A roughly cut boulder marks an unkempt grave in Shockoe Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia. The inscription reads: ‘Elizabeth L. Van Lew, 1818-1900: She risked everything that is dear to man-friends, fortune, comfort, health, life itself-all for the one absorbing desire of her heart-that slavery might be abolished and the union preserved.’

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in America's Civil War magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

This is the only surviving tribute to a woman to whom Maj. Gen. Benjamin F. Butler, commander of the Union Army of the James, referred as ‘my correspondent in Richmond.’ Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, commander in chief of the Union Army, considered her valuable enough to order personal protection for her when he entered Richmond.

Elizabeth Van Lew was born in 1818 to a prominent Richmond merchant family. She grew up across the street from the mansion the family later purchased on Church Hill. Upon the death of her parents, she inherited the family estate. Well before the American Civil War began, she was considered an abolitionist, and the Van Lew estate was a station for the Underground Railroad.

Even before the war, she was considered eccentric by Richmond society, of which she should have naturally been an integral part, because of her outspoken abolitionist beliefs and practices. Social leaders in Richmond assumed she had acquired her Northern ideas when she went to Philadelphia for schooling. They also tended to discount her as a true Southerner because her parents had both come from the North.

After her father’s death in 1843, she and her mother freed the nine family slaves. Most of them stayed with the family as paid servants, and several were important links in the communications network she established with the Union Army headquarters during the final years of the war. She also tried to reunite separated family members by purchasing them from her neighbors.

Van Lew was considered pretty in her youth, but by the time she was in her forties she was the classic ‘old maid,’ with a sharp nose and piercing blue eyes. Her unmarried state, at a time when all women were expected to marry, further embellished her reputation for eccentricity.

Whatever the original source, the nickname ‘Crazy Bet’ allowed her to straightforwardly pursue her goals in aiding the Union officers who were incarcerated at Libby Prison and communicating information obtained from them to the Federal lines undetected. By the time anyone in Richmond truly believed that she was a successful spy for the enemy, Grant had arrived in the city and it was too late to do anything about it.

Shortly after the First Battle of Manassas on July 21, 1861, Van Lew learned of the appalling conditions in Libby Prison, the former ship chandler’s warehouse just down the hill from the Van Lew home, where Union officers were being held. She approached the prison’s commandant, Lieutenant David H. Todd (First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln’s half brother), and asked for permission to minister to the prisoners. He was horrified at the very suggestion and denied her permission to enter the prison.

She then contacted Confederate Secretary of the Treasury Christopher Memminger, an acquaintance of hers. She reminded him of a sermon he had given on Christian charity. ‘It said that love was the fulfilling of the law, and if we wished ‘our cause’ to succeed, we must being with charity to the thankless, the unworthy,’ she wrote. Memminger gave her a note to the provost marshal, who in turn was flattered into giving her a pass to the prison.

Van Lew visited the prisoners regularly, bringing supplies and medicine purchased with her own funds and with profits from her brother’s hardware store. At first, she simply mailed military information given to her by the officers to Union headquarters. Surprisingly, some of it actually arrived.

As a result of her visits to Libby Prison, Van Lew persuaded Confederate doctors to transfer seriously wounded Union officers to Confederate hospitals in Richmond. She purchased food, bedding and clothing on a regular basis and, on occasion, furniture for the men in prison. In return, the Federal prisoners carved studs and a ring for Van Lew out of bones or buttons and gave them to her in token of their appreciation. The mementoes remain with the Van Lew Papers in the New York Public Library. More important, the men gave her current and valuable information about the Confederate troop movements they had observed before being taken prisoner. She immediately conveyed that information to Union intelligence. Messages were written in code in a clear ink that looked like water but, when dipped in milk, appeared black.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to