Emma Green: The Making of a Southern Identity

 

 

Election Day: It was a Thursday in May 1859, the 26th – another school day, perhaps at the Wentworth Seminary for Young Ladies, for Emma Green. Emma was the 16-year-old daughter of the richest man in the City of Alexandria. Her father James was a prominent entrepreneur who topped the city in his declared wealth in the 1860 census and was the third richest by taxes paid in 1859. Over the next three years, Emma and her family, influenced by family ties and by the events of a war that engulfed them, slowly transferred their loyalty from the Union to the Confederacy.
 
The Setting: A decade earlier (in 1848) James had acquired the grand Carlyle House mansion on North Fairfax Street, built in 1753 and originally, before land filling commenced, fronting the banks of the Potomac. It was the most elegant residence in the city. At the same time he also bought the adjacent three-story building, with its furnished and naturally-lit basement, which had once housed the Bank of Alexandria. The bank had failed in 1834 and efforts to find a consistent purpose for this imposing building in the hard times that prevailed had not succeeded; it had been used over those 14 years as medical offices, a US Post Office, and sections of it as a large luxury apartment. 
 
But the economy was improving by the late 1840s and by 1849 Green had transformed the former bank building into an elegant hotel with a first class restaurant in its spacious basement. So successful was this enterprise that in 1855 Green began a massive extension of the hotel, building across the Fairfax Street space in front of Carlyle House to the next adjoining commercial building. Green designed an edifice with over 100 rooms, rising to four stories for half of the space and then reducing to three stories to become symmetrical with the bank building. This massive project created what was probably at the time the largest single building in Alexandria. It was testimony to James Green’s vision, business acumen, and energy. With great patience, Green had acquired land and buildings around Carlyle House; his plans were long-term, both for his family and his adopted city.
 
The 1850s were a boom time for white Alexandria, after years of depressed circumstances, lost opportunities, and many commercial and industrial failures. The Green family helped generate this boom and rose with it. Green’s Mansion House Hotel, under James’ proprietorship, was easily the largest and most luxurious hotel in town, and one of the notable hotels on the east coast. But it was all short-lived.
 
The Civil War brought freedom for Alexandria’s enslaved population (1,237 in 1860, ten percent of the town population) and a small step toward equality for the equally large free black population (1,342 in 1860). But in other respects, Alexandria was devastated by the War. Although skirmishes and battles were close by, they never directly touched the city. Indirectly it was deeply affected: Alexandria was for those five years a garrison town; Green’s grand hotel became a bloody battlefield hospital, the rent promised for it was not paid until after James Green’s death, the furniture factory was confiscated to be a prison for Union deserters. Politically, the Greens became Southerners. 
 
It was not always so. The 1860 census conflates the hotel and Carlyle House, listing as Green family residents Emma; her sister Lydia, two years older; as well as her mother Jane, 56; and father James, 57. The family shifted accommodation repeatedly. In the chimera years before the War, Emma sometimes stopped in the hotel or Carlyle House, now behind and almost surrounded by the hotel, or sometimes stayed in their country home at The Grove, a 232-acre farm, three miles from town within walking distance of school. Sometimes Stephen referred to The Grove as “home” and other times suggested home was the house on South Fairfax Street in which he, and James Edwin, rented rooms from their brother John; his most consistent attachment was to their old family home: a three story duplex with dormer windows on Prince Street purchased by James in 1839. It would be to the Prince Street house (now numbered 212 and 214) that Stephen and his parents would move after the occupation of their hotel by the US Army.
 
The Family: Emma was part of a large, cooperative and hard-working family: three brothers who lived in town and worked in the family businesses and three older sisters, married to Virginia boys. James in particular was distraught when Emma’s little sister, Alice, and the youngest in the family, died in March of 1860 after a seemingly sudden and unexpected illness.

The Greens were hands-on business people, remarkably busy and hard working. In some sense they, like many English families, lived “above the shop.”  Perhaps to compensate for their proximity to the new hotel business, James had also constructed a large portico on the back of Carlyle House, extending the first floor outdoors, giving the family, to the degree Carlyle House was family quarters, a splendid view of the Potomac and perhaps providing a degree of privacy.
 
The extended Green family was also large, close, and rapidly expanding to include cousins, uncles, aunts, grandchildren, and in-laws from both sides. Jane Muir Green was the daughter of another local furniture-making family originally from Scotland. James and Jane were both first generation British immigrants and part of highly aspirational families in the same trade.  Emma’s two oldest sisters, Mary and Elizabeth Jane, married into the Stringfellow family of Culpeper, as would Emma herself, after the War. Sarah married into the Jacobs family and Lydia never married. Three of the girls, including Emma, chose husbands who were or became Episcopalian ministers, perhaps a measure or means of this British family fitting into American society.
 
Mansion House Hotel in 1859 was a bustling place, for in addition to members of the family it housed many boarders, several white domestic servants, and 16 slaves. This labor force, free and enslaved, was kept busy cleaning the chambers, serving food, assisting guests and running the stables. James owned one of those slaves and rented in the others, ten from owners in the adjacent countryside and five from fellow townspeople. Eleven of the slaves were male, and all but three were listed in the census as “mulatto,” as were three of the five female slaves. The men were mostly young, 18 to 26; two of the females were children, 8 and 12; the three women were all listed as 40 years of age.
 
For Emma’s three brothers, John William, Stephen Alexander, and James Edwin (Jim), May 26, 1859 was Election Day: the day when they would stand among other men, mostly older than they were, and declare out loud their choice of candidates standing for the US Congress and four state offices: member of the Virginia House of Delegates, governor and lieutenant governor and attorney general. The Green brothers unanimously chose the candidates of the Opposition Party, office after office, right down the line. As it turned out, this was the last state election before the secession crisis engulfed Virginia and Alexandria.   
 
The two older brothers, John and Stephen, together owned Alexandria’s finest furniture factory: the three-story Green & Brother factory, with its fine copula and clock to announce the time to its workers, was at the north-east corner of South Fairfax and Prince Streets. Their father James was a renowned cabinetmaker, manufacturer, and industrial pioneer. For many years he had made furniture for fine hotels like the Planter’s Hotel in St. Louis and for many of Virginia’s most eminent families, including the Lees. (The desk in Appomattox Courthouse on which Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant was made by the James Green Furniture Factory.) In the mid-1850s, with his flourishing hotel to occupy his time, James Sr. had handed over this manufacturing business, factory, and its purpose-built machinery to his two oldest sons. They employed 26 workers but both were themselves skilled cabinetmakers; James Edwin, too, was probably learning their trade.
 
Furniture and furniture for hotels ran in the family tradition. James Green Sr. had expanded the hugely successful furniture manufacturing business set up by his father William, an English immigrant in 1817. He would furnish his own hotel with his own company’s furniture and in 1860 James would say that his occupation was now “hotel keeper.”
 
The census of 1860 would also show that all three brothers and their families shared a large two-story home also on Fairfax Street, on the west side between Prince and Duke Streets, around the corner from the long-held house on Prince Street, and kitty-corner from the family’s furniture factory. John converted this house to a duplex after the War. This building exists today as 207 and 209 South Fairfax Street. The furniture factory still stands, too, converted to an apartment building.
 
The first generation Greens were young people and their sharing of the Fairfax Street house marked their transition to independence. John, who was listed as owner of the house, was the oldest at 32 in 1859. His wife Fanny was 26, as was Stephen. Maggie, Stephen’s wife, was 21, as was the youngest brother James; his wife Annie was just 19.  James had his 21st birthday on the 14th of April and the May 26 election was the first in which he could vote.
 
Slavery, Religion and Politics: Unlike their hotelier father, neither the brothers nor their wives were directly involved in slave ownership or renting although with two baby boys and two youngsters, a boy and a girl, between them, they surely needed domestic help, and just as surely could have afforded to buy slaves, or rent them. But this was not the family inclination. The Grove was a large farm, producing mixed crops, and was worked by free labor, as was the furniture factory, one of the largest employers in the city. James rented in many slaves; he owned a single slave.
 
Like their father and mother, the three Green brothers were members of St Paul’s Episcopal Church. Over half of the 59 men who were members of their church owned slaves: some very many slaves. Three of the 67 women who were members of St. Paul’s also owned or rented slaves.  This household of married Green children (unlike Emma, Lydia, and Alice who lived with their parents) may have benefited from the white and black labor employed and enslaved at the family’s high class hotel.  
 
The church was important to the Greens. As an upwardly mobile immigrant family, they’d had to create a social context for themselves. Family connections mattered, and with seven daughters and three sons, marriage was an excellent way to make the connections, but with consequences. Maggie and Annie, married to Stephen and James Edwin, were both members of the St Paul’s congregation: perhaps the young couples had met at church. Fanny, John’s wife, was not listed as a member of any church.
 
The brothers all voted in Ward 2, in front of the City Council Chambers at the corner of Cameron and North Royal, just a block up from the hotel. Two hundred and eighteen men voted, but the Green brothers did not step up together. John, the eldest, voted first, about halfway through the election, among a group of well-off Opposition voters. James was next, 43 voters later, participating in his first election, and doing so among a group of less well-off Opposition voters and then, 13 voters after his younger brother, came Stephen, first to declare among a group of nine Opposition voters. But their father did not vote.
 
Most of St. Paul’s male parishioners did vote: a turnout of 73 percent, well above the city average. And they voted for the Opposition Party candidates.  Alexandria had long been a Whig city, befitting its commercial nature. With the collapse of the national Whig party, Alexandria became a stronghold of the Opposition Party, while the Democrats had increased almost everywhere else in Virginia, agitating on the slavery issue and the ominous rise of the Republican Party to the North. The members of St. Paul’s were politically united: 18 voted a straight ticket, three of whom were the Green brothers. Another 19 voted mostly Opposition with a few votes for Democratic candidates. The Democratic Party secured only two straight ticket voters from St. Paul’s parishioners, with another four calling out an Opposition candidate for some of the five offices being elected.  Fifteen others, like James Green Senior, did not vote at all: St. Paul’s minister, George Norton, did not vote, but non-voting was an unusual decision for a pillar of the community like James Green.
 
Northern Views in a Southern City: The political orientation of James Green was well known, however. A few years earlier, in 1854, he had been elected to Alexandria’s Common Council as a Whig. But he was not a voter in subsequent elections. Indeed it was the threat of war that seems to have again propelled James into more overt political activities. He voted with Stephen and John in the 1860 and 1861 municipal elections, calling out his support for Opposition candidates, even when his sons strayed to support a Democrat for local office.
 
The family was not a quick convert to the Confederate cause, and perhaps James Edwin, the youngest, led the way. In February, 1860, John was one of 90 delegates from Alexandria to the Opposition Party convention in Richmond – a last-ditch effort to create a viable political party to stand against the local Democrats and the national Republicans. Stephen in his diaries left the most indelible trail of partisan engagement including
·      attending the local Whig Convention in February 1859
·      engaging in and excited by the March municipal and May state elections, fixing up the wareroom at the factory in preparation for the local conventions and elections
·      attending May ratification meetings for John Bell and Edward Everett, president and vice president candidates of the Constitutional Union Party, in Alexandria and Baltimore
·      attempting to attend the June 18 adjourned national Democratic convention in Baltimore in expectation that moderate Stephen Douglas would be nominated for president. Turned away as he had no ticket, Stephen attended rally in Monument Square
·      noted in July the excitement of rallies for the John Breckenridge and Joseph Lane, Southern Democrat candidates for president and vice president 
·      attending in September a Bell and Everett meeting; noting meetings of Breckenridge and Lane, Douglas and Herschel Johnson,
·      writing on election day, November 7, 1860 that “Alex has done well for the Union” as the city polled overwhelming for Bell and Everett.
 
Other city businessmen also tended to vote Opposition: this was the voting choice of the progressive elite who looked to commerce, railroad development, transportation improvements and manufacturing for the city’s future. While many were slave-owners or, like James Green, rented in slaves for their businesses, few indeed voted for a political party agitating the slavery issue. James’ clerk at the hotel, Samuel F Gregory, 43, called out a vote for the full slate of Opposition candidates, but the bookkeeper, George S. Stewart, 33, was an exception and voiced a split ticket, mostly for Democratic candidates.
  
This early summer day was the culmination of weeks of public meetings and heated discussions in Alexandria, and within Emma’s family, too.
 
The Southern View: The extended Green family was divided in its political views with the support for the increasingly assertive Democrats far clearer on the in-law side. James had largely absented himself from voting; in 1860 and 1861 he again appeared at the polls, still an Opposition advocate as were his three sons. But his sons-in-law, much more linked to the slave economy, would likely have voted Democratic. The Stringfellow family of Culpeper, into which Emma’s two older sisters had married, was a far more traditional Southern family than the Greens. The Stringfellows were country people, and planters, and deeply committed to the retention of slavery; their influence was powerful and would prove profound for the Greens.
 
The oldest Green daughter, Mary, had married Rev. Horace Stringfellow in 1849 and had three children. In 1850 Horance and Mary were living with the Green family in Alexandria but would soon move to the country. Elizabeth Jane had married Robert Stanton Stringfellow (Stant), son of a Culpeper plantation owner, five years later and had a little girl, Annie. Robert’s uncle, Benjamin Franklin Stringfellow, was Missouri’s attorney general, and a ‘border ruffian’. Thornton Stringfellow, another uncle, was a Baptist minister in Culpeper who became known for his liturgical defense of slavery. And then there was another Benjamin Franklin Stringfellow: “Frank,” the soon-to-be Confederate spy, and Emma’s future husband.
 
Frank was Robert’s brother, and like their ruffian uncle, was named Benjamin Franklin, but was known as Frank. He had come to Alexandria’s Episcopal High School, as had so many of his family, for his education, arriving in 1858 and graduating in 1860. Emma met 18-year-old Frank, years earlier, perhaps in Culpeper when visiting her sister and niece or perhaps in the Green Mansion House Hotel dining rooms. He was, after all, a brother-in-law, a young student in town, and they were both Episcopalians. And James Edwin, Emma’s youngest brother, had been a student at Episcopal High School too, from 1850 to 1853, as the school was emerging as a local institution with strong Southern views.
 
Frank was a charming, enterprising young man – a surprising fellow because, at five foot six and slightly built, many people thought him much younger. They tended to underestimate him: but not Emma! She and Frank soon had an understanding. They became sweethearts, and determined to marry one day. Frank held firm views: a Southerner through and through. James Green Sr., however, was withholding his consent, as Emma’s father, considering Frank, a student, too poor to marry. Frank went, after graduation, to Mississippi to teach Latin and Greek and to provide for his future wife. But by the time of Frank’s graduation from the Episcopal High School in 1860, the world was starting to turn upside down.
 
Conflicted: Perhaps James Green, unlike his sons, was unwilling to announce his political views in 1859, as some businessmen were. As tension mounted he remained firmly on the non-Democratic side. But James Green must have felt himself with increasingly conflicted loyalties. He was the son of an immigrant – was in fact an immigrant himself because he had arrived in the United States with his parents as a 16-year-old. He had come from a country that had eliminated from its empire the slave trade even while he was still in England and then, shortly after the Greens came to America, slavery itself – and yet he was a slave owner, and had been so, and now “rented in” many more. By going into the hotel business, he had moved from manufacturing, which employed labor, mostly free, to the Southern hospitality industry, which was heavily dependent on slave labor. And of course England, whatever its views on slavery, was economically dependent on Southern cotton for its textile mills. The British Government supported Southern secession and toyed with recognition of the Confederacy as a separate nation: Robert E. Lee’s attack northward to Gettysburg was calculated to produce exactly this political result.  
 
Yet as a leading citizen James Green shared the obsessions and interests of the Industrial Revolution, having experienced the potential of railroads and machinery. The Green family had always been proud to make fine furniture for many customers, some public, some private, but particularly for hotels, including Mansion House, and for the plantation elite. In 1834, when James bought the three-story brick building on the corner of Prince and Fairfax Streets in Alexandria and transformed it into a furniture factory, he immediately installed advanced steam engines for sawing and turning wood. By the 1850s, because of the railway, merchants from the Shenandoah Valley, and far beyond, made up a large customer base for the furniture company. Stephen’s diaries record furniture shipments, which he assembled, to be transported by train, by boat and by wagon, much of it heading north.
 
James was a mainstay of Alexandria’s business ambitions. As a capitalist and entrepreneur he had been a director of the Alexander Canal Company and the Mount Vernon Cotton Factory; he had built a coal wharf for transshipping Appalachian coal coming down the C & O Canal into Alexandria. He was one of the incorporators of the Alexandria Water Company. He dealt in city and country real estate, owned a lumber yard and sold building supplies. As a philanthropist, he was a director of the Orphan Asylum and each year took in orphans to train up in his furniture factory as apprentices. He was a leading force in shaping Alexandria’s economic future, as his politics indicated.
 
James had initially set up his furniture business in Washington D.C. and his family retained very close ties with the city, just eight miles away and so easily reached, by boat, by omnibus, and by railroad cars. Alexandria’s commercial rival, Baltimore, was also on the family travel schedule; Stephen’s wife was a Baltimore girl and he was a frequent visitor for trade. Hyde Park, New York, was another family tie northward, and James’ will would list his many properties in Brooklyn. And the Midwest, too, was on the family map; several of the Green girls would shelter in Indianapolis during the Civil War. 
 
Canny James was all business, and hotels were part of the family business model too. In 1848, when James created the Mansion House Hotel, initially just in the defunct Bank of Alexandria building, it was a fateful move.
 
As an hotelier, saloon keeper and restaurant owner, James had shifted economies, and now owned and rented many slaves to maintain the competitive edge for his luxury hotel. So did other hotel owners: Samuel Hefleblower at Gatsby’s Tavern depended on the labor of 20 slaves. Slave ownership did not yet determine politics. Thus Hefeblower announced a vote for every one of the Opposition candidates. But a personal stake in the issue of the moment must have troubled a rational business mind.  Other smaller hotel owners were mixed in their politics, a few voting Democratic like Thomas Huntington at the Virginia House on the docks. Some did not vote at all, like James Green, and like Martin Maddox at the prestigious Marshall House Hotel.  
 
Knowing that James Green had family members, customers and guests in both camps, the Election Day crowd would have been interested to hear whether the wealthiest man in Alexandria, and the owner of the city’s preeminent place of lodging, would vote alongside and with his sons, or unexpectedly stand with Virginia’s Democrats. They would have been disappointed when James did not appear.
 
Torn between Frank and her brothers, Democrat and Opposition, Emma, even more than her father, would have felt the full force of the political storm that that swirled around her.
 
Two years later: On May 23, 1861, in an election with a remarkably low turnout, Virginians ratified the secession of their state from the United States. That night five Union army regiments entered Alexandria across the Long Bridge spanning the Potomac, others came via the C & O Aqueduct, another landed by boat.  There was no resistance; there were two needless deaths.
 
On October 30, C.A. Foley, Surgeon General of the US Army, offered to rent the Mansion House Hotel as a hospital for $750 a month beginning November 11, foreseeing accommodation for 1000 patients; James agreed and the family had two weeks to empty the hotel of guests and the furniture which the family factory had largely supplied. The Greens remained owners of Carlyle House, but the family many members of the family dispersed, with Stephen and his parents residing again at the Prince Street house.
 
At the conclusion of his 1861 diary, Stephen Green, in Alexandria, lamented: “How is it with our once happy family scattered from their homes.” He counted one brother, John, the eldest, on the farm at Centerville and another, James, the youngest, in the army of the South. John was perhaps the most moderate of the three brothers. James Edwin was a founding member of the Old Dominion Virginia Rifles, joining up in December, 1860, even before hostilities had begun. Stephen’s diary recorded their, and his, and his father’s movement into the Confederate cause.  
 
His sisters were scattered too: three in Indianapolis, Indiana, likely Mary, whose minister-husband, was rector at St. Paul’s Episcopal, and probably also the two single girls, Lydia and Emma. Jane Eliza (Jeanie) was in Culpeper and possibly Sarah too. Stephen concluded: “I am the only one left here with my parents prisoners to submit to any insult [and] not being allowed to move from town.” “Houses burnt and women turnout of doors in the cold winter storms [,] even their beds taken from them meary [sic] because their husbands chose to think for themselves.” He ended with a prayer, “Wilt Thou in thy infinite mercy change the hearts of our enemy [emphasis added] and cause them to see the error of their ways and bring peace once more upon the two countrys [sic].”  
 
The Greens, an English immigrant family engaged in transformative trade and technology and part of an expanding national economy, transited first to a divergent extended family with a newly shared interest in slavery and now were becoming an extended family united in support of the Confederacy and the preservation of a slave economy.
 
Four years later: In 1863 the Civil War raged and Alexandria was essentially a military camp for the defense of Washington. James Green’s hotel was now a vast military hospital with 1,000 sick, wounded and dying soldiers; the family furniture factory had been requisitioned by the US Army and became a prison for Union deserters. Emma was once again in Alexandria, in all likelihood living with her parents at their old Prince Street home, around the corner from what had been their factory, now a US Army prison.
 
James Edwin had become a Lieutenant in Company H of the 17th Virginia Infantry and John had joined the armies of the Confederacy, rising from captain to major in the Army of Tennessee. James Senior and Jane and Stephen remained in Alexandria; in February 1862 father and son were arrested for assisting Confederate soldiers and imprisoned in Washington.
 
Emma’s beau Frank had joined the Confederate Army, becoming a captain in the 4th Virginia Cavalry, a “confidential scout” (as a memorial on his gravestone puts it) for Jeb Stuart, and a spy: he went undercover in Alexandria, posing as a dental assistant but gathering information about Union troop movements. As the story goes, Emma knew and helped. According to the story told by historian and author Virginia Morton, one day “Stringfellow proceeded to Emma’s house alone but discovered Union officers occupying the upper levels. Undeterred, he crept into the cellar from the back of the house and asked Emma’s maid to fetch her… Emma agreed to call on the informers and returned within a few hours with vital information of Union Gen. Irvin McDowell’s planned attack.”
 
Through 1863 Emma would sometimes meet with Frank, now based in Alexandria and posing as a store delivery person – cover for trips into Washington DC to visit Southern informers in the War Department. They were extended stays at times; Frank wrote of “[s]ix happy weeks we spent in the city of Alex.”
 
Six years later: In early 1865 at gatherings of Union friends in Washington, Emma rendezvoused with Frank who was under cover, gathering intelligence for Jefferson Davis and courting both Emma and disaster. By the end of the war, Stringfellow was known as the most dangerous man in the Confederacy, with a $10,000 bounty placed on his head.
 
Later that year, after the end of the war, General Robert E. Lee’s wife entrusted John W. Green, who by then owned Mansion House, to store the Lees’ Arlington possessions in his warehouse, including many of the Lee’s most treasured pieces of furniture, among which were items made in James Green’s furniture factory.
 
James fought the US government through the courts for years, seeking the monthly rent of $750 that he had been promised to turn over his hotel to the Union Army, adding a claim for $5000 in damages. He refused to sign the federal loyalty oath for fear, he said, that this would lead to confiscation of his other properties in Virginia; his claims were thus denied “as he was believed disloyal.” Finally on May 5, 1865, the day the Confederate government was dissolved, James Green took a highly qualified oath of loyalty, declaring that “I have not since the first day of January, 1864, voluntarily in any way, given aid or assistance to those in rebellion against the Government of the United States.” The fight with the US government for rent and damages continued.
 
Eight years later: By 1867 James Edwin had joined his brother Stephen at Green and Brother, the furniture manufacturer, replacing John. And in 1867 Emma married Frank, who had returned from his flight to Canada. In 1876 he became an Episcopalian minister and a popular speaker, telling the tales of his Civil War exploits. They had five children.
 
Twenty-one years later: In Alexandria, on August 22, 1880, Jane Muir Green died and was buried at Ivy Hill Cemetery. In Alexandria, eighteen days later, on September 8, James Green Senior died and he, too, was buried at Ivy Hill Cemetery.
 
Twenty-four years later: On January 29, 1883, the US government awarded the late James Green Senior $32,750 for 43 months and 20 days rent of Green’s Mansion House Hotel, but denied the claim for damages.
 
“Dark and dangerous as these days were they were not without much to make them among the happiest days of the war. I was at that time engaged to a young lady living in Alex. and when she came to see her Union friends in Washington, I laid aside all thought of danger and was happy even while in hourly danger of a terrible death. She has since rewarded me for my constancy by giving me her hand. And five children have heard from her how hard it is to say ‘No’ to a soldier who will come through such danger to do his courting.
 
~ Frank Stringfellow on his courtship of Emma Green ~
For more, visit emmaofalexandria.com.