miss Virginia Moon. She is an active and dangerous rebel in the employ of the Confederate government. Has contraband goods and rebel mail and is the bearer of dispatches."

Scornfully Ginnie gave back the document. "That's a very ridiculous charge." Captain Rose moved nearer. "Anyway, I'm ordered to do what they tell me." Little Ginnie looked up: "You, a man, ordered to search me? I'll never endure it!"

The captain expected scant trouble on that score. "How can you help it?" Clearly the man had never heard of Ginnie's prowess. He was standing inside the door across the washstand from her, with Mrs. Moon between them. As Ginnie explains: "There was a slit in my skirt and in my petticoat I had a Colt revolver. I put my hand in and took it out, backed to the door and leveled it at him across the washstand. If you make a move to touch me, I'll kill you, so help me God!'"

Captain Rose hesitated, and Ginnie lashed out at him again: "Does General Burnside know of this? I don't think he does. he has been a friend of mine since I was five. . . . You had better be careful what you do or I will report you to him." As she spoke, she informs us, she was thinking hard. She could shoot the fellow and, since the door was locked, get rid of the dangerous dispatch before anyone else broke in.

Fortunately her threats worked. Captain Rose told her she would be searched in the office. Taking tlie luggage and keys, he went out to summon an orderly. That was his mistake, for Ginnie swiftly locked the door, pulled the paper from her bosom, "dipped it in the water pitcher and in three lumps swallowed it." When he returned Captain Rose found the door unlocked and Ginnie with her hat on. The two women and their escort had trouble in pushing through the heavy crowd on the street, and the annoyed Union officer mumbled to Ginnie: "I suppose you feel like hurrahing for Jeff Davis."

As a matter of fact, Ginnie confides in her memoir, she was so pleased over destroying the dispatch that she did exactly that. "I raised my hand over my head and said in a loud voice, 'Hurrah for Jeff Davis!'" In the provost marshal's office the Union officers, opening a trunk, uncovered a supply of bluechecked gingham. She wanted it for cliildren's aprons, Ginnie told them, though she confesses to us that she "meant it for soldiers' shirts." The men drew out about fifty letters to Southerners, and then- a ball of opium. Captain Andrew Kemper, officer in charge, asked in astonishment; "What are you doing with that?"

"My mother can eat that much in a month," Ginnie retorted. "She requires it." As Captain Kemper "covered his mouth with his hand to hide a smile," Mrs. Moon sat up straight in her chair, even more firm-lipped than usual. Ginnie observed that "she might have been under the influence of it then." A moment later Kemper picked up a heavy quilt, felt it, ripped it open, and found that it was filled with opium, quinine, and morphine, drugs that were sorely needed in the South.

As to what happened next, accounts differ; but apparently a Federal officer started to close the door and Ginnie's hoop skirts got in the way. "He put his hand down to put them aside and found that the dress and petticoats alike were quilted." He called for a housekeeper, who searched the spy, confiscated her costume, and gave her a substitute. According to the next day's paper, Ginnie had been wearing "forty bottles of morphine, seven pounds of opium and a quantity of camphor," some of it "in a huge bustle, or sack, fastened to her person"!

Regretfully Captain Kemper announced he would have to keep the two Confederates as prisoners. Ginnie pertly suggested one or two nearby Federal prisons. Ah, but they were not suitable for ladies, the Yankee told her; perhaps a hotel would be best. Kemper named a fashionable one along the river. Ginnie inquired if General Burnside was due back soon, and where he stayed. Learning that Burnside lodged at the Burnet House, she announced she and her mother would go there or nowhere.

Paroles were handed to them, and the stern Mrs. Moon said she would put her name to nothing at all. Ginnie signed for them both. At the hotel, Captain Rose shivalrously asked her down to dinner. Ginnie answered: "You're my jailer. I have to put up with you." Nevertheless, the meal went pleasantly enough, and Ginnie's charm and humor made Captain Rose still more friendly. With an arch look he held up a telegram. He thought she'd like to know its contents, but he couldn't let her see it. Feeling sure he "would not dare to scuffle with me before all those people," Ginnie snatched it, and learned that General Rosecrans in Nashville was demanding that Miss Moon be forwarded to him. Ginnie lost no time in dispatching her card to Burnside's office. In the morning the general sent word he would receive her. She recognized old Buttons at once, despite the passage of thirteen or more years, "by his uniform, side whiskers and size." Holding out both hands, Burnside cried: "My child, what have you done this for?" "Done what?"

The general was sad. "Tried to go South without coming to me for a pass. They wouldn't have dared stop you."

Ginnie gave her friend Buttons a straight look. "General, I have a little honor. I couldn't have asked you for a pass and carried what I did." The general sighed, asked her a few more questions, and then told her he would take the matter out of the hands of the customhouse officials and "try her himself." Delighted, Ginnie thanked him. Meanwhile her spirits were so much restored that she was reproving the Yankees, accusing one official of keeping her intimate garments. "I had not the least idea that my stockings, petticoats or corsets could be construed as government prizes." She had been left without a change, she observed, while the Union officers must intend to consign her property to the use of their friends!

Since General Burnside was so obviously sympathetic, other officers tried to gain Miss Ginnie's good will. "I was asked down to the parlors every evening to meet some of the staff officers," she recalled with evident pleasure. "The Yankee women in the parlor looked very indignant to see these officers being so polite to a Secesh woman." She was still not yet nineteen.

Even then the forthright girl amused herself with a bit of Union-baiting. One of Burnside's aides told her that Joe Jefferson was playing at a Cincinnati theater. Wouldn't she like to see him? Miss Ginnie considered and said yes, she would. Then would she accompany the captain? Ginnie sighed; that would be breaking her parole, which prohibited her from leaving the hotel without competent military authorization. The captain smiled; he could fix that. The younger man went out and called on General Burnside, who returned with him; Miss Ginnie had authority to see the play. "Oh, I can go?" The blue eyes brightened. "Yes."

"Then I won't." The light had become a small flame. "My brothers are in front of your bullets daily, and I wouldn't be seen escorted by a Yankee!"

General Burnside bowed: "I'll bid you good evening," he said, and returned to his room.

Soon afterward the general lifted his eyes from his desk to see before him a much agitated lady. With a markedly British accent she explained that she was an Englishwoman journeying from Virginia's springs to the Arkansas waters. Only a few hours ago she had been informed that two other women had been arrested, and now she "hastened to ask protection from such a possible misfortune to herself, and also for a pass to proceed." Warming to her subject, the visitor explained testily that she had hoped for a few days of relaxation in Cincinnati, but "this continued excitement would be the death of her, and worse than the fatigue of travel."

Ambrose Burnside, who had courted Lottie Moon so long that he knew every line of her face, sat silent through the barrage. Then he told the caller, gently: "You've forgotten me. But I still remember with pleasure the hours I used to spend with you in Oxford." Lottie still tried to brazen it out, protesting against these ridiculous accusations. She was only a traveling Englishwoman, ill and hopeful. . . .

The general shook his head, and Lottie realized that her game had failed. Even had she tried her old specialty of jaw-cracking, she could not have fooled Ambrose Burnside. . . . She joined Sister Ginnie and her mother and for weeks they remained under surveillance in Cincinnati or at her home nearby. There are indications that her onetime beau kept Lottie in suspense for a long time, making every effort to frighten her out of her Confederate activities.

The records show that no action was ever taken against Lottie or Ginnie. And yet the official correspondence, discovered in recent years in Ohio, reveals that some of Ginnie's rebel mail presented evidence of earlier writing in invisible ink. Other notes, it was declared, showed that "the fair mail carrier is widely known in . . . Philadelphia, Montreal, Canada; Murfreesboro, Tennessee. They show that she has traveled diligently and has been engaged for some length of time in this way." The report concluded that the "known disloyalty and disloyal connections of these ladies" demanded that a stop be put to their activities.

In spite of everything, charges were dropped against both Moon sisters. The Knights of the Golden Circle eventually proved an ineffectual organization, confused in its purposes, and the movement slowly collapsed. Lottie and Judge Clark left Ohio for New York. For them spying and conspiracies-even the war-had ended. For little Ginnie, however, Yankees were Yankees, and she continued her own form of hostilities. Back in Memphis, she collected marriage proposals again, slipped information to handy Southerners, and otherwise acted as a gadfly to the Union side.

Ginnie had orders to report daily at 10 A.M. to Federal General Hurlburt, the Northern officers hoping this would limit her operations. Obviously it did not, and after three months the general commanded that Miss Ginnie Moon was to get out of the Union lines and stay out! Gathering up her skirts, Ginnie cheerfully shook off the Yankee dust. Her movements for the next seven or eight months are a mystery. Then about the middle of 1864 she turned up at Danville, Virginia, with her sister-in-law.

Ginnie's brother, ill and defeated, had escaped from the United States to the South of France. From there he wrote to ask if his wife, two children, and Ginnie could join him, to sit out the war overseas. The two women obtained passes and worked their way to Newport News-only to be halted by none other than Ben Butler. Unless they took the Union oath, they learned, they could not go on.

Ginnie's sister-in-law felt she had to accept; Ginnic tossed her head and announced that she'd never do it. Afterward she asked her sister-in-law how she could have taken the oath, and the lady answered: "I didn't hear a word that man talked about. I kept saying the multiplication table as hard as I could."

Butler kept Ginnic in custody for a time. Her relatives said she lived on "bread and water," but this report may well be doubted. After a while the general said that if she agreed to the oath, he could still help her join the family group. The general's emissary pointed out that, after all, Miss Ginnie would have to take it before summer, when Butler would be in Richmond.

Miss Ginnie gave him a look. "If Butler's in Richmond, he'll be hanging to a tree!" That settled that. The Union finally permitted Ginnic to go on into Confederate territory, and there she strengthened friendly relationships with someone she had already met, Jefferson Davis. Her family has kept several Davis letters, addressed to "Dear Ginnie" and asking a blessing on her and "my dear friend, your sister."

In spite of Ginnie's help the long war ended. The South had lost, but Ginnie, who lived on for sixty years after Appomattox, never accepted defeat for a moment. . . . The older sister Lottie became a novelist and pioneer woman newspaper correspondent, covering European capitals during the Franco-Prussian war. Ginnie remained for years in about Memphis, rambunctious as ever. She seemed a living anachronism in her rustling silk dresses, her beribboned shirtwaists, starched and stiff, and her tiny hat in the style of earlier days. But the few people who took Ginnie Moon for Whistler's mother had surprises in store for them.

For a time she took in boarders-men only; she wouldn't have women around the house. She became a heroine in a grim yellow fever epidemic of the 1870s. When she reached her own mid-seventies, Ginnie had an idea-Hollywood-and she went there. Standing before the producer Jesse Lasky, she said she wanted to act. "What makes you think you can do it?" Lasky asked. Ginnie folded her small arms: "I'm seventy-five years old, and I've acted all of them." The producer nodded: "You'll do."

She did, taking parts with Pola Negri, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Miles Minter. At seventy-six, she donned padded jacket and helmet for a seaplane flight. In her later years, tired and a bit bored, she took herself to Greenwich Village. Delighting in the atmosphere, she chain-smoked, mixed her own juleps, and talked by the hour, with scorn and spirit, to the younger residents who crowded around her. Riding on Riverside Drive with a party of Northern friends, she once glanced at Grant's Tomb. "Damn him," she said.

As one of her final deeds, the little woman who some called wild "tamed" an alley cat and made him her companion. In September of 1926 an artist neighbor found the eighty-one-year-old Miss Ginnie stretched on the floor, her hand extended toward the door, the cat beside her. She had stopped fighting at last. . . .