03

“I Fought the Law and the Law Won”

In one of his more recent works, political and cultural critic Garry Wills considers the role played by myth in the shaping of accepted mainstream attitudes, rhetorical tropes and beliefs regarding American national pasts, as well as the ways in which historical retellings of those pasts have contributed to the American body politic’s interpretation of government generally (and, in particular, the federal government of United States) as “a necessary evil” rather than a positive institutional good responsible for the organization of the American nation-state, its attendant socio-political processes, and of course its body politic.¹ The central tenant of Wills’ 1999 book A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government is that Americans as individuals and groups have relied on false and mythologized histories of America’s pasts which have led them to believe that the American political constitution is in fact based on an essentially anti-governmental theoretical foundation. Wills argues,

…the historical and constitutional evidence constantly used in these debates [over whether any and all governmental formations must necessarily be understood to subtract from the rights of individuals] is largely bogus. But that just raises another question. Whence comes this determination to distort the history of our legal system? The distortion began very early, when the arguments of Antifederalists against the Constitution were said, only a decade or so after the document’s ratification, to be embodied in the Constitution. People could stay loyal to the Constitution only if they felt it was disloyal to itself.² [italics in original]

To support this argument, Wills conducts a whirlwind tour of events in American history involving the material and rhetorical challenges posed to the establishment of the federal government. He begins by attempting to set the proverbial record straight regarding the founding of the American republic and its attendant mythologies relating to Minutemen and the supposedly voluntary and universal military service of the American colonial period, arguing that a more historically accurate version of the events of America’s pasts undercuts the ways in which national mythology can be called on in contemporary contexts to support, for example, the National Rifle Association’s essentially anti- or extra-governmental interpretation of the second amendment of the Bill of Rights (i.e., the NRA’s argument that since universal gun ownership—at least among males—was supposedly used as a colonial defense against the British, present-day gun ownership is therefore nothing more or less than an act of responsible citizenship).³ Wills dispatches such “revolutionary myths” and their most recent political applications before proceeding on to account for the manifestation of anti-governmental attitudes and behaviors of individuals he refers to as “nullifiers” (individuals who have used their positions within government to advocate nullification of the federal government), “seceders” (the nineteenth century South and the Confederate government), “insurrectionists” (individuals who have led either armed or rhetorical rebellions against the government), “vigilantes” (those who act according to a sense of moral authority and willfully break the law using violence or violent rhetoric), “withdrawers” (nonviolent separatist individuals and communities), and, finally, “disobeyers” (those who, as Wills’ moniker suggests, willfully but nonviolently engage in acts of civil disobedience). Wills concludes this historical exegesis with his own argument in favor of government as “a necessary good” and a discussion of who really loses when Thoreau’s tenet that “the government is best which governs not at all” is actually applied to the scope of contemporary American social and political life.⁴

Whether or not one accepts Wills’ historiographical interpretation and narrative re-organization of the events and political ideologies of the United States’ constitutional history (and indeed, a number of historians have presented valuable work which controverts or at least complicates Wills’ arguments and conclusions), his acknowledgement of Americans’ historical distrust of bureaucracy and governmental structures and his attempt to discover the origins of such anti-governmental values is both admirable and timely, especially given the reorganization throughout the 1990s of domestic paramilitary groups, state militias and other homegrown militaristic cells often linked to far right-wing hate groups and acts of domestic terrorism such as the Oklahoma City bombing of April 19, 1995. The above description of Wills’ premise, assumptions and project, then, is meant to act as a frame to my own exploration of American political style and the ways in which a close look at only one category from Wills’ litany of anti-governmentalists (Civil War-era Southern secessionists) can be understood to illustrate the existence of a defiantly postcolonial, iconic and decidedly mainstream “outlaw” American political performative. This performative style, I argue, draws heavily on iconographic portraits of both historical personas and their attendant political ideologies to establish a performance of citizenship which, although based on and steeped in American mythologies of anti- or extra-governmentality (i.e., “outlaw” behaviors and performances), nevertheless also serves, depending on its application in inter/transnational and domestic contexts, as a kind of quintessential performance of American patriotism. While I rely on Wills’ work in A Necessary Evil for the extensive historical documentation used to support his interpretation of anti-governmentality as a cornerstone of both historical and contemporary American political and cultural life, I apply his work to my own subject in ways he, in all likelihood, would not appreciate. Wills’ argument rests largely on the positivist premise that there exists a singular, knowable (and documented) American past which, if it could simply be revealed and made available to the American body politic, would demonstrate once and for all that the federal government is both meant to be and can be effectively used as a mechanism for positive change in the everyday lives of Americans without becoming an invasive and tyrannical force. While Garry Wills argues that only a misreading or misinterpretation of the events of America’s pasts could support the contention that the American constitutional system is indeed based on a theoretical premise of anti-governmentality, I draw on recent work by both historians and scholars of political communication to suggest that it matters less whether or not such a fundamentally anti-governmental foundation actually exists than it does whether Americans, based on the historiographical technologies of heritage sites, museums, reenactments and other contemporary presentations of the events of American pasts, believe that it exists and have engaged in political behaviors which reflect that belief.

In my own work in this essay, then, I am appropriating Wills’ ideas as a theory (rather than a diagnosis) of anti-governmentality which can be used to interrogate the ways that national myth and American outlaw iconography (as manifested and performed in narratives, museums, reenactments and other cultural products) is not simply a misappropriation or a malfunctioning of history or historiographical discourse. As made clear by British scholar of nationalism Anthony Smith, myth can and does function as a vibrant way for people to both experience and help construct a usable past which frames and contextualizes the lives of individuals and collectivities alike, helping people to create and establish communities based on systems of shared beliefs drawn from a (supposedly) shared past.⁵ In what follows, I understand anti-governmentality and the iconographic American outlaw performative as a value manifested through political style that is not merely counter- or sub-cultural, but indeed central to the practice of American politics in both historical and contemporary contexts.⁶ Toward this end, I consider the co-constitutive roles played by anti-governmentality and the historical legacies of those individuals who have performed and/or continue to perform such a style, taking as a case study several female spies for the Confederacy and their narrative as well as embodied performances of Southern and Confederate nationalism. The use of these female spies as a case study draws attention to the ways in which gender can be used as a category of analysis of iconographic outlaw practices of American citizenship generally, especially since American outlaw figures have traditionally appeared in folk histories and other cultural representations as cowboys, roughriders, motorcyclists, and other biologically male pistol-wielding felons on the lam from the long arm of the law. An analysis of the myth-making outlaw performatives of pro-secession women who spied for the Confederacy offers not only a chance to revision the iconography of the American outlaw with a critical eye trained on women and the ways in which they have traditionally been under-represented in American histories (particularly histories of violence and conflict), but also an opportunity to understand how outlaws and anti- or extra-governmental activities, behaviors and ideologies are constructed in mainstream historical narratives in opposition to a federal American government eager to gender itself as male in the eyes not only of its own body politic, but also the larger global community.⁷ The personas and performances of allegiance to the Confederacy turned in by these female spies are also particularly fruitful for an analysis of outlaw performances of American citizenship given the sheer number of both male and female outlaws and folk heroes temporally and geographically connected to Civil War-era secession, the Confederacy and the Lost Cause.⁸

Confederate spies Rose O’Neal Greenhow, Belle Boyd and “sister act” Ginnie (Virginia) and Lottie (Charlotte) Moon continue, long after their deaths, to perform as cultural signifiers and icons of Confederate political style in historical narratives as well as at local fairs, reenactments and other events commemorating the Civil War and the Confederacy.⁹ In this essay I consider the purpose these women serve as historical “imaginings” that might explain the frequency with which they are referenced and re-enacted in popular narratives and entertainments.¹⁰ Drawing on the work of scholars of nationalism, political communication and gender performance as well as performance studies scholars and feminist historians of Southern and Confederate women¹¹, I argue that these female spies for the Confederacy have become a part of mainstream historical narratives and contemporary entertainments relating to the Civil War for several reasons, the first and most obvious of which is the availability of primary documentation pertaining to their interactions with both the United States military and the federal government (i.e., their illegal actions as spies and resulting arrests, imprisonments and trials). Additionally, several of the most famous of these spies acted as their own literary agents, seeking out and securing publishers for their memoirs. While the Moon sisters have left behind no published narratives, Rose Greenhow and Belle Boyd have most certainly written themselves into history, often recording in their published texts not only the events of their lives but also their personal correspondence and even transcriptions of the press coverage they received during their respective periods of arrest and imprisonment. Their careful transcription of newspaper and magazine articles not only leaves a valuable trail for historians and other scholars to trace, but also points to the ways in which these women were aware that they had entered the annals of history and sought to control the context and content of their representation much as a contemporary politician seeks to control his/her image.

Also accounted for here are the ways in which these spies’ embodied performances (including vituperative anti-Union rhetoric as well as the brandishing of firearms and the securing of financial assistance, medical supplies and armaments for Confederate forces), though they transgress the idyllic antebellum and war-era conceptions of gender performance referred to as Confederate Womanhood, are nevertheless justified in the spies’ own memoirs and in mainstream historical narratives as both appropriate and constitutive actions for female Confederate nationalists.¹² I suggest, then, that these female spies stand in contemporary contexts as exponents of anti-governmental Confederate political style not despite their supposedly gender-bending performances of Confederate nationalism, but because those performances were justified as appropriately patriotic via the spies’ construction of themselves as “ladies,” (a nineteenth century epithet connoting social, educational, economic and racial privilege) and their biological sex making them more acceptable than cross-dressing female soldiers and more interesting (given their rhetorically attributed and personally claimed acts of derring-do) than civilian women on the home front. Because their performances as spies were enabled by their performances as socially acceptable, if pro-secession, ladies, Greenhow, Boyd and the Moons are allowed (and, in fact, desired) to stand as representatives of the South and the Confederacy because their historical personas help to maintain and continually revitalize a Southern regional ideological performative which simultaneously re-imagines and redeems not only the South as a nation, but also the Confederacy as a still-salient political body through the aestheticization of that (imagined) Confederate body as female. Just as feminist scholar of nationalism Nira Yuval-Davis makes clear the desire of governments to establish both international and domestic political legitimacy by gendering themselves male (thereby creating an essentially domestic and heterosexist union between the state as administrative male patriarch and the governed body politic as dutiful and dependent wife/child), I argue that this case study and the analysis it occasions throw into relief the cultural intersection of outlaw iconography and performances of citizenship from which emerges an itinerant outlaw performative that can be (and has been) applied both to resist and to reify contemporary American performances of patriotism and acceptable citizenship.

“Thinking Makes it So”:¹³ The Ideological Constitution of the Southern Nation and the Outlaw Performance of Southern National Identity

The issues associated with the Civil War, including states’ rights and the interdiction of slavery, are by now well known and well-documented, and it is not my project to enumerate or explore them in great detail here. Instead, I am particularly interested in the ways these issues were framed, shaped and applied in hegemonic Southern discourse, as well as in the narrative performances authored by and associated with female spies Rose O’Neal Greenhow and Belle Boyd, both of whom left behind written records of their views and experiences. Not surprisingly, the rhetoric of the most influential pro-slavery Southern statesmen of the antebellum era, including Rose Greenhow’s friend and political mentor South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun, folded slavery into their discourse on states’ rights, arguing that individual states should be allowed to determine their own cultural and economic practices. The real problem with slavery, however, contend a number of historians and constitutional scholars, actually had more to do with the electoral math which resulted from the Northern concession to count each slave as 3/5 of a person, an agreement that effectively ceded the electoral edge to the densely populated South.¹⁴ Whether it was an issue of the implications of electoral math and/or the South’s ideological belief that the federal government was betraying the spirit of individual liberties and states’ rights Calhoun and others believed could be found in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution (as the Confederacy too adopted these as their foundational documents), Confederate spy Rose O’Neal Greenhow had much to say regarding the glory of independent states, the virtues of a federal government that would honor the hands-off policy she believed the Constitution guaranteed, and the supposedly tyrannical and invasive rule of the Lincoln Administration in and over her home state of Maryland. Greenhow’s 1863 narrative My Imprisonment and the First Year of Abolition Rule at Washington (hereafter referred to as simply My Imprisonment) is filled to bursting with anti-Union, anti-Lincoln, pro-secession and pro-states’ rights rhetoric, concluding with a article pronouncing “Man Incapable of Self-Government,” which Greenhow herself describes as pertaining to nothing less than “the downfall of the American Republic.”¹⁵ Long before that concluding article, however, Greenhow makes clear her interpretation of states’ rights when she catalogs the abuses suffered by the South, particularly the border states of Maryland and Virginia, and likens the pro-secessionist South to European nation-states struggling for independence during the second half of the nineteenth century. Greenhow states,

After repeated and intolerable aggression upon the rights of those [Southern] States—accompanied and aggravated by an insulting tone of moral superiority, until a union with such communities was no longer to be endured by any high-spirited people—[the North and the Union] at length stirred up a furious and desolating war. For two years a torrent of blood has flowed between their people and my people. The noble State of Virginia, with which I am most nearly connected, has been devastated by hosts of barbarous invaders—always overthrown indeed in the field before Southern valour, but always destroying and plundering where they found the country unprotected; whilst my own dear native State of Maryland has been subject to a still more stinging and maddening oppression, in the utter destruction of all her liberties, and in the establishment of a brutal and vulgar military despotism which has reduced the gallant old State to the debased condition of Poland or Venetia; and such ‘order reigns in Baltimore,’ as that moral death which tyrants call ‘order’ in Warsaw or in the beautiful City of the Sea.¹⁶

Adopting here (and throughout much of her narrative) what Superintendent Wood, the warden of Washington, D.C.’s Old Capitol Prison, described as her “God and Liberty style,” Greenhow conforms her narrative to the expectations of nineteenth century prosody, the dramatic flair of her words more characteristic of the heroine in a melodrama or a novel by Sir Walter Scott than the narrative tone dominating the numerous other spy memoirs offered by operatives for both the North and the South, and particularly contrasting the tone taken by Greenhow’s fellow Confederate Belle Boyd.¹⁷

In comparison to Greenhow’s notorious narrative style, Boyd’s writing is plain and to the point, and her memoirs focus more closely on her own experiences as an “activist” spy famed for her casual interactions with Confederate soldiers and officers alike as well as for placing herself repeatedly in harm’s way to deliver information or avenge the honor of the South in civilian interactions with Union troops.¹⁸ The subject of a number of post-Civil War novels and plays, including one by famed melodramatic playwright Dion Boucicault, Boyd was only seventeen when the war broke out in 1861 and just twenty-one when her memoirs were published in England in 1865 as the war drew to a close.¹⁹ While she is acknowledged as far less ideological than Greenhow in her narrative of the events and personages associated with the Civil War, focusing more closely on her own adventures and the experiences of her family, Boyd too, like Greenhow, frames her memoirs within Confederate nationalist rhetoric which constructs the North as an imperial power and the Lincoln government as tyrannically repressive. Considering her arrest and imprisonment in first the Old Capitol Prison and then the Carroll Prison unwarranted, though she openly acknowledges her work as a spy, Boyd too references contemporaneous nationalist struggles in Europe, citing particularly the persecution of political prisoners and referring to Abraham Lincoln as “Napoleonic,” a characterization congruous to Greenhow’s own appellation of the revered war-era president as “Abraham the First.”²⁰

Both Greenhow and Boyd also clearly express another of the principle tenets of Confederate nationalism when they help to establish through their rhetoric the myth of a hallowed Southern national past.²¹ Boyd and Greenhow both insist that the South’s aristocratic past stretches back to the European peerage, a claim also made by Southern intellectuals hoping to bind white Southerners together across social and economic class divides.²² Writing of her father’s military outfit, the Stonewall Brigade, for example, Boyd explains that both the brigade and its commanding general, Stonewall Jackson, took their shared nickname from a glorious British military past. Boyd states,

it is with pride we Confederates acknowledge that our heroes caught their inspiration from the example of their English ancestors. When our descendants shall read the story of General Jackson and his men, they will be insensibly attracted to those earlier pages of history which record the exploits of Wellington’s Light Division.²³

While Greenhow similarly references Maryland’s own historical relationship with England in an attempt to connect British cavaliers with pro-secessionist Southern patriots, she helps to identify the South as not only differentiated from the North through its representative state power, the Confederacy, but also argues that Southerners are literally a “race” apart from their Northern counterparts.²⁴ In a letter dated December 27, 1861, Greenhow defines the South as a discrete entity from the Union when she writes to former social acquaintance and Lincoln-administration Secretary of State William Seward, “You cannot conquer us, Sir. A nation armed in the defence [sic] of her rights is under the protection of God” (italics added).²⁵ She goes on to classify the Southern nation as unified by belief and style when, in the same letter, she warns Seward, “you cannot subdue a people endowed with such a spirit of resistance…”²⁶

Such rhetorical constructions of the South as a nation unified by shared beliefs and practices as well as by “race” or ethnicity are noteworthy not only for their representation of Confederate nationalist ideology, but also for the significant role such discourse played in determining the policies of the Confederacy. Drawing as heavily on a rhetoric of shared beliefs and geographic unity as on the notion that white Southerners themselves constituted a separate “race” than that of Northerners, states such as Virginia, North Carolina and Alabama considered enacting legislation limiting their respective state citizenships only to those individuals born in the state or who had lived there for a specific number of years (Faust, Confederate Nationalism 36). While this legislation was ultimately opposed, seen as divisive of the Southern community and potentially disruptive of racial unity among white Southerners (as well as the maintenance of racial hierarchy), such conceptions of citizenship demonstrate not only the power Southerners invested in exclusive notions of community, but also the importance of the symbols used to represent that imagined community and the ideologies which helped to constitute the South as a nation.

Steel (and) Magnolias:
Gender, Outlaw Iconography, and the Power of “Pastpresents”

Even a cursory overview of the small body of literature available on female spies for the Confederacy makes clear the association of Rose Greenhow, Belle Boyd and Ginnie and Lottie Moon (all women located geographically outside the Confederacy at the war’s beginning in 1861) with flags, music, and firearms, the potent symbols of the ideologies used to constitute Confederate nationalism during the nineteenth century. In his frequently referenced collection of profiles of spies for both North and South, historian and novelist Harnett T. Kane pays particular attention to Greenhow, Boyd and the Moons, emphasizing their use of these symbols of Confederate nationalism. Published in 1954, the same year biographer Ishbel Ross issued the first comprehensive study of Greenhow’s life, Kane’s book appears extraordinarily well-researched, despite the fact that its author constructs his narrative of each woman’s service out of romantic, action-packed anecdotes and accounts of outlandish escapades that seem more akin to the theatrical melodrama popular during the nineteenth century than to traditional historical texts.²⁷ Writing of Ginnie and Lottie Moon, for example, Kane focuses on the young women’s romantic attachments as their major contribution to the war effort, citing especially the patriotism of younger sister Ginnie Moon (who, like Boyd, was only 17 years old when the war began) in becoming engaged to sixteen boys at one time. “If they’d died in battle,” he quotes her as saying, “they’d have died happy, wouldn’t they?” Apparently a spunky girl, she supposedly added, “And if they lived, I didn’t give a damn.”²⁸ Yet another, more ideologically and symbolically germane story associated with Ohio-born Ginnie Moon has to do with her performed choice to join the Confederacy. While attending a girl’s school in Ohio over which the Union flag was raised, she requested to be sent south to live with her mother, who had relocated to Memphis, Tennessee. When her request was denied based on her youth and the danger involved in such a journey, Ginnie Moon promptly removed from her pocket the small pistol she carried with her and shot out each of the stars in the objectionable Union flag before packing her bags and joining her mother in the South.²⁹

Similar incidents recounted in the lives of other spies include Belle Boyd’s notoriously excused fatal shooting of a Union officer. Described by Kane as “zestful,” “overwhelmingly feminine,” and the possessor of “the best pair of legs in the Confederacy,” the teenaged Boyd gained notoriety when she shot a Union soldier for shoving her mother aside as Mrs. Boyd attempted to prevent him from raising the United States flag over their home in Martinsburg, Virginia (now West Virginia).³⁰ Kane marvels at the fact that Boyd faced no punishment and concludes that “tears and smiles” must have helped the Federal investigators to reach their decision that the dead officer had indeed behaved in an ungentlemanly manner.³¹ Interestingly, Kane’s accounts of Belle Boyd’s and Ginnie Moon’s willingness to brandish firearms not only against Union forces but also against Union flags as symbols of the United States federal government, are thrown into sharp relief by the fact that he makes no mention of the numerous occasions on which Rose Greenhow is supposed to have drawn her pistol on her Union captors when they violated her expectations of privacy during her period of house arrest.³² Recalling the Union detectives’ thorough search of her home (and her equally thorough attempt to destroy all immediately available evidence), Greenhow makes clear that she was willing to shoot for her privacy, as well as to make sure that her private papers would not be confiscated. She writes:

The search still went on…I was then allowed to go to my chamber, and then resolved to accomplish the destruction of some important papers which I had in my pocket, even at the expense of my life…Happily, I succeeded without such a fearful sacrifice. The detective…rapped at my door, calling ‘Madam! Madam!’ and afterwards opened it, but seeing me apparently legitimately employed, he withdrew. Had he advanced one step, I should have killed him, as I raised my revolver with that intent; and so steady were my nerves, that I could have balanced a glass of water on my finger without spilling a drop.³³

Though Greenhow goes on to state that her revolver was taken from her shortly after this incident, leaving her “no means of defence [sic]” and “for the first time in [her] life…exposed to the dread of personal violence,” she later writes that she threatened to wield a “very admirable pistol” against a guard at the Old Capitol Prison, despite the fact that she had no ammunition.³⁴ Interestingly, no mention is made in the narrative of how she either regained her own weapon or acquired another.

Confederate nationalist symbols of rugged outdoor sportsmanship and the independent, agrarian lifestyle that both rhetorically and performatively characterized the South and Southern culture, the pistols and other firearms associated with female spies for the Confederacy help to summarize the ways in which Greenhow, Boyd and the Moons acted and continue to act in present contexts (during reenactments and other commemorative and spectacular historical events) as effective representatives of not only Confederate nationalist ideology and its attendant symbols, but also as proponents of outlaw American citizenship and anti-governmental political style (especially given the symbolic importance of pistols, rifles, and other weaponry in both folk and mainstream academic narratives of the events of America’s pasts). Garry Wills contends that besides being characterized by an active distrust of a strong centralized American government, anti-governmentalisms of all times and places have traditionally characterized as authentic all things populist and constructed (either self-consciously or not) in opposition to the bureaucratic infrastructure associated with governmental bodies. He argues that entities or practices which could be (and/or have been) characterized as “provincial, amateur, spontaneous, candid, homogeneous, traditional, populist, organic, rights-oriented, religious, voluntary, participatory” and dependent on “rotating labor” are privileged by anti-governmentalists over those entities or practices which are characterized as “cosmopolitan, expert, efficient, confidential, articulated, progressive, elite, mechanical, duties-oriented, secular, regulatory, delegative” and characterized by “dividing labor.”³⁵

Wills, a political and cultural critic, is hardly alone in his recognition of such characteristics as clearly aligned with anti- or extra-governmental performances of American citizenship. Indeed, scholars of political science and American cultural studies have long suggested that fringe and minority political groups rely on such authenticating characteristics to assert the validity and political efficacy of their ideological positions and/or the performances of citizenship occasioned (or at least rhetorically justified) by those systems of belief. Just as Wills asserts that anti-governmentalists of all stripes have privileged the rural and agrarian over the urban and industrial, scholar of American history and American Studies Catherine McNichol Stock suggests that incidents of vigilante violence in the United States (especially those associated with non-hierarchically structured paramilitary groups) have much to do with both historical and contemporary tensions between regional economic interests and systems.³⁶ While I disagree with McNichol Stock’s ultimate conclusion (that most vigilante violence has historically been located in rural as opposed to urban areas and that this phenomenon can be explained by privileging an economic analysis over that of culture or ideology), her observations do lend significant support to Wills’ contention that there exists a long history of American political performance and rhetoric which takes as its central tenant the irreconcilable differences between the ideologies, cultures and economies of disparate regions of the United States—itself a claim that is born out by nineteenth century maps detailing both the topographies and industries associated with not only North and South, but also the states and territories forming the politically contested borderlands between these two regions.³⁷

Indeed, Wills’ litany of those values and political characteristics used by anti-governmentalists to validate both their ideologies and political styles, when considered alongside McNichol Stock’s careful tracing of economic histories of rural violence, make clear the conformity of the Confederacy and its proponents to the traditional rhetorical tenants of anti-governmentality and performances of an iconographic outlaw styling of American citizenship. By constructing themselves as connected to specific Southern geographic areas such as Maryland, Virginia and Tennessee rather than the border territories in which they had actually lived most of their lives such as Washington, D.C. and Ohio, Greenhow, Boyd and the Moons rhetorically and performatively privilege the provincial, rural and agrarian over the cosmopolitan, urban and industrial, even as their abilities and service as spies relied on their knowledge of and access to both kinds of regions and economies. Similarly, the spies and their actions are constructed in not only their own narratives but also in biographical materials chronicling their exploits as decidedly amateur and organic (they serve as unpaid and untrained spies rather than sometimes-paid soldiers), candid (none hid their Southern sympathies or denied their espionage efforts in the face of arrest or incarceration), traditional and homogeneous (they identified with the South via ethnicity as well as shared beliefs), and rights-oriented (both their narrative and embodied performances clearly reference the right to independence and privacy for both individuals and collectives such as states). While mainstream scholars as far apart on the American political spectrum as Garry Wills and political theorist Richard Hofstadter identify anti-governmentality as a problem and a threat to the American state, then, the Confederate body politic and the women who spied on its behalf exhibit pride in what Wills refers to as their anti-governmental characteristics, and express the belief that anti-governmentality, because it is a threat to the state and hegemonic state power, is constitutive of a responsible and appropriate paradigm of U.S. citizenship.³⁸ In this way, then, these Confederates acknowledge their nebulous connection to the Union by not only constructing themselves in opposition to it (thereby implicitly recognizing the legitimacy of the federal government even as they disclaim it, since to be a citizen of the Confederacy was also to be an outlaw citizen of the Union and the United States government), but also by suggesting that they adhere more closely to the fundamental tenants of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution than the (supposedly) despotic Lincoln administration. In working to construct and represent, via nationalist symbols and ideologies, the Southern nation and the Confederate government, these female spies for the Confederacy recognized (as did the founders of the American republic) that “image is everything” and that the performance of nationhood is inextricably bound up with the nation’s attempt to establish political legitimacy.³⁹ What they would not have been able to foretell, however, is the ways in which their Civil War-era performances of outlaw political style and Confederate citizenship would be used in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to reify not only stereotypes having to do with gender performance, but also with the gendered political binary of the governing body (gendered male) and the governed body (gendered female) used to define the parameters of acceptable performances of American citizenship.⁴⁰

Traditional historical scholars of the Civil War South Harnett T. Kane, John Bakeless, and numerous others, through the patronizing tone and melodramatic content of their narrative associations of female spies with firearms, flags, and adventurous escapades replete with danger, intrigue, and light-hearted sacrifice have framed and defined female spies for the Confederacy according to their gender performances and the degree to which those performances either adhered to or resisted gender expectations of Southern middle-class white women in the mid-nineteenth century.⁴¹ While such scholars have suggested that women were natural spies because of their propensity for gossip and their inability to keep secrets, Kane perhaps expresses this sentiment best when he writes:

The ladies were terrific. In this war they made their American debut in espionage, and never since have the nation’s women taken such an active part as spies. No matter how raging a partisan a man might be, his wife or sister was probably still more impassioned. They became the best recruiting sergeants; they were “not at home” to those who lagged in enlisting, and they sent such friends white feathers or boxes containing dresses. They connived endlessly, they took great risks, and they pushed through to success in ways impossible to simple males. They showed again and again that the female is not only the deadlier of the sexes, but also the livelier.⁴²

While his research is, for the most part, sound, Kane’s tone and description here (and throughout his narrative) reduces the significance of the risks taken and the punishments suffered by the female spies who were arrested and imprisoned. Kane joins a host of other (predominantly male) historians when he suggests that the Civil War was the last “romantic” conflict, in which “the generation that thrilled in admiration of Sir Walter Scott usually observed the ‘rules’ of knightly, or at least gentlemanly, conduct.” Kane continues on to argue, “had [civilians, enlisted men and military officers] not played Ivanhoe on endless occasions, scores of undercover agents would never have survived to tell their stories.”⁴³

While such a romantic description of the events of the Civil War has been disrupted by revisionist historians of the 1980s and 1990s, especially scholars such as Michael Fellman, who chronicles the guerilla warfare of border states such as Missouri and challenges the interpretation of the war between the states as a largely rhetorical and ‘low rape’ war, even feminist scholars who have recovered, archived and republished the narratives and papers of Southern civilian women and female spies for the Confederacy have been too busy challenging the sexist assumptions of earlier scholars to explore the impact these female spies have had on contemporary outlaw iconography and political culture via their representation at populist entertainments associated with the Civil War.⁴⁴ Instead of concluding my own study with the acknowledgement that Rose Greenhow, Belle Boyd and Ginnie and Lottie Moon were not nearly as transgressive in their gender performances as suggested by early historians such as Kane, and that in fact they wielded those performances deftly in their self-representation as Confederate nationalists and loyal Southern ladies, I suggest that these female spies, because of their biological sex and because they framed themselves as gendered subjects have served as suitable ideological stand-ins for the South and the Confederacy, and, like those regional and bureaucratic entities, been characterized as hysterical, excrescent/over the top, and distinctly feminine in opposition to a United States federal government explicitly gendered as male patriarch in relation, during the Civil War, to the South and the Confederacy, and in more historically overarching contexts, in relation to the governed body politic of the United States.⁴⁵

Feminist sociologist and scholar of nationalism Nira Yuval-Davis, in her book Gender and Nation, argues that despite the fact that they have seldom enjoyed the same rights of citizenship status as have their male counterparts, women are traditionally called to stand in as representatives of the nation in its nationalist performance because of their ability to reproduce the nation both biologically and culturally. Just as historians Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelan suggest in their analysis and presentation of statistical data entitled The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life, that women are more likely than men to archive, preserve and analyze the past either professionally or in their everyday lives (largely because they have been taught that such a project falls within their purview as women), so too does Yuval-Davis argue that women serve the nation (via a complex web of both oppression and agency) as bearers of both children and culture: women serve the present by remembering the past and ensuring the future of their communities, nations and/or cultures.⁴⁶

Given Yuval-Davis’s premise that women as a category (left largely untroubled by differences of class, “race,” ethnicity, color, sexuality, etc. by nations preferring to rely primarily on clear boundaries between male and female, “masculine” performance and “feminine” performance) are used “in the service of the nation” in nationalist representations, it is not surprising that Greenhow, Boyd and the Moons have served as famed representatives of the Southern nation and the Confederacy both during the Civil War and in present-day commemorative spectacles.⁴⁷ Because these women, having the means to do so, wrote themselves into history through either their famed narratives or their embodied performances, female spies Greenhow, Boyd and the Moons have survived as historical personas. But it is because they wrote themselves (and have been written about) as gendered subjects that enables them to solve the historiographical problem of Confederate nationalism in contemporary popular cultural contexts. These female spies may represent the legacy and continuing political salience of the Confederacy because they can be framed in contemporary contexts as amusing, non-threatening and essentially entertaining personas, despite the fact that Greenhow alone is believed to have caused the deaths of well over one hundred Union soldiers when she warned Confederates of the Union army’s advance on Bull Run. Indeed, the use of attractive, interesting, adventurous, and already famous female icons to represent the Southern nation makes possible the reimagining of the South as a distinct cultural nation characterized by anti-governmental Confederate political style because, gendered female, neither the Southern nation nor the Confederate government are rendered “serious” or “legitimate” as political entities.⁴⁸ Instead, the modernist dislike and distrust of national myth and notions of socially constructed meaning such as that expressed by Garry Wills “reduces” the Southern nation and the Confederacy to an outlaw, anti-governmental cultural and political style rather than an officially recognized historical phenomenon.⁴⁹ While such an approach appears to solve the problem of Confederate nationalism from a popular and academic historiographical perspective (since neither historians nor the United States government risk losing face by conferring legitimacy on the South or the Confederacy or seeming to condone the policies protected and practiced by the Southern government), it nevertheless ignores the powerful material implications of heritage culture and the “pastpresents” embodied every time Rose Greenhow, Belle Boyd or Ginnie and/or Lottie Moon are reenacted, commemorated, or celebrated in a museum exhibit (as they are at the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C.) or in a live entertainment such as an encampment. Coined by theorist Katie King, the term “pastpresents” is meant to denote “the visible evidences that the past and the present cannot be purified each from the other.”⁵⁰ Inextricably bound up together, then, the past and the present converge in cultural heritage sites such as Plymouth Plantation and Colonial Williamsburg just as they do in the bodies of reenactors portraying female spies for the Confederacy or in filmic and other cultural representations of outlaw and anti-governmental performance. Brought back to life to stand in for the Confederacy and the Southern nation, these spies make the past live again through the materiality of the present, and both shape and suggest the myths and memories that will be used in the future. Just as Rose Greenhow, Belle Boyd and Ginnie and Lottie Moon are kept “alive” via commemoration and reenactments, so too does the Confederacy and the Southern nation re-assert itself as a powerful “pastpresent,” that has clearly made an impact on contemporary American interpretations of the nineteenth century political past and some of its most significant historical personas.

Above The Law:
Celebrity Citizenship and the Gendering of Outlaw Political Style

I would like to conclude by suggesting the contemporary cultural implications of the outlaw political style I have advanced in this case study of female spies for the Confederacy, particularly regarding the ways in which such a style relies on “pastpresents,” or references to historical personas and their attendant ideologies. Just as it has taken numerous full-length works by historians and scholars of Southern history to establish the validity of Confederate nationalism as an ideological and political product of Civil War-era culture, so too have large numbers of edited volumes and monographs been authored which suggest the continuing relevance of the Civil War and war-era ideologies in contemporary social and political culture and memory.⁵¹ One particularly useful study of the ways in which Southern and Confederate nationalism has maintained cultural relevance in contemporary political life is journalist Anatol Lieven’s 2004 text America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism. Lieven persuasively suggests that a specifically Southern regional performative (steeped in Confederate nationalist mythologies as well as a subject identity crafted out of the South’s defeat and the continued salience of the Lost Cause) not only continues to exist, but also that this performative, like the Confederate flag itself, has been largely transmuted into a generic antiauthoritarian symbol—an anti-governmental outlaw performance all its own.⁵² Particularly interested in understanding the Southeast’s post-1960s swing toward the right of the partisan political spectrum, Lieven cites not only published work, but also his own experience as a college professor in the American southeast when he argues that white hegemonic Southern culture has responded to its political and ideological defeat during the Civil War, to the chaos and turmoil of Reconstruction and to its relegation to the margins of American political life by reframing its identity as proudly defiant and gleefully reveling in not only its status as an international political embarrassment and relic of the Lost Cause, but also its depiction (especially in the urban Northeast) as a region populated by inbred, uneducated “rednecks.”⁵³ Perhaps the most cogent assertion Lieven makes, however, is one articulated by few historians or theorists of nationalism within the American academy: he argues that the combination of Confederate nationalism, Southern ethno-cultural identity, and mainstream American mockery of the South has resulted in a particularly dangerous and chauvinistic brand of American patriotism-turned-nationalist performance which has been both encouraged and adopted by George H.W. Bush’s administration in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

While Lieven’s argument is a persuasive one, it accounts only for the performance of American nationalism in opposition to a foreign enemy or another nation-state, noting the effect of such nationalist performances on domestic political life only insofar as nationalism can be understood to bind an imagined community together, producing a kind of submissive political quiescence as the body politic falls unquestioningly in line behind its leaders and the legislation they pass.⁵⁴ When such a nationalist performance is enacted by the American body politic as a nation and an imagined community, it is the United States government itself, Lieven argues, which is enabled to act the part of the outlaw (world) citizen, engaging (rightly or wrongly) in preemptive and unilateral military maneuvers in the name of securing the “homeland,” toppling foreign dictators and exporting the civic republican virtues of American style democracy. But what happens to such fundamentally anti-governmental outlaw performances of über-patriotism when they are embodied by private citizens within a domestic context? I contend that the political performatives of female spies for the Confederacy make clear, through their references to and citations of the anti-governmental political acts and styles of the past (especially given that the Confederacy, like the Union, justified its own ideologies by harkening back to the founding fathers and the establishment of the United States as an entity independent of British colonial rule) that a long American history of defiantly post-colonial, anti-governmental attitudes, and behaviors which express those attitudes, exists. Just as Confederates cited the words and personas that came before them, so too are such Confederates (and their mythological representations in and by female spies and other iconic personas associated with the Civil War-era South) referenced by contemporary political outlaws fascinated not only by Confederate interpretations of states’ rights, but also the supposedly rugged, rural, and agrarian individualism of the mid-nineteenth-century Southeast as a region.

Such contemporary outlaws include individuals such as Timothy McVeigh and the Nichols brothers, Randy Weaver, Waco cult leader David Koresh and the numerous anonymous individuals who belong to local paramilitary groups and state militias across the nation. While such organizations were officially disbanded late in the nineteenth century after the conclusion of the Civil War, the 1980s and 1990s saw a significant increase in these kinds of non-hierarchical associations of survivalists and others usually located on the far-right political fringe. How and why are such individuals, even if they never blow up a federal building or harm their fellow Americans, constructed in the mainstream media as crackpots and vigilantes, characterized by the feminizing qualities of hysteria and unfounded paranoia—and how is this treatment altered when those same paramilitary groups can be of use to the federal government by serving, in one recent example, as border patrol forces? While political theorist Richard Hofstadter has labeled such groups, their rhetoric and their performative political style as “paranoid” because, like clinically paranoid individuals, their political styling is, by his estimation, “overheated, oversuspicious, overaggressive, grandiose, and apocalyptic in expression,” the now-canonical essay in which this designation appears was originally penned in 1965, well before feminist analysis had exposed such evaluative criteria as reflective of a sense of political decorum based on decidedly masculine civic “virtue,” a word itself taken from the root “vir,” meaning “man.”⁵⁵

Just as women make the best stand-in for a feminized (read: vanquished) Confederacy and Southern nation, outlaw political ideologues of all times have been and continue to be feminized under the gaze of a mainstream political culture governed by a sense of decorum based on a white, male, middle-class performance of moderation and rationality. Indeed, one need only look at the press coverage of individuals such as McVeigh, Nichols and Ruby Ridge icon Randy Weaver to note the ways in which much is made of their failures as military personnel. Despite being awarded the Bronze Star for his service in the 1991 Gulf War (an honor he was stripped of after his conviction), McVeigh was largely depicted as an unsuccessful soldier, desiring vengeance against the United States and its citizens because of his own inability to pass the physical endurance test required for entrance to the elite Green Berets.⁵⁶ What a study of gender and the construction and performance of outlaw political style, whether the case study is of female spies for the Confederacy or activist/terrorist members of contemporary paramilitary groups, is the fact of bureaucratic hegemony and gendered nationalist discourse. Whether the political causes of the loser is or has ever been attractive (as it most surely is not in the case of the Confederacy), what is exceedingly clear is that as long as the winner writes history for the bureaucratic state to teach to its body politic, only those entities already imbued with political validity get the privilege of interpreting the Constitution and other founding documents and, accordingly, evaluating the legitimacy of the actions of individuals and groups whose political beliefs and behaviors reference those documents for justification. Any other groups attempting to justify their (illegal) actions via their interpretation of these documents as a higher authority than extant political structures are and will continue to be contained by a governmentally-sponsored rhetoric which constructs such groups and individuals as excrescent and out of control—just as crazy, treacherous and unpredictable as Harnett T. Kane regarded female spies for the Confederacy.

Notes

Kristen A. Williams is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. She has worked for the Rhode Island Affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union and the pro-choice National Abortion Federation. Her current research focuses on the regionalist and nationalist narratives associated with and produced by industrial heritage sites and historical tourism in Rhode Island.