August 12, 2025 • 11 mins
A thrilling, cinematic saga of a Southern belle whose espionage for Abraham Lincoln and the Union helped win the Civil War.Wealthy Southern belle Elizabeth Van Lew had it all. Money, charm, wit—the biggest mansion in Richmond. So why risk everything to become the Civil War’s most productive Union spy?The answer was simple: freedom. In this gripping history of a secret espionage genius, Gerri Willis reveals how Elizabeth built a flourishing spy network in the heart of the Confederate Capitol. Flouting society’s expectations for women, Elizabeth infiltrated prisons, defied public opinion, and recruited an underground movement of freed slaves, secret Unionists, and brave captives.Putting her straitlaced Victorian past behind her, Elizabeth encountered vivid characters—assassins, socialites, escape artists, and cross-dressing spies. From grave robbery to a bold voyage across enemy lines, her escapades grew more and more daring. It paid off. Her agents were so well-placed that she had spies gathering information in both the Confederate War Department and the Richmond White House, and couriers providing General Ulysses S. Grant with crucial, daily intelligence for the war’s final assault.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello and good morning everybody.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
Who is it Sarah?
Speaker 1 (00:02):
This would be me. Wait wait, let me check, let
me check. Yeah, it's me. It's me.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
I have I am I saying your name right? Tell
me I am you did?
Speaker 1 (00:10):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Yeah, this is Jerry.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
How'd you figure that out? Jerry?
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Well, you know panetics. Actually I was good at that.
That was one of the few things I excelled at
in elementary school.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
You got to tell me how you jumped onto this book, because,
I mean I had no idea that this woman even existed.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Right, She's been lost to history, I mean sincerely, if
it had not been for an obscure spy, an essay
analyst who was walking around the National Archives one day
and found this room that had been closed for a
long time. Who walks in. There's a stack of papers
to the ceiling and they're sealed with red tape. He
(00:53):
opens them up and lo and behold they are the archives.
They are the reports of the spooks the Union during
the Civil War had been unopened in one hundred years.
She pulls them out and it tells him everything they
were doing in those years. And Elizabeth van lu figures
pretty prominently in that because she ran the spir ring
(01:16):
that General Ulysses S. Grant relied upon and especially in
the latter years of the war. So, you know, it's
been fascinating uncovering her story. I felt a little like
Nicholas Cage National Treasure, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
Yes, but I mean she was unlikely to even be
doing this position. I mean, she was rich, she had
it all charm with everything that's right.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
Well, she could have moved to Philadelphia, right called in
a day, moved her whole family up there. She had
enough money, and she said, no, no, I am going
to stay with my uh, with my people in Richmond.
She had this incredible affinity for the Commonwealth from the
state of Virginia, and she thought it was wrong, wrong,
(02:03):
wrong for them to leave the Union. And she was
dedicated to ending slavery. Of course, one of the complicated
facts was that our family owned slaves. Oh wow, so yeah,
so she freed some of them. Others worked for her
in her aspiring Uh. The story is juicy and complicated,
(02:25):
and if you're looking for something to get dad for
a Father's Day, this is this is a great buy.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
Well, yeah, because this is the kind of stuff that
my father would call a Western because it's got that
ed edginess to it, that that gives it that you know,
that that that appeal of oh my god, what's up next.
Oh it's another cliffhanger. Okay, I'm coming back to it.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
Well, there's an amazing amount of action. When I started
the research on this book, I thought I was going
to investigate a little old lady who wrote these little notes. No,
she went off in all kinds of ways that I
never expected. She staged a meeting in northern Virginia, crossing
(03:06):
enemy lines in the heart of the war, going to
this wild Washington ball where all of the lights of
the Union were to meet and discuss a raid on Richmond,
which she had called for. She met all kinds of people.
John Wilkes Booth lived only blocks from her in the
(03:27):
years before the war, as he was training to be
an actor. He did a lot of his training right
there in Richmond. I mean, it's hard to put together
these days, how small that world was. Yeah, everybody knew.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
Everybody, Please do not move. There's more with Jerry Willis
coming up next. Hey, thanks for coming back to my
conversation with author Jerry Willis. It blows me away because
you're connecting dots that most of us do not know
even existed, and it really makes it more genuine inside
our story telling capabilities even today, because this is the
(04:05):
kind of book that's going to say, did you know this?
And I got it out.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
Of this okay. One of the amazing facts that really
hit me personally is that in the years before the war,
women could be arrested or fined for wearing pants on
the street in public. And like, I knew that women
had fewer rights, right, I knew they couldn't vote, I
(04:29):
knew they couldn't sign contracts. I knew they had to
turn over their cash to their husbands when they got married.
But the idea that you couldn't wear pants on the street,
to me was mind blowing. And of course, during the
war that was a big deal because there were literally
hundreds of women who fought for the Union and the
Confederacy and they dressed as soldiers and nobody suspected them
(04:53):
in part why because they were wearing pants.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Yep, yep, yep. Yeah. Why do I know that? Somewhere
along the line, I do him that's impressive because because
I don't know if there was a movie or something
because they didn't know if it was a he or
a she. But yet she was in this war, and
so I mean, but see now that really brings this
picture into play even more because the way that Elizabeth
put her plans together, she thought like a human being,
(05:20):
not as a woman, you know, from that from that
era she.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Was she felt like she had a responsibility to do
the right thing for Richmond. And she was really angry
with the Unionist men in those years before the war
because they would not stand up to the plantation owners
who were pushing the south towards a secession. And she thought,
(05:45):
oh my god, I'm gonna have to do this myself.
And she was wealthy, right, She had standing in the community.
She knew everybody in Richmond. Everybody in Richmond knew her,
and she was in an unusual position to influence people,
and she used that power.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
How was she able to plan things out so perfectly?
Because I mean, I'm a planner. I love to read
about people who put things together way before it actually happens.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
So her transformation from well meaning but sweet woman to
you know, incredible spymaster was fascinating, and that's what I
was really interested in in this book. Because starting out,
she started using all the skills of a Southern lady,
a Southern bell. She knew how to persuade men, she
(06:34):
knew how to make them feel at ease, and she
used those in her first meeting with Confederate generals, getting
access to Union soldiers who were held in prisons. Oh
you're so handsome. Oh my goodness, your hair should adorn
the statue of Janice, you know, like, and they bought it.
(06:55):
So that worked. And then she started reaching out to
peace people she knew in the community to get information,
to get access, and as she got more and more
access to the prisons, the prisoners held there gave her
information they were overhearing from the guards. So now she's
starting to collect and collate information. She starts sending reports
(07:19):
to Washington, right addressed to whom it may concern, not
knowing how to get her information out. Finally, the Union
discovers her who she needs is a spy, and she
creates a huge spiring including people. And you're in this area.
Richmond was industrialized, and there were people from all over
(07:41):
the world working in their factories there, and some of
those folks she invited in unionists. She invited in slaves
helped her, who black freemen helped her. You know, she
might have been from the upper echelon of Richmond society,
but her spiring included everybody.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
That makes me want to dig even more because you're right,
I am down here in the south and I mean,
my neighbor could be connected to somebody who was in
the inside that spir ring.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
Really, I mean, it's amazing to me. It's amazing to
me just how you know, she really operated like a
chief executive, do you know what I mean? She had
the moxie, she was bold, she was decisive. It was
amazing to me how you know how she was able
(08:33):
to do these things. But listen, she was under threat,
and her diary catalogs how worried and nervous she was.
She's fearful and why one day in the middle of
eighteen sixty three, she's sitting around the house and there's
a knock of the door and it's two Confederate detectives
who are coming in to search her house. And at
the time, on the third floor in the attic, she
(08:56):
is giving sanctuary to three Union officers who she's going
to put on the road that night to escape. So
if they knock into a wall or start laughing or sneezing,
She's going to be exposed. But thankfully it doesn't work
out that way. They you know, she manages to put
(09:17):
these two detectives at ease. And think about it, these
guys probably had never seen a house like she owned
on Church Hill, and she turned up the volume on
her whole southern bell. She to, you know, why, I
welcome to my home, you know, and invited them for
apple sauce cookies and you know, tea afterwards. So you know,
(09:42):
they were kind of won over by her. She was
able to make herself seem like a supportive Confederate woman,
when in fact she was just the opposite.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
God, I there's a sign of me that it hurts
so bad that that time has forgotten her. But at
the same time, I'm glad that we are discovering her now.
It almost makes it even more special that what you
have done has introduced us to somebody who is very
special in our history.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
Well, I mean, I am amazed by her. Her latter
years were sad. She remained in Richmond and the entire
city turned their back on her. She had no social life.
No one wanted to meet with her, and you know,
you look at that and you think, wow, you know,
(10:28):
here she has made the ultimate sacrifice. By the end
of the war, she's given away nearly all of her money. Right, Oh,
and she has has made the ultimate sacrifice, and she's unrewarded. Really,
I mean, the Union came across with a job. She
was made postmaster of Richmond. But other than that, you know,
(10:50):
the people in Richmond still did not like her, and
after she died a couple of years afterwards, they tore
down her house built in an element entry school. Did
they name it after her? No, they did not.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
Where can people go to find out more about your
journey as well as Elizabeth's.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Story, Well, go to Jerry Willis dot com. I have
a website that includes a lot of information as well
as where I'll be appearing. I'll be in Charlotte in
a couple of weeks speaking.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
Do you know why? Because I'm in Charlotte.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
You're in Charlotte. It was so great if you came. Yeah,
it's inside the Levine Center at the Art Museum there.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
On Treon Street right downtown. Yeah, yep, absolutely, wow. Well,
I'm looking forward to that and I hope we can
have a face to face conversation there on that particular day.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
Thanks, do I want to see you? Come on out?
Speaker 1 (11:43):
Excellent? Will you be brilliant today? Okay, Jerry, Hi you.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
Too, Thank you, Thanks for talking to you. Thank you
for your curiosity. I really appreciate it.
Hello and good morning everybody.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
Who is it Sarah?
Speaker 1 (00:02):
This would be me. Wait wait, let me check, let
me check. Yeah, it's me. It's me.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
I have I am I saying your name right? Tell
me I am you did?
Speaker 1 (00:10):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Yeah, this is Jerry.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
How'd you figure that out? Jerry?
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Well, you know panetics. Actually I was good at that.
That was one of the few things I excelled at
in elementary school.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
You got to tell me how you jumped onto this book, because,
I mean I had no idea that this woman even existed.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Right, She's been lost to history, I mean sincerely, if
it had not been for an obscure spy, an essay
analyst who was walking around the National Archives one day
and found this room that had been closed for a
long time. Who walks in. There's a stack of papers
to the ceiling and they're sealed with red tape. He
(00:53):
opens them up and lo and behold they are the archives.
They are the reports of the spooks the Union during
the Civil War had been unopened in one hundred years.
She pulls them out and it tells him everything they
were doing in those years. And Elizabeth van lu figures
pretty prominently in that because she ran the spir ring
(01:16):
that General Ulysses S. Grant relied upon and especially in
the latter years of the war. So, you know, it's
been fascinating uncovering her story. I felt a little like
Nicholas Cage National Treasure, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
Yes, but I mean she was unlikely to even be
doing this position. I mean, she was rich, she had
it all charm with everything that's right.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
Well, she could have moved to Philadelphia, right called in
a day, moved her whole family up there. She had
enough money, and she said, no, no, I am going
to stay with my uh, with my people in Richmond.
She had this incredible affinity for the Commonwealth from the
state of Virginia, and she thought it was wrong, wrong,
(02:03):
wrong for them to leave the Union. And she was
dedicated to ending slavery. Of course, one of the complicated
facts was that our family owned slaves. Oh wow, so yeah,
so she freed some of them. Others worked for her
in her aspiring Uh. The story is juicy and complicated,
(02:25):
and if you're looking for something to get dad for
a Father's Day, this is this is a great buy.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
Well, yeah, because this is the kind of stuff that
my father would call a Western because it's got that
ed edginess to it, that that gives it that you know,
that that that appeal of oh my god, what's up next.
Oh it's another cliffhanger. Okay, I'm coming back to it.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
Well, there's an amazing amount of action. When I started
the research on this book, I thought I was going
to investigate a little old lady who wrote these little notes. No,
she went off in all kinds of ways that I
never expected. She staged a meeting in northern Virginia, crossing
(03:06):
enemy lines in the heart of the war, going to
this wild Washington ball where all of the lights of
the Union were to meet and discuss a raid on Richmond,
which she had called for. She met all kinds of people.
John Wilkes Booth lived only blocks from her in the
(03:27):
years before the war, as he was training to be
an actor. He did a lot of his training right
there in Richmond. I mean, it's hard to put together
these days, how small that world was. Yeah, everybody knew.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
Everybody, Please do not move. There's more with Jerry Willis
coming up next. Hey, thanks for coming back to my
conversation with author Jerry Willis. It blows me away because
you're connecting dots that most of us do not know
even existed, and it really makes it more genuine inside
our story telling capabilities even today, because this is the
(04:05):
kind of book that's going to say, did you know this?
And I got it out.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
Of this okay. One of the amazing facts that really
hit me personally is that in the years before the war,
women could be arrested or fined for wearing pants on
the street in public. And like, I knew that women
had fewer rights, right, I knew they couldn't vote, I
(04:29):
knew they couldn't sign contracts. I knew they had to
turn over their cash to their husbands when they got married.
But the idea that you couldn't wear pants on the street,
to me was mind blowing. And of course, during the
war that was a big deal because there were literally
hundreds of women who fought for the Union and the
Confederacy and they dressed as soldiers and nobody suspected them
(04:53):
in part why because they were wearing pants.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Yep, yep, yep. Yeah. Why do I know that? Somewhere
along the line, I do him that's impressive because because
I don't know if there was a movie or something
because they didn't know if it was a he or
a she. But yet she was in this war, and
so I mean, but see now that really brings this
picture into play even more because the way that Elizabeth
put her plans together, she thought like a human being,
(05:20):
not as a woman, you know, from that from that
era she.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Was she felt like she had a responsibility to do
the right thing for Richmond. And she was really angry
with the Unionist men in those years before the war
because they would not stand up to the plantation owners
who were pushing the south towards a secession. And she thought,
(05:45):
oh my god, I'm gonna have to do this myself.
And she was wealthy, right, She had standing in the community.
She knew everybody in Richmond. Everybody in Richmond knew her,
and she was in an unusual position to influence people,
and she used that power.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
How was she able to plan things out so perfectly?
Because I mean, I'm a planner. I love to read
about people who put things together way before it actually happens.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
So her transformation from well meaning but sweet woman to
you know, incredible spymaster was fascinating, and that's what I
was really interested in in this book. Because starting out,
she started using all the skills of a Southern lady,
a Southern bell. She knew how to persuade men, she
(06:34):
knew how to make them feel at ease, and she
used those in her first meeting with Confederate generals, getting
access to Union soldiers who were held in prisons. Oh
you're so handsome. Oh my goodness, your hair should adorn
the statue of Janice, you know, like, and they bought it.
(06:55):
So that worked. And then she started reaching out to
peace people she knew in the community to get information,
to get access, and as she got more and more
access to the prisons, the prisoners held there gave her
information they were overhearing from the guards. So now she's
starting to collect and collate information. She starts sending reports
(07:19):
to Washington, right addressed to whom it may concern, not
knowing how to get her information out. Finally, the Union
discovers her who she needs is a spy, and she
creates a huge spiring including people. And you're in this area.
Richmond was industrialized, and there were people from all over
(07:41):
the world working in their factories there, and some of
those folks she invited in unionists. She invited in slaves
helped her, who black freemen helped her. You know, she
might have been from the upper echelon of Richmond society,
but her spiring included everybody.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
That makes me want to dig even more because you're right,
I am down here in the south and I mean,
my neighbor could be connected to somebody who was in
the inside that spir ring.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
Really, I mean, it's amazing to me. It's amazing to
me just how you know, she really operated like a
chief executive, do you know what I mean? She had
the moxie, she was bold, she was decisive. It was
amazing to me how you know how she was able
(08:33):
to do these things. But listen, she was under threat,
and her diary catalogs how worried and nervous she was.
She's fearful and why one day in the middle of
eighteen sixty three, she's sitting around the house and there's
a knock of the door and it's two Confederate detectives
who are coming in to search her house. And at
the time, on the third floor in the attic, she
(08:56):
is giving sanctuary to three Union officers who she's going
to put on the road that night to escape. So
if they knock into a wall or start laughing or sneezing,
She's going to be exposed. But thankfully it doesn't work
out that way. They you know, she manages to put
(09:17):
these two detectives at ease. And think about it, these
guys probably had never seen a house like she owned
on Church Hill, and she turned up the volume on
her whole southern bell. She to, you know, why, I
welcome to my home, you know, and invited them for
apple sauce cookies and you know, tea afterwards. So you know,
(09:42):
they were kind of won over by her. She was
able to make herself seem like a supportive Confederate woman,
when in fact she was just the opposite.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
God, I there's a sign of me that it hurts
so bad that that time has forgotten her. But at
the same time, I'm glad that we are discovering her now.
It almost makes it even more special that what you
have done has introduced us to somebody who is very
special in our history.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
Well, I mean, I am amazed by her. Her latter
years were sad. She remained in Richmond and the entire
city turned their back on her. She had no social life.
No one wanted to meet with her, and you know,
you look at that and you think, wow, you know,
(10:28):
here she has made the ultimate sacrifice. By the end
of the war, she's given away nearly all of her money. Right, Oh,
and she has has made the ultimate sacrifice, and she's unrewarded. Really,
I mean, the Union came across with a job. She
was made postmaster of Richmond. But other than that, you know,
(10:50):
the people in Richmond still did not like her, and
after she died a couple of years afterwards, they tore
down her house built in an element entry school. Did
they name it after her? No, they did not.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
Where can people go to find out more about your
journey as well as Elizabeth's.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Story, Well, go to Jerry Willis dot com. I have
a website that includes a lot of information as well
as where I'll be appearing. I'll be in Charlotte in
a couple of weeks speaking.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
Do you know why? Because I'm in Charlotte.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
You're in Charlotte. It was so great if you came. Yeah,
it's inside the Levine Center at the Art Museum there.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
On Treon Street right downtown. Yeah, yep, absolutely, wow. Well,
I'm looking forward to that and I hope we can
have a face to face conversation there on that particular day.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
Thanks, do I want to see you? Come on out?
Speaker 1 (11:43):
Excellent? Will you be brilliant today? Okay, Jerry, Hi you.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
Too, Thank you, Thanks for talking to you. Thank you
for your curiosity. I really appreciate it.
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