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This week's hero is...
Elizabeth Van Lew
Elizabeth Van Lew was born on October 12, 1818, in Richmond, Virginia. When she was a child, she was sent to a Quaker school in Philadelphia. This had the unintended consequence of causing her to reform her views on life. One of the things that changed forever, was her view on slavery.
Although she had come from a slave-holding family, Elizabeth became an anti-slavery advocate as soon as she returned to Virginia. When her father died in 1843, she made the decision to free their family's slaves. However, her fight against slavery did not end there. When the Virginia seceded from the Union and Civil War began in 1860, Elizabeth Van Lew decided that her loyalties would lie with the Union.
During the war, an old tobacco factory was used as a prisoner-of-war camp in the city of Richmond. It was meant to incarcerate Union officers who were captured during battle. It was called, Libby Prison. Due to the Confederacy's limited amount of supplies conditions inside the prison were quite deplorable for anyone unlucky enough to be taken there. Many of the prisoners began to die within weeks of their arrival.
Elizabeth decided to aid the prisoners in any way that she could. She persuaded the Confederate warden of the prison camp to allow her to bring food and medicine to the prisoners. By doing this, she incurred much anger and disgust from many of her neighbors who were ardent supporters of slavery and secession. It was not long that she began receiving numerous death threats wherever she went in Richmond. Despite her unpopularity, Elizabeth not only continued to help the Union POWs, she also participated in espionage against the Confederacy.
She organized a spy network of 12 people (including former slaves). They began their activities by smuggling letters from the prisoners out of Libby Prison to their families. As the war progressed, they began reporting on Confederate troop movements through Virginia. She was able to smuggle her dispatches to Union lines by using a colorless liquid to conceal the words and numbers on the paper. She would then use a courier to carry them to the nearest Union outpost. The words could be uncovered when milk was poured over them. By December of 1863, her network began the high risk operation of aiding the escape of POWs from Libby Prison. Her information would play a decisive role in one of the most famous prison escapes in American history.
In February of 1864, Elizabeth Van Lew received word that the POWs in Libby Prison were planning a mass breakout. She aided them by smuggling them maps of the area that showed how to avoid Confederate outposts. The breakout began on the night of February 14, when 108 prisoners escaped through an underground tunnel that they had dug. Due to the information that they had been given, approximately 58 successfully evaded recapture and made it to Union lines (48 were recaptured and 2 drowned while crossing the Potomac River).
For the rest of the war, Elizabeth Van Lew's spy network continued to aide the Union armies. One member of her network (a former slave named, Mary Bowser) proved to be invaluable. She was able to disguise herself as one of Confederate President Jefferson Davis's slaves and sneak into his home. Once there she stole numerous of documents from his desk. These documents were then delivered to directly to Union General Ulysses S. Grant during his Overland Campaign in 1864. They would have a direct impact in his eventual victory over Robert E. Lee a year later.
When the Civil War ended, Elizabeth Van Lew's network officially disbanded. However, General Grant never forgot her incredible contribution to the Union war effort. When he was elected President in 1869, Grant appointed Elizabeth to the position of postmistress of Richmond (a position she held for eight years). Despite being lauded as a hero by the Federal government, she was treated as an outcast by the people of Virginia (especially in Richmond). Many of them viewed her as a traitor to the Confederate cause and treated with contempt for the rest of her life. When she died on September 25, 1900, hardly anyone in Virginia (except for her family) mourned her.
Today however, Elizabeth Van Lew is remembered as an American hero. In 1993, she was posthumously inducted into the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame. Her headstone reads, "She risked everything that is dear to man–friends, fortune, comfort, health, life itself, all for the one absorbing desire in her heart–that slavery might be abolished and the Union preserved". No words could better describe, Elizabeth Van Lew.
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/biographies/elizabeth-van-lew
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/elizabeth-van-lew-an-unlikely-union-spy-158755584/
https://ehistory.osu.edu/articles/elizabeth-van-lew-crazy-bet-brings-down-richmond
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