Elizabeth Van Lew: Richmond Spymaster, Mary Bowser and Ciphers in Eggshells

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Elizabeth Van Lew was born in 1818 to a wealthy Richmond hardware merchant and educated at a Quaker school in Philadelphia, where she absorbed abolitionist views. When her father died in 1843, his will barred the family from freeing the people they enslaved, so Elizabeth and her mother quietly paid them wages instead. Once the war began, the two women brought food, books and clothing to Union officers in Libby Prison, using the cover of Victorian charity to pass money, notes hidden in book bindings, and directions to safe houses.

General Benjamin Butler recruited her after escaped prisoners described her work, and her network grew to include clerks in the Confederate War and Navy departments and Mary Bowser, a formerly enslaved woman whom the Van Lews had educated in Pennsylvania, who reportedly worked in Jefferson Davis's household. Messages traveled in a book cipher, sometimes rolled inside hollowed eggs. After the war, Grant made her Richmond's postmaster, where she hired Black men at equal pay, but Rutherford B. Hayes replaced her in 1877. Shunned by Richmond society and denied reimbursement, she died poor in 1900.

She raised the first United States flag in Richmond when the city fell in April 1865.
George H. Sharpe of the Army of the Potomac recommended she be reimbursed $15,000 for funding the network herself.
Relatives of Colonel Paul Joseph Revere, whom she had aided as a prisoner, supported her in old age and paid for her tombstone.
The Crazy Bet nickname and feigned-madness story came from a 1911 biography and are rejected by modern scholars.
Richmond demolished the Van Lew mansion in 1911, and she entered the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame in 1993.

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