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November 6, 2021 18 mins

This 2011 episode from previous hosts Sarah and Deblina covers the life of Mary-Elizabeth Bowser, who was released from enslavement by Elizabeth Van Lew, then went on to become an agent in Van Lew's "Richmond Ring" of Civil War spies.

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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Coming up on the show, we're going to
mention the household of Elizabeth Van lu who ran a
spine network for the Union during the US Civil War
and she ran it from the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia.
Previous hosts actually talked about Van Lou and her spy network,
and that is in Today's Saturday Classic, which is about

(00:23):
one of her spies, Mary Elizabeth Bowser. This episode was
by previous hosts of the show, Sarah and Deblina, and
it originally came out on July, So enjoy Welcome to
Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Deblina

(00:49):
Chalko Boarding and and we are taking another look in
this episode at what is apparently my new favorite topic, spies.
I sent you an article last week and you were
pretty thrilled about it. Yeah, I was. I'm sorry, Sarah,
I'm afraid you think I might be obsessed with this
subject r spy. I wish I were a spy, but

(01:10):
really I'm not obsessed with this topic. I just think
it's really fascinating and there are so many different facets
to it that you can look at and we're going
to get off of it soon or at least move
on to something else civil war related. But we couldn't
do that without at least taking a look at this
last or one other facet I should say, of the
of Civil War espionage, which is African American spies. And

(01:32):
it appears as though many Black Americans took an active
role in Union espionage during the war, although, as we'll
see a little later on, in most cases there aren't
a lot of records around now to tell us exactly
what their individual accomplishments were. Yeah, and there are a
few reasons for that. It's due in part to racial prejudice,
but also because Union spy masters would often destroy any

(01:54):
record of their contributions after the war to protect the
African American spies. And then most didn't want their identities
to become known in the first place, even after the war,
because they feared repercussions if Confederate sympathizers ever found out
about it. They had taken a big risk spying in
the first place and didn't want to get caught after
the fact. Yeah, the penalty was death, so it would

(02:16):
be really bad if you were found out. But According
to the CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence, intelligence
on the Confederates provided by African Americans, which was known
as Black dispatches, was the quote most prolific and productive
category of intelligence obtained and acted on by Union forces
throughout the Civil War. So former slaves and free blacks

(02:38):
alike participated in this and Harriet Tubman is probably the
most well known name in this category of spies, although
she's probably better known for her work with the Underground Railroad.
That's how most people know her, I think, but existing
records and books written by other self proclaimed spies. In
other words, white spies give us information to substantiate about

(02:58):
eight to ten more include Udine. The person we're going
to talk about in this episode, Mary Elizabeth Bowser. We
don't know that much about Bowser, including whether that was
even her real name. Some people still question her very existence,
but she was eventually inducted into the U. S. Army
Intelligence Hall of Fame, so clearly some people believe in

(03:18):
her contributions. Yeah, you can't tell her story though, without
talking about someone whose existence is definitely known, that of
her Union spy master Elizabeth Van lou who started a
ring of spies in Richmond, and with the help of
Van lou story, we learned the generally accepted version of
events concerning Bowser too and can explore the mystery surrounding her.

(03:40):
Who was she really all right? So, Mary Elizabeth Bowser
was born into slavery in about eighteen thirty nine, and
there's some questions surrounding her exact name, as we mentioned,
but it's likely that in those days she was known
just as Mary or even van Lose Mary, because she
was the slave of John van Lou who was a
wealthy hardware merchant in Richmond, Virginia, and the Van Leus

(04:03):
were a very prominent family. They were well connected, they
were well respected. They had this huge mansion on the
highest hill in Richmond. Things started to change though for
the family after John van Lew died, and sources differ
as to when that was eighteen forty three or eighteen
fifty one. But it wasn't the wealth that changed. The
family definitely inherited all of that. It was some of

(04:25):
their social conventions and beliefs that started to change. Right. So,
after his death, the eldest Van lou daughter, Elizabeth van Leu,
convinced her mother to free all nine of the family
slaves Mary included, and she also supposedly bought the relatives
of those slaves and freed them too. So why did
she free these slaves? Well, Elizabeth had always had a

(04:46):
sympathy for slaves, but she had also been educated by
a school in Philadelphia that opposed slavery, so that just
reinforced her beliefs and kind of solidified them. Several slaves
chose to stay on as paid servants in the Van
Lou household, and Mary was one of them. Elizabeth, though,
after being around Mary for a wild did recognize her
intelligence and ended up sending her up to school up
north in the late eighteen fifties. We're not sure where

(05:09):
exactly it was, but may have been a Quaker school
in Philadelphia. Mary did return to Richmond though, before the
war started, and according to a two thousand six article
in American History, public record does show that she married
a free black man named William or perhaps Wilson Bowser
in eighteen sixty one in St. John's Church, and that's
where her last name of Bowser comes from. But she

(05:31):
seems to have immediately taken up with the Van Lou
household again, this time though it was to do a
very different kind of work. Yeah, because after the war started,
Elizabeth van Leu really didn't waste any time contributing to
the union effort. She got permission to nerves wounded union
soldiers in Libby Prison, and conditions there were really pretty bad.

(05:52):
She would visit regularly and assist the soldiers, you know,
bringing them items like books and stationary and food, and
she in this way started her spy efforts too, because
she would carry letters and messages in and out of
the prison, and the way she'd do this was pretty clever.
She'd hide them in books or in the bottom of
a food pan, and then relay those messages to union officers.

(06:16):
Sometimes she would just talk to the new prisoners and
they would tell her what they'd seen, and other times, uh,
they'd tell her what they had overheard from doctors or
nurses or guards who were talking in the prison. So
she had a lot of different means of communication going
on within the prison, but also some cool ways to
code or messages. Yeah. Sometimes the books she carried out,

(06:36):
for example, would have faintly underlined letters and numbers that
formed a message when you put them together and read
them altogether. A little smarter than Bell Boyd's tactic of
signing Bell at the end of her aspect or early
tactic at least or the pages of the books would
have tiny pin pricks on them that meant something, so
the books were used in that way. But another tactic

(06:59):
of Eliza Bits is that she would write letters that
had coded messages written in invisible ink between the lines,
and the ink would turn black if you applied milk
to it. And Sarah loves this one because she used
to be quite the connoisseur of invisible ink. I was
kind of the treehouse spy in my day, and I
did have some invisible ink, which which I used a
great effect. But Elizabeth would carry the CIPHERD code for

(07:23):
all of these messages in the back of her watch,
which I thought that was really interesting too, because who's
going to take apart this Richmond socialites watch when she's
leaving the prison, you know, just a real clever final
detail for all of this. Yeah, And it said that
years later when she died, they actually found that code

(07:44):
in the same place, So she kept it all those years,
even after the war, right, so when it became dangerous
to send this information through the mail or through the post.
Elizabeth set up an elaborate network with five courier relay
points between her home and Union army officers. Sometimes she
would um tear a message into pieces and have each
piece delivered by a different agent to keep it hidden. Yeah. Again,

(08:07):
pretty amazing tactics. So of course others in Richmond noticed
that this woman had clear union sympathies. She was visiting
the prison and all of that, and they didn't improve.
So to offset suspicion, she started up an act. She
pretended to be crazy. She wore dirty, torn clothing, she
left her hair uncombed, it got all matted. She would hum,

(08:30):
she would jerk her head back and forth and carry
on conversations with herself while she walked down the street.
People even started calling her crazy bet, so nobody paid
that much heed to what she was doing. Yeah, and
again to compare her to Bell Boyd, I mean, in
that episode we talked about how Bell used her feminine
wiles to carry off her spine draw out information from

(08:54):
from union men. Yeah, exactly. And Elizabeth has had to
pretend to be crazy and you know, use all these
secret codes, all these kind of involved tactics because she
was in her forties when she started spying and was
a spinster, not necessarily considered that attractive, so she took
a different approach. She did um and it was a

(09:15):
fairly effective one. Another thing that she did that was
different from Bell too, though, is that she didn't work alone,
and probably the best known for is establishing this extensive
network of spies in Richmond that the Federals dubbed the

(09:36):
Richmond Ring, and it consisted of hundreds of spies that
managed to work their way into pretty much every arm
of the Confederate establishment, Libby prison, the war, Navy departments,
Richmond businesses, and with the help of Mary Bowser, into
the Confederate Executive Mansion itself. All right, So we've got
to explain the background behind that. It said that Elizabeth,

(09:59):
perhaps through the recommendation of society connections, got Mary a
job as a servant in none other than Jefferson Davis's
household under the name Ellen Bond. And Mary, of course
was said to be intelligent, she had gone to school,
but she also put on an act, just like Elizabeth
in a way she didn't let others know how smart

(10:21):
she really was. She pretended to be kind of dim
wit it a little bit loopy, so no one in
the executive mansion would think anything of saying important things
in front of her. Yeah, up to that point, slaves
in general were underestimated, though that started to change a
little bit as the war went on. That was one
of the things that really blew me away about this

(10:42):
this podcast too, that that you would have to go
through that transformation of feeling that people would be so
confident to speak in front of their slaves at the
beginning of the war at least. Yeah, it's hard for
us to imagine nowadays. But in eighteen sixty three, General
Robert E. Lee made a statement that I think was
kind of a revelation at the time. His quote was,

(11:03):
the chief source of information to the enemy is through
our negroes. I mean, people didn't even realize that their
servants would be listening or would be taking in and
interpreting the information that they were so freely giving out. Yeah,
so apparently Mary's tactic worked. You know, she made herself
blend into the background, just kind of a spacey young

(11:25):
woman who was working in the house. And meanwhile, though
she was listening to everything she heard while she was
serving meals in the Presidential dining room, she saved scraps
from Davis's waiste basket while she cleaned up his study.
She would memorize messages that she read on his desk
while she was dusting. And a man named Thomas McNiven,
who was a Scottish baker in Richmond at the time

(11:48):
and also a union spy and the one who gave
us the only documented reference to Mary as a union spy,
said that she had a photographic memory, so she could
remember every word of the mess wages that she saw. Yeah,
and the info that she got included things like true movements,
military strategies, treasury reports, and from time to time Mary

(12:09):
would meet up with Elizabeth near the Van lou mansion
to give her reports of what she learned, and then
Elizabeth would come dressed as a countrywoman so that she
wouldn't be recognized, basically, and it said that McNiven, for
his part, would sometimes serve as a courier for Mary too.
When his bakery wagon came around to the Executive mansion,
she'd passed information along to him, and nobody thought anything

(12:30):
of it because it was just the baker coming backer
and the servant picking up the goods. So Mary pulled
off this act from about eighteen sixty three to eighteen
sixty five, and Elizabeth reported everything she found out back
to Ulysses s. Grant, and it said at one point
General Lee complained that the enemy received his directives before
they even reached his own lieutenant. So clearly there was

(12:54):
a pretty sophisticated spying system going on in Richmond. Yeah,
and it's all said that Davis suspected that there was
a leak in his house, but he never managed to
really figure out who it was. But Mary must have
felt the heat of suspicion because in eighteen sixty five
she just disappeared. She fled the capital, and some even
say that she may have tried to burn down the

(13:16):
house on her way out the door. We're not sure
if that's actually kind of call attention to your own flight,
but nonetheless, no one knows what happened to her. So
after the war, Van Loo and the federal government destroyed
all the records of the Richmond Ring to protect the
lives of everybody who was involved. But again that's why
so many details of Mary's life are still very sketchy.

(13:37):
So we mentioned McNiven and how he gave us our
only documented source of Mary's spying, but some people even
feel that his account can't be trusted because he had
this tendency to exaggerate. Nevertheless, stories about Mary did start
showing up as earliest nineteen hundred in Richmond newspapers, and
Van Loo's niece even revealed her name in an inner

(14:00):
you in nineteen ten, So clearly some people knew who
this was, and they were talking about her well after
the fact, right Bowser maybe even left a diary behind,
and it had reportedly been seen by the wife of
her great great grand nephew as late as in nineteen
fifty two and would have been a gold mine of
information about her life potentially, but it was thrown away.

(14:21):
And we mentioned in the beginning that we weren't even
exactly sure about what Mary's real name was, because more
recent research by scholar Elizabeth Varren, who wrote a book
on Van Lou, suggests that Mary's name was actually married
Jane Richards and Mary Jane Richards was a Van Lou
slave who was sent to be educated in New Jersey

(14:42):
as a child, and after the war, Richard's married this
guy with the last named Garvin and went on to
become an educator, and a couple of times in an
interview and in a letter, she did admit to working
in the Secret Service during the war as a detective,
even though parts of her story contradict some other account
of Bowser's life. So it's it's hard to say. Maybe

(15:03):
this is the same woman, maybe maybe it's different. Yeah,
but maybe it does lend some validity to Bowser's story though,
the story that a person like her existed after the war.
Verena Davis Jefferson, Davis's wife, was asked about the espionage
work of her former maid, Mary Bowser, and she denied
that any of her Richmond servants could have been spies,

(15:23):
and in nineteen o five letters she even said quote,
I had no educated Negro in my household and really
just flatly denied having hired anyone from Van lou So
her response is considered kind of questionable, though, because she
reportedly had a few servants on staff who were very
well known and widely known around the area to be educated.

(15:43):
So she may have just said this because she didn't
want to admit that she had been duped by someone
working in her household. Yeah, or maybe she wasn't even
aware of what was going on in her household, didn't
realize her own servants were educated, especially since we know
Mary was putting on an act. Presumably others could have
been too, And that's a good point. But as for
Van lou, Grant praised her after the war for her contributions.

(16:05):
He said, quote, you have sent me the most valuable
information received from Richmond during the war. So very high praise.
And when he became president, he appointed her Richmond postmaster,
a position that paid four thousand dollars a year, but
after he left office, she lost that gig. She went
on to work in the Washington Post Office, but eventually
had to leave that too, and then couldn't get work. Yeah,

(16:26):
and by the time she died on September at the
age of eighty two, she was very poor. She was lonely.
She had spent all her money off her inheritance on
her spy efforts during the war and helping former slaves
after that, And in the end, the family of a
man she had helped in Libby prison came through for her.
They gave her some income, but she still had no

(16:49):
friends locally because of that controversial stance. She had taken
during the war, so kind of a sad ending to
the story of a master spy that interesting in the US.
She certainly stuck to her principles. We can can say
that for Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday.

(17:13):
Since this episode is out of the archive, if you
heard an email address or Facebook U r L or
something similar over the course of the show that could
be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast
at i heart radio dot com. Our old house stuff
works email address no longer works, and you can find
us all over social media at missed in History. And

(17:35):
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