In the spring of 1865, with Union troops closing in on Richmond, a mob gathered in the street below Elizabeth Van Lew’s house. The Stars and Stripes was flying from her roof, the first Union flag raised in the Confederate capital. Men and women who had endured four years of war, who had lost sons and husbands, looked up at that flag and saw treason in the most intimate form imaginable. They surged toward the house, ready to burn it to the ground with the woman inside.
Elizabeth Van Lew came out onto the balcony. She was a small, frail-looking woman in her late forties, but she faced the crowd without flinching, prepared to stand her ground against hundreds of furious Confederates. Only Mary Bowser, her former servant and fellow spy, pulling her back inside, saved her from the mob that day. Van Lew had spent years as one of the most effective intelligence agents of the Civil War, operating in the very heart of the enemy.
Yet her survival in that moment, and for years before it, remains one of the war’s most remarkable feats. She was born in Richmond in 1818. Her father ran a successful hardware business, and the family ranked among the most prominent in the city. But Elizabeth was sent to Philadelphia for her schooling, where she was educated by Quakers.
The experience shaped her for life. From an early age she was wholly opposed to slavery, and when her father died in 1843, she put that conviction into action. She convinced her mother to free every slave the family owned. With the inheritance she received, roughly two hundred thousand dollars in today’s currency, she set about buying the relatives of those freed slaves so that families could remain together, and then freeing them as well.
She paid for her former slaves to receive proper education and training, employed them where she could, and found them work where she could not. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Van Lew found herself in an extraordinary position: a passionate abolitionist and Unionist living in the capital of the Confederacy. She was, to all appearances, a minority of one. She was surrounded by secessionist fervor in a city that had become the beating heart of the rebellion.
Yet instead of keeping her views private, she openly declared them. She told anyone who would listen that she believed in the Union and opposed slavery. That she was not murdered, that her house was not burned down, seemed to those who later studied her life almost beyond belief. But her position carried a strange kind of protection.
In a deeply male-dominated society, a woman was largely invisible. A woman who appeared slightly unhinged, who muttered to herself and spent her fortune on strange charitable whims, was not only invisible. She was dismissed as incapable of anything dangerous. What made Van Lew truly dangerous was the network she had built before the war even began.
The slaves she had freed, and the families she had reunited, formed a chain of loyalty that stretched from Richmond toward Union lines. These were people who owed her everything, who understood that she had spent her own fortune to buy their freedom and keep their families together. When the war came, they proved willing to risk their lives for her. Any of them, if caught helping her, would have been executed without hesitation.
They knew this, and they worked for her anyway, because they understood they were working for the greater good. Van Lew’s first major undertaking was helping Union prisoners held at Libby Prison in Richmond. The prison was a converted warehouse, monstrous in scale, packed with captured Union soldiers. Van Lew obtained permission to bring the prisoners food and other comforts under the cover of charity.
The guards saw only a genteel Southern woman performing acts of Christian mercy. They did not look too closely at what she brought. Locksmith tools and knives were hidden in jam jars. A custard tin was constructed with a secret compartment.
Her shoes had hollowed-out heels. A seamstress sewed hidden pockets into her dresses, which were so voluminous that a woman of her era walked around, as one commentator put it, like she was inside a tent. Under the noses of the guards, she smuggled in lockpicks, maps, and blades. She used ingenuity in her methods.
On one occasion, she sent prisoners a Bible with instructions to look at Second Chronicles, verses twenty-nine and thirty. She had pricked tiny holes into the pages, each one revealing a single letter when the paper was laid over a reference point and the page number was used for alignment. Transcribed in order, the pinprick letters spelled out a message detailing where to go after escape. Maps were stitched into the seams of blankets.
Inside each blanket, the map showed not only roads and railway lines but, most importantly, the locations of safe houses. Those safe houses were owned by the very people she had freed before the war, who now passed escaped soldiers from one home to another, moving them along in darkness until they reached Union territory. Van Lew even hid some prisoners in her own attic. A prisoner’s boot could be peeled back at the heel to reveal a useful little lockpick.
The recently invented tin can was put to work as a hiding place: inside a tin of strawberry jam nestled a small pocket knife. When a prisoner encountered a guard who offered resistance, the knife might prove essential. The blankets she brought were often described as having loose stitching along one seam, which was where the map was concealed. She would hand them over with a pointed remark about the quality of the needlework, trusting that a clever prisoner would understand.
The escapes were successful time and again. When prisoners reached Union lines and reported what Van Lew had done for them, word reached General Benjamin Butler. In 1863, after she helped two soldiers escape and return through enemy lines, Butler dispatched a courier to recruit her as an officially recognized Union agent. She was instructed to send information in coded dispatches and was taught to write in an invisible ink that only became visible when the paper was heated over a flame.
Using a simple quill dipped in lemon juice, she would write messages that appeared blank. When the recipient held the paper near a candle, careful not to let it scorch, the letters would brown and surface, revealing the words. She sent such messages into Libby Prison, where prisoners only needed a candle to read her instructions. Earlier, she had sent her trusted servant Mary Bowser north to receive a private education, at Van Lew’s own request and expense.
When Mary returned to Richmond, she was intelligent, literate, and possessed a remarkable memory. Van Lew placed her where she could do the most damage. The household of Confederate President Jefferson Davis was in desperate need of help. The first lady was pregnant and required additional staff.
Van Lew offered her slave, explaining that the woman was not very skilled in the kitchen and possibly illiterate, but she would do her best. That modest black woman was Mary Bowser, who could in fact read and write, and who possessed a photographic memory. She was hired as a dining room servant in the Confederate White House. The president, his family, and his generals paid her no attention, assuming she could not understand their conversations, even if she could remember them.
Every evening, as the Confederacy’s military leaders sat down to dinner, Mary Bowser served the soup. Six or eight generals might be present, discussing tactics, troop movements, supply problems, and strategy, passing maps around the table. Mary moved among them with the potatoes and the port, absorbing everything. When the meal was done and the maps were folded away, she reported to Van Lew everything she had witnessed.
On one occasion, she overheard talk of a fresh cavalry unit being moved to the old Cherry River fort and heavy cannons being positioned at the overlook at Piping Point. Such details went straight to Union headquarters. Grant himself later said that the information that came from Richmond via Van Lew and Mary was the best intelligence he received from anywhere. The success of the operation rested on the blindness of the Confederates.
No one in their wildest dreams believed a Negro servant had the intelligence to understand what the generals were saying. That assumption, as one observer noted, is likely part of why the espionage worked as well as it did and may well have helped the Union win the war. By June 1864, Van Lew’s network had grown to more than a dozen people, a loose alliance of men and women, black and white. It reached from the highest levels of the Confederate government, through the prison system, and down the chain of safe houses that funneled escaped soldiers home.
General Grant made her, for want of a better term, an official Union spy and gave her a personal code name: Babcock. As suspicion mounted, Confederate agents began following Van Lew through the streets of Richmond. She needed a way to move freely and meet her contacts. She created a character, Crazy Bet, who was plainly not all there.
She walked with her head cocked to one side, muttering to herself, developing a twitch, spouting religious fervor from her Quaker upbringing. Townspeople dismissed her as the mad woman who spent her money on frivolous things, who bought slaves only to give them away. No one believed that such a creature could possibly be a Union spy. In a very male-driven society, being a woman made you invisible.
Being a mad woman made you invisible and stupid. Van Lew also demonstrated a courage that went beyond espionage. An attempt to free Union prisoners, based on information she had provided, went catastrophically wrong. The raid’s leader, a Union colonel, was killed.
The Confederates put his body on public display at the railroad depot. The man had lost one leg earlier in the war, and his body was propped up without his wooden leg. The little finger of his left hand had also been severed. Van Lew was disgusted by the mutilation, and she resolved that the brave young man would be given dignity in death.
She went out to the battlefield with a couple of slaves, dug up his body from its shallow grave, and brought it back to Richmond for a proper burial. Standing before those who had desecrated the corpse, she confronted them: if this had been your husband, would you have allowed this to happen? Just because he was a Union soldier did not mean he was not a Christian man worthy of treatment as one. In the early morning of April 3, 1865, as Union troops advanced on the burning city, Van Lew raised the Stars and Stripes above her home.
It was the first Union flag raised in the South. The crowd in the streets was enraged, and the mob that gathered threatened to burn her house down. She stood defiantly on the balcony. She had hidden the Union flag away in her home, waiting for this moment, and in something like ecstasy she flew it in the middle of enemy territory.
She could not have known she would survive. Everyone around her was asking how she dared. It was, those who studied her life agreed, a measure of the woman she was. After Grant finally captured Richmond, Van Lew’s work as a spy master was done.
She received the grateful thanks of Grant and other officers, along with a small payment for her efforts. But her inheritance and her social standing were gone. The war had cost her everything. She had bankrupted herself for the Union cause, spending her fortune on freeing slaves, funding escapes, and supporting her network.
And her fellow Richmonders could not forgive her. Even though she had been on the winning side, she was living among the defeated. She was labeled a traitor and a spy. She was called insane, the legacy of her Crazy Bet persona haunting her for the rest of her life.
To this day, those who study her are struck that she is still spoken of in some quarters as a traitor and a witch. What she did, one observer noted, was very much like what the French Resistance did in the Second World War, living among the Gestapo in occupied territory. She did exactly the same thing, living in enemy territory her entire war. In her final years, she had fewer and fewer friends and little or no money left to survive.
She accepted handouts from the families and relatives of soldiers she had helped during the war. She died in her home in her beloved Richmond in 1900. Those who have studied her life place her above the great spymasters of history. Men like Sir Francis Walsingham operated from the comfortable surroundings of palaces, backed by armies, government funds, and monarchs who listened to them.
They commanded networks of highly placed spies. Elizabeth Van Lew was a woman on her own, working in the middle of the enemy, driven not by money or fame but by altruism. She bankrupted herself being a spy. She had spies sitting in the very rooms where the enemy made their decisions, a network in the heart of the opposition that Grant himself called the best intelligence he received anywhere.
When one considers the millions spent today on modern intelligence agencies, it is worth remembering that Van Lew built her entire operation around the kitchen table over a hundred years ago, with a single woman, a few freed slaves, and an unshakable belief that all people deserved to be equal. Throughout history, her admirers maintain, there has never been a more effective spy.
