Born in Maryland, probably in Montgomery County, about 1815, Rose O╒Neal grew up there and in Washington, D.C., in the elegance of prewar Southern society. In 1835 she married the prominent physician and historian Robert Greenhow. She became a leading hostess of Washington, a confidante of several powerful political figures, notably John C. Calhoun and James Buchanan, and a party to various intrigues, especially those of the Cuban General Narciso Lùpez. In 1850 the Greenhows moved to Mexico City and then to San Francisco. After her husband╒s death in 1854 Rose Greenhow returned to Washington, D.C., where after the election of Buchanan as president in 1856 she was again a major social figure. Although she had long been a staunchly pro-slavery Southerner, she remained in Washington after the outbreak of the Civil War.
Greenhow was soon recruited as a Confederate spy. In July 1861 she secured and forwarded by courier information about movements of General Irvin McDowell╒s army toward Manassas Junction, Virginia. In August she was arrested by Allan Pinkerton, head of the Union secret service, and confined to her home. She somehow managed to continue sending information from there and, after her incarceration in January 1862, even from Old Capitol Prison. In March she was examined by a War Department commission, and in June she was exiled south. Greeted as a heroine in the Confederacy, she was handsomely rewarded by President Jefferson Davis. In August 1863 she sailed for Europe as an unofficial agent of the Confederacy, and later that year she published her prison diary, My Imprisonment and the First Year of Abolition Rule at Washington. Her celebrity having preceded her, she was presented at the British and French courts and was reportedly courted by Lord Granville. On October 1, 1864, weighed down by gold sovereigns, she drowned in the sinking of a small boat in which she was attempting to run the federal blockade of Wilmington, North Carolina.
Photo: Greenhow in the Old Capitol Prison, with her daughter.
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