My Imprisonment at Washington. By Mrs. Greenhow. (Richard Bentley.)—This book
would be offensive if it were not so very absurd. Its author was during the Presidency of Mr. Buchanan one of tho leaders of Washington fashion, and though violently Southern in her sympathies she chose to remain at Washington to act as a spy. Others of her Southern accomplices kept their offices under Mr. Lincoln, in order to betiay his counsels, and Mrs Greenhow, under cover of the immu- nities allowed to women in America, forwarded the information they gave het to General Beauregard. Throughout the book she boasts of her success—that the Government engineers sent her their plane, and that President Davis has confessed that " without her there would have been no Bull's Run." Yet she considers herself a martyr because she was summarily arrested, confined first in her own house under strict sur- veillance, afterwards in the Capitol, and was finally sent South in safety. What on earth did she expect? That the prisons of America are a disgrace to the country we do not doubt. In a country so little used to bear taxation, it is natural they should be, and of course this was aggravated by the sudden increase of the number of prisoners. Every complaint, however, which Mrs. Greenhow made seems to have been attended to by the superior authorities, though the intolerable inso- lence of her letters might well have excused a different course. The same unwomanly violence of tongue accounts for much of the misconduct of the underlings, and much is clearly exaggeration. When actually in the custody of the police, she made signals to some of her confederates, and in the attempt to prevent this a Captain Dennis seized her by the arm. "A strong effort," says the lady, " was afterwards made to drive this from my mind, as if aught but the life-blood of the dastard could efface it! " Some 350 pages of this bombast, mingled with all the slanderous gossip of Richmond respecting the Northern statesmen, are what readers will find here.
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