From Confederate Spy to Hollywood Actress

Her film career lasted just five short years, but the life-and-death acting experience Virginia Moon had gained as a Civil War spy helped her win a unique niche in Hollywood history.

In 1919, as the Jazz Age with its effervescent youth culture bubbled to life, the elderly Moon sat across from producer Jesse Lasky at the Famous Players-Lasky Studios at Selma Avenue and Vine Street.

Lasky asked her just one question: “What makes you think you can act?”

“I’m 75 years old,” Moon replied. “I have acted all the parts.”

And the woman who had once fooled Yankee soldiers was right. Her acting had been a deadly serious matter almost six decades earlier, when Virginia, nicknamed “Ginnie,” and her sister Charlotte, known as “Lottie,” were bold and effective Confederate spies.

Their father had been one of the rare Virginia planters who moved north, to Oxford, Ohio, where he freed his slaves.

Lottie, the elder sister, was no raving beauty like Ginnie, but she was a prankster, a flirt, an expert horsewoman and a crack shot with a captivating personality and many suitors.

One of them was the young Ambrose E. Burnside, the future Union general who would give his name to the thick swatches of hair that extended from his temples nearly to his nostrils. Over time, the Burnside style evolved and came to be known as sideburns.

But as Lottie and her hirsute beau stood at the altar to exchange “I do’s,” Lottie changed her mind, said, “No, sirree, Bob!” and ran out of the church, jilting the future military leader.

The following year, 1849, she finally met and made her match, when she promised to marry James Clark, a Southern loyalist attorney and soon-to-be-judge who called her “the damnedest, smartest woman in the world.”

Lest he too be stood up, Clark, on their wedding day, is said to have pressed the hard, cold muzzle of his pistol into his true love’s ribs and whispered, “There will be a wedding here today or a funeral tomorrow.”

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Even though her children grew up in the North, where Lottie settled with her new husband, little changed the allegiances of a family whose roots in the South dated to pre-Revolutionary days. In fact, Virginia and her parents moved back to Memphis, Tenn., shortly before the onset of hostilities between the Union and Confederacy.

In 1861, when the Civil War broke out, Lottie’s husband was head of the Knights of the Golden Circle, a secret order of Southern sympathizers known as Copperheads because they wore copper pennies in their lapels. When a Confederate spy arrived at the Clarks’ home and realized he was too recognizable to carry out his mission, Lottie volunteered to go. Disguised as an Irish washerwoman, she crossed nearby enemy lines with a coded message.

Mission accomplished, she walked to Ohio’s Camp Chase prison, searching for one of her three brothers, known as “Daredevil Moon.” Instead, she found disease and starvation. While spearheading efforts for better prison conditions by organizing the town’s women to pressure the military to improve the prisoners’ lot, Lottie collected more than 200 Southern prisoners’ letters to their families.

When Union authorities discovered the letters in her possession, Lottie fled to a Copperhead enclave in Canada. (More than 70 years later, the letters were delivered to writers’ families.) On her way back, she stopped in Washington, D.C., disguised as a wealthy English invalid seeking health treatment.

Befriending several Union Army officers, she also endeared herself to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, who controlled the military prison camps with an iron hand. Through him, she met President Abraham Lincoln, who invited her to ride in his buggy to view the Army of the Potomac.

She soon scurried south with her reconnaissance information. When Stanton and Lincoln learned of her true identity, Stanton was humiliated. Raging like a madman, he put a $10,000 price on her head, “Dead or Alive.”

Though 15 years Lottie’s junior, Ginnie was no idle child. At age 17, she was attending Oxford Female College in Ohio when the war broke out and she demanded to go home to Memphis. When administrators denied her request, she loaded her pistol and shot out the stars from the Union flag hoisted above the school.

Promptly expelled, she further outraged the locals by scratching “Hurrah for Jeff Davis” across a department store’s front window with her diamond ring.

She also outdid her sister’s romantic exploits. Flirting with Yankee soldiers at Lottie’s home, she promised over time to marry a total of 16 of them when they returned from the war. “I thought if they died, they would die happy, and if they didn’t, I didn’t give a damn,” she recounted in an interview years later.

Soon she was shuttling supplies and messages across enemy lines, hiding a pearl-handled pistol in her umbrella. By April 1863, the Yankees had gotten wise, and she was arrested as she was about to step aboard a paddle-wheeler to Memphis.

Swallowing her pride along with a coded message, she demanded to see her sister’s old beau, Gen. Burnside--the man Ginnie had, as a child, called “Buttons” for his military uniform.

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At headquarters, soldiers found 50 pieces of “rebel mail,” 40 bottles of morphine and seven pounds of opium concealed inside her bustle and her hooped petticoat.

“My mother can eat that in a month. She requires it,” she declared. But Burnside only laughed. Within weeks, Lottie, still posing as the English invalid, also was caught and brought before the man she had once jilted. “You may have forgotten me,” he said, “but I have not forgotten you.”

Burnside went through the motions of a court-martial, but soon released the sisters. Lottie and her husband moved to New York, where she became a newspaper correspondent for the New York World, which sent her to cover the 1870 Franco-Prussian War. She died in 1895 in Philadelphia at 76.

Ginnie continued her liberated ways, stunning her Presbyterian minister nephew and his congregation by smoking in church, mixing her own mint juleps, and excoriating a Tennessee judge who had sentenced a sickly black woman to the “rock pile” for the crime of resting in the city streets.

Throughout her life, which was long and never encumbered by matrimony, she preferred men, civilians or soldiers, to women. At the Memphis boardinghouse she ran, she rented only to men.

She was drawn to Hollywood in 1919 by the chance to act again--this time for film and not war--and to fly in an airplane. She achieved both, the latter as an eager passenger in a Lockheed seaplane, flying up the coast to Santa Barbara.

For five years, she had her moments in front of the cameras. In 1922, she had a bit part in Douglas Fairbanks’ classic “Robin Hood,” and the following year she appeared as a gypsy fortune teller in “The Spanish Dancer” with Pola Negri. She had bit parts with such stars as Theda Bara and Mary Miles Minter.

Even Hollywood soon paled, and Ginnie Moon, the self-described “unreconstructed rebel,” spent her last years living near her adopted daughter and among Jazz Age companions in Greenwich Village, where she died at 81 in 1925.