
	Where results make sense

Topic: Elizabeth Van Lew

Related Topics

American Civil War spies

List of American Civil War topics

Pauline Cushman

Thomas Jordan

Sarah Emma Edmonds

Belle Boyd

Old Capitol Prison

American Civil War

Jefferson Davis

Albert Cashier

Allan Pinkerton

John Mosby

American Southwest

1763

Metric system in the United States

In the News (Thu 31 Dec 09)

Northern Trust

Marvin Harrison

Peter Chernin

Gary Locke

Match Play

Penelope Cruz

Mickey Rourke

AR Rahman

Danny Boyle

Hugh Jackman

	VALib V50N1 - Virginia Reviews
		John Van Lew (who died in 1843) was aware of his wife's antislavery leanings, as Varon argues from a codicil to his will in which he changed from bequeathing all rights to the family slaves to his wife to leaving her only the use of the slaves to prevent her selling or emancipating them.
		Van Lew became the head of a spy organization for the Union general Benjamin F. Butler, helped Federal prisoners who escaped from Libby Prison, and buried the Union colonel Ulric Dahlgren, who was killed during an 1864 raid on Richmond.
		In Varon's hands, Elizabeth Van Lew is a independent southern woman who held to her convictions and principles despite the constant threat of danger and the severe criticism of public opinion.
	scholar.lib.vt.edu /ejournals/VALib/v50_n1/reviews.html (3495 words)

	Elizabeth Van Lew - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Elizabeth Van Lew (1818-1900), who became known as "Crazy Bet," was a famous Union spy in the American Civil War.
		Elizabeth's friend Mary Bowser, a freed slave, worked closely with Elizabeth throughout the war, obtaining military intelligence disguised as a slave.
		Van Lew is a member of the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Elizabeth_Van_Lew (161 words)

	From slave to spy: Mary Elizabeth Bowser (Site not responding. Last check: )
		Van Lew was quite outspoken on both these issues, but despite her stance against war, she volunteered her services to the Union cause when war broke out between the North and South.
		Mary Elizabeth stayed on with the Van Lew family and worked for a time, and it was during this period that she married a freeman named William or Wilson Bowser.
		Van Lew was considered by Richmond society to be somewhat strange; however, she was not viewed as an enemy of the Confederacy.
	aia.lackland.af.mil /homepages/pa/spokesman/Nov04/heritage1.cfm (705 words)

	Elizabeth Van Lew
		Elizabeth Van Lew was born in 1818, oldest daughter of John Van Lew, a prominent Richmond businessman.
		Elizabeth: provided imprisoned Union soldiers with bribe money, food and books; hid escaped prisoners-of-war; and spent her entire inheritance ($10,000) buying and freeing slaves and pursuing anti-Confederate efforts.
		Elizabeth's abolitionist tendencies were learned from one of her teachers at the school she attended in Philadelphia.
	www.nps.gov /malw/vanlew.htm (190 words)

	"Crazy Bet" Van Lew
		Elizabeth Van Lew was born in 1818 to a prominent Richmond merchant family.
		Van Lew was considered pretty in her youth, but by the time she was in her forties she was the classic "old maid," with a sharp nose and piercing blue eyes.
		Van Lew visited the prisoners regularly, bringing supplies and medicine purchased with her own funds and with profits from her brother's hardware store.
	www.thehistorynet.com /acw/blvanlew (803 words)

	Elizabeth Van Lew « GiRl SpY
		Elizabeth Van Lew (1818-1900) was a Quaker educated daughter of a Virginia plantation owner who became a Union Military spy during the Civil War.
		Aside from Elizabeth’s involvement in the Mary Elizabeth Bowser spying affair, Van Lew was openly Pro-Union, an abolitionist, openly provided food and clothing to Union POW’s (also helped a few escape as well), and used a great deal of her own fortune to finance her espionage activities for which, oddly, she was never arrested.
		On the cheeky side, Van Lew communicated her intelligence to Ulysses Grant by sending him flowers wrapped in a Richmond, Virginia newspaper (because she developed a cipher system for the newspaper to be decoded), and even smuggled messages out of Virginia via hollow eggs.
	girlspy.wordpress.com /2008/07/07/elizabeth-van-lew (300 words)

	Elizabeth Van Lew biography
		Elizabeth was almost caught once when an expected Union scout had not arrived to pick up a requested up-to-date report on Richmond's defenses.
		After the war, President Grant appointed Van Lew as postmistress of Richmond from 1869 to 1877, but because of her loyalty to the Union, she was ostracized by the community.
		Elizabeth had spent most of her family's wealth on her wartime activities, and so lived in poverty in the Van Lew mansion with her niece and 40 cats.
	www.lkwdpl.org /wihohio/vanl-eli.htm (2555 words)

	Elizabeth Van Lew
		Elizabeth Van Lew was a southern girl, born in Richmond, in 1818, the daughter of a wealthy family with connections and kin in the north.
		Van Lew was educated in Philadelphia and returned home a convinced and vigorous abolitionist.
		Van Lew occasionally aroused suspicion, so, in order to throw off would be pursuers, she wore dirty clothes and mumbled to herself on the street.
	ehistory.osu.edu /world/PeopleView.cfm?PID=349 (308 words)

	Mary Elizabeth Bowser biography
		Accounts record the Van Lew women buying members of their slaves' families from other owners, when they found out they were going to be sold, and then freeing them.
		After the war began, Elizabeth Van Lew asked Mary to help her in the elaborate spying system she had established in the Confederate capitol.
		Despite Elizabeth being a staunch abolitionist and loyal to the Union, she was a prominent member of Richmond because of her father's wealth and status.
	www.lkwdpl.org /wihohio/bows-mar.htm (1192 words)

	Civil War Women
		Elizabeth Van Lew was born into privilege, the eldest daughter of John Van Lew, a prominent Virginia businessman.
		Elizabeth was 43 years old when she began to spy for the Union.
		Van Lew lived to the ripe old age of 82, but she died penniless.
	civilwarwomen.blogspot.com /2006/07/elizabeth-van-lew.html (730 words)

	The Complete List of Historical Women - Last Name Begins with "B"
		Van Lew and her daughter, Elizabeth, freed all of their slaves, in addition to buying members of their slave families from other owners and freeing them as well.
		Elizabeth Van Lew, an outspoken abolitionist, soon arranged for Bowser to be educated in Philadelphia.
		Despite her abolitionist sentiments, Elizabeth Van Lew was a prominent figure in Richmond, though secretly she was regularly sending reports to Union officials about activities in the South.
	www.legendsofamerica.com /we-womenlist-b.html (1726 words)

	Elizabeth Van Lew
		Elizabeth was different from the other woman spies because she used neither charm nor beauty to get her military information.
		Elizabeth began her spying in the North for the next four years, she was setting up networks of couriers and making up codes.
		After Elizabeth Van Lew died her apprication of her kindness to her country, the people had a gravestone erected on her grave which said," She risked everything that is dear to man-friends,fortune,comfort,health, life itself, all for the one absorbing desire of her.
	www.east-buc.k12.ia.us /98_99/CW/spies/liz.htm (281 words)

	Mary Elizabeth Bowser: Female Civil War Black Spy – Encyclomedia.com
		Van Lew was the Underground's operator who traveled to the War Department in Washington after the war and destroyed all records mentioning Mary Bowser, herself, and the Richmond Underground.
		While never keeping her Union loyalties a secret, Van Lew, a member of a well respected white family in Richmond, managed to skirt suspicion by simply appearing to be an eccentric in front of Confederate authorities.
		She was given the nickname “Crazy Bet.” Mary Elizabeth Bowser was a slave of the Van Lew family who was freed and sent north to receive an education.
	www.encyclomedia.com /mary_elizabeth_bowser.html (389 words)

	Elizabeth Van Lew, The Richmond Spy
		Yet Miss Van Lew became a freak in Richmond, a woman whose existence was a protest against the beliefs of her class and region.
		Van Lew died, and his son John, as energetic as he was unspectacular, took over the hardware business with success.
		Elizabeth had been told "there was to be an exit" in the near future, and she prepared "an off, or rather end room." Personal problems intervened and she had left the house when some of the escaping prisoners sought refuge, and the servants turned them away.
	www.civilwarhome.com /crazybet.htm (5750 words)

	Elizabeth Van Lew (Site not responding. Last check: )
		Elizabeth Van Lew, a member of one of Richmond's best and Virginia's oldest families, was 42 years old when the Civil War broke out.
		Van Lew had paid for the Northern education of one of her freed slaves, Mary Elizabeth Bowser, and managed to find employment for her on President Jefferson Davis's household staff.
		Van Lew continued to live in her Richmond family mansion for the rest of her life.
	members.cox.net /quarter_3/Civil_War_Women/Elizabeth_Van_Lew.htm (335 words)

	BookCloseouts.com - The Bestseller in Bargain Books (Site not responding. Last check: )
		Ranging from Van Lew's childhood, through the Civil War, and into the years after the end of the war, the narrative, told with almost tender regret by the ghostly Van Lew, makes very personal the tragedy of this most wrenching American conflict, while also engaging the reader as a co-conspirator in Van Lew's Unionist activities.
		Elizabeth Van Lew was known in Richmond as the spinster daughter of a prominent family.
		Elizabeth saw the Antebellum South as deluded by a system that limited not only its slaves, but also the privileged classes, who dared not rock the boat lest their idealized view of the world be shattered.
	www.bookcloseouts.com /default.asp?R=9780765303165S (272 words)

	Oxford University Press: Southern Lady, Yankee Spy: Elizabeth R. Varon (Site not responding. Last check: )
		Northern sympathizer in the Confederate capital, daring spymaster, postwar politician: Elizabeth Van Lew was one of the most remarkable figures in American history, a woman who defied the conventions of the nineteenth-century South.
		Varon's powerful biography brings Van Lew to life, showing how she used the stereotypes of the day to confound Confederate authorities (who suspected her, but could not believe a proper Southern lady could be a spy), even as she brought together Union sympathizers at all levels of society, from slaves to slaveholders.
		Elizabeth Varon's account rescues her from both derision and oblivion, depicting an intelligent, resourceful, highly principled woman who remained, as she saw it, true to her country to the end.
	www.oup.com /us/catalog/general/subject/HistoryAmerican/CivilWarReconstruction/~~/dmlldz11c2EmY2k9MDE5NTE0MjI4NA== (899 words)

	Civil War Continues - Women in the Civil War - Elizabeth Van Lew
		Elizabeth Van Lew was born in 1818, the oldest daughter of John Van Lew, a wealthy Richmond businessman.
		After the war, President Grant rewarded Elizabeth with the job of postmistress of Richmond, which she held from 1869 through 1877.
		Although revered in the North, Elizabeth was ostracized by the citizens of Richmond.
	www.geocities.com /civil_warcontinues/ElizabethVanLew.html (433 words)

	African American National Biography
		Upon Van Lew’s death in 1843 or 1851, his wife and daughter, Elizabeth, manumitted his slaves and bought and freed a number of their family members, Mary among them.
		Noting her intellectual talent, Elizabeth, a staunch abolitionist and Quaker, sent Mary to the Quaker School for Negroes in Philadelphia to be educated.
		Adopting a distracted, muttering personae, she was dubbed “Crazy Bet.” During the war, Van Lew helped manage a spy system in the Confederate capitol, went regularly to the Libby Prison with food and medicine, and helped escapees of all kinds, hiding them in a secret room in her mansion.
	www.fas.harvard.edu /~aanb/SHTML/sampleEntries.shtml (11330 words)

	Richmond spinster a blue angel - The Washington Times: Civil War (Site not responding. Last check: )
		Born into a well-to-do Richmond family in 1818, Van Lew was sent to Philadelphia to study and appears to have returned to Virginia with strong anti-slavery views.
		Elizabeth was protected by the fact that whereas her Unionist opinions were well-known, her intelligence activities were not.
		The Van Lew fortune was a casualty of the war, but Elizabeth was quick to cash in on her wartime services.
	washingtontimes.com /functions/print.php?StoryID=20030905-082358-4291r (780 words)

	Mary Bowser
		Van Lew sent for Mary Elizabeth, who returned from Philadelphia to assist her in her efforts.
		Van Lew used her local connections to obtain Mary Elizabeth Bowser a position as a household servant in Confederate President Jefferson Davis’ White House in Richmond.
		Van Lew suffered many social repercussions due to her assistance to the Union Army during the war, and ended up quite poor at the time of her death.
	www.gibbsmagazine.com /Eliz.htm (528 words)

	Van Lew House
		Van Lew made little effort to hide her Union proclivities, though why she was not apprehended along with other known Unionists is not known.
		Interior of Van Lew Mansion, showing the inside of the "secret room" where Unionists and escaped prisoners were hidden.
		Describes the capture and execution of Timothy Webster, the Libby Prison escape (mentions prisoners being aided by Van Lew, and good feeling amongst the Unionists toward her), a shooting of a prisoner at Libby, “the clerk” of Libby being involved in trading with the prisoners (Ross), and being shot at while near Locust Alley.
	www.mdgorman.com /Other_Sites/van_lew_house.htm (895 words)

	The American Civil War, Elizabeth Van Lew
		Born into a prominent Richmond family, Elizabeth Van Lew returned from her schooling in Philadelphia as an adamant abolitionist determined to fight slavery in the bastion of the South.
		Van Lew also sent her household servants--though she had freed the family's slaves, many of them chose to stay with her--northward carrying baskets of farm produce.
		After the war, President Grant rewarded Van Lew with a job as postmistress of Richmond, which she held from 1869 to 1877.
	history-world.org /elizabeth_van_lew_1818.htm (451 words)

	Linwood Holton Elementary School
		Elizabeth Van Lew, grew up there and was later shunned for her position against slavery and spying for the Union during the Civil War.
		She had ensured that all her family's slaves were freed before the Civil War, and later became the Post-Mistress of Richmond as thanks for the use of her inheritance and risk of her life to the Union cause.
		After Elizabeth Van Lew died the old mansion was eventually torn down, and the Bellevue School erected in its place.
	richmond.k12.va.us /schools/bellevue/history.htm (340 words)

	ELIZABETH VAN LEW SPIES, RAIDERS & PARTISANS
		After the war began, Van Lew used her reputation for odd behavior as a cover, enabling her to become the most effective Union spy in Richmond.
		Her humanitarian service to Yankee prisoners angered Richmond society, and Van Lew suffered what she described as "the threats, the scowls, the frowns of an infuriated community." Van Lew adopted more eccentric behavior, mumbling to herself as she walked down the street, wearing shabby clothes, and sporting matted hair.
		Van Lew had paid for the Northern education of one of her freed slaves, Mary Elizabeth Bowser, and managed to find employment for her on President Jefferson Davis's household staff.
	www.wtv-zone.com /civilwar/evanlew.html (353 words)

	Van Lew, Elizabeth L.
		Born on October 17, 1818, in Richmond, Virginia, Elizabeth Van Lew was the daughter of a prosperous family of Northern antecedents.
		After the fall of Richmond in April 1865 Van Lew was personally thanked and given protection by General Ulysses S. Grant.
		Van Lew then returned in poverty to Richmond, where she was still a social outcast because of her wartime activities.
	search.eb.com /women/articles/Van_Lew_Elizabeth_L.html (309 words)

	[No title]
		Elizabeth Van Lew, a tiny, birdlike creature with a sharp, peckish nose, bright blue eyes and hair done in ringlets, was a charitable soul; and her beneficence in Richmond took the form of frequent visits to Libby Prison with baskets of "goodies" for "her boys".
		During her girlhhod, Chief Justice John Marshall was a frequent visitor to the Van Lew home, and the famous Swedish soprano Jenny Lind, later sang in it's parlor.
		Several years before the war, Elizabeth had sent one of her freed slaves, a highly intelligent girl named Mary Elizabeth Bowser, north to be educated.
	mariah.stonemarche.org /livhis/women/vanlew.htm (1228 words)

	bellvue_redesign.gif
		Elizabeth Van Lew, grew up there and was later shunned for her position against slavery and spying for the Union during the Civil War.
		She had ensured that all her family’s slaves were freed before the Civil War, and later became the Post-Mistress of Richmond as thanks for the use of her inheritance and risk of her life to the Union cause.
		After Elizabeth Van Lew died the old mansion was eventually torn down, and the Bellevue School erected in its place.
	www.richmond.k12.va.us /schools/bellevue/about.htm (340 words)

Try your search on: Qwika (all wikis)