Southern Lady, Yankee Spy: The True Story of Elizabeth Van Lew, a Union Agent in the Heart of the Confederacy by Elizabeth Varon published by Oxford University Press (2003)
Elizabeth Van Lew was a Richmond “Lady.” She used her position in Southern society to develop a spy ring informing the Union high command about the plans of the Confederate leaders. Van Lew organized African Americans, white men, and society women to spy on generals, politicians, and other leaders to gather intelligence and then to transmit it to Union headquarters. Southern Lady, Yankee Spy by Elizabeth Varon gives a careful biography of Elizabeth Van Lew and the society she lived in during the Civil War Era in Richmond.
While Elizabeth Van Lew came from a high economic strata in Richmond, her family had originally come from the North. Her father John was from Jamaica on Long Island, New York. Her mother Eliza was born in Philadelphia. Her grandfather was an ardent patriot during the Revolution and he served on the Pennsylvania constitutional convention and became mayor of Philadelphia. The couple moved to Richmond in the the early 1800s and Elizabeth was born in 1818. The family opened a hardware business that became prosperous. And, while the Van Lews kept pushing to try to be regarded as elite within Richmond society, they were often privately critical of slavery. However, as Professor Elizabeth Varon says, the Van Lews tried to steer a course down the middle between outright abolitionism and the “pro-slavery creed.”
The City of Richmond had been burned to the ground during the American Revolution. When the Van Lews move there, it was a rough frontier town. During the decade when Elizabeth was born, the population nearly doubled as it became the political and economic capital of Virginia. As the city grew, so did its dependance on slave labor. Those admitted to high society almost always had slaves. Her father bought some Africans for status as well as for labor.
In 1836, the Van Lews bought a three story mansion on Grace Street that was once inhabited by the mayor of the city. The grounds occupied a full city block. By 1830, the number of slaves were nine, and ten years later they numbered fifteen.
Rather than have Elizabeth attend school in the South, her parents sent her away to Philadelphia. That city was a thriving metropolis with ten times as many people as Richmond. She may have come into contact with abolitionist ideas there. When she returned to Richmond, acquaintances took note of her antislavery views even though the Van Lew family still owned household slaves. Others heard about her views and several other anti-slavery residents collected around her. As war approached in 1860, Elizabeth became the leader of an opposition made up of African Americans and dissident whites.
After the Union defeat at Bull Run in July of 1861, many captured soldiers were brought to Richmond. Van Lew and her mother began going to the prisons to bring food and other assistance to the starving prisoners of the Confederacy. This immediately attracted public criticism. One newspaper said:
“Two ladies, a mother and a daughter, living on Church Hill, have lately attracted public notice by their assiduous attentions to the Yankee prisoners confined in this City. Whilst every true woman in this community has been busy making articles of comfort or necessity for our troops… these two women have been expending their opulent means in aiding and giving comfort to the miscreants who have invaded our sacred soil, bent on raping and murder, the desolation of our homes and sacred places, and the ruin and dishonor of our families. … The largest human charity can find ample scope in kindness and attention to our own poor fellows. …the course of these two females … cannot but be regarded as an evidence of sympathy amounting to an endorsation [sic] of the cause and conduct of these Northern Vandals.”
Southern “ladies” were not to dispense charity to the starving men in the enemy army.
Although Van Lew knew that her actions had been exposed to the public and that she was receiving threats, she was secretly assisted by both her Black and white followers. She organized assistance for those Union officers held as hostages by Jefferson Davis. One officer later recalled that “as we went up-stairs and entered the cell, a basket of hot rolls sat on a bench inside, sent by Miss Van Lew, the Union prisoners’ friend in Richmond. The jailer seeing it uttered an exclamation of anger, saying: “‘Well, you may keep that, but it is the last you will get here.’ ” In spite of the threat, Van Lew continued to bring them food.
In April of 1862, the Confederacy executed a spy for the first time. Accusations that Van Lew was a spy became widespread. She tried to deflect them by providing aid to the Confederate wounded. And yet, with the increased danger, Varon writes, Van Lew placed her and her allies in greater danger by delivering intelligence to the Union forces.
According to Varon, white Unionists fell into distinct classes. There were wealthy, slaveholding former Whigs who supported the nascent underground financially. Second, there were working class people and merchants who were immigrants or born in the North and who carried out most of the underground work. All risked exposure and death. While Elizabeth Van Lew is the central character in this book, Varon also explains the lives of the individuals who worked with her and the sufferings they and their families endured.
Beginning in 1862 and continuing onward until the close of the war, Van Lew was not only bringing food to the men in the prisoner of war camps. She also helped them to escape. Her house was a safe house for prisoners fleeing North and one of her underground operatives was a clerk at Libby Prison where he could arrange the breakouts, sometimes giving the prisoner a Confederate uniform to speed him on his way. After the escape white and Black members of the underground took the prisoners to the Van Lew mansion where they were fed and instructed how to get within union lines. Other Unionists also offered their homes to the escaped prisoners.
Blacks working inside the prisons collected information on new prisoners and surreptitiously communicated with the prisoners of war. As one prisoner remembered, “The negroes who came in to scrub would say ‘That is Miss Van Lew. She will be a friend if you can escape.’ ”
While Van Lew had been helpful to the Union, it was only with the arrival of Ben Butler in December of 1863 that Van Lew’s underground was fully integrated into the Northern war effort. They assisted more than one hundred Union soldiers who had escaped from Libby Prison in one of the biggest jailbreaks in the history of the war. And they gave information to Butler that would later be of help to Ulysses S. Grant during the Overland Campaign.
Varon also writes about the popular belief that Van Lew infiltrated a Black woman into the household of Jefferson Davis. In 1905, Varina Davis acknowledged that the Confederate White House used Blacks as slaves and servants, but she denied that she employed a spy. She wrote that she never employed an “educated negro ‘given or hired’ by Miss Van Lew as a spy” during the war. “My maid was an ignorant girl born and brought up on our plantation…who would not have done anything to injure her master or me.” However, people who knew Van Lew said that she had infiltrated the Confederate White House. Varon gives accounts of this claim, although she does not make a final judgement on it. She does point out that Mary Richards, a slave, was sent by Van Lew to be educated in the North and later worked for the Richmond Unionist underground, so perhaps she is the undercover agent.
After Richmond was taken, Grant put an armed guard around the Van Lew residence to protect it from avenging Confederates. General Butler sent a letter to the War Department telling them that Van Lew had “furnished valuable information during the whole campaign.” Julia Grant, Ulysses S. Grant’s wife, recalled that when the general arrived in Richmond after the capture he told her “he said he must call on Miss Van Lew, [for] she had rendered valuable service to the Union.””
Van Lew was appointed postmaster for Richmond. According to Varon:
“Van Lew positioned herself as a champion of racial equality, and took actions, both symbolic and concrete, to elevate the status of blacks. In April of 1870, for example, when Richmond blacks orchestrated a massive procession through the city to celebrate the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment (that enfranchised African American men), Van Lew hung an American flag on the outside of her mansion to show her approval. The procession “gave rousing cheers” when it passed her house. Van Lew’s action won the praise of the New National Era, the Washington, D.C., newspaper edited by eminent black abolitionist Frederick Douglass; hers was “one of the few houses upon which the flag of the Union was flying.””
Elizabeth Van Lew tried to advance Black civil rights both during the Civil War and during Reconstruction.
Southern Lady, Yankee Spy was the second book published by Elizabeth Varon. She has become a very important scholar on the Civil War and her recent biography of Confederate General James Longstreet attracted widespread attention. Similar to the Longstreet book, her biography of Elizabeth Van Lew has the engaging feel of a narrative, with the analytic scholarship of an academic biography. Varon tells the story well, but she does interrupt the narrative to point out varying accounts of what happened or to disprove myths that grew up around Van Lews actions during the war and Reconstruction. This is a modern biography, not a hagiography and it includes Van Lew’s mistakes as well as her insight into how the South could be remade without slavery.
I recommend this book to those who study the Civil War and Reconstruction, those interested in spy craft, and to Women’s History students. It is also good for a look at 19th Century Richmond and African American’s part in that society. .
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