There are many celebrated Southern spies. Rose Greenhow, Belle Boyd, and Henry Harrison come to mind. Sisters Lottie and Ginnie Moon are not usually included on that list as being famous or celebrated. But they were spies, none-the-less.[1]
Virginia "Ginnie" Moon
Richard Hall
considered them “An extraordinary pair of sisters who did not at all fit the
stereotype of the Southern belle.”[2]
Robert S. Moon was doctor who passed in 1858. He was married to Cynthia Ann
Sullivan, and they had several children, including daughters Charlotte C. “Lottie”
Moon Clark (1829-1895) and Virginia B. “Ginnie” Moon (1844-1925). Lottie was
born in Danville, Virginia, while Ginnie’s birthplace is often listed as either
Memphis, Tennessee, or in Ohio. The family had an extensive library, and the
daughters grew up reading volumes like Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason and
Charles Darwin’s works. Cynthia, Virginia, and another sister Mary were living
in Oxford, Butler County, Ohio, in the 1860 census. It is not clear where Lottie
Moon was living according to the 1860 census. One account states that Ginnie
was attending a girl’s school in Ohio at the start of the war, probably the
Western Female Seminary. This account states that Ginnie, previously an abolitionist,
but wishing to support the Confederacy once the war began, begged school
officials to “allow her to leave school and join her mother in Memphis.” Of
course, her mother is listed in the 1860 census as living in Oxford, Ohio. Maybe
she had left and moved to Memphis in the few weeks between when the census
taker came by and the start of the war. Another account states that Ginnie “showed a little too much fervor and
was expelled [from the school] when she shot the US flag that was flying over
the campus full of holes.”[3]
As the story
continues, Ginnie was working as a nurse, and after discovering the hospital
was running low on supplies, made her way North under the pretext of visiting
her boyfriend in Ohio, or, for her mother to sell property. It is unclear how
many trips she made before being discovered. When she was searched, Federal
soldiers discovered “many vials of medicine in her skirts, as well as a number
of dispatches. She escaped arrest only because Union general Ambrose Burnside
was an old friend of hers—when she was a little girl, she used to call him ‘Buttons’
because of his military uniform, and he would give her candy.”[4]
Another account of the event states that both Ginnie and her mother were apprehended
in Cincinnati after boarding a steamship for the journey south. As she related
in an autobiographical sketch late in life, she had “on an underskirt with a
row of quinine bottles in the bottom and -a row of morphine bottles above. I
had the dispatch wrapped in oil silk in my bosom.” The Federal officer stated
he had an order for her arrest and demanded for her to be searched, to which
Moon would not consent, going so far as to pull a pistol on the officer and
daring him to try. She did consent to go to the provost marshal’s office, and,
while the officer was gone procuring a carriage, Moon took off the petticoat
and hid it under the mattress, with her mother lying down on the bed. The message
hid in her bosom she soaked in water and then swallowed. Back at the provost
marshal’s office, the soldiers searched her baggage, finding contraband, such
as a bolt of blue checked linen that she passed off for material for future children’s aprons and ball
of blue mass that her mother supposedly might consume in a month. The pair were
kept confined and could pick the place of confinement. Moon asked for the
Newport Barracks, and the Confederate prison in Columbus, but was denied,
settling on the Burnett House, where Burnside was staying. She actually gained
an audience with Burnside, and Burnside stated that "You have infringed upon
a military order of mine. so I'll take you out of the hands of the Custom House
and try you by courts martial, myself and my staff." Of the letters she
was carrying, none of them contained military information, and Moon and her
mother were allowed to proceed to Memphis. While in Memphis she had to report
to General Hurlbut every day at 10:00 am. After three months, she was ordered
to leave Federal lines and not to return.”[5]
There is a thought that before being expelled from Memphis, she secreted
messages to Nathan Bedford Forrest. She went to Danville for a while, then planned
to go to France with other family members. She was arrested by Federal general Benjamin
Butler and confined at Fortress Monroe for a time before being released, sent
to City Point, and then back into Confederate lines.[6]
Richard Hall writes that both sisters lived in Ohio and that Lottie was “romantically involved with future Union general Ambrose Burnside.” Lottie did not marry old “Buttons,” supposedly walking out on him at the altar, but did marry Judge James Clark of Ohio. According to one source, James Clark was a Copperhead and involved in the Knights of the Golden Circle. Their home in Ohio was a spot where “Confederate couriers” could safely stop. Needing to get a message to Edmund Kirby Smith in Kentucky, Lottie donned the “disguise of an old woman” and “succeeded in passing back and forth through the lines and accomplishing the mission.” Thereafter she conducted several other spying missions, one in which she met agents in Toronto, then delivering papers to Richmond.[7]
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| Marker in Memphis |
Ginnie lived in
Memphis following the war, then in the early days of Hollywood, went there and
was in several films, including Douglas Fairbank’s Robin Hood (1922) and
The Spanish Dancer (1923). She next moved to Greenwich Village,
where she died in 1925. She is buried in Elmwood Cemetery, Memphis. Lottie
moved to New York with James after the war. James practiced law and wrote
articles for the New York Ledger. Lottie eventually started writing for
the New York World and was a correspondent in Paris covering the Franco-Prussian
War. Returning to the states, she published How She Came into Her Kingdom,
under the nom de plume of Charles M. Clay. She passed away in 1895 in
Massachusetts, although her place of burial seems unknown.[8]
Many of these
stories seem larger than life and, in the case of spies, one always has to
exercise a little caution. There is a note in the Federal Provost Marshall
papers, dated April 7, 1863, stating that Virginia B. Moon, of Butler County,
Ohio, had permission to go home to Butler County, but had to report to Hurlbut
on April 10 in Memphis. Likewise there is a letter regarding Cynthia A. Moon
regarding the same.[9]
The Daily Conservative shared an article from Petersburg in May 1864
that “Miss Virginia Moon” was on the flag of truce steamer New York,
arriving in City Point.[10]
The post-war articles concerning the pair, they are numerous.
[1] Many
books do not mention the Moon sisters, including Wagner, Spies in the Civil
War (2009); Towne, Surveillance and Spies in the Civil War (2015);
Ford, Daring Women of the Civil War (2004); Bakeless, Confederate Spy
Stories (1972); Valezquez, The Woman in Battle (2010).
[2] Hall,
Women on the Civil War Battlefront, 90.
[3] https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/virginia-bethel-moon/;
Cordell, Courageous Women of the Civil War, xx.
[4] Cordell,
Courageous Women of the Civil War, 54.
[5] Moon,
“The Moon and Barclay Families,” 32.
[6] Hall,
Women on the Civil War Battlefront, 91; Donald, Stealing Secrets,
106.
[7] Hall,
Women on the Civil War Battlefront, 91; Donald, Stealing Secrets,
96, 100.
[8] Donald,
Stealing Secrets, 107-109.
[9] Virginia
B. Moon, Union Provost Marshals File of Paper Relating to Individual Civilians,
1861-1865, RG 109, M345, roll 0194.
[10] The
Daily Conservative, May 4, 1864.
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