War history. All at the university of virginia. Thankfully, shes not a hockey buff. I dont believe she is. She said, go caps. What has happened to the American Sports scene . I dont know. I never thought in a civil war conference people would be jawing about hockey. Such is life. A very accomplished scholar. Shes published a number of books, including we mean to be counted, white women and the politics in antebellum virginia. This union, one of my favorite overviews of the 1850s. Published by university of North Carolina press. Victory, defeat and freedom at the end of the civil war, published by oxford. Its an outstanding book. Its a way to look beyond the surrender proceedings and material culture, visual culture. How it resided in american memory. Its outstanding. I cant say enough good things about it. Today, subject of her talk, she published true story of Elizabeth Van lew, a union agent in the heart of the confederacy. [ applause ] i bring you greetings from virginia and im delighted today to tell you about a remarkable virginian. Elizabeth van lew, i wrote a biographer of her 15 years ago. As we approach the 200th anniversary of her birth she was born september 25, 1818. Were coming up on the anniversary. Im more fascinated by her than ever. In part because new details of her life continue to come to light. In part, because we now know more than ever about the phenomena that van lew represented, white southern unionism, something about which i will say a good deal here and in our discussion after. It was clear to me from the start when i began researching van lews life more than 20 years ago that she is in many ways a problematic subject for a biographer. Part of the problem is that at the time i started writing, the vast majority of americans had never heard of her. She was an obscure figure for most of the reading. At the same time, among civil war aficionados, folks like us, she was a mythical figure, known but cloaked in all sorts of twicetold tales. Finally, for people in her native richmond, van lew has been a very polarizing figure. Shes regarded as a heroin in some quarters and a pariah in others. I will sketch, the myth, the legends handed down. I will focus on offering my corrective to that myth. Then i will close with some observations about van lews historical significance and her significance for our field of civil war studies. The legend first. The principal features of the van lew legend are as follows. Van lew was, so the story goes, a rare white southern abolitionist whose antisavory sentiments can be traced to her northern parentage and education in philadelphia. She headed up a union spy ring that aided prisoners there, federal prisoners. She had, according to the myth, almost unfettered access to the Union Soldiers in confederate prisons. Although her northern sympathies were wellknown to many confederate richmonders, so the story goes, van lew avoided detection during the war by crafting a reputation as an imbalanced and therefore essentially harmless old spinster. She has been remembered as crazy bet. Over the years, many a treatment of van lew has suggested that the role of crazy bet came easy to her because she was, an odd and eccentric woman. This mythical view is proven resilient in part because of the nature of the sources available to us. Very imperfect sources. Van lew kept a journal during the war and left behind to the New York Public Library a disorganized set of personal papers. During the war, she kept the papers buried in an undisclosed location so if confederate authorities burst into her house they wouldnt find them. Working with the papers is tough going. If we plum their murky depths and put them this context and recover other voices and perspectives on van lew, we can reconstruct her story. I will make the case today that the true story of elisebee lili lew is more compelling than the mythologic mythological. First of all, van lews views on slavery. Second, the military significance of her spy network. Did it matter in the end that she led this richmond underground . Did the underground matter . The issue why she never got caught. She escapes detection all the way through. One of the things that made her a tough subject for biographers. It was a clandestine operation. She was trying to hide what she did from public view. I will Say Something about the origins and problems with this crazy bet van lew as crazy bet image. Lets go back to her early life. I will take on this topic of slavery first. According to the van lew myth, van lew was an abolitionist. Someone who knew from the time she was a child that slavery was wrong. Someone who committed herself to emancipation. The word abolitionism, of course, was and is a loaded term and has to be unpacked, if you will. For van lews detractors, sympathetic to the confederacy, calling her abolitionist was a way to brand her as an outsider to the south. Someone who thanks to her northern parentage and her views she picked up was never a real virginian. For van lews defenders, over the years, calling her an abolitionist has been a way to paint her as a moral paragon. Someone who saw the light when her fellow southerners could not. A close reading of the sources reveals that van lew was not an abolitionist in the sense that William Lloyd garrison were abolitionists. Instead of rejecting slavery in the company of slaveholders, they staked out a position of middle ground. The van lew family, upper middle class family, lived in a mansion on church hill. They made every effort to fully assimilate into Southern Society and the van lew family during the antebellum period owned dozens of saves. Van lew and her mother with whom she was very close privately lamented the evils of slavery, hoping all the while that through individual acts of kindness and charity, freeing individual slaves, they could erode slavery from the inside. Van lew and her family supported the african colonialization movement which sought to deport blacks to africa. Van lew sent her most valued slave to liberia as a teenager to ask she be returned to her to slavery in richmond a few years later. I will come back to that story. Puzzling and improbable. While there is some evidence that sources are murky here that van lew secretly freed some of her slaves and allowed them to stay on working for wages. Freed slaves had to leave within a year. That she gave a secret freedom to some slaves. Her family had ownership of at least half a dozen slaves. Mary richards among them. Well into the civil war. This is not the provifile of an abolitionist. Van lew believed in voluntary e emancipation. This was no northern thing. This was a virginian outlook. In her youth, an attitude support for colonialization and other schemes that fell out of favor over the course of the antebellum period. As the quote unquote positive good defense of slavery emerges. Here is the key to understanding van lews life and spy career. She did not see herself as someone who repudiated the confederacy or repudiated the south. Instead, van lew believed that secessionists and confederates were the traitors to the south. In her reckoning, it was they who in the wake of lincolns 1860 election abandoned virginias heritage of political moderation. It was they who rejected reform and compromise. It was they who became blinded by their proslavery creed. The secession crisis which she watched carefully, the debates in richmond, represented for van lew a catastrophe and an epiphany. Van lew did, would eventually elaborate a critique of slavery. That was forged in the firestorm of secession. She concluded that slavery had made southern whites an s antidemocratic and dangerously selfrighteous. Slavery was the cause of the madness of secession. She, like other unconditional unionists, those folks who would remain true blue throughout, rejected the secessionists boasts, one rebel could whip ten yankees. She believed as most of the unconditional unionists did, that the war would be a carnival of death. No quick end and victory. Theres tantalizing evidence that suggests that van lew may have been influenced by africanamericans in her household. To see slavery in this framework of sin and redemption. Not long after virginias secession van lew would write, one of the family servants predicted the downfall of the confederacy telling her, quote, you will see, they shall fall down slain, that is the fulfillment of prophecy. Van lew wrote those words in her journal followed by a brief empathetic postscript. So said with clear eye and bright hope, the intelligent colored man that called us owners. Van lew shared the bright hope. She looked to the union army to fulfill his prophecy. Van lew would take measures to promote emancipation and help africanamericans, including those working in her household, to flee the south. Thus it was only after secession closed off that imagined middle ground in the slavery debate that elizabeth embraced abolition. She chose to stay in richmond after secession. She could have decamped to the north. She had relatives in new york and pennsylvania. She chose to stay in richmond where she felt she had, as she put it an awful responsibility to her fellow virginians, particularly the blacks in her orbit. In her political calculus, its the unionists remaining true to the state. Van lew in short was not born and raise ed an abolitionist bu evolved into one. This is key to understanding her mentality. She would bring to her war work, her spy work, the special zeal from guilt and regret of a late comer to the truth. Someone trying to make right. How was van lew to fulfill that awful responsibility . As she saw it. Its long been established that van lew rallied to the assistance of Union Prisoners of war. She helped them to survive. She helped them escape. This especially in the first two years of the war. In the second half of the war, she headed an intelligence operation quite elaborate which gathered Vital Information for grants army. Even this aspect of her story has cloaked in myth, as i suggested. According to the crazy bet legend, van lew was regarded as so crazy and harmless, she was allowed to wander confederate prisons as will, hatching plans with the prisoners and gathering data to send to union forces. Its true then in the first year of the war, van lew did have access to some confederate prisons in richmond. She did befriend and assist inmates, union men in prison there. She secured that access by manipulating her image as a southern lady. She publically justified hy eies acts of charity to the unworthy as she put it. In keeping with the female imperative to be benevolent. After martial law was imposed, a measure followed by sweeping arrests of dozens of suspected unionists, van lew could no longer visit with union pr prisoners. She was never allowed to enter the notorious libby prison. The Union Underground, socalled, that coalesces under her leadership, managed somehow in spite of a new atmosphere of scrutiny, managed to provide relief and means of escape. For Union Soldiers in prison in richmond. And to help civilians, white and black southern unionists flee the confederacy and find refuge in the north. Richmond unionists in her circle it was a small and brave circle of operatives worked with her to provide escapees with safe houses, with passes and disguises and guides and contacts to take them to union lines. The main weapons in van lews arsenal in these early days were her familys wealth, which she spent liberally to bribe confederate guards and officials, and her familys social standing. They were a wellrespected southern family. Her mother in particular thought of as a sort of southern matron. Very high standing in the community. She parlayed that social standing into numerous favors from influential confederates. Its true that van lew resorted to play acting to get her way. Her favorite role was the role of the loyal, respectable confederate lady. When in the presence of confederate officialdom, she and her mother did their best to, quote, talk southern confederacy, unquote. To fit in. They even took in confederate borders and opened their home to the rebel wounded in what were intended to be conspicuous shows of loyalty to the confederacy that would throw confederates off the scent. Perhaps the most important asset for the Union Underground this play acting and her Family Resources were important, but the most important asset was the cooperation of africanamerican unionists who risked life and limb for this Union Underground. According to the memoirs of a colonel who was stationed at grants headquarters at city point in the last year of the war, i will quote, miss van lew kept two or three bright, sharp colored money on the watch near libby prison who were ready to conduct an escaped prisoner to safety. Ney on the watch near libby prison who were ready to conduct an escaped prisoner to safety. Eney on the watch near libby prison who were ready to conduct an escaped prisoner to safety. Y on the watch near libby prison who were ready to conduct an escaped prisoner to safety. On the watch near libby prison who were ready to conduct an escaped prisoner to safety. It represents interracial interaction. Her family mansion on church hill provided this way station for fugitives on the journey. The most fabled of those africanamericans who worked for the underground is the mysterious Mary Elizabeth bouser. Rumors began to circulate that during the war she had planted a black servant as a spy in the very inner sanctum of the white house. It seems so improbable. An article published in 1900 furnished some details. The story began to come to light as van lew is passing from the scene. According to this article, the van lews had sent one of their slaves to philadelphia to be educated and sent her to liberia to welcome her back to richmond on eve of the war. This same mysterious slave who the papers did not name initially was planted so the the article claimed, in the Confederate White House where in her guise as a domestic servant the spy gathered intelligence for the Union Underground and funneled it on to van lew. The story took on a new life when van lews executor of her estate, a northern man, purportedly ascertained the identity of the mysterious white house spy from elizabeths niece who remembered the name of the agent as Mary Elizabeth bowser. They passed the name on to a journalist who made this information as the white house spy public in a 1911 article. As i research van lews life, i was keen to learn as you can imagine everything i could about ma mary bowser. What i learned trying to follow this is that the woman all these years that we had membered as mary bowser was, in fact, one Mary Jane Richards. The records of the American Colonization Society along with other sources demonstrated that it was a slave girl named Mary Richards who they sent north to be educated and sent to liberia and summoned back to richmond on the eve of the war. This Mary Richards stayed one step ahead of the authorities as she worked in the richmond underground by using a series of aliases, including mary henley and mary jones. We fast forward to reconstruction, there we have letters in richards hand, revealing she had served as a federal agent during the war. I was able to corroborate the story and map it on the bowser story. Interestingly this is an object lesson in what historians do and the joys and pit falls of our work. The most striking piece of evidence on Mary Richards wartime exploits didnt come to light until after i published a book. Some years after i published my book about van lew, someone at the state library in virginia sent me a newspaper article from a new york newspaper, one of the premiere africanamerican count newspapers in the country. That article covered a speech given by a woman going by the name Richmonia Richards to the brooklyn, new york, baptist church. In this article, we see the claim we see richards credited with having said she had gone into the president s house seeking for washing and making her way into a private office where she opened the drawers and scrutinized papers. Here is evidence from just a few months after the war that really puts Mary Jane Richards in the Confederate White House, something i looked for and not found in all those my own many days of research. So i was thrilled by the emergence of this source. It confirmed that bowser is richards and richards was in the Confederate White House. I was chagrinned i hadnt found it myself. I hadnt thought in a million years that Mary Jane Richards would pop up in brooklyn in september of 1865. Of course, with our wonderful digital newspapers, we can key word search, i might have found the source more quickly using modern technology. That article represents a new set of leads i hope folks will follow in this story. Riches and others like her key to van lews network. Beginning in the winter of 1863, van lews double life, where shes pretending to be a loyal confederate lady while working for the union, her double life becomes more risky as she and her fellow union operatives are enlisted in the federal secret service. Took a while to get together but finally they do. They have gotten wind from various people who made their way out of richard mondof richms an underground. They sign her up. Van lews role at this point is crucial. Her mansion is the nerve center of this spy operation. She is best described as a spy master who oversaw and deployed a devoted group of unionist operatives. People willing it take her orders without question and to risk their lives to do so. To my mind, again, as all of this came to light in my research, the very existence of this network to me undercut the crazy bet theory. Its hard to believe that men and women who have trusted their lives to van lew if she made it a practice of acting erratic in public. She inspired the trust of the people in her network. That network reached far beyond richmond into the neighboring counties. Her operatives practiced a primitive but effective spy trade craft. They used code names. They used invisible ink to write messages. They carried those hidden in their shoes and clothing. It was prim