Departures of note

Rose O'Neal Greenhow, a Washington socialite, ran a Confederate spy network in the capital at the start of the Civil War. In July 1861, she passed secret messages to Confederate General P. G. T. Beauregard about Union troop movements, including plans for the First Battle of Bull Run. Confederate President Jefferson Davis credited her information with securing the Southern victory at Manassas on July 21, 1861. After the battle, she received a telegram from her handler, Thomas Jordan, thanking her on behalf of the president and general.

Born in 1813 in Montgomery County, Maryland, Greenhow was orphaned as a child and raised by an aunt who ran a boarding house in Washington. She married Dr. Robert Greenhow Jr. in 1835 and became a prominent socialite, befriending figures like John C. Calhoun and James Buchanan. After her husband's death in 1854, she grew sympathetic to the Confederate cause, influenced by Calhoun. Recruited by Captain Thomas Jordan, she used a 26-symbol cipher to encode messages and coordinated with pro-Confederate congressmen, Union officers, and couriers.

Suspected of leaking information, Greenhow was placed under house arrest in August 1861 by Allan Pinkerton, who found coded messages, maps of Washington fortifications, and other intelligence in her home. She was transferred to Old Capitol Prison in January 1862, where she continued to signal messages from her window. Released without trial in May 1862, she was deported to the Confederacy and hailed as a heroine. She then ran the blockade to Europe, where she met Queen Victoria and Napoleon III, and published her memoir, My Imprisonment and the First Year of Abolition Rule at Washington, in London in 1863.

In August 1864, Greenhow left Europe on the blockade runner Condor, carrying dispatches and $2,000 in gold from her memoir royalties sewn into her clothes. On October 1, 1864, the ship ran aground near Wilmington, North Carolina, while pursued by a Union gunboat. Fearing capture, she fled by rowboat, but a wave capsized it, and the weight of the gold dragged her under. Her body was recovered with a notebook and a copy of her book, containing a note for her daughter. She was given a Confederate military funeral and buried in Oakdale Cemetery, where a cross marks her grave as 'A Bearer of Dispatches to the Confederate Government.'