The Union Spy Ring in Richmond: Black Spy in the Confederate White House

Elizabeth Van Lew

The White House of the Confederacy

Elizabeth Van Lew of Richmond, although from a good family, was an ardent Unionist who refused to leave town even as the Confederate government took up residence. Her continued devotion to the Union cause was considered just another of the eccentricities of the woman her neighbors came to call “Crazy Bet”. Van Lew began to accentuate her eccentricities. As she walked along the street, she mumbled and hummed to herself, head bent to one side, holding imaginary conversations. Her disguise served her well as she set up a wide reaching spy ring within the Confederate capital, and some say within the Confederate White House itself.


Van Lew began visiting Richmond’s Libby Prison, where Union POWs were imprisoned. As a humanitarian gesture, Van Lew brought food, medicine, and books to the prisoners. She came out with military information. Newly arrived Union prisoners secretly recounted the strength and dispositions of Confederate troops they had seen on their way from the front to Richmond. As the war progressed Van Lew was able to place fellow Union sympathizers within the Confederate War and Navy Departments, and regularly smuggled messages out of Richmond in hollow eggs. General Grant would later say of her efforts, “You have sent me the most valuable information received from Richmond during the war.”

Van Lew’s most daring purported accomplishment remains shrouded in mystery and involved insinuating one of her former servants, Mary Elizabeth Bowser (also known as Mary Jane Richards) into the Confederate White House. Bowser had been a slave of the Van Lew family, but Van Lew freed her and sent her North to be educated many years before the war. When Van Lew established her spy ring she asked Bowser to return and work with her for the Union. Van Lew obtained a position for Bowser as a servant in the Confederate White House through the recommendation of a "friend" who provided supplies to that household. Bowser reported conversations she overheard and the content of documents she was able to read while working in the house. Another Union spy, Thomas McNiven, noted that Bowser had a photographic memory and could report every word of the documents she saw. Stories about Bowser appeared as early as May 1900 in Richmond newspapers. In a 1910 interview with Van Lew’s niece, Bowser was revealed as being part of the spy ring. Jefferson Davis' wife, Varina, publicly denied that a black female spy could have infiltrated the Confederate White House and denied any knowledge of such a person as Mary Elizabeth Bowser. Bowser was inducted into the US Army Intelligence Hall of Fame at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, on 30 June 1995.

When the Union army captured Richmond in April 1865, Van Lew was the first person to raise the U.S. flag in the city. After the war she insisted, “I'm not a Yankee”, maintaining that she was only a good Southerner, holding to an old Virginia tradition of opposition to human bondage.

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First Confederate Officer Killed in the Civil War

Fort Sumter fell on April 14, and on April 17 Virginia adopted an “Ordinance of Secession” in the form of a repeal of Virginia’s ratification of the U.S. Constitution, to take effect upon ratification by the vote of the people. This election took place on Thursday, May 23, 1861, and Virginia seceded from the Union.


Before dawn on Friday, May 24, Union troops invaded Virginia, seizing Alexandria and Arlington Heights across from Washington City. On Friday afternoon, miles away at Fox’s Mills, north of Fairfax Court House, seventeen year old Sally Summers was minding the afternoon recess in front of her schoolhouse when she saw a surrey coming down the road from the direction of Alexandria. The driver was her uncle, Amos Fox. As he passed he shouted, “You better dismiss your school right away and go home to your mother. The Union army is advancing!”

Three Virginia militia units (the Rappahannock Cavalry, the Prince William Cavalry, and the Warrenton Rifles) had taken up positions around the strategic village of Fairfax Courthouse. These units were still a part of the "Virginia Army," even though the secession of Virginia was ratified by a popular vote on May 23, 1861. Virginia’s forces were not transferred to the Confederacy until June 6, 1861.

Before dawn on June 1st, Lt. Charles Tompkins, 2nd U.S. Cavalry led a raid on Fairfax Courthouse. After charging through lines of the Virginians twice, the Union cavalry was finally driven off. In the morning, the body of Captain John Quincy Marr of the Warrenton Rifles was discovered. Marr had been hit by a spent round ball. He had a large bruise above his heart but his skin had not been penetrated.

Captain Marr's body arrived in Warrenton that evening and he was buried the next afternoon in the Warrenton Cemetery after a ceremony in the clerk's office yard before a large crowd of mourners. Marr became a Southern martyr.

Charles Henry Tompkins received the Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions at Fairfax Court House. His was the first action of a Union Army officer in the American Civil War for which a Congressional Medal of Honor was awarded, although it was not awarded until 1893. His citation reads: "Twice charged through the enemy's lines and, taking a carbine from an enlisted man, shot the enemy's captain."

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Sid Grauman and the celebrities of Hollywood

No single individual did more to create the Hollywood cult of celebrity than theatrical genius Sid Grauman.  As a youth, Grauman worked in the ramshackle towns of the Alaska Gold Rush as a paperboy.  Newspapers were scarce and expensive, costing up to one dollar each.  Grauman met a store owner who purchased one of his newspapers for $50. The store owner then charged admission to local miners to whom he read the paper aloud in his store. Grauman learned that people would pay handsomely to be entertained.

Grauman built a series of theaters that would define the “movie palace” of Hollywood’s Golden Era.  The Egyptian theater, built in 1922, was the setting for the first-ever Hollywood premiere, Robin Hood, starring Douglas Fairbanks, on Wednesday, October 18, 1922.  The exterior and interior walls of the theater contained Egyptian-style paintings and hieroglyphics. The four massive columns that mark the theatre's main entrance are 4+¹⁄₂ feet wide and rise to a height of  20 feet, the large courtyard in the front, complete with a fountain and palm trees, was specifically designed to host the theater’s famous red carpet ceremonies.

 Grauman built an even more magnificent theater in 1927 further up Hollywood Boulevard, the Chinese Theater. The Chinese Theater was modeled on a Mandarin palace. Not satisfied with the fusion of opulence and stardom, Grauman imbued the Chinese Theater with a mystic aura for millions of movie fans: it was Grauman’s brainchild to invite movie stars to place their hands and feet in the wet cement of the theater’s patio. The dried imprints became like holy relics to movie fans, the imprints also allowed fans to measure their own hands and feet against these relics of their saints.

The hand and feet prints of Marilyn Monroe are said to be the most popular relics.

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Midnight Rising: John Brown’s Raid (Book Review)

Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War

By Tony Horowitz

A well written and informative book, but one which romanticizes and glorifies terrorism, for that was what John Brown was by the standards of his own day and by the standards of our own.

Brown, a religious fanatic, with a family history of mental illness, whom Horowitz acknowledges many of his close associates thought exhibited signs of insanity, saw himself as God’s instrument on earth. Brown was pledged to violence and declared, “The sins of this country can only be purged with blood.” Wherever Horowitz uses the word “insurgent” substitute “jihadist” and try to conjure up the same sympathy for Brown that Horowitz’s use of the milder term allows.

There is little to admire in Brown’s bloody career, which ranged from hacking five unarmed men to death in Kansas in 1856 to killing unarmed civilians at Harper’s Ferry in 1859 and trying to incite widespread murder and mayhem. Brown was disavowed in his own day by most in the North, including the Republican candidate for President, Abraham Lincoln. Despite Brown’s condemnation by the moderate elements of his own day, Horowitz, embraces the position of the most polarized abolitionists of 1859 in somehow seeing Brown as having performed a service to the nation by providing the “spark that caused the civil war.” The supposition being that only a bloody civil war that resulted in 600,000 deaths (as a percentage of population this would equate to some six million Americans today) could result in the abolition of slavery.

This supposition is wrong however. Another American slave society abolished slavery without firing a shot. The other great slave society of the late 19th century was Brazil. The Brazilian economy depended on slaves especially in mining, cotton production, and sugar cane production. More slaves were imported into Brazil over the course of three centuries than were imported into North America. By the late 19th century slavery was in decline. Slaveowners preferred to pay free immigrant labor from Europe low wages than to keep supporting entire slave communities from cradle to grave, since a significant portion of those communities (the sick, disabled, very young, and very old) were non-productive. By 1871, the sons of all existing slaves were freed. In 1885, all slaves aged over 60 years were freed. Slavery was legally ended nationwide on May 13, 1888, with the government compensating slaveowners for each slave freed. A mere twenty three years after the bloody American Civil War Brazil ended slavery peacefully, perhaps because it did not have fanatics like John Brown to foment fear and violence.

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Gays in Colonial America

Following Biblical teachings, a sexual act that involved two human beings “of the same sex” was defined as a crime in colonial America. Legal codes focused much more specifically on male sex than did clerical pronouncements. Although a capital crime, standards of proof were high making conviction difficult even if juries were so inclined, which they seldom were in capital cases. Colonial newspapers published accounts about the arrests results from the anti-sodomy campaigns begun in the early decades of the eighteenth century as part of London’s “Reformation of Manners” movement. Newspapers also reported on the anti-sodomy campaigns in the Netherlands, where as many as two hundred and fifty men were prosecuted and some two dozen executed. On only two known occasions did women appear before New England courts on charges of “unclean” behavior with each other. In 1642 Eliza Johnson was whipped and fined by an Essex County quarterly court for unnatural “practices betwixt her and another maid.” Two other women from Yarmouth, Massachusetts were prosecuted for “leude behaviour each with other upon a bed.” A New Haven law of 1655 included sex between women as a capital offense. The law did not specify how sex between women was to be defined or proven.


Many New Englanders were committed to informal moral stewardship through surveillance of their neighbors. The layout of New England’s towns and villages facilitated “watchfulness”. Families generally owned a dwelling in town and a plot of land outside removed from the houses. Houses were built around the meetinghouse and close to one another. Farming lots were long, narrow strips which allowed town folk to work side by side. The god fearing had no need for privacy, only sinners had something to hide. The regime of constant neighborly surveillance led to a constant flow of information about people’s behavior that sometimes led to formal proceedings for a whole range of sexual behavior.

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Mass Murder is as American as Apple Pie

The United States experienced 645 mass murder events (killings with at least four victims) in the period 1976-2010, or approximately twenty mass murder events per year. Media accounts report that the nation is horrified and “mystified” by the most recent incident in Aurora, Colorado. Horrified is believable, mystified is not. The mystery is not why there are so many such events, but why there are so few.


America celebrates violence in its popular culture (movies, video games, sports, songs, television) and has the most heavily armed civilian population in the world with some 90 guns for every 100 men, women and children in the country. Americans are more heavily armed than Iraqi’s (34 guns per 100 people), or Serbians (58 guns per 100 people). There are some 12,500 gun inflicted homicides annually in the United States. America has lost fewer active duty military personnel killed in war in the last thirty six years than are killed in one year of civilian gun violence.

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How Martha Washington Lived

Have you ever fallen madly in love with a pair of shoes? Luxury footwear, combining the art form of a sculpture with the beauty of a piece of sparkling jewelry, has obsessed women for centuries. Certainly this was true in the case with Martha Washington. Tucked away in the recesses of Mount Vernon’s archival vaults is a pair of avant-garde deep purple silk high heels studded with silver sequins that Martha wore on the day of her wedding to George Washington. Emily Shapiro, curator at Mount Vernon, describes the shoes as a little sassy and definitely “over the top” for the time, “They were the Manolo Blahniks of her time.”


At the time of her marriage to George Washington in 1759, Martha was 27 and George was twenty six. Martha was one of the wealthiest women in Virginia, having inherited five plantations when her first husband died. She was a bit of a clothes horse. Then, as now, if you had wealth you flaunted it, making sure you had the best clothes ordered from London in the deepest, richest colors. Such colors set the upper classes apart from poorer classes who wore drab homespun clothes in browns, beiges and tans.

We don’t generally think of Martha Washington as a vivacious fashionista. She has come down to us after two hundred plus years as a frumpy, dumpy, plump, double-chinned Old Mother Hubbard type. There may be more design than accident in this portrayal of Martha Washington and the women of the Revolutionary War generation (‘The Founding Mothers”). The new Republic needed to make a clean break with the aristocratic ways of Europe and completely embrace simple republican virtues. Both George and Martha Washington were transformed by generations of historians into marble figures of rectitude whose dignity and decorum fostered a sense of legitimacy for the new country.

But neither Martha Washington nor the women of the South’s leading families were marble statues, they had the same strengths and weaknesses, passions and problems, joys and sorrows, as the women of any age.

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