[The following takes place during the American Civil War.]
Perhaps the murkiest personage to turn up at Fort Pillow in those early April days was a sturdy, black-haired young woman of about twenty-six years of age named Mollie Pittman. She was born Mary Ann Pittman, the sole child of a poor Kentucky laborer who moved the family to Dyer county before the war to work for Thomas Buchanan, a future captain in the 15th Tennessee Cavalry. She grew into a quick-witted, dauntless woman with a “deep, dark, penetrating eye,” and when war broke out she assisted W. H. Craig in raising an infantry company known as the Bell Greys. Pittman appears to have passed herself off as Thomas Phillips, serving as a substitute for the real Tom Phillips, a Dyer County carpenter. As Phillips she rose to company commander until her discharge in May 1862, after which she and some of her men joined Forrest’s cavalry, where she took the name Rawley and again served briefly as a lieutenant. Perhaps it was after her gender was discovered that Forrest, impressed by her pluck and gift for impersonation, enlisted her to act as a spy and smuggler under the name Mary Hays.
Her chief assignment was to purchase supplies – mostly small arms and ammunition – from the secessionist Beauvais family of St. Louis and convey them down to Forrest. Joining a secret copperhead society known as the Southern League, she made three trips before her capture, and it was after her third run, as she was pausing at Randolph, that she received orders from Forrest to meet him at his camp some ten miles from Fort Pillow to pick up a rebel uniform and resume her masquerade as Lieutenant Rowley. “He said he would rather detail ten of his best officers for this business,” she bragged, “than lose my services at that time.”
[…]
[Later, after being picked up by Union forces] Pittman was placed in isolation at Irving Block prison, and remained at Memphis telling the authorities her tales, and impressing them with a knowledge of military affairs that few civilians, or officers, for that matter, could match. She said she had learned from an encounter with Forrest that Lincoln’s secretary of the treasury Salmon Chase was a copperhead who had exchanged twenty thousand dollars in Federal greenbacks for nine hundred dollars’ worth of Confederate gold. She claimed that members of the Southern League put on blackface to pose as colored troops and went around St. Louis killing Union pickets. She informed on her fellow prisoners for giving secret signals to passersby.
At last the authorities proposed, supposedly with the blessing of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, that she prove her fidelity to the Union by visiting the Beauvais family in St. Louis, to see if they would continue to do business with her, ostensibly on behalf of the Confederacy. Apparently she did as she was told, for she was present when the Yankees arrested the senior Beauvais in his store. But it is no surprise that after the war Mary Ann “Mollie” Pittman – aka Thomas Phillips, aka Lieutenant Rawley, aka Mary Simpson, Timms, or Hays – would entirely vanish.
Source:
Ward, Andrew. “All is Quiet.” River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre in the American Civil War. Viking, 2005. 130-32. Print.
Original Source Listed:
Willoughby, “Bayonets and Bloomers.”
Further Reading:
If you enjoy this type of content, please consider donating to my Patreon!
No comments, yet...