Discover the Story of Elizabeth Van Lew, the Mastermind Behind a Critical Union Espionage Network During the Civil War

Elizabeth Van Lew operated a network of spies in Richmond, Virginia, sending coded messages to General Ulysses S. Grant during the Civil War. Undeterred by criticism from her Southern peers, Van Lew provided the Union cause with key information during a decisive time in American history.

Abolitionist Roots

Elizabeth Van Lew (1818–1900) was born on October 12, 1818, into one of Richmond, Virginia’s leading commercial families. Her father came to Richmond 12 years earlier and built a successful hardware business, relying on the labor of enslaved people to run it. The family lived in a large home in Church Hill and owned a farm on the outskirts of the city.

Despite her family’s ownership of enslaved people, Van Lew herself was an abolitionist. When her father died, he left a stipulation in his will that his wife and daughter could not free the people enslaved in their home, but the Van Lew's gave the enslaved people the degree of independence and financial autonomy allowed by law, letting them live elsewhere and work for an income.

When Virginia seceded from the Union in April 1861, Van Lew was determined to aid the abolitionist cause and worked with other Richmond Unionists to create a network in the middle of the Confederacy.

Espionage to Aid the Union

Van Lew wrote letters of warning to the Union War Department beginning in 1861, describing events in the Confederate capital. She outlined Confederate troop numbers and movements, which she sent North using special messengers.

After the Battle of Bull Run in July 1861, Richmond was filled with wounded Southern troops and Northern prisoners of war. With her family’s high social standing, Van Lew was granted permission to visit the prisoners at the tobacco warehouses-turned prisons. She brought food, clothing, and other items to Union soldiers hoping to make them more comfortable. Van Lew was particularly well-known by the troops at Libby Prison, which was just blocks from her Church Hill home.

It was not unusual for women at this time to bring aid to wounded and imprisoned troops, but where Van Lew differed was what else she did with her time at the prisons. She listened intently to conversations between hospital surgeons and prison guards. She spoke in whispers with Union troops who gave her information about the strength of Confederate troops and supply trains and where the rebels were headed.

Northern soldiers passed her notes with hidden meanings concealed in baskets of food and returned books with words or page numbers underlined. Van Lew also helped Union prisoners escape from these prisons, gave them money and resources to bribe officers, and even hid some of them in her home.

In 1863, she and her network of Union sympathizers helped two Union soldiers escape and return North. These soldiers told General Benjamin Butler about the aid they received from Van Lew, and in December 1863, General Butler formally recruited her as a Union spy.

Van Lew established a five-stop relay line to send messages from her home in Richmond to the Union high command. The first stop after the Van Lew home on Church Hill was their farm outside the city. Van Lew employed the family’s formerly enslaved people to carry her messages from one stop to the next. Pretending to run errands, they carried secret messages hidden in sewing baskets, sewn into the hem of a dress, enclosed in the sole of a shoe, or even in a hollowed-out egg.

General Butler instructed Van Lew on how to secure her messages by writing in a colorless ink that only became visible once soaked in milk. She also developed a cipher that she used to encode her messages. The cipher key was found hidden in the back of her watch following her death.

Her spy network included over a dozen agents, including clerks in the Confederate War and Navy Departments, formerly enslaved people posted around the city as information gatherers, and even Mary Bowser, who had formerly been enslaved by the Van Lew family and was then employed as a servant in the Confederate White House.

Faithful Spy or Treasonous Traitor

When Richmond fell to Union forces in April 1865, Van Lew was the first person to raise the United States flag in the city. She served as an incredible asset to the Northern cause during the Civil War. General Ulysses S. Grant wrote to her, “You have sent me the most valuable information received from Richmond during the war.” Other generals compared her service to the value of 25,000 fighting troops.

Following the war, Van Lew was appointed as a Clerk in the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, State of Virginia at a salary of $100 per month, where she worked to provide relief to freedmen and refugees. The average salary for this position at the time was around $78 per month, making Van Lew’s salary equal to or more than men holding the same position.

As reward for her service, General Grant appointed Van Lew as Postmaster of Richmond in 1869, making her the first woman to hold this position in the city. As postmaster, Van Lew worked to modernize the city’s postal system, supported women’s suffrage and racial equality, and appointed many African Americans and women to positions in the office.

After Reconstruction, Van Lew was dismissed from her post and ostracized by Richmond society for her abolitionist beliefs and actions during the war. Those in society shunned her, and, as she had spent her inheritance to support her espionage work and donated her salary in office to charities for African Americans and in support of social equality, she struggled financially.

“Crazy Bet”: Elizabeth Van Lew’s Legacy

Van Lew was treated like an outcast by her peers at the mere idea of her aid to the “Yankee cause.” When the war was over, Confederate leaders knew just enough about her actions to justify calling the Van Lew home “the Yankee War Department in Richmond,” according to an 1887 article in the Chicago Daily Tribune. In fact, after the war, Van Lew requested the War Department to return all the dispatches she sent. Upon receiving them, she destroyed almost all of her messages in an effort to hide the extent to which she helped the Union during the war.

She had been harshly criticized for her aid efforts in hospitals and prisons. In July 1861, the Richmond Examiner reported that “two ladies, a mother and a daughter, living on Church Hill, have lately attracted public notice by their assiduous attentions to the Yankee prisoners... these two women have been expending their opulent means in aiding and giving comfort to the miscreants who have invaded our sacred soil.” She even received threats of violence during the war. “I have had brave men shake their fingers in my face and say terrible things,” she wrote in her diary. “We had threats of being driven away, threats of fire, and threats of death.” Many labeled her as eccentric and mad and gave her the nickname “Crazy Bet.” Van Lew risked her life daily in her support for the abolitionist cause.

Elizabeth Van Lew died in 1900, and a circle of her friends from Boston paid for her funeral. She was buried in Shockoe Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia, with a headstone that reads:

“ELIZABETH L. VAN LEW (1818–1900) She risked everything that is dear to man – friends – fortune – comfort – health – life itself – that slavery might be abolished and the Union preserved. This boulder from the Capitol Hill in Boston is a tribute from Massachusetts friends.”

Because only one of her dispatches survived her own post-war destruction, much of what is known about Van Lew comes from her wartime journal. She kept the diary by her bedside table and buried finished portions of it in the yard of her Church Hill home.

Elizabeth Van Lew’s legacy is preserved in her 1993 induction into the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame, and she is remembered as an effective Civil War spy and key asset to the Union Army.

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