Elizabeth Van Lew: The Life of the Richmond Woman Who Ran a Union Spy Ring in the Confederate Capital

Though espionage is a hallmark of every major war, spies are often depicted in countless works of fiction as discovering secrets on which the fate of nations hang in the balance. Reality is generally rather more mundane, as spies often gather low-level intelligence that only makes sense when it is examined by analysts and compared to information from other sources. Espionage provides clues to what the enemy is planning, but on its own, it rarely changes the course of a war. Moreover, real spies are generally anonymous, not the bold, swashbuckling action heroes depicted in fiction. Spies must hide in plain sight, and that is best achieved by being as innocuous as possible. The most effective Union spy of the war was a Richmond spinster named Elizabeth Van Lew, who ran one of the most successful espionage networks from a mansion on Church Hill in the heart of the Confederate capital. She communicated directly with Ulysses Grant, and she smuggled intelligence out of Libby Prison using methods so varied and inventive that the Confederate authorities who suspected her never fully figured out how she was accomplishing it. She recruited a woman she had freed from enslavement to serve as a domestic servant in Jefferson Davis' own household, placing an observer at the nerve center of Confederate executive decision-making. She maintained these operations for four years under constant suspicion, in a city that had come to despise her, without ever being successfully indicted for the treason that every Confederate official in Richmond assumed she was committing.Van Lew’s story does not fit neatly into the categories that popular histories of Civil War espionage tend to favor. She simply started the war as a middle-aged woman who had inherited considerable wealth and unshakable convictions when it came to the necessity of abolishing slavery, and before the war had even started, she had made the conscious decision to do everything within her power to defeat the Confederacy.