Person:Charlotte Moon (1)

Confederate spies during the American Civil War. Lottie and Ginnie Moon were the only sisters who worked as spies, couriers, and smugglers during the American Civil War, and they also played key roles in the Great Northwest Conspiracy. Drawing on their charisma and connections, they gathered information on Union movements and activities from their many suitors.

Cynthia Charlotte (Lottie) was born in Danville, Virginia, on August 10, 1829. The third child and first daughter of Dr. Robert S. Moon, and Cynthia Ann Sullivan, Lottie was independent and strong-willed. As a child, she excelled at riding, shooting, and acting, which were later manifested in her skill as a spy. She married Judge James Clark in 1849 after spurning Ambrose Burnside at the altar. Both Clarks were Copperheads (Northerners who sympathized with the Confederacy), and their home at Jones Station, Ohio, was both a supply base and respite for Confederate soldiers and spies.

In 1862 Lottie delivered a message from General Sterling Price to Colonel Edmund Kirby-Smith in Kentucky at the bequest of Walter Taylor of the Zachariah Taylor family. After her success on this first mission, she was sent to Canada where she delivered dispatches and letters to Toronto. Passing herself off as a British woman en route to mineral springs in Virginia, her uncanny ability to fake joint injury saved her from discovery on several occasions. She was finally captured by General Ambrose Burnside, who recognized her. Lottie was a prisoner of war for three months. After the war, she wrote for the New York World and in 1870 the paper sent her to Paris as a war correspondent during the Franco-Prussian War. After returning to the United States and trying her hand at acting, she became a novelist and wrote under the pen name Charles M. Clay. She died in Philadelphia on November 20, 1895.

This does NOT actually belong to my family, but "Mrs. Moon" actually Cynthia Charlotte Moon, aka Lottie Moon, a known confedarate spy, is my second cousin, three times removed. ( She married James Clark in 1849.)
So I guess it is my family's fault the letter was never delivered!
My e-mail address has changed. It is now threegz@pacbell.net for anyone wishing to contact me.
This is what I have on Lottie Moon:

Cynthia Charlotte "Lottie" Moon was generally described as an "interesting girl". Her apple-round face was not improved by a coiffeur that drew her uncurled hair severely down on the back of her neck. The husband she eventually chose, James Clark, called her, with marked enthusiasm, "the damnedest, smartest woman in the world."

In her teens, Lottie shot pistols at targets, took dares to ride bareback through the streets, and spoke her mind about anything that occurred to her. Like other spies-in-the-making, she became a fair actress. For amateur theatricals or for the simple amusement of friends, Lottie played many parts, and did clever imitations. She also learned a peculiar trick which would stand her in good stead. She could throw her jaw out of place with a cracking sound, assuming an expression of extreme agony.

When Lottie Moon was growing up she was engaged to twelve different young men at the same time. Her sister Ginnie's sixteen fiancee's was the result of her margin of additional loveliness. She really wanted to marry James Clark, a fellow Virginian and Miami graduate who had gone into a career in law and who was somewhat older than the rest. She finally agreed to marry a younger man closer to her age, Lieutenant Ambrose Burnside of Liberty, Indiana.

Lieutenant Burnside and Lottie set the date for the wedding, June 21, 1848. (This was some years before the war). On that day, before a full assemblage in the church, when the minister asked Ambrose if he would take Lottie to be his wife, he nodded and said he would. The minister turned to Lottie and asked if she would take Ambrose to be her husband. She looked at the tall young Lieutenant beside her, shook her head defiantly side to side, and said "No, Sir-ee Bob, I won't". There at the altar she had changed her mind. She really wanted James Clark, not Ambrose Burnside.

The family said that Ambrose Burnside returned to woo Lottie again. He accepted defeat only when Lottie's tight-lipped mother sent back his latest letter with a notation on the envelope: "Lottie was married to James Clark last week."

For young attorney, later Judge, James Clark, the courtship had been almost as difficult as Burnside's. Another man considered Lottie definitely pledged to him. It has been said that Lottie told the second fellow she would marry him on the day she had set for James Clark, "if you get there first." In any case that gentleman showed up at the wedding. James Clark made up his mind there would be no jilting this time. Just before the couple went into the parlor, the youthful groom shoved a revolver against Lottie's satiny side and declared: "There'll be a wedding today, or a funeral tomorrow." There was a wedding...

During the Civil war, Lottie "splendid service" as a southern spy.

In that war a young lady of Oxford distinguished herself as one of the war's principal espionage agents. Charlotte "Lottie" Moon lived adjacent to the Miami University Campus in Ohio, initially in the home that was occupied until 1995 by the Beta Theta Pi headquarters. Then they moved several doors down east on High Street to what is still called The Lottie Moon House, on the corner of University and High, across the street from the guest cottage of the University.

Let's simply say Lottie Moon, her sister and brothers, with Virginia and Tennessee in their backgrounds, along with their parents, remained loyal to the South when the split came in 1861 between the North and the South and the Civil War erupted. One of Lottie Moons sisters, (Virginia Bethel Moon, aka Ginnie Moon), like Lottie, would serve as an espionage agent, but only Lottie would really reach top stature as the skilled Mata Hari of her generation.

One day in 1862 the Clarks received an excited caller. Walker Taylor of the Zachary Taylor clan, from over the line in Kentucky. Taylor was traveling under a false name and telling questioners he was there to buy mules to restock his farm. Instead, he whispered to Lottie, he carried messages from Confederate General Sterling Price which must be taken at once to General Edmund Kirby-Smith in Kentucky. He couldn't do it, too many people knew him by now. Lottie asked if anyone could carry them and was told "Oh yes."

"Then I will." Within a few hours Lottie put her acting skill to a test. From her house there went "a woman, very much bent, an old bonnet tied over her ears and partly concealing her face, toothless and muffled to the ears in a dilapidated shawl." That afternoon the bent figure crossed the Ohio by ferry, and found a transport ready to leave for Lexington - in the precise direction she had to go.

There, Lottie turned Irish. "Her husband, poor dear old man, was...dying in the hospital." Shure, it was little enough to let a poor woman see her darlin' once more...When the officials refused permission, Lottie did not give up. She spied several "fellow Irishmen" and went into her act again, with tears and gestures. To hell with officialdom, said the sentimental boys, and why shouldn't the likes of this good woman be allowed to join her man? They smuggled her aboard.

At Lexington, the pathetic creature said good-bye with thanks, and walked towards the outskirts of town. What she would do now depended on luck. Hearing hoof beats, Lottie swung around to face Colonel Thomas Scott, a Southerner whom she had once met. Without bothering to see if anybody were watching, the "old woman" straightened up, hailed him, and thrust the papers into his hand. "Colonel Scott, promise on your life you'll give these to Colonel Kirby-Smith, and nobody else."

Scott stared. Who was this creature? Lottie repeated that the important thing was to get the documents to the Colonel. Then she walked back to Lexington, and when a train for a point near home left that night, the tiny Irish woman sat mournfully in one of the coaches. Listening, she learned that a warning had just been issued to watch for a "female spy" on the train. A few minutes later, Lottie was crying sadly again. In the seat in front of her sat General Leslie Coombs, a former Kentucky Governor and a strong Union man. The general turned and Lottie poured out her story of a stricken husband - and a detail - the hungry children waiting for her.

She was afraid, she sniffled, that with all the war suspicions, somebody would take her for one of those dangerous spies they talked about...General Coombs sympathetically assured her he would look out for her. When the train reached Covington, Kentucky, Coombs himself helped Lottie down and she rode across the river to safety. Without transportation from that point, she walked home though the woods and across fields. Arriving in time for breakfast, she told her story to the delighted butternuts, (the common word for Dixie partisans) and young Ginnie, the apprentice spy, listened with even more interest than the others.

In October of 1862 Lottie attended a meeting of espionage agents in Toronto, Canada for gathering of information. Lottie then returned to the States. Meaning to get to the Confederacy, she presented herself in Washington, D.C. at the Office of the Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton. She told the secretary that she was an English noble-woman, that her name was Lady Hull (or Hall) who had come all the way from Britain to take baths in the warm waters of Virginia, only to find there was a war on. How could she possibly get to the other side of the front lines to get into those warm waters to treat her ailing joints, to get relief from the rheumatism and the arthritis which so badly crippled her? The Secretary, totally persuaded that Lottie was what she presented herself to be, felt compassion. He told Lottie that it just so happened that President Lincoln himself was going the next day to inspect the troops in the front lines, just to the east of Richmond. She could ride in the!
President's personal carriage with Abraham Lincoln, down to the lines. He would even giver her a note to assure safe passage through the lines and on to the warm springs if Virginia for treatment.

The next day, there was Oxford's Lottie Moon seated next to the President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, riding in his personal carriage, and across from her sat the Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton. As the carriage rumbled on through the hills of Northern Virginia, Lady Hull, exhausted from her long trip over to this new world, fell asleep, or so it seemed. As she dozed on, with audible sounds of slumber periodically escaping from her lips, the President and the Secretary of War began to become less and less discreet in their comments about what needed to be done in the war in the next few weeks. Before long they were divulging the most confidential information, and there was Lottie Moon absorbing it all as she feigned slumber.

They arrived at the front lines and Lottie, with the note, passed on to see Jefferson Davis himself. She delivered to the South the important information, which for months thereafter cost the North dearly in terms of actions that were anticipated by Confederate troops even before they occurred, resulting in defeat after defeat for Northern troops. It was because of this that Stanton and Lincoln finally agreed that they'd been duped--that Lady Hull had been in fact a Confederate agent, and they came to know that she was Lottie Moon. Secretary Stanton himself put a price of $10,000 on her head, dead or alive.

It is now April, 1863, Lottie has married James Clark and she is engaged in espionage against the North. She made her way to Cincinnati hoping to cross the river into Kentucky, disguised as an Irish scrubwoman. She was bound, she said, for Lexington, to visit her boy who had been injured in combat and needed a mother's love. A young private, standing first watch, said he did not have authority to let her through. She asked who did, and he said "The General". Said Lottie, "Take me to the General". The private did.

They went up the stairs to an office on the second floor. They knocked on the door, and a voice called out, "Come in". In they walked to behold, seated behind the desk in Generals stars, Ambrose E. Burnside. He was now in command of the defense of southern Ohio, southeastern Indiana, and northern Kentucky. Lottie's Irish dialect left her as she tried to tell the General why she needed a pass to see her wounded son in the hospital in Lexington. After several false starts General Burnside recognized who he was confronting. He said, "Lottie, I know who you are." Despite her protestations he insisted he knew who she was and finally she agreed. Yes, she was Lottie. The general could have had her shot or hung, but there was still a spark. he agreed instead to place her under house arrest at the Burnet house in Cincinnati if she would forgo any further espionage service for the South in the remainder of the war. She agreed, and she lived out the war in Cincinnati under house arrest.

Lottie Moon was the author of several books: "Baby Rue", 1881; "The Modern Hager", 1882; "How She Came Into Her Kingdom", a romance, 1885. she wrote under the nom-de-plume, Charles M. Clay.

Source:Sketches of the Moon and Barclay Families by Anna Mary Moon

Source:Philsgenes.org Moon Family Line Stories and Histories Lottie Moon-Spy by Dr. Phillip Shriver http://philsgenes.org/Moons/S and H/Lottie Moon - Spy.html

Source:Philsgenes.org Moon Family Line Stories and Histories Chapter 13 Sister Act Spies for the Blue and Gray by Harnett T. Kane http://philsgenes.org/Moons/S and H/SisterAct.html