Eliz Van Lew: Union Spy, Richmond, Confed Capital, Grant's Source. Spy Mary Bowser, Libby Prison
Last edited Tue Apr 4, 2023, 12:13 PM - Edit history (4)
- Elizabeth L. Van Lew (1818–1900), Encyclopedia Virginia. Ed.
Elizabeth Van Lew was a Richmond Unionist and abolitionist who spied for the United States government during the American Civil War (1861–1865). Leading a network of a dozen or so white and African American women and men, she relayed information on Confederate operations to Union generals and assisted in the care and sometimes escape of Union prisoners of war being held in the Confederate capital. Van Lew, who worked with invisible ink and coded messages, has been called “the most skilled, innovative, and successful” of all Civil War–era spies.
While some historians have claimed that she was open about her Unionist politics, deflecting suspicion by behaving as if she were mentally ill, others have argued that these “Crazy Bet” stories are a myth.
After the war, Van Lew served as postmaster of Richmond during the administration of U.S. president Ulysses S. Grant, one of the generals to whom she had once fed information. Van Lew was born on Oct. 15, 1818, in Richmond, to John Van Lew of Long Island, New York, and Eliza Baker of Philadelphia, Pa. Despite their Northern roots, the Van Lews owned enslaved people, lived in a mansion on Church Hill, and belonged to Richmond society. After attending a Quaker school in Philadelphia, however, Elizabeth Van Lew began to develop antislavery views, and following the death of her father, her mother freed some of the family’s enslaved laborers. When Virginia seceded in the spring of 1861, Van Lew did not succumb to Confederate patriotism as so many other Southern Unionists did. Instead, she immediately committed herself to finding ways to undermine the Confederate war effort.
Early in the war, Van Lew and other Richmond Unionists—including John Minor Botts, F. W. E. Lohmann, and William S. Rowley—banded together to form an underground network, which eventually targeted the Confederate prison system in particular. During the summer of 1861, Van Lew and her mother visited captured Union soldiers being held in Richmond prisons. If their motivation was at first compassionate—they brought the men food and tended to their wounds—it soon turned tactical. Prisoners were an important source of information, and Libby Prison, which housed hundreds of Union officers, often in desperate conditions, was located just 6 blocks from the Van Lew mansion. Van Lew never was able to gain entrance there, however, and instead bribed guards for various purposes, such as having prisoners transferred to hospitals where she might visit them.
In several cases, she passed information to inmates using a custard dish with a secret compartment. In 1864, as the head of a Richmond spy network managed by Union general Benjamin F. Butler, she may have helped some of the 109 prisoners who tunneled out of Libby. -- Elizabeth Van Lew and Mary Richards Bowser: Mary Richards Bowser, who had been enslaved by the Van Lew family, also may or may not have used the “crazy” technique in her spying. Van Lew arranged for Bowser to be educated in the north and sent as a missionary to Liberia. During the war, Bowser worked as a servant for Jefferson Davis‘s family in the Confederate White House, where she collected information and passed it on to Van Lew or other spies...https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/van-lew-elizabeth-l-1818-1900/#start_entry
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- Smithsonian, 'Elizabeth Van Lew: An Unlikely Union Spy,' May 4, 2011. Ed. A member of the Richmond elite, one woman defied convention and the Confederacy and fed secrets to the Union during the Civil War.
.. One of the most effective was Union spy Elizabeth Van Lew—a prominent member of Richmond, Virginia, society. The 43-year-old lived with her widowed mother in a 3-story mansion in the Confederate capital. Educated in the North, Van Lew took pride in her Richmond roots, but she fervently opposed slavery and secession, writing her thoughts in a secret diary she kept buried in her backyard and whose existence she would reveal only on her deathbed. “She believed that Va.’s distinct and special role as the architect of the Union required it to do whatever it could to preserve and sustain the country,” said historian Elizabeth Varon.“But she always pretended to be a loyal Confederate.”
As her wealthy neighbors celebrated Confederate victories, Van Lew quietly focused on helping the Union.
Over the next 4 years she would send valuable intelligence to Union officers, provide food and medicine to prisoners of war and help plan their escapes, and run her own network of spies. “She is considered the most successful Federal spy of the war,” said Wm. Rasmussen at the Va. Historical Society. These triumphs for the Union, however, would ultimately cost Van Lew not only her family fortune but also her place as a member of Richmond’s social elite.
-- LIBBY PRISON: Van Lew saw her first opportunity to help the Union after the Battle of Manassas in July 1861. Having no place to hold the Union prisoners pouring into Richmond, Confederates put them up in a tobacco warehouse. The now-infamous Libby Prison, as it was called, soon became known for its harsh conditions, where hundreds of men suffered from disease, hunger and despair. Van Lew volunteered to become a nurse there, but her offer was rejected by the prison overseer, Lt. David H. Todd—the half-brother of Mary Todd Lincoln. Van Lew went over his head and used flattery and persistence to persuade Gen. John H. Winder to allow her and her mother to bring food, books and medicine to prisoners. Van Lew and her mother were vehemently criticized for their efforts. The Richmond Enquirer wrote, “Two ladies, a mother and a daughter, living on Church Hill, have lately attracted public notice by their assiduous attentions to the Yankee prisoners…. these 2 women have been expending their opulent means in aiding and giving comfort to the miscreants who have invaded our sacred soil.” Threats of violence quickly followed..
-- Union Spymaster: In Dec. 1863, 2 Union soldiers who had escaped from Libby Prison with the help of Van Lew’s underground network told Union Gen. Benjamin Butler about Van Lew. Impressed with the stories, Butler sent one of the men back to Richmond with orders to recruit Van Lew as a spy. Van Lew agreed and soon became the head of Butler’s spy network and his chief source of information about Richmond.. On February 14, 1864, one hundred Union officers escaped Libby Prison by digging a tunnel under the street—one of the most daring prison breaks of the war. Fewer than half were recaptured. The victory, however small, rallied the hopes of Northerners.. -- Grant’s Greatest Source: By June 1864, Van Lew’s spy network had grown to more than a dozen people. Along with the agents in government service, she relied on an informal network of men and women, black and white.. The group relayed hidden messages between 5 stations, including the Van Lew family farm outside the city, to get key information to the Union. Later, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant told Van Lew, “You have sent me the most valuable information received from Richmond during the war.” After a long, exhausting campaign, Grant finally captured Richmond and Petersburg in April 1865... https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/elizabeth-van-lew-an-unlikely-union-spy-158755584/
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- Libby Prison, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libby_Prison
- MARY RICHARDS- BOWSER, also known as Mary Jane Richards Garvin and possibly Mary Bowser (born 1846), was a Union spy during the Civil War. She was possibly born enslaved from birth in Virginia, but there is no documentation of where she was born or who her parents were. By the age of 7, she was enslaved by the household of Elizabeth "Bet" Van Lew, in Richmond, Virginia. The Van Lew family sent Richards to school, probably in Princeton, New Jersey, and then to Liberia via the American Colonization Society. Richards returned to Richmond shortly before the outbreak of the American Civil War, where she was one of many black and white Richmond residents who collected and delivered military information to the United States Army under the leadership of Elizabeth Van Lew...https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Bowser
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(Two young brothers, my ancestors served in the Union Army and fought in the Richmond- Petersburg Campaign. They were captured and sent to Libby Prison in Richmond. Both survived and walked home several hundred miles to the Ohio River Valley).
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