The rain came down in sheets, hammering the backs of the three men as they followed a fourth through the mud of Oakwood Cemetery. The night was moonless and cold, their faces lit only by intermittent lightning. Thunder rolled overhead as if God himself was commenting on what they were about to do. They were grave robbers, and they knew the penalty.

Confederate soldiers patrolled nearby, and if they were caught digging up the body of a Union officer, death by hanging or firing squad awaited them. Neither option appealed, so they moved quickly, their crude shovels of iron and wood biting into the wet earth. The groundskeeper pointed to the spot. Beneath them lay the flimsy pine coffin of Lieutenant Colonel Ulric Dahlgren, dead for more than a month.

When they reached the casket, the worst part of the assignment began: prying it open in the dark to confirm it was the right body. They could not risk a torch. One of the spies shoved his hands inside, fingers searching. No right leg below the knee.

The little finger of the right hand was missing. They had the right man. The decaying body of Ulric Dahlgren was back in Union hands, though not yet on Union soil. His remains were carried to the farm of a Union operative, and the next morning, a woman appeared.

Elizabeth Van Lew had come to claim the body. She likely wore the skirt and jacket of a farm woman to hide her identity as she moved to the workshop, steeling herself for what she was about to see. The smell hit her first, like rotten eggs, but the stench did not stop her. She was familiar with the odor of death.

Dahlgren’s body lay on a table, encircled by her unionist agents, her friends and confidants. Victorian culture was obsessed with death. A calm look on a dead person’s face signaled that the soul was at peace and ready for the afterlife. It was important for Elizabeth to comfort Dahlgren’s family with a story of his serene demeanor.

But Dahlgren had been cut down on the battlefield, and the last thing on his mind had been meeting his maker. According to the Richmond papers, his face bore a look of agony. Elizabeth would have to improvise. She leaned down for a closer look.

Her fingertips skimmed his chest and what was left of his limbs. From her diary: the skin was dirty and scratched, his face yellow-green, the most exposed parts like his nose dried out and brown, his eyes opaque, the blue irises glazed over. Poor Dahlgren, she thought. The kill shot to his back had left a large wound.

She must have wondered whether he had been caught by the fatal blow as he fled, whether he had been running in fear. But there was no time for second thoughts. Her presence here on this remote farm was dangerous. She listened for the sound of hooves, men on horseback, the slap of a rifle butt against a thigh.

Any of it would expose her work and her spy ring. She had to finish her task. The ring held an informal funeral ceremony, singing a hymn and praying together. This was not the quiet, demure spy Elizabeth Van Lew had been expected to be.

She did not simply stay in her home and write reports. She got out. She went places. She had once walked directly into the Confederate War Department and approached a Confederate officer, turning him into a Union agent.

It worked. When she could not convince people, she bribed them. She impoverished herself in the process. She was relentless, driven by a willpower rarely seen, committed to ending slavery and to restoring the Commonwealth of Virginia to what it had been before the war tore it apart.

How had this wealthy southern Richmonder, a woman with money, charm, wit, and one of the most elegant homes in the city, come to this? The answer was simple: freedom. Elizabeth Van Lew was born into a household that owned slaves, yet she became a fierce abolitionist. Her parents were not originally from Richmond.

Her father came from Long Island, opened a hardware business that sold to the University of Virginia and everyone else, and was well known and well liked. Her mother came from Philadelphia, the daughter and granddaughter of an abolitionist who had signed the Constitution, served as mayor of Philadelphia, and founded an abolitionist society that went on for years. Elizabeth would have heard stories about him over and over again. She had been educated in Philadelphia, where southern belles were typically sent to learn how to be proper women.

But Elizabeth got a very good education there, and she encountered abolitionists for the first time. That may have influenced everything she did for years to come. The family kept slaves on their properties, at least a dozen between the house and the farm outside the city. It was how people in the South showed their wealth.

Elizabeth fought with her father about it. She slowly helped the enslaved either buy themselves out of slavery or freed them directly. She sent an entire family north. Some simply stayed with her, because in that time and place there were not many options for people in that situation.

Before the war, Richmond was not the rural outpost outsiders imagined. It was a vibrant, industrialized city, a powerhouse. Gallego flour was known internationally, the Coca-Cola of its time, sold in South America and Europe. Tobacco was processed everywhere.

Tredegar Iron Works was a primary source of Confederate artillery, locomotive parts, and cannons. Without Tredegar, there likely could have been no southern war machine at all. The sky Elizabeth knew was filled with smokestacks and stinky smells, including guano shipped from South America to fertilize tobacco fields. As the war began, Elizabeth wanted to help Union officers held in Richmond’s notorious prisons, where conditions were poor and desperate.

By the middle of the war, hungry Richmond children came to the prisons to beg for food, but the prisons had no food either. In the early days, Elizabeth approached the Confederate officers who ran the prisons and asked for access. She was refused twice. Two different officers told her, in effect, that she was a southern lady and should go be a southern lady.

The third time, she changed tactics. She told the officer, “Why, your hair is so beautiful it should adorn a statue of Janice. ” He fell for it, gave her access, and throughout the war helped her do what she needed to do. Her position in society bought her access.

People were afraid to confront her because of her money and power, and she knew how to talk to people, how to influence and persuade them. She was teaching herself how to be a spy as she went. At first she sent her reports to the White House, addressed to whom it may concern. She had no idea who to contact.

Eventually General Benjamin Butler, himself a whole piece of work, found her and gave her a cipher so she could write her reports in code. She sent them as if she were his niece, using disappearing ink and other tricks she figured out on her own. Butler was impressed, and Ulysses S. Grant’s spy operators took her away from him.

They liked her reports. One of them reached Lincoln’s desk. By 1864, Elizabeth was sending dispatches, sometimes three a week or more, to Grant’s battlefield breakfast table. Legend has it the reports were sometimes accompanied by a rose, though we do not really know if that is true.

Her enslaved servants and ring members snuck the reports past enemy lines. At first, they wrote notes and hid them in the heels of their shoes, bulky shoes with a hole hollowed out in the heel, and walked them across the river. Enslaved people were not under suspicion and could go almost anywhere. Grant was sitting just across the river by the middle of the war.

They almost got caught a couple of times. Eventually Grant’s people started coming closer to Van Lew to gather information directly, relying less on the enslaved couriers, sending someone on horseback down to the river, trying anything they could imagine. Elizabeth managed to sneak agents into the Confederate War and Navy departments. She had the wardens of Richmond’s prisons in her pocket.

Her ring grew as Virginia residents became increasingly weary of the war and desperate for it to end. The most productive espionage operation of the Civil War on either side, as the historian Edwin Fishel would conclude a century later, was the service performed by Richmond’s Unionist underground, run by Elizabeth Van Lew. Yet for nearly a hundred years, almost no one knew. Ninety-four years after the Civil War, Edwin C.

Fishel, a former spy during World War II, was poking around the hidden corners of the National Archives. In a disused room that had to be unlocked, he found stacks of documents piled to the ceiling, wrapped in red tape and tied in bows. They were the neatly organized reports of the Army of the Potomac’s Bureau of Military Information, the spooks of the Union, compiled by its head, George Sharp. Sharp had been known for a style of spying called all-source intelligence: collecting documents from everyone with information during the war, spies, deserters, enslaved people, free men, and putting them together in handwritten reports for Grant.

Fishel’s discovery led to a 700-page history of Civil War spying, and his verdict was stunning: Elizabeth Van Lew ran the most productive espionage operation of the entire war. Her nickname, Crazy Bet, was wrong, or at least inaccurate. Fishel’s discovery showed that Elizabeth was not the caricature the newspapers made of her. The papers generally described her as a sort of Clara Barton of Richmond, not understanding the depth of her contribution.

The more historians studied, the more they agreed with Fishel: she was consequential, essential to the Union’s efforts. The Union, notoriously stingy, gave her what amounts to $50,000 in today’s dollars, a grant from the Union Army to do her work. By the winter of 1864, Gettysburg was a memory and the siege of Petersburg had been going on for six months. Richmond was in a sorry state.

People were starving. Inflation was rampant. Calls for a raid to free Union officers and soldiers from the city’s prisons were growing louder. Elizabeth called for a raid, and Lincoln authorized it.

He ordered it led by Hugh Judson Kilpatrick, who happened to be the great-great-great-grandfather of CNN anchor Anderson Cooper. A smaller force would be led by Ulric Dahlgren, a young heartthrob of his day, the son of a naval commander, a friend of Lincoln’s who had risen through the ranks quickly and lost part of a leg in an early battle. The plan was a classic pincer movement. Kilpatrick would threaten Richmond from the north, drawing attention and manpower, while Dahlgren crossed the James with just 500 cavalrymen to come in from the south and free the prisoners.

It all went horribly wrong. Dahlgren was killed. His body was taken by the Confederates and put on display at a train depot on the York River. The Confederates buried him in Oakwood Cemetery.

Elizabeth, who had wanted this raid to succeed, was so upset that she decided the body would be retrieved. She ordered members of her spy ring to dig him up. Her agents smuggled the body to a farm. When Elizabeth arrived and saw Dahlgren’s face, she knew she had to comfort his family.

She did what she could. Her ring held an informal funeral, singing hymns and praying together. Throughout the war, Elizabeth had a companion at her side. Mary Jane Richards, sometimes known as Mary Jane Bowser, was an enslaved woman whom Elizabeth had sent north for education and to Liberia to live a free life.

Mary Jane hated Liberia and came back, but she could not return to Richmond as a free woman. She had to live with Elizabeth as her servant. The legend is that Elizabeth placed Mary Jane inside the Confederate White House to spy on Jefferson Davis, offering her own personal housemaid to Varina Davis after learning the couple was in want of one. Mary Jane was said to gather information from Davis’s desk in the snug, a tiny room in the White House of the Confederacy, maybe eight by ten feet, with a fireplace, a desk, and a little sofa where the frequently ailing Davis lounged.

Neither Elizabeth nor Mary Jane ever claimed the story was true during their lifetimes. It came from one of Elizabeth’s nieces, told to a reporter decades later. It is possible they self-censored, for fear of reprisals. It is also possible it never happened.

We simply do not know. What is clear is that Mary Jane was extraordinary for her time, educated, traveled, and that she did fight slavery alongside Elizabeth. She helped collect information from the household slaves of Confederate leaders, tapping into the network of enslaved people who worked in Richmond’s homes and factories. She accompanied Elizabeth on walks around the prisons, and prisoners were told that Elizabeth Van Lew would help them escape.

Mary Jane was always there, overhearing critically important conversations. She did enter the Confederate White House once, according to her own account, and was tossed out almost immediately by Davis. As the war ground on, Elizabeth grew bolder. She crossed enemy lines.

According to a version of a story written by a member of her ring who was with her at the time, she and her elderly mother took a train across enemy lines to Northern Virginia to meet with General Kilpatrick and discuss the plans for his raid. She contributed what she knew about getting into the city, the best roads to use, what to watch out for, what the Confederates were doing. At that same location, the soldiers were preparing for something called the Washington Ball, building an incredible edifice in the middle of a battlefield out of anything they could find, taking down houses, chopping down pine trees. Senators came from Washington for the party.

Young women came down with their weary mothers in tow. The party went on all night, and in the course of it, a cross-dressing Confederate spy, a man dressed as a woman, gathered secrets about the disposition of Union soldiers and gave them to the South. A big ball in the middle of a war. Elizabeth also faced danger at home.

One day, in the middle of the war, two Confederate detectives came to search her house. She had three Union officers hidden in the attic on the third floor. She took the detectives on a very slow tour of her house, steering them away from the third floor. By the time they reached the attic, they were so hungry, and she had promised them food, that they wrapped things up and went on their way.

She manipulated the situation because she was very smart about how to talk to people. That was her southern belle training and education. After the war, Grant made her postmaster of Richmond, a very big and powerful job, and she was great at it, improving the performance of the postal service. Richmond did not care.

They wanted one of their own in the position. She was ostracized by the city. As the years went on, she took on different jobs with very little success. She died in the house she had always lived in, surrounded by a picture of Ulysses Grant looking down on her and a bust of Lincoln.

She was surrounded by the men she loved. She never married. Her family said she had been engaged as a young woman and that he had died of malaria. But she was powerful, with money and one of the best houses in Richmond.

Marriage would have thrown all of that into the wind. She was buried in Richmond, where her headstone was provided by fans in Boston who admired her. After her death, that fabulous mansion was occupied by a historical society and other groups over the years, and finally the city tore it down. Today an elementary school stands on the site.

It is not named for her, which says something about the city’s lingering attitude toward her. There is a sign in front with her name on it, but the school itself is not named for her. The woman whom the historian Edwin Fishel called the head of the most productive espionage operation of the Civil War on either side was nearly buried by history for a century. A woman raised as a southern belle, mannered and gracious, had been a hardened Union spy all along.

She was never as pretty as her picture showed, one wag said of her. Everybody is a critic. But the record Fishel found in that locked room in the National Archives proved what she had been all along: not a magnolia, not a colorful footnote, but essential to the Union’s prosecution of the war.