Elizabeth Van Lew, circa 1861.
(Library of Virginia)
Two days after the First Battle of Bull Run (or First Manassas, as Southerners would come to call it), Elizabeth Van Lew left her Grace Street mansion and set out for Ligon’s Prison, a converted tobacco warehouse four blocks away on the corner of Twenty-Fifth and Main. The city was in a “palpable state of war,” she observed, the somber notes of Handel’s “Dead March” accompanying an endless procession of military funerals, warhorses with empty saddles walking toward Capitol Square. Every arriving train carried the same ghastly freight: plain pine boxes filled with the dead and hundreds of the wounded, who staggered along with powder-stained faces and bandaged heads, using muskets as crutches while searching for hospitals with empty beds. She walked among them, incongruous in her finest day attire: a silk dress trimmed with ribbon and a matching scalloped parasol, armor for a battle of her own.
A curious crowd gathered around the perimeter of the prison and stared up at the grated windows. “Whenever they caught a glimpse of a Federal officer,” said one witness, “[they] hooted at and insulted him . . . men, women, and even little children scarcely old enough to walk, united in heaping scurrilous abuse upon them.” They called this practice “stirring up the animals.” One lady shook her parasol at the prisoners and shouted, “What did you come here for? We will have you know that if you kill all of the men, the women will make more soldiers.” The bystanders misinterpreted her remark and began snickering, laughing even harder when she tried to clarify: she meant the women would take up arms when all the men were killed—nothing so bawdy as what they had in mind.
Elizabeth followed a guard to the office of Confederate lieutenant David H. Todd, the prison’s commander and a brother-in-law of President Lincoln. She silently rehearsed what to say, her heart hammering inside her ears. It was possible the rebel officer would recognize her; everyone in Richmond knew the Van Lew name. Richmond society had always tolerated her, partly because of her father’s legacy as a prominent businessman and slave owner and partly because she was perceived as a benign oddity, an eccentric old spinster destined to die alone in her house on the hill. She was forty-three, had never married, and still lived with her mother. She had a frail, knobby frame and blue eyes set deep within the sharp angles of her face, a face that once passed as beautiful. She was invariably described as “nervous” and “birdlike,” and, according to one contemporary, was “never as pretty as her portrait shows.”
Elizabeth had to be careful how she presented herself at this meeting, as her neighbors—not to mention her sister-in-law, an ardent Confederate sympathizer—would surely hear of it by day’s end. Although a native of Richmond and one of its wealthiest citizens, she had Yankee roots, a pedigree that prevented her from achieving the standing that came with birth into the right families. Her father, John, hailed from Jamaica, Long Island, and her mother, Eliza, from Philadelphia, where her own father, Hilary Baker, served three terms as mayor and was an early member of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, a pioneering and influential antislavery organization. In the early 1830s they sent Elizabeth to school in that city under the care of an abolitionist governess, and by the time she returned home to Richmond, her world had irrevocably changed. “It was my sad privilege to differ in many things from the perceived opinions and principles in my locality,” she wrote in her diary. “This has made my life intensely sad and earnest.”
Nearly every day she walked past Odd Fellows’ Hall, just a few steps away from the Capitol, where dozens of slave owners conducted business, and the nearby Lumpkin’s Alley, with its auction blocks and “Negro jails.” She scanned the notices in the Richmond Dispatch about runaways: “Left the Tredegar Iron Works about three weeks ago,” read one. “A NEGRO MAN, calling himself ‘CHARLES BLACKFORD,’ the property of Mrs. F. G. Skinner . . . about 5 feet 6 inches high, well built, very dark skin, looks confused when spoken to.” Slavery, she believed, “is arrogant—is jealous and intrusive—is cruel—is despotic—not only over the slave, but over the community, the State.” She once gave a tour of the city to the renowned Swedish author Frederika Bremer, including a stop at a tobacco factory. Bremer was horrified by the conditions of the slaves, toiling ceaselessly amid the dirt and “murderous” smells, and saw that “Good Miss Van L. could not refrain from weeping.”
Elizabeth came to understand the importance of appearances, and the intricate subterfuge required to maintain them. Despite their Northern connections her family had achieved the social respect that comes with prosperity, and her father aggressively vied for his place in Richmond society. As the proprietor of a hardware business whose clients included Thomas Jefferson and the University of Virginia, he amassed enough of a fortune to purchase a three-story mansion in the prestigious neighborhood of Church Hill, a property that became a showpiece of the city and a stage for elaborate parties; Chief Justice John Marshall, Swedish opera star Jenny Lind, and Edgar Allan Poe all mingled in the parlors and wandered through the exquisite gardens. Her mother expertly played the part of the gracious Southern hostess and Christian lady, bringing her three children—Elizabeth and younger siblings Anna and John—to the venerable St. John’s Episcopal Church, where Patrick Henry gave his “liberty or death” speech standing in the Van Lew family pew. They understood that slaveholding was a prerequisite for wielding any political or financial influence in the South, and by 1843, the year of John’s death, they had a staff of fifteen. He bequeathed them all to his wife with the stipulation that she was not to sell or free any of them, a provision she decided not to honor.
Eliza, Elizabeth, and Elizabeth’s brother John (her sister Anna had moved north to Philadelphia) participated in the system of “hiring out,” in which slaves could find their own employers and keep a percentage of their wages, eventually earning enough to purchase their own freedom. Elizabeth also began spending her $10,000 inheritance (about $300,000 today), buying slaves for the express purpose of freeing them. Many of them chose to stay and work for her—in the Van Lew house, “servant” did not mean “slave”—and Elizabeth’s humane treatment of her staff did not go unnoticed. “From what I have seen of the management of the Negroes of the place,” said one neighbor, “the family of Van Lews are, I am satisfied, genuine abolitionists.”
Elizabeth never made a secret of her loyalty to the Union; after all, two thirds of the Virginia convention had voted the same way until after the Battle of Fort Sumter, and more than a third stood firm even then. But after Virginia seceded and Richmond became the Confederate capital, such opinions had potentially dangerous consequences. Richmond society’s polite tolerance of Elizabeth’s background and eccentric behavior degenerated into open hostility. “Loyalty was called treason, and now cursed,” Elizabeth wrote. “Surely madness was upon the people.”
The Dispatch warned of marauding Yankees intent on “butchery, rape, theft, and arson.” Young girls carried daggers and pistols in their crochet purses and fired at marks in the street. Dr. George Rogers Clark Todd, another brother-in-law of Lincoln’s and a devoted Confederate, was arrested for merely declaring in a bar that President Davis had treated him “damned rascally.” Her moneyed neighbors visited the troops encamped at the Old Fair Ground and beseeched the men to “kill as many Yankees as you can for me.” Elizabeth once accompanied them and spoke at length with the soldiers. “I longed to say to them, ‘be not like dumb driven cattle’. . . . They kindly informed me that Mr. Lincoln had said he was coming down to take all our negroes and set them free, and they were going to protect us women.”
The ladies gathered for afternoon tea and spoke of slaughtering all Richmond residents who had been born up North, a thinly veiled threat against Elizabeth’s mother. They wondered why her brother John hadn’t volunteered for the Confederate army along with other men of his stature and class; having to run the family business was hardly a legitimate excuse. They coveted “Mr. Lincoln’s head or a piece of his ear.” During one recent visit, when the discussion turned to secession and slavery, a neighbor named Mrs. Watt became so “offended and disgusted” by Elizabeth’s “obnoxious” opinions that she left immediately, exiting in a swirl of silk and a stomp of high-button boots. Even Elizabeth’s own sister-in-law, Mary, who lived with her in the Church Hill mansion, would not hesitate to report the Van Lews for any disloyal activity, either real or perceived. The women issued Elizabeth one final invitation, asking her to help sew clothing for the rebel army. She refused—an act of defiance that only confirmed suspicions among people who never quite considered her one of their own.
Elizabeth made one public concession to her new reality, removing the family’s American flag from its pole on the chimney, visible from Grace Street on the right side of the mansion. It was uncommonly large for a private flag, eleven by twenty feet, and she had first raised it in 1850, more than a decade before. With the addition of each new state to the Union she sewed a representative star, taking particular pride in Oregon and Kansas, which joined as secession began sweeping the land. With the flag down and packed away, she wrote in her diary of her “calm determination and high resolve” to aid the Union, aware that her family’s position would be crucial to her success. Only a member of Southern society would know how to turn its prejudices into weapons, and have the opportunity and access to defeat it from within.
She recalled the phrase she’d doodled over and over again as a child, practicing her penmanship in her notebook: “Keep your mouth shut, your eyes and ears open.”
When the war broke out, Lieutenant Todd was working as the overseer of a plantation, managing and disciplining slaves with a particularly brutal hand, a tactic he carried over into his work with the prisoners. One inmate accused him of entering the prison with his sword drawn and striking men with the flat of its blade, and others alleged that he ordered seven Union prisoners to be shot just for innocently leaning against the windows. He sat behind his desk, gray wool jacket fully buttoned, lips barely visible behind a thicket of black beard. Elizabeth thought he had a “violent appearance.”
“Lieutenant,” she began, “I would like to be made hospital nurse for the prisoners.”
It was the truth, and her inquiry wouldn’t seem unorthodox; every Southern woman had opened the doors of her home to the Confederate sick and wounded, rolling cloth bandages and collecting lint for packing wounds. She needed to begin somewhere, and this was a practical and inconspicuous first step.
Todd asked Elizabeth for her name and wrote it down. He realized who she was and looked up at her, surprised. “You are the first and only lady to make any such application,” he said, meaning no one had yet volunteered to minister to the Yankees. He refused to grant her request. Perhaps, he suggested, she could appeal to Mr. Christopher Memminger, secretary of the treasury for the Confederacy.
She did, that same afternoon, taking her family’s carriage, an exquisite barouche drawn by four snow-white horses, fourteen blocks west. Traffic was maddeningly obstructive—the influx of Confederate volunteers had more than doubled the city’s population since the outbreak of the war—and she shared the dusty roads with convoys of wagons, some piled high with the dead, their rigid feet splayed in all directions, the occasional stiffened arm raised in an eternal salute to the sky.
The War Department Building was housed in the Mechanics Hall at Ninth and Bank Streets, a venue that in peacetime hosted concerts by the Richmond Philharmonic Association and a farming contest called the “Trial of the Ploughs.” Sitting across from Memminger, Elizabeth summoned skills she had last used twenty years ago, back when she was considered one of Richmond’s most eligible belles and had her pick of suitors. Only one of them had been worthy, but he’d died before they could marry, succumbing to the yellow fever epidemic in 1841 when she was twenty-three; she still kept the cameo brooch he’d given her. Subsequent prospects failed to appreciate her candor and obstinacy and unorthodox convictions, her willingness to subvert social codes if she believed they were wrong.
“Please sir,” she said, and smiled. “Let me see the prisoners.”
Memminger shook his head. “I could not think of such a thing. Such a set and such a class—they could not be worthy of or fit for a lady to visit.”
Elizabeth let her eyes dampen and clasped her hands. “Once I heard you at a convention, in peace times, speaking beautifully on the subject of religion,” she said, sotto voce. “Love was the fulfilling of the law, and if we wish our cause to succeed, we must begin with charity to the thankless and unworthy.”
At the words “our cause,” his face relaxed. He wrote a note instructing her to see General John Winder, the commanding officer of the prison system. For the third time that day Elizabeth found herself in the office of a Confederate authority—in this case, one who would become an important figure in her plans.
Winder was sixty-one, eighteen years Elizabeth’s senior, and had been inspector general of the Richmond area camps for a month. Every related job that did not automatically fall to another office—chasing deserters, issuing passes, enforcing curfews, housing prisoners—became his responsibility. His official photograph, which for a century would serve as the only image of him as a Confederate general, showed a menacing figure with hooded eyes and a thin, taut mouth who looked well capable of committing all of the crimes eventually laid at his feet, including the deaths of nearly thirteen thousand Union prisoners at Andersonville in Georgia. Adding to the effect was a scar along one cheek, the remnant of a wound acquired during the Mexican-American War, when a projectile struck a nearby soldier and caused his brains to spatter across Winder’s face, a piece of skull slashing his skin. He had ended his forty-year career with the US Army with great regret, ultimately deciding that attempting to restore the Union by force was unconstitutional. Elizabeth knew that he, like so many Southerners, had divided loyalties within his family; Winder’s oldest son, William, was around the same age as her brother and serving as a captain in the Union army.
General John Winder, provost marshal of Richmond.
(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
She knew, too, that he had already earned the enmity of Richmonders by recruiting a force of civilian detectives—men so boorish and violent they were nicknamed the “plug-uglies” (or, occasionally, the “alien plug-uglies,” a reference to members who hailed from the foreign and unsavory cities of New York and Philadelphia). In addition to raiding gambling dens and brothels and confiscating citizens’ guns and swords, the plug-uglies conducted counterintelligence operations, identifying and intercepting Union spies.
The general motioned for Elizabeth to sit down. Silently she studied his hair, the white tufts swelling and peaking like miniature waves. Her own hair, once swinging golden and thick down the length of her back, was now faded and clipped. She no longer expected flattery but still recognized its worth, the power in elevating the ephemeral.
“Your hair would adorn the temple of Janus,” she told him. “It looks out of place here.”
Winder’s lips stretched into a smile, and for a moment she couldn’t tell if he felt patronized or pleased.
“I should be glad to visit the prisoners,” she added, “and I’d like to send them something.”
Her approach worked. Winder wrote a note and pressed it into her palm: “Miss Van Lew has permission to visit the prisoners and to send them books, luxuries, delicacies, and what she may please.” Elizabeth thanked him, surprised by how greedily he accepted her praise. “I can flatter almost anything out of old Winder,” she boasted to one Unionist friend. “His personal vanity is so great.”
She was aware, though, that the general might be motivated not by vanity but by his own brand of deception—a desire to know exactly what she brought into the prisons, and if she began taking anything out.
Elizabeth gathered fresh fruit, cake, books, and clothing for the Union prisoners, her carriage heavy with provisions as it pulled up to the gate. Her ministrations soon caught the attention of the press. Without naming names—although the implication was clear—the Richmond Examiner printed the following item:
“Two ladies, a mother and a daughter, living on Church Hill, have lately attracted public notice by their assiduous attentions for the Yankee prisoners confined in this City. Whilst every true woman in this community has been busy making articles of comfort or necessity for our troops, these two women have been expending their opulent means in aiding and giving comfort to the miscreants who have invaded our sacred soil, bent on raping and murder, the desolation of our homes and sacred places, and the ruin and dishonor of our families.”
The Richmond Dispatch ran a follow-up: “They are Yankee offshoots, who had succeeded by stinginess, double-dealing and cuteness to amass out of the credulity of Virginians a good, substantial pile of the root of all evil.” If these women weren’t careful, the paper concluded, they would be “exposed and dealt with as alien enemies to the country.”
It was one thing for Elizabeth to feel threatened by her neighbors and sister-in-law but quite another to see such language in print, tacit permission for both government officials and private citizens to enact any manner of revenge. At this point, early in the war, being “dealt with” was a nebulous but nonetheless terrifying prospect: it could mean permanent exile from the South, away from family and friends; it could mean prison, with all of its attendant horrors; it could mean public execution at the gallows. Given her gender it could also mean nothing at all, since Jefferson Davis’s newly composed Alien Enemies Act referred only to the deportation of male citizens unwilling to take an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy. Union soldiers suspected of spying were languishing in Richmond prisons, but no action had yet been taken against any woman—let alone one of Elizabeth’s prominence and wealth—suspected of disloyalty. For now, at least, her social position and gender served as her most convincing disguise. No one would believe that a frail, pampered spinster was capable of plotting treasonous acts, let alone carrying them out right under the government’s nose.
Elizabeth clipped the article and scrawled in the margin: “These ladies were my mother and myself. God knows it was little we could do.”
What she did do, a few weeks later, was offer to care for a dying Union prisoner inside her own home. Calvin Huson, who was married to the niece of US secretary of state William Seward, had been captured at Manassas and sent to Ligon’s, where he contracted typhoid fever. Huson, it was rumored, came to Manassas hoping to be made governor of Virginia after a Union victory ended the war, and the Southern press reported his current predicament with glee. “Poor Calvin Huson,” wrote the Charleston Daily Courier, “who came out to Manassas to ‘see the fun’ and who fell into the hands of the funny rebels.” Again Winder granted Elizabeth’s request, and when the closed carriage rumbled up Grace Street her neighbors all knew a Yankee was inside. But if any of them followed Elizabeth’s patient to the door, they would spy an oversize Confederate flag, hanging boldly on her entry parlor wall.