Elizabeth Van Lew
Her father sent her to a Quaker school in Philadelphia, and she came home a flaming abolitionist and a die-hard patriot. She was extremely outspoken about her beliefs. She had a good heart and couldn’t bear the suffering caused by the institution of slavery.
Her father died when she was 25 years old, and she convinced her mother to free their nine slaves. When she learned that her slaves’ family members were to be sold, she purchased them, and liberated them, too.
Elizabeth Van Lew
She used part of her inheritance to send her former slave, Mary Elizabeth Bowser (whom I wrote about in an earlier post) to the Quaker school. Though she disdained war, Ms. Van Lew remained loyal to the Union after the Civil War began. She arranged for Mrs. Bowser to work as a servant in the home of Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president. By appearing to be uneducated, Mrs. Bowser was able to gather critical information about the Confederacy.
Mrs. Bowser and Elizabeth met after dark near the Van Lew family farm. Hiding her curls under a huge bonnet, she passed herself off as a poor countrywoman riding about in her buggy.
Elizabeth was 43 years old when she began to spy for the Union. In her own opinion, she was a loyal Virginian, and the secessionists were traitors. She quickly assembled a circle of accomplices: slaves and farmers, seamstresses and storekeepers, black and white, working in plain sight for the North.
From her garden, Elizabeth could see the old ship chandler’s warehouse, a huge rectangular building with four floors, which the Confederates had converted into the infamous Libby Prison. She heard of the suffering of the Yankee prisoners who were housed there, and brought baskets of food, medicines, and books to them. Though her fellow Richmonders scowled at her, they didn’t interfere. She gathered information about Confederate troop movements from the new inmates.
Elizabeth Van Lew never married. She was viewed as an eccentric, so she began to play the part, hoping she would appear harmless. She walked the streets of Richmond in shabby clothes, her head bent to one side, talking to herself or to an imaginary friend. That’s when her neighbors began to call her "Crazy Bet."
But her espionage activities increased. She recruited more aides and bribed officials when necessary. The Yankee soldiers at Libby Prison passed messages to her by faintly underlining certain words and scribbling hen scratches in the margins of the books she loaned to them. The Confederate prison guards never caught on.
Some of the slaves had stayed on as paid servants, and Elizabeth used them as couriers. They carried secret messages in the baskets of eggs and produce they sold on the streets of Richmond. She used most of her inheritance to finance her espionage activities.
In 1865, when General Grant was finally able to visit her and thank her for her service to the Union cause, Elizabeth raised the Union flag above her home for the first time in four years. A mob of angry neighbors threatened her with violence, but she didn’t waiver, telling them that Union forces would arrive within the hour. The crowd soon dispersed.
After the war, Elizabeth needed a job to supplement what little was left of her family fortune. As president, Ulysses. S. Grant appointed her postmistress of Richmond, but she lost that job when Rutherford B. Hayes took office. She accepted a clerical position at the Post Office Department in Washington D. C., which she resigned after Grover Cleveland was elected president.
She returned to Richmond and lived out her days in the family mansion, but the citizens of Richmond hadn’t forgotten about her support of the Union during the war. No one would socialize with her. She was still reviled and ostracized.
We might never have known about her exploits if not for her diary, which was found buried outside her home after her death. It was a complete record of her life. Ms. Van Lew lived to the ripe old age of 82, but she died penniless.
She paid dearly for her beliefs. How courageous!
Copyright © 2006 Maggie MacLean
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