Albert D . Richardson Albert Deane Richardson ( October 6 , 1833 - December 2 , 1869 ) was a well - known American journalist , Union spy , and author . Civil War imprisonment and escape . Richardson wrote for the " New York Tribune " owned by Horace Greeley , and traveled to battlefields during the American Civil War to report on the war , often with fellow journalist Junius Henri Browne . Richardson and Browne were imprisoned for 20 months in seven different prisons , confined successively at Vicksburg , Jackson , Atlanta , Richmond , and Salisbury , North Carolina , prisons . On December 18 , 1864 , after 20 months of imprisonment , he escaped from Salisbury , along with Browne . They traveled together more than 400 miles through hostile country , and reached the Union lines on January 14 , 1865 . His list of Union soldiers who died at Salisbury , published in the " Tribune " , is the only authentic account of their fate . A Tragic Affair . Richardson was one of the best known reporters of his age , due to his abilities as a writer and his services ( during the American Civil War ) as a Union spy . Unfortunately his reputation is recalled as the victim of a homicide that gained considerable notoriety in the Gilded Age . Richardson ' s wife and daughter had died during the war , and he subsequently met Abby Sage McFarland , an actress married to one Daniel McFarland . McFarland claimed to be a major businessman and politician , but basically he was a violent husband and alcoholic with connections with Tammany Hall . Richardson and Abby Sage McFarland lived together , their friends and acquaintances ( including Horace Greeley ) understanding Richardson was protecting the woman he loved while she was trying to get a divorce , something that was not well received generally by the public in the 1860s . Sage McFarland and Richardson got advice from his friend Vice President Schuyler Colfax on using Indiana divorce laws for the fastest results . McFarland shot and wounded Richardson in March 1867 , but the latter recovered . But on November 25 , 1869 McFarland shot Richardson in the offices of the New York Tribune in front of the night clerk Daniel Frohman ( later a famous Broadway producer ) . Richarson was fatally shot , but lived for over a week . By this time Abby Sage had gotten her divorce , and Richardson married her at a special bedside marriage performed by the Rev . Henry Ward Beecher . The trial was a farce , with Tammany connections and dislike for the people who worked at the Tribune being used fairly shamelessly to protect McFarland . He was shown by his defenders to be a defender of the home and hearth against a seducer , as Harry K . Thaw would be shown to be in his 1907 trial for the murder of Stanford White . McFarland was acquitted among cheering crowds . But his ex - wife did not return to him and spent the rest of her life as Abby Richardson , working in the theater as play reader . She died in 1900 . McFarland went west . In the words of the criminal historian Edmund Pearson , it did not take him long to drink himself to death . Looked at today the story has a modern ring because of Abby being the victim of domestic violence . Yet even sixty years later the historian Claude G . Bowers in his partisan history " The Tragic Era " ( 1929 ) showed a mean comfort in the fate of Richardson , and the tarnishing of Beecher , Colfax , and Greeley by the scandal ( as though they were responsible , not McFarland ) . Books . In August 2013 , a new book about Junius Henri Browne and Richardson , " Junius and Albert ' s Adventures in the Confederacy " by journalist and author Peter Carlson , was published by PublicAffairs . ISBN 0 - 679 - 43398 - 8 .