SYMHC Classics: Mary-Elizabeth Bowser

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Speaker 1: 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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, 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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. 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 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 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, 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. 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. 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, 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 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. 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 you can subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts, Google podcast, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.