Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,893
By This is the grave of Frank Stringfellow.
Born into pro-slavery scumbag extremism sometime around 1840 (the actual date is unclear), Benjamin Franklin Stringfellow was a piece of work. He went by Frank but he wasn’t named after Benjamin Franklin per se, he was named after his uncle by the same name who would later become infamous for being a leading pro-slavery terrorist on the Kansas-Missouri border before and during the Civil War. Before that, Uncle Ben was attorney general of Missouri, so it’s not like what he was doing wasn’t fully OK with the so-called respectable community.
Young Frank was a chip off that block. The South committed treason in defense of slavery in 1861. Stringfellow was all in. At this point, he was teaching Latin and Greek to kids at a fancy school in Mississippi. He wanted to fight more than he wanted to teach. But there was a problem. He was tiny. I mean, very small. He weighed 94 lbs. So he was rejected not once, but four times, by the Confederate Army. But Stringfellow, I mean this was a man who really wanted to be involved in treasonous activities to defend slavery. So he kept trying and kept trying. And of course he was connected through his family to Confederate elites. Not all members of the family did commit treason in defense in slavery. At least a couple of his cousins joined the American army, But not Frank. He finally got a commission as a captain in the 4th Virginia Cavalry. Never let it be said that these people had to commit treason because they were from the South. Lots of southerners did not make this choice.
One time, Stringfellow’s men captured a Union soldier who had a pass to bring a woman to a fancy ball. So Stringfellow took the pass, dressed as a woman, and attended himself. Evidently this worked, or so the story goes, thanks to his elite female friends in northern Virginia who taught him about proper etiquette. Supposedly, chatty Union officers also believed he was a woman (his size helped here) and through them talking to him, found out that Ulysses Grant was about to take over as commander of armies in Virginia and other strategic gossip. Eventually, he was found out and was escorted away by a lieutenant. But then he pulled a Derringer he had on him and forced the lieutenant to drive him back to southern lines. It’s a hell of a story at least, however true it is.
I will say this–Stringfellow was a brave traitor. He became close to J.E.B. Stuart, who used Stingfellow as his personal scout. He’d take on any mission and so was assigned to just about any risky mission. Unfortunately, he was never killed in these activities. In September 1862, he led a group of 20 soldiers on a raid to kidnap American General Joseph Bartlett. It didn’t work, but it does give you an idea of the nearly suicidal missions he would take. He would remain a raiding fiend. He was involved, for instance, in John Singleton Mosby’s raid on Loudon Heights in 1864.
But what Stringfellow really did was become an effective spy. In fact, he was Robert E. Lee’s top spy. He was frequently stationed in Alexandria, Virginia, claiming to be a dental assistant (my god, the horrors of what that meant for patients in the 1860s…) while gathering intelligence for Lee. In fact, his spying was so good and he became known enough that there was a $10,000 reward on his life by the end of the war.
Much later, there were rumors that Stringefellow was involved in the Lincoln assassination. This became a plot point on the PBS show Mercy Street. But there’s no evidence of it and it’s unlikely. Would be better if PBS didn’t spread false rumors, even against scumbags like Stringfellow.
After the war, Stringfellow moved to Canada for awhile, both because he was so deeply committed to slavery and treason that he refused to take the loyalty oath and because for 5 seconds it looked like the government would actually punish leading traitors. But then of course, even northern Republicans mostly forgot what the war was about and just said that it’s all good and pardoned everyone, even Lee and Jefferson Davis. Disgusting. So Stringfellow returned to Alexandria in 1867, when Andrew Johnson was just pardoning everyone and most Republicans didn’t care anyway. He married Emma Green, who was also involved in Stringfellow’s spying operations after the Union seized her family’s hotel in Alexandria. In 1883, the government paid Green and thus Stringfellow back rent on the seizure of the hotel, demonstrating once again just how pathetic the post-Civil War response to the South by the Republican Party had become.
Back in Alexandria. Stringfellow decided to become a minister. Naturally, what does Baby Jesus love more than treason in defense of slavery? He was ordained as an Episcopalian priest in 1876. Later, he became a chaplain in the Army thanks to Ulysses S. Grant, who recommended him based on the belief that Stringfellow once could have killed him, but did not! See, now this is how you lose a Civil War victory right here. You not only don’t punish the traitors, you start doing favors for them. And Stringfellow’s specific mission from God, as he saw it, was to be a good minister to ex-Confederate veterans. So he used to combine his stories of being a spy with his Christian message to rally all those ex-traitors around nostalgia for their treason, which is what Christ wanted. This all makes me sick.
Stringfellow spent the rest of his life with his treason nostalgia ministry, dying in 1913, at the age of 72.
Frank Stringfellow is buried in Ivy Hill Cemetery, Alexandria, Virginia. He’s not even the most problematic person in that cemetery, thanks to Wernher Von Braun.
If you would like this series to visit other Civil War spies, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Belle Boyd is in Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin and Pauline Cushman is in San Francisco. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.
Also, you should support LGM. This grave series is the most unusual historical series in the entire history of the internet. I mean, it’s almost 2,000 posts in, all of which at least semi-serious historical discussion! Without LGM, you would be impoverished in your knowledge of history. So help us out. Make it happen if you want more graves and let me assure you, I have some real scumbags coming up in the next couple of weeks, just for you!
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