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    A Yankee Spy in Richmond
    A Yankee Spy in Richmond
    A Yankee Spy in Richmond
    Ebook212 pages7 hours

    A Yankee Spy in Richmond

    By David D. Ryan

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    She walked the streets of Richmond dressed in farm woman’s clothing, singing and mumbling to herself. Soon her suspicious and condescending neighbors began referring to her as “Crazy Bet.” But she wasn’t mad; she had purpose in her doings. She wanted people to think she was insane so that they would be less likely to ask her questions and possibly discover her goal: to defeat the South and to end slavery. Elizabeth Van Lew, of Crazy Bet, was General Ulysses S. Grant’s spy in the capital city of the Confederacy.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherStackpole Books
    Release dateSep 15, 2017
    ISBN9780811766364
    A Yankee Spy in Richmond

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    • 4/5
      Elizabeth Van Lew lived in Richmond, Virginia, and was educated in the North. She believed slavery was wrong and was loyal to the Union, giving much of her life and inheritance in furthering the Union cause. In particular, she spied and gave information on troop movement and supplies, and worked to better the conditions and protect escapees from Libby Prison. This is her wartime diary, incomplete at least in part due to her own vigilance in getting rid of evidence that could have incriminated her.I first heard of this when reading my LibraryThing Early Reviewer copy of The Secrets of Mary Bowser. Mary was a former slave at the Van Lew residence, and was instrumental in Elizabeth's and Thomas McNiven's spy network. Unfortunately, perhaps due to Elizabeth's care in destroying documents or the way the diary was buried for years, very little mention is made of anything connected to Mary Bowser, and only a little more is included of Elizabeth's own spying (primarily letters inserted that have innocuous messages on their face, but a request for information once heat and acid is applied to the document). The Introduction pretty much covers the most interesting parts of the diary, and it's hard to follow what happened because it's such a truncated account. You do, however, get a window into the mindset of Elizabeth Van Lew, who saw her work as being loyal to her country (rather than her state), and definitely saw the point of the Civil War as ending slavery. She was appalled by the treatment of Union soldiers. She had deep convictions and her behavior mirrored what she believed, even though it made her extremely unpopular in her hometown. The inclusion of letters at the end, both by and about Elizabeth Van Lew, round out the picture of her life. Recommended if you're interested in the historic time period or place.

    Book preview

    A Yankee Spy in Richmond - David D. Ryan

    A YANKEE SPY IN RICHMOND

    A YANKEE SPY IN RICHMOND

    The Civil War Diary of Crazy Bet Van Lew

    edited by

    David D. Ryan

    STACKPOLE

    BOOKS

    Copyright © 1996, 2001 by Stackpole Books

    Published by Stackpole Books

    An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

    4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

    www.rowman.com

    All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to Stackpole Books, 5067 Ritter Road, Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania 17055.

    Printed in the United States of America

    First paperback edition 2001

    Materials from the Elizabeth Van Lew Papers, Rare Books and Manuscripts Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations are used with permission.

    COVER ART: The composite photograph of Richmond was taken by Mathew Brady in 1865. Courtesy Robert W. Waitt and the Library of Congress. The photograph of Elizabeth Van Lew was first published in the 1912 book On Hazardous Service by William Gilmore Beymer.

    Cover design by Tracy Patterson

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Van Lew, Elizabeth L., 1818–1900

    A Yankee spy in Richmond : the Civil War Diary of Crazy BetVan Lew / edited by David D. Ryan.

    p. cm.

    Includes bibliographical references (p.).

    ISBN: 0-8117-2999-0

    1. Van Lew, Elizabeth L., 1818–1900—Diaries. 2. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Secret service. 3. Spies—Virginia—Richmond—Diaries. 4. Women spies—Virginia—Richmond—Diaries. 5. Richmond (Va.)—History. I. Ryan, David D. II. Title.

    E608.V34A3 2001

    973.7'85—dc20

    96-10623

    CIP

    To
    The Reverend Robin Christopher Ryan, C.P.

    CONTENTS

    FOREWORD

    INTRODUCTION

    1861

    1862

    1863

    1864

    1865

    CONCLUSION

    APPENDIX: SELECTED LETTERS

    NOTES

    BIBLIOGRAPHY

    FOREWORD

    As a Richmond native, I have always been fascinated with the stories of Elizabeth Van Lew, the nineteenth-century woman who lived in the mansion on the city’s Church Hill. She was General Ulysses S. Grant’s spy in Richmond during the Civil War. As her deeds became known during and after the war, she was ostracized by Richmond society. Five years ago I began collecting copies of her papers, letters, and Occasional Journal in an attempt to bring them together from their various archives and to tell her story.

    Aiding me in my effort were the John Stewart Bryan Memorial Foundation and D. Tennant Bryan, my former boss at Richmond Newspapers for nearly twenty-one years. I wish also to thank my editor, William C. Davis, and the publisher, Stackpole Books. Wayne Furman, Office of Special Collections, New York Public Library, aided me with the Van Lew papers, including the original copy of the Occasional Journal and letters. I am grateful to Mr. Furman and the New York Public Library for allowing me to use the Van Lew papers in their collection. John M. Coski, historian at the Museum of the Confederacy, gave me valuable aid, as did Conley Edwards and other staff members of the Virginia State Library and Archives; Kathleen Albers at the Richmond Newspapers Library; Francis Pollard and associates at the Virginia Historical Society; Margaret Cook of the Swem Library of the College of William and Mary; Arthur B. House of the National Archives; William S. Simpson, Jr., of the Richmond Public Library; Robert W Waitt, grandson of Thomas McNiven; and the staff of the Valentine Museum, Richmond.

    INTRODUCTION

    All wars produce spies, and the Civil War was no exception. There were those spies who provided information for only one reason—money—and there were those who provided information out of a sense of duty to a cause. A slave told where Confederate units were located; a white merchant told a Confederate general of movements of Federal cavalry. Most spies have gone unrecognized throughout history, but others have become famous and their stories have been recounted in books. The Civil War had both kinds, for there were literally thousands of them on both sides.

    Some of the most famous spies of the Civil War included women. Rose Greenhow and Belle Boyd are two examples. Mrs. Greenhow, a Washington socialite, provided Confederate General P. G. T. Beauregard with information on Federal troop movements toward Bull Run in 1861. For nine more months she sent information to the Confederates that she gained through her social contacts. Finally in April 1862 she was made to move to Virginia by the Federals to prevent her from gaining access to more information. Boyd, a seventeen-year-old girl, provided General Thomas Stonewall Jackson with information on Federal troops during Jackson’s 1862 Shenandoah Valley campaign. She was arrested twice and in 1863 moved to England to escape being arrested again. Timothy Webster of Perrymansville, Maryland, spied for the private agency of Allan Pinkerton. Webster made many forays into Virginia to retrieve information valuable to the Union, but he was captured by Confederate detectives in Richmond. On April 29, 1862, he became the first spy of the Rebellion to be hanged. His sweetheart, Hattie Lewis, was imprisoned in Richmond’s Castle Thunder for a year.

    By the winter of 1862–63, General John Henry Winder, Henrico District provost marshal, had his hands full trying to control the loyalist spies in Richmond. Among those his detectives arrested was former Virginia Congressman John Minor Botts. A loyalist, Botts was confined for several weeks in Castle Godwin and then placed under house arrest for suspicion of spying. He was never tried.¹

    Another suspected Federal spy watched by General Winder was William Alvan Lloyd, a New York and Baltimore businessman. A well-known publisher of railroad and steamboat guides and maps of the South, Lloyd used his business to travel throughout the South to collect information as President Abraham Lincoln’s personal spy. To get in Winder’s good graces, he bought the general a $1,200 custom-made uniform as well as other gifts. But Winder had his suspicions and ordered Lloyd watched. Lloyd, however, was still able to provide Lincoln with information and maps of Confederate ports and of troop movements, even being so brash as to live for a time in the Virginia cities of Lynchburg and Danville.²

    On the other side, Jerome Clarke, a hard-fighting guerrilla in the western theater, used his feminine looks to dress up as a flirtatious woman and spy on the Federals. This woman was known as Sue Mundy.³

    Perhaps one of the most interesting spies was a Richmond native. She did not spy for her state, but rather for the Union. And even though she was under the constant threat of being discovered, she kept a secret diary about her efforts. Had her diary been found during the war, she surely would have been tried as a spy and probably hanged. While portions of her Occasional Journal have been quoted in previous books, the entire existing journal and her letters have never been brought together and edited until now. This is her journal, her letters, her story.

    John Van Lew, prominent Richmond businessman, friend of U.S. Chief Justice John Marshall, and owner of black servants, died September 14, 1843. His funeral service, conducted at his Richmond, Virginia, Church Hill mansion, was attended by hundreds of friends from Richmond, New York, and Philadelphia. Fifty-seven years later his daughter, Elizabeth, died in the same mansion. She was buried at the family plot in Shockoe Hill Cemetery, but her grave went unmarked. Years later some friends from Massachusetts sent a granite stone to mark the site, but as far as most Richmonders were concerned, the spot could have gone unmarked forever. The plaque placed on the stone told why:

    ELIZABETH VAN LEW 1818–1900

    She risked everything that is dear to man—friends, fortune, comfort, health, life itself, all for one absorbing desire of her heart—that slavery might be abolished and the Union preserved.

    Elizabeth Louisa Van Lew, code name Babcock, was a spy for the Union, sending military and other information to Generals George H. Sharpe, chief of the U.S. Bureau of Military Information (Secret Service); Benjamin F. Butler, commander of the Army of the James; George G. Meade, commander of the Army of the Potomac; and Ulysses S. Grant, overall commander of Union forces during the last year of the war. She also provided Union soldiers in Richmond prisons with bribe money, food, and books; hid escaped prisoners in her home and at friends’ homes; and instigated the Kilpatrick-Dahlgren raid on Richmond in 1864 to free Union prisoners. She spent all of her inheritance buying and freeing slaves and pursuing her anti-Confederacy efforts.

    Elizabeth wrote of her work as a spy in her Occasional Journal but was constantly in fear that it and the work she was doing for the Union military would be discovered. The keeping of a complete journal was a risk too fearful to run. Written only to be burnt was the fate of almost everything which would now be of value.⁴

    Fortunately she did not burn the journal, but she did bury it for some time. Her fears of recrimination from Southerners continued after the war, and on December 16, 1866, she went to the U.S. War Department and requested that every message she sent during the conflict be returned to her. All were returned, except a few that had been overlooked, and she destroyed the notes.⁵

    Elizabeth was born October 15, 1818, in Richmond, the first of three children of John and Eliza Louise Baker Van Lew. The Van Lew (Van Lewen) family immigrated to America in 1660.⁶ Her father was born March 4, 1790, in Jamaica, Long Island. Her mother, born in Philadelphia in 1798, was the daughter of Hilary Baker, a former mayor of the friendship city. John and Eliza met in Richmond and were married at St. John’s Church on January 10, 1818. Their other children were Anna Paulina, born October 7, 1820, and John Newton, born August 26, 1823. The family’s first home was located on the south side of I Street (later Marshall Street) between Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth Streets. In 1836 John purchased a three-story mansion in the 2300 block of East Grace Street on Church Hill. He bought the house from John Adams, physician, developer, and mayor of the city from 1819 to 1825.⁷ Built of stucco walls, the large home was trimmed in Scotch limestone, brought over as ballast in pre-Revolutionary ships. Twin semi-circular steps with iron balusters led up on either side of the stone front porch. An eighteen-foot-wide hall extended from the front to the rear of the house, where a splendid piazza gave the Van Lews a commanding view of the James River to the south and the city to the west and north.⁸

    John Van Lew had moved to Richmond because of an unspecified illness, probably a respiratory ailment, that grew worse over the years. Nevertheless, he was able to establish a successful merchandising business, owning five hardware stores. He doted on his children. I remember my father coming in at night and waking and taking us up in our long white flannel gowns to sit awhile on his knee, to be pressed to his heart, recalled Elizabeth. My parents were both intellectual and devoted to books. Fifty dollars a year was allowed to buy books.⁹ The Van Lew house became the center of social gatherings. Among the guests were the Marshalls and the Richmond families of the Lees, the Robinsons, the Wickhams, the Adamses, the Cabels, and the Carringtons. Edgar Allan Poe once read his poem The Raven in the Van Lew parlor. The family rode through the city in a carriage pulled by six white horses, and they would often travel to White Sulphur and Sweet Springs in the western mountains of Virginia for vacation and to restore John’s health. In the earliest existing family letter, Mrs. Van Lew wrote her cousin, Charles J. Richards, on April 2, 1838, from Sweet Springs, telling him she was learning to swim and the latest news of who was at the resort.¹⁰

    Two years later, Mr. Van Lew wrote Richards from Philadelphia, mentioning his illness. As regards my health, I hardly know what to say. My life at best some year past has been but . . . ‘miserable,’ one day better and the next worse. Two days ago I was laid out. . .. I am again confined to the house.¹¹ Three years later, when Elizabeth was twenty-five, he died after a severe and protracted illness.¹²

    John Van Lew left the house and his other real estate to his wife, and a $10,000 endowment to each of his children.¹³ Part of the property consisted of a parcel of land across the street. Upon it Mrs. Van Lew built two houses, which she rented out for additional income.¹⁴

    As a child in the early 1830s, Elizabeth had been sent to Philadelphia for school. While there she was under the influence of a governess who spoke strongly for the abolition of slavery. This influence and a girl she met at the springs probably formed Miss Van Lew’s own abolitionist feelings. John Albee, a Boston researcher who spent twenty years around the turn of the century studying Elizabeth Van Lew, said, I have repeatedly asked those who knew Miss Van Lew for some explanation of her activities on behalf of the slave, though she owned slaves herself. In his notes at the Swem Library of the College of William and Mary, he recorded that one of Elizabeth’s friends recalled Miss Van Lew saying that as a girl she had gone to Hot Springs and there met a daughter of a slave trader. This girl told Miss Van Lew that once her father had for sale a slave mother and her young babe, and that when the mother found that she had been sold to one purchaser and parted from her babe, who had been sold to another, the mother’s heart broke and she fell dead. Miss Van Lew said that she never forgot that fearful story and its effect lasted for her life.¹⁵ Soon after the death of her father, she convinced her mother to free their nine slaves, and Elizabeth used some of the money generated by her endowment to purchase relatives of the servants and to free them.

    Writer Fredrika Bremer, a native of Finland, visited Richmond in 1854. She recalls meeting Elizabeth:

    June 18th. I have, both yesterday and to-day, received a great number of . . . invitations. [One of them] was [from] a Mrs. Van L., a widow and her daughter; intellect, kindness and refinement of feeling were evident in their gentle countenances. The daughter, a pleasing, pale blonde, expressed so much compassion for the sufferings of the slave, that I was immediately attracted to her. She drove me out yesterday to see the lovely environs of Richmond. . .. We . . . drove to a large tobacco manufactory. . .. Here I heard the slaves, about a hundred in number, singing at their work in large rooms; they sung quartettes, choruses, and anthems, and that so purely, and in such perfect harmony, and with such exquisite feeling, that it was difficult to believe them self-taught. . .. Good Miss Van L. could not refrain from weeping.¹⁶

    Miss Bremer was invited to the home of a slave owner, but after seeing the slaves at the warehouse, she refused the invitation.¹⁷

    Elizabeth was one of the belles of Richmond and considered pretty in her youth, but she never married. Albee speculated Miss Van Lew may have been involved in a failed romance that left her forever bitter.

    While Elizabeth’s brother, John Newton, following in his father’s footsteps, operated a successful hardware business, she and her mother continued their frequent trips to the springs. Writing her son from White Sulphur Springs in 1860, Eliza Van Lew noted, "Your sister and myself like these Springs better than any we’ve ever been. The air and water agree with us.

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