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During the American Civil War, Elizabeth Van Lew ran a Union spy ring in the capital of the Confederacy, Richmond, Virginia. Van Lew was born in Richmond in 1818 and educated in Philadelphia. She returned to Virginia an ardent abolitionist and convinced her family to free their slaves.

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Transcript

Content: During the American Civil War, Elizabeth Van Lew ran a Union spy ring in the capital of the Confederacy, Richmond, Virginia. Van Lew was born in Richmond in 1818 and educated in Philadelphia. She returned to Virginia an ardent abolitionist and convinced her family to free their slaves.

Committed to help the Union cause, she operated a spy ring. In order to deflect suspicion, Van Lew wore dirty clothes and mumbled to herself on the street. Richmonders began calling her “Crazy Bet” and mostly regarded her as harmless. However, “Crazy Bet” was as crazy as a fox, and she passed information through book spines, egg baskets and false bottoms of trays when she visited Union POWs being held near her home. She pried information from unsuspecting Confederate soldiers and officials and ran a secret and successful courier service to the Union line in 1864. It is believed that Mary Bowser, a former slave who worked in the wartime home of Jefferson Davis, was one of Van Lew’s operatives.

Financing her spy ring left her penniless when she died in 1900. Years later, her grave marker was funded by friends from Massachusetts. On it was carved these words:

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

At the University of Richmond, I’m Dan Roberts.

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