By Brian D. Kowell
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2023, All Rights Reserved
Editor’s note: This article was originally published in The Charger in December 2023.
“If I could only see her once more, I feel that exile would lose its terror.”1
“[I] am growing very anxious to rec. letters, especially . . . fr. VBM . . . [she] is my chief source of anxiety. I fear I may have to go to some foreign land without ever bidding adieu to my best & most loved friend.”2
“Am at a loss to hear from VBM. Must see her on my release at all events.”3
So wrote Ohio soldier James Parks Caldwell in his diary. Countless soldiers in the Civil War wrote to their wives and sweethearts, longing to see them. What makes Caldwell’s situation unique is that he was imprisoned at Johnson’s Island Prison in Sandusky Bay, Ohio, and his sweetheart was a rebel spy.
Parks, as Caldwell was called by his family, was born March 27, 1841 in Monroe, a small town in southwestern Ohio. Butler County, where Monroe sits, is a region known for a considerable population of Shaker people. He was the first of eight children born to Dr. W.W. Caldwell and Isabella H. Parks Caldwell. Both parents were of Scotch-Irish descent and were staunch Presbyterians and Democrats.4
Parks was a bright boy. When his principal at the local academy informed his father that Parks had passed everything offered in the course of study, Dr. Caldwell decided, despite Parks being only 13-years-old, to enroll him at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He entered on September 2, 1854.5
Miami University was founded in 1809 and had a distinguished faculty. Among its members was Professor William H. McGuffey of McGuffey Readers fame. Many of Parks’ classmates became important men after graduation, such as future United States President Benjamin Harrison, noted journalist and ambassador Whitelaw Reid, and Parks’ roommate, Benjamin P. Runkle, who would become a Union brevet brigadier general in the Civil War. Parks, Runkle, and five others formed the Sigma Chi Fraternity at Miami University in 1854.6
So who was VBM, and how did Parks find himself imprisoned on Johnson’s Island?
In 1855, Parks’ sister Isabella enrolled at Ohio Women’s College (sometimes referred to as Oxford Female College). Isabella introduced her brother to her closest classmate, Virginia “Ginnie” Bethel Moon. They had a lot in common. Ginnie’s father was also a doctor, Dr. Robert S. Moon, who migrated to southwestern Ohio from Virginia in the 1830s. The Moons were staunch Democrats, and despite freeing their slaves, believed in states’ rights and had strong southern ties through family connections in Memphis, Tennessee and Panola County, Mississippi. Ginnie, like Parks, came from a large family of six children, being the youngest born on July 22, 1844 and three years younger than Parks. She was small, dark haired, with big blue eyes, a small nose, and a quick smile. She was spirited, flamboyant, high-strung, and charming. When Ginnie’s father died, her mother enrolled her at Ohio Women’s College and moved to Memphis. Parks had never met anyone quite like Ginnie Moon and was soon smitten.7
Parks graduated in 1857 and went to Iowa to visit an uncle. While away, his father moved the family and his medical practice and apothecary to the bigger town of Hamilton, Ohio. Upon his return, Parks decided to study law in the office of Judge James Clark, who married Ginnie’s older sister Charlotte “Lottie” Moon. When Judge Clark left the bench to return to private law practice, the Clarks resided in Mrs. Moon’s house, which is now known as the Lottie Moon house. It is there that Parks took up residence to study law. After the outbreak of the war, Clark became the leader in the Butler County Copperhead movement. It is easy to imagine how Parks was influenced by the Clark’s political leanings and his empathy for Ginnie’s strong pro-southern feelings.8
Ginnie’s fierce pride for her beloved South was paramount in her demand to be released from school when a professor criticized her pro-southern leanings. Being so young, this was denied. Legend has it, she somehow found a gun and proceeded to shoot out the stars of the American flag in the school’s courtyard and followed up by scratching “Hurrah for Jeff Davis” on windows with her diamond ring. Her actions got her expelled. She was remanded to the custody of her sister Lottie, where she and Parks found themselves under the same roof. This might have pleased Parks, but it did not please the Clarks.9
The Clarks soon decided to send Ginnie south to be with her mother and sister Mollie in Memphis. Parks soon followed. Dr. Caldwell recorded:
“J.P.C. left Hamilton Oct. 7, 1858 for Mississippi. Reached Memphis October 16. Left Memphis for Panola, Oct. 21. God bless my dear son.”10
Parks stayed as a guest of the Moons in Memphis and in Panola and decided to settle in the South, teaching the children on the plantation of Colonel Freeman Irby. As other plantation owners in Panola County began to send their children to be taught, Parks organized a school that he named Palmetto Academy near Como, Mississippi.11
Why does any man do what he does? Is it ultimately for the love of a woman? And how does that woman change his life forever?
Two former students from the Palmetto Academy told an agent for the modern historian of Sigma Chi Fraternity that “he [Parks] came to Mississippi with a family named Moon from Ohio and that he was in love with a young lady in that family named Miss Ginnie Moon, and on that account when the family moved South from Ohio, he came South.”12
With the outbreak of the war and the increase in hostilities, Ginnie, Mollie, and their mother began to make bandages for the Confederate cause. Ginnie’s brothers all enlisted with the Confederate army. Ginnie also began to travel back and forth between Memphis and Hamilton, Ohio, hiding medicines, possibly supplied from Dr. Caldwell, and other much needed supplies on her person (the “Petticoat Express”) and passing any information to the Confederate authorities. The Memphis Commercial Appeal wrote, “She needed no pass to get through the Union lines. Her eyes and her way won her permission.”13
Parks warmly espoused the Confederate cause and not wanting to disappoint Ginnie, enlisted in Hoole’s Company, Mississippi Light Artillery (Pettus Flying Artillery or Hudson Battery) as a private. Because of his education, he was soon promoted to second lieutenant. Parks saw action at Shiloh on April 6-7, 1862. Commanded by Captain Alfred Hudson and attached to Brigadier General John Bowen’s Brigade, the battery unlimbered on the south side of Locust Grove Branch near the Peach Orchard in support of the attacking Confederate infantry. Captain Hudson was killed in the action along with many of the men. On the second day, the battery supported Bowen’s brigade near the Eastern Corinth Road and took additional losses. After the battle, casualties were so high in the battery that the men who were left were transferred to Watson’s Louisiana Battery while camped in Jackson, Mississippi in summer 1862.14
One day the new second lieutenant was given dispatches to deliver to headquarters in Jackson. While there he purchased “a new uniform on my fresh promotion to the lofty position of Second Lieut.” While in town he heard of captured Union officers there waiting to be exchanged. He knew that his fraternity brother Runkle was at Shiloh, and he decided to ride his horse to the prison to see if any officers from Ohio were incarcerated. Arriving at the makeshift prison, he shouted up to a group of Union officers in a second story window, “Any Ohio men up there?” A Major Van Horn announced himself as being from Ohio, and Parks asked if he or any of the other Ohio men had attended Miami. Getting a negative answer, Parks said, “I’m from Ohio myself,” to which the Union officer responded, “Those are d—d queer clothes for an Ohio man to wear.”15
Ginnie Moon continued to act as a courier carrying dispatches from Memphis to Hamilton. When Memphis fell to Union forces in June 1862, she began to carry information to Brigadier General Nathan Bedford Forrest. She was said to have swallowed an important message to Forrest to prevent it from falling into Union hands. She was under suspicion of spying and left Memphis for safety in Grenada, Mississippi.
Watson’s Louisiana Battery was attached to Bowen’s Third Brigade in Major General Mansfield Lovell’s First Division, District of Mississippi in Major General Earl Van Dorn’s Army of West Tennessee. On October 3-4 Generals Earl Van Dorn and Sterling Price attacked the Federals from northwest of the town of Corinth, Mississippi. Parks was in the middle of a maelstrom on October 4.16
Lovell’s Division was positioned on a ridge on the far Confederate right flank. He was ordered to assault Battery Phillips when the main Confederate attack went forward to attack Battery Robinett, but Lovell refused to move. Bowen, frustrated and taking matters in his own hands, ordered his brigade’s sharpshooters forward while the remainder of his infantry lay prone behind the crest of the ridge. He then ordered four guns of Watson’s Battery forward to their support. As they dropped tail into battery, a dozen Federal cannon opened fire. The fire was so hot that Watson’s Battery “only fired two rounds before it had to retire,” wrote one Mississippian. Another wrote, “less than five minutes there was scarcely a man, horse, gun carriage, or caisson left of the outfit.” Luckily Parks was unhurt. Van Dorn and Price’s forces were repulsed and retreated to Holly Springs, Mississippi and eventually to Jackson, where Van Dorn would be replaced by Major General John C. Pemberton. After the war when perusing the Official Records, Parks discovered, “That General Bowen in his report of the Corinth campaign has done me the honor to class me among those ‘conspicuous for coolness and courage during the action and on the retreat.’”17
According to Parks, his battery was camped at Greenwood, Mississippi on December 29, 1862, then marched to Vaiden, Mississippi where they camped on January 20, 1863, arriving finally in Jackson, Mississippi on February 14, 1863.18 Greenwood is about 21 miles from Grenada, and Parks apparently discovered that Ginnie was there staying with friends, the McLeans. The record is unclear whether Parks ever met with Ginny there. But before marching to Vaiden he wrote, “Just before leaving I went to Mr. McLeans to bid my friend farewell, & much to my disappointment, found her gone.”19
Ginnie Moon may have returned to Memphis, perhaps engaging in another smuggling trip to Ohio. She evidently traveled to the Jackson, Mississippi headquarters of Major General Sterling Price. Her visit was prompted by articles published in J.W. Tucker’s Jackson newspaper, The Argus. In those articles, Tucker strongly hinted that General Price was the de facto military head of a movement to create a Northwest Confederacy and that he was trying to coordinate these efforts with the Copperhead organizations in the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa. Ginnie offered to carry dispatches from Price to the leaders of the Ohio Knights of the Golden Circle. Price acquiesced to her request when she explained her Ohio origins, her connection with Judge Clark, and her brother-in-law’s Copperhead connections and close association with Clement C. Vallandigham.20
With Pemberton’s army defending Vicksburg from Grant moving from the north, Major General Franklin Gardner was ordered to Port Hudson to defend the Mississippi River from Major General Nathaniel Banks moving from the south. Gardner immediately put his engineers to work constructing defenses and requested reinforcements. Pemberton sent him a mixed force of infantry, cavalry, and artillery under Brigadier General Abraham Buford. Parks, now promoted to first lieutenant, accompanied Watson’s battery with this force to Port Hudson arriving in March 1863. Buford was later recalled by Pemberton. However, Watson’s battery, staying behind, was split up and converted to heavy artillery. Gardner had approximately 7,000 men divided into three wings – a southern wing under Colonel William Miles, a center wing under Brigadier General William N.R. Beall, and a northern wing under Colonel Isaiah George Washington Steedman.
Four of Watson’s guns were assigned to the center wing, while Parks was assigned to Steedman’s northern wing to command a section of guns. Banks’ army besieged Port Hudson for 48 days. There were a number of assaults trying to break the Confederate lines, all unsuccessful. Nonetheless, cannons were especially targeted by the Yankees, who had a three to one advantage in numbers. Supplies, ammunition, and food were running out for the defenders. The daily ration per man was three small ears of corn. The Confederates resorted to butchering mules, horses, and rats for meat. The number of killed, sick, and desertions increased daily. Finally, on July 9, 1863, the white flags went up and Gardner surrendered his forces. Fewer than 3,000 Confederates could stand in line during the surrender ceremony. Parks was now a prisoner of war.21
All of the Confederate officers were sent to New Orleans and placed in jail at the Custom House on Canal Street. There Parks wrote to his sister, “When I last heard (April 26th) from Va. M., Clark, Frank & Miss Mollie Moon were well.” He was transferred to Johnson’s Island Prison on October 13, 1863, where he would remain for the next 18 months.22 During that time he wrote to his family and the Moons. Parks remained devoted to the Confederate cause. Twice he had an opportunity to be released if he would take an oath of allegiance to the Union but refused. He was unaware, until after the war, that his fraternity brother and college roommate, Runkle, now on the military staff of Governor Tod, petitioned for Parks release and, as a favor, Tod granted the request, but insisted on the oath being taken. The second time was when his father came to the prison seeking to get Parks’ parole, to be secured by sufficient bonds and securities. Prison authorities refused but instead suggested the oath. Parks later wrote:
“But I knew from sorrowful observation that I had only to take that oath and make a contemptible deserter of myself in order to obtain a release. When my father came to Johnson’s Island, hoping to be allowed to see me, and asking for such an interview in the presence of some officers, he was asked whether he would advise me to take the oath of allegiance. His answer, entirely respectful and in no way to be construed as disloyal, was unsatisfactory. But on account of his high standing as a Mason, he was allowed the privilege of looking at me through field glass at the distance of three or four hundred yards.”23
With the surrender of the last of the Confederate armies, on Monday June 12, 1865 Parks wrote: “I have taken the oath! That I should have lived to see this day!”24 After a brief period of recovery with family in Hamilton, Ohio, he returned to Panola County, Mississippi to reestablish the Palmetto Academy. Judge Clark and Lottie had moved to New York City. Ginnie was in Virginia with Mollie. Parks was admitted to the Mississippi bar on November 25, 1866. Ginnie had moved back to Memphis, but there is no record that the two met.
Virginia Bethel Moon never married. She opened a boarding house in Memphis renting only to men. When her female black cook died, she took in the woman’s child and raised him. She adopted other “lost” children. She became a familiar sight on the Memphis streets and was known to carry a pistol secreted in her umbrella. She stunned her Presbyterian minister nephew and his congregation by smoking in church, mixing her own mint juleps, and excoriating a Tennessee judge for sentencing a sickly black woman to prison because she was resting on the city streets. She was a supporter of women’s rights and claimed she voted in a Memphis election before women’s suffrage. In 1870 she helped victims during the outbreak of yellow fever in Memphis. In 1919 she went to Hollywood, California. There she got to fly as a passenger in an airplane and in 1922 convinced producer Jesse Laskey to cast her in a bit part in Douglas Fairbanks’ classic Robin Hood. The following year she appeared as a gypsy fortune teller in The Spanish Dancer. She returned east and spent her last years in Greenwich, New York, near her adopted daughter, where she died at 81 in 1925.25
Parks also never married. Instead, his wanderlust resulted in a move to California where he was admitted to the bar, dividing his time between practicing law and writing. His numerous articles and poems were published in various periodicals. He was admitted to the Texas and Tennessee bar associations. He returned briefly to Ohio and then finally settled in Jackson, Mississippi in 1875. He became a recognized leader among the Confederate veterans and was personally acquainted with ex-President Jefferson Davis who was passing his final years in Biloxi, Mississippi. Parks had written in his diary on May, 15, 1865:
“Terrible news! Nothing less than the capture of our beloved President, whom I honor and respect first among mortals . . . . They may subject him to indignities, but they cannot deprive him of the love of thousands of devoted men. Nor can they deprive us of the privilege of being more proud of him in adversity than we were in his hours of glory.”26
When Davis died on December 9, 1889, one of the most widely circulated tributes to his memory was written by Parks.
James Parks Caldwell’s own death came suddenly in the morning hours of April 5, 1912 in his room at the Kennedy Hotel in Biloxi. The Gulfport (Miss.) Daily Herald on Friday, April 5, 1912, carried the headline: “James P. Caldwell, Lawyer, Veteran, and Founder of a Fraternity, Dead.” His remains were buried in Biloxi Cemetery, where in 1930 Sigma Chi Fraternity dedicated a monument to the memory of James Parks Caldwell.27
According to Parks’ obituary, “He had told intimate friends of a love affair during the Civil War when he had made an effort to get a leave of absence to go and claim his bride.” Clearly, Parks’ feelings toward Ginnie fit the lyrics of the song “The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi.”
When the world goes wrong, as it’s bound to do
And you’ve broken Dan Cupid’s bow.
And you long for the girl you used to love,
The maid of the long ago.
The blue of her eyes and the gold of her hair
Are a blend of the western sky.
And the moonlight beams on the girl of my dreams,
She’s the sweetheart of Sigma Chi.
It is not known what correspondence took place between Parks and Ginnie or what commitment they attached to one another, but Ginnie was later to recount that she had promised to marry 16 soldiers during the war, saying afterwards, “I thought if they died, they would die happy, and if they didn’t, I didn’t give a damn.”28 Seems like Parks’ love had been a one-way street and he never knew it.
Footnotes (Click on the book titles below to purchase from Amazon. Part of the proceeds from any book purchased from Amazon through the CCWRT website is returned to the CCWRT to support its education and preservation programs.)
1. Caldwell, James Parks, A Northern Confederate at Johnson’s Island Prison: The Civil War Diary of James Parks Caldwell. Ed. George H. Jones, Jefferson, North Carolina, McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2010. Diary entry May 3, 1865.
2. Ibid., diary entry April 18, 1865.
3. Ibid., diary entry June 1, 1865.
4. Ibid., p. 7. Nate, Joseph C., “James Parks Caldwell,” https://sigmachi.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Nate-Caldwell-Bio.pdf. P. 41.
5. Caldwell, A Northern Confederate at Johnson’s Island Prison, pp. 8-9.
6. Ibid., p.12. William H. McGuffey, 9/23/1800-5/4/1873, professor, university president, and author of McGuffey’s Readers. Whitlaw Reid, 10/27/1837-12/15/1912, newspaper editor, ambassador to France, VP running mate of Benjamin Harrison in unsuccessful 1892 presidential election, and author of two-volume treatise Ohio in the War. Benjamin P. Runkle, 11/3/1836-6/28/1916, roommate of Caldwell at Miami University in a room they called “The Crystal Palace,” where in 1854 they became founding members of Sigma Chi Fraternity.
7. Kane, Harnett T., Spies for the Blue and Gray: The Perilous World of Espionage During the Civil War, New York, Ace Star Books, reprinted by arrangement with Doubleday & Co., 1954. P.189.
8. Caldwell, A Northern Confederate at Johnson’s Island Prison, p. 8.
9. www.findagrave.com/memorial/8493683/virginia-bethel-moon. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence to support either of these actions.
10. Nate, Joseph C., The History of the Sigma Chi Fraternity, 1855-1930, vol. 4, Chicago, The Fraternity. Caldwell, A Northern Confederate at Johnson’s Island Prison, p.16.
11. Caldwell, A Northern Confederate at Johnson’s Island Prison, p. 16.
12. Ibid., p. 20.
13. Kane, Spies for the Blue and Gray, p. 194. Caldwell, A Northern Confederate at Johnson’s Island Prison, p. 21. A granddaughter of Dr. Caldwell wrote, “Grandpa (Dr. W.W. Caldwell) nearly impoverished himself sending supplies from his drugstore in Hamilton, Ohio.”
14. Cunnigham, O. Edward, Shiloh and the Western Campaign of 1862, ed. Gary D. Joiner & Timothy B. Smith, California, Savas Beatie, 2007. P. 264. The battery consisted of two 3-inch rifles and two 12-pound howitzers. Smith, Timothy B., Shiloh: Conquer or Perish, Lawrence, Kansas, University Press of Kansas, 2014. P. 192, 334.
15. Nate, Joseph C., “James Parks Caldwell,” https://sigmachi.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Nate-Caldwell-Bio.pdf. P. 46.
16. Cozzens, Peter, The Darkest Days of the War: The Battles of Iuka & Corinth, Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press, 1997. P. 328.
17. Ibid., pp. 271-272. Hirsch, I.E., “Shot Through by a Cannon Ball.” Confederate Veteran 11, no. 11, November 1903. Pp. 505-506. Smith, Timothy B., Corinth, 1862: Siege, Battle, Occupation, Lawrence, Kansas, University Press of Kansas, 2012. P. 215. https://sigmachi.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Nate-Caldwell-Bio.pdf. Caldwell letter to Runkle, April 1896. P. 49.
18. Caldwell, A Northern Confederate at Johnson’s Island Prison, pp. 25-26.
19. Caldwell, A Northern Confederate at Johnson’s Island Prison, p. 77. Diary entry of Wednesday, January 20, 1864.
20. Kane, Spies for the Blue and Gray, pp. 194-195. Castel, Albert, General Sterling Price and the Civil War in the West, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1968. Pp. 132-133, 193-195. The exact date of Ginnie’s audience with Price is obscure. Kane, however, gives the date of this meeting as February 1863, and Price left Mississippi crossing the river on March 18, 1863. Ginnie and her mother traveled to Ohio with the dispatches. The Clarks were being watched by Federal authorities, and Ginnie was suspected of being a spy. She and her mother were arrested when they tried to return south. On her person were found 40 bottles of morphine, seven pounds of opium, and a quantity of camphor. She demanded to be taken to General Ambrose Burnside, an old family friend. He held them for a while and then had the charges dropped. They could return to Memphis with the stipulation that Ginnie had to check in daily with General Hurlbut, the garrison commander in Memphis.
21. Hewitt, Lawrence Lee, Port Hudson: Confederate Bastion on the Mississippi, Baton Rouge & London, Louisiana State University Press, 1987. Pp. 106, 132, 169-173. Tanner, Linn, “The Meat Diet at Port Hudson” Confederate Veteran, XXVI, 1918. P. 484. Tanner, Linn, “Port Hudson Calamities – Mule Meat,” Confederate Veteran, XVII, 1909. P. 512. https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/search-battle-units-detail.htm?battleUnitCode=CLAWATSYA. According to the NPS site, Watson’s Battery was converted to heavy artillery. Caldwell, A Northern Confederate at Johnson’s Island Prison, p. 26-29.
22. Caldwell, A Northern Confederate at Johnson’s Island Prison, p. 29. July 18 letter from J.P. Caldwell to Dear Sister Belle, p. 68-70. https://sigmachi.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Nate-Caldwell-Bio.pdf. P. 52.
23. Nate, p. 50-51.
24. Caldwell, A Northern Confederate at Johnson’s Island Prison, p. 200.
25. Kane, Spies for the Blue and Gray, p. 201. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jan-09-me-52359-story.html. Rasmussen, Cecilia, “From Confederate Spy to Hollywood Actress,” Los Angeles Times, January, 9, 2000.
26. Caldwell, pp. 26-37, 196. Nate, pp. 53-55.
27. Ibid., p. 47. Nate, p. 59.
28. Caldwell, A Northern Confederate at Johnson’s Island Prison, pp. 20-21. Kane, Spies for the Blue and Gray, p. 194. https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/virginia-bethel-moon/. Bucy, Carole Stanford, “Virginia Bethel Moon,” Tennessee Encyclopedia, December 25, 2009. Accessed September 16, 2023.