Elizabeth Van Lew Biography

I see that Elizabeth Varon's biography of Elizabeth Van Lew is on sale (I misread the OUP sales catalog this morning and though this was forthcoming).  Cribbing now from the OUP webpage:

Northern sympathizer in the Confederate capital, daring spymaster, postwar politician: Elizabeth Van Lew was one of the most remarkable figures in American history, a woman who defied the conventions of the nineteenth-century South. In Southern Lady, Yankee Spy, historian Elizabeth Varon provides a gripping, richly researched account of the woman who led what one historian called "the most productive espionage operation of the Civil War." Under the nose of the Confederate government, Van Lew ran a spy ring that gathered intelligence, hampered the Southern war effort, and helped scores of Union soldiers to escape from Richmond prisons.
Varon describes a woman who was very much a product of her time and place, yet continually took controversial stands--from her early efforts to free her family's slaves, to her daring wartime activities and beyond. Varon's powerful biography brings Van Lew to life, showing how she used the stereotypes of the day to confound Confederate authorities (who suspected her, but could not believe a proper Southern lady could be a spy), even as she brought together Union sympathizers at all levels of society, from slaves to slaveholders. After the war, a grateful President Ulysses S. Grant named her postmaster of Richmond--a remarkable break with custom for this politically influential post. But her Unionism, Republican politics, and outspoken support of racial justice earned her a lifetime of scorn in the former Confederate capital. Even today, Elizabeth Van Lew remains a controversial figure in her beloved Richmond, remembered as the "Crazy Bet" of Lost Cause propaganda. Elizabeth Varon's account rescues her from both derision and oblivion, depicting an intelligent, resourceful, highly principled woman who remained, as she saw it, true to her country to the end.

And you know what?  She has a pretty cool gravemarker in Richmond's Shockoe Hill Cemetery.  That's the illustration of this post.  There's also a school on the site of her house on Church Hill, which I ought to post about at some point.

Comments

[Monica Eppinger]

Thanks for the alert! I include a very brief synopsis of Elizabeth van Lew's spying career in the "history of intelligence operations" segment of my National Security Law class, both for its intrinsic historical interest and to illustrate the practices in American spycraft of recruiting and running a network, a precursor to some post-WWII practices of HUMINT. The new biography should be a fascinating read.

[Alfred Brophy]

I didn't know she had such significance for intelligence history. My interest in her is focused on the cemetery (the boulder pictured above was taken, the plaque says, from capitol hill in Boston) and her anti-slavery beliefs.

[Monica Eppinger]

I'm not sure that she did. U.S. practice of intelligence was episodic (and thus its history episodic rather than cumulative) at that point, so I wouldn't claim that elements of her conduct of intel carried into the present.

But she was significant in her day, a very effective part of the Union intelligence effort (particularly after the Pinkertons the North hired proved so ineffective.) Pedagogically, she makes a great (and unclassified) case study of how a network is recruited and run, which is itself a reflection of a particular epistemological slant still discernible in U.S. intel today, at least in the HUMINT side of the house.

You probably know this already, but worth mentioning given your interest in her anti-slavery beliefs, that it is believed that one of the most effective spies in her network was an African-American woman who worked in Jefferson Davis' house. (I'll be interested to see if the new biography sheds any light on this or debunks it as urban legend.)

The boulder is cool too.

[LoisLeveen]

Union Generals Grant, Sharpe, and Butler all praised the intelligence gathered by Van Lew's spy ring--although it's difficult to know today precisely what information she smuggled to them, because the official records related to the espionage were destroy after the war, at Van Lew's request (presumably to protect other members of the spy ring).

Since Varon's biography was published, I've done additional research about the ring, which you can read about in the article "A Black Spy in the Confederate White House" http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/21/a-black-spy-in-the-confederate-white-house/ and in the book *The Secrets of Mary Bowser* http://www.thesecretsofmarybowser.com

[Susan Poser]

Proud to say Elizabeth Varon was my college roommate for 4 years at Swarthmore. She is a brilliant historian, a great person, and the book is indeed wonderful.