Tag Archives: Confederate States of America

Elizabeth Van Lew – A Union Spymaster in Richmond

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Southerner Elizabeth Van Lew Supported the Union

Elizabeth Van Lew

Elizabeth Van Lew

Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederacy, had a crafty Union spy operating within it to subvert its secessionist rebel efforts. The spy was a woman named Elizabeth Van Lew.

Van Lew’s parents were from the North and her father John came to Richmond with his wife Eliza to become a hardware merchant. Their daughter Elizabeth was born in Richmond in 1818. John Van Lew’s hardware business prospered and the family lived in the upscale Church Hill neighborhood of Richmond. The family attended the historic Saint John’s Episcopal Church and the Van Lews became part of Southern society. They owned many slaves, despite mother Eliza and daughter Elizabeth believing slavery was evil and wanting it to end.

When the Southern states began seceding from the Union after Abraham Lincoln’s election as president in November 1860, young Elizabeth thought secession was a bad policy. Van Lew supported the Union, the Republican Party, and the abolition of slavery. She thought the opposite of what most all Southerners thought. When the Civil War began, Elizabeth had the means and opportunity to move North and be with other family members. Instead, Elizabeth chose to stay in Richmond, the seat of the Confederacy. She had plans.

She Gave Aid and Help to Libby Union Prisoners of War

Richmond’s Libby Prison held Union officer prisoners of war under difficult and overcrowded conditions. The prisoners suffered from disease and malnutrition, and the prison had a high death rate. Elizabeth Van Lew visited the prison pretending to be a loyal Southern lady living up to her Christian faith and womanly concern for others. She provided help and aid to the suffering and needy Yankee prisoners. Elizabeth used her family’s wealth to bribe guards and officials to gain favors and assistance for the prisoners. What she sneakily did, with her philanthropist and caring cover of helping the prisoners by giving them food and medicine, was to also help them escape.

Van Lew gathered information from the prisoners and passed it over to Union forces. In March 1862, President Jefferson Davis clamped down on Richmond with an iron fist of martial law. Many people thought to be Union supporters in the Confederate capital were arrested. Elizabeth Van Lew could no longer visit Libby Prison and give aid to the prisoners. This did not stop her clandestine pro-Union efforts in Richmond. She changed her tactics.

Learn Civil War History Podcast: Elizabeth Van Lew – A Union Spymaster in Richmond

Listen and learn about Elizabeth Van Lew.

 

 

The Richmond Underground

With Van Lew’s leadership, the Richmond Underground was organized as a Union spy ring. The Richmond Underground was a secret spy network made-up of whites and African-Americans. It helped Union prisoners escape from imprisonment and helped pro-Union Southerners flee to the North. Van Lew and other workers of the Richmond Underground arranged for escapees to have shelter in safe houses and provided them with disguises. The Van Lew family home was used as a safe house. Some members of the Richmond Underground helped escapees by accompanying and guiding them to safety within Union lines.

Her Spy In the Confederate White House

Mary Elizabeth Bowser

Mary Elizabeth Bowser

When Elizabeth Van Lew passed away in 1900, it was rumored that she’d had an African-American servant planted and working as a spy in the Confederate White House during the Civil War. This proved to be true. Mary Jane Richards Denham was an African-American lady whom the wealthy Van Lews had sent North for her education, and then on to Liberia. The Van Lews had Mary Jane return to Richmond shortly before the Civil War began. On her return to the South, with help from the Van Lews, Denham devised an identity as Mary Elizabeth Bowser to avoid detection and capture by Confederate authorities.

Mary Jane Richards Denham/Mary Elizabeth Bowser became an active spy in the Confederate White House. Those in the Confederate White House assumed she was a slave and illiterate. Conversations were not hidden from her. Mary would listen attentively and read what papers she could to gather information. After the Civil War, using the name “Richmonia Richards,” she gave a speech that was written up in a newspaper article. In her speech, she told of going, “into President Davis’s house while he was absent, seeking for washing” and then finding her way to an office where she, “opened the drawers of a cabinet and scrutinized the papers.”

Federal Service and Military Recognition

Ben Butler

Ben Butler

Major General Benjamin F. Butler recruited Elizabeth Van Lew and other Southern Unionists into Federal service. Van Lew’s spy efforts reached their peak. The Van Lew family home in Richmond became the heart and center of the Richmond Underground spy network. Van Lew was known as a spymaster. Her group of spies used code words and invisible ink in messages hidden in their clothing and shoes. These messages contained valuable intelligence for Union officers. As General Grant fought against the trench lines stretching from Petersburg to Richmond, the Richmond Underground provided him with information. This information included important news about the Confederate movement of men and matériel going back and forth in the east and the Shenandoah Valley.

After the Civil War, George H. Sharpe, the chief of military intelligence for the Army of the Potomac, wrote about contributions that spymaster Elizabeth Van Lew made to the Union. Sharpe wrote, “for a long, long time, she represented all that was left of the power of the U. S. Government in the city of Richmond.”

 

The Confederate Helicopter – A Crazy Idea?

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The Confederate Helicopter – A Crazy Idea?

It Looked Good on Paper

General Winfield Scott’s Anaconda Plan of blockading Southern ports was successful by 1862. The Confederacy was having difficulty exporting cotton and importing weapons, putting a strain on its war effort. In Mobile, Alabama an ingenious architectural engineer named William C. Powers had a somewhat crazy idea that might stop the Union ships from blockading Mobile Bay and elsewhere.

Three-quarter view of William C. Powers’ model. National Air and Space Museum (NASM A-34342-A), Smithsonian Institution. https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/plans-little-known-confederate-helicopter

Powers wanted to bomb the Union ships in Mobile Bay to oblivion using a steam-powered helicopter. He began his helicopter plan using designs, drawings, and ideas from Leonardo da Vinci and Archimedes. His resulting drawing was of a machine we would consider today to resemble a crude helicopter-like craft.

Powers helicopter design had an engine in the middle, two smokestacks, and two vertical Archimedes’ screws meant to provide lift and get the craft airborne. Another two horizontal Archimedes’ screws, one on each side, would provide the thrust needed to propel the helicopter forward. A rudder for steering and control was at the back of the craft. Two models were made of the helicopter, a small model and a full-sized one.

 

 

 

lattice

Lattice design.

Powers deserves credit for his helicopter design ingenuity. His helicopter had some advanced technology built into it. For example, it had a lattice construction to provide strength while decreasing overall weight. The lattice construction was innovative and a sound idea. During WWII, the British used lattice construction when they built the Wellington bomber. Powers was cleverly ahead of his time.

Powers’ Confederate helicopter might have looked good on paper and in models, but it was never built. Providing money and resources for the helicopter was a problem for the Confederacy. The contraption also had serious design flaws. An expert at the Aeronautics Department of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington has examined Powers’ helicopter design. He has concluded that the steam engine was a major flaw.

Aeronautical expert Tom Poane of the museum claims that Civil War-times steam engines were impossible to construct light enough, small enough, and powerful enough, for Powers’ helicopter to fly. He also explains that the Archimedes’ screws would not provide enough lift and thrust needed for flight.

 

 

Archimedean Screw

Archimedes’ screws were used in Egypt before the third century BC to move water from a low place up to higher irrigation ditches. They worked well in that capacity, but Archimedes’ screws were not meant to move air. The Archimedes’ screws would probably have been too heavy for a Civil War steam engine’s relatively limited power. Plus, the helicopter would have to carry a heavy bomb or bombs. These bombs would have to be large enough to destroy a ship.

Perhaps Powers’ Confederate helicopter sounds crazy to us today, but the Civil War brought on many inventions and innovations which sounded crazy for the times. These inventions included the telegraph, photography, submarines, ambulances, ironclads, and hot air balloons. All of these successful inventions changed how the Civil War was fought and life after the Civil War.

We know the Confederate helicopter was a failure. It was a dream that never got off the ground. What if Powers’ crazy helicopter idea had actually worked? How would it have influenced the Civil War? We can only imagine and speculate.

Maybe those Yankee blockading ships in Mobile Bay and in other Southern ports would have been bombed to smithereens by a fleet of Confederate helicopters. Then the Confederacy could have shipped cotton out and weapons in. That would be a Civil War game-changer as the Confederacy became stronger. Perhaps the outcome of the Civil War would’ve been different.

Before we judge Powers as being as mad as a March hare, let’s consider two brothers from Ohio who later had a crazy idea about creating a flying machine. Their airplane invention and dreams came true at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina on December 17, 1903, when their plane flew for fifty-nine seconds. Some people thought Wilbur and Orville Wright were crazy.

Even Wilbur Wright had doubts about man ever flying in a heavier-than-air machine:

“I confess that in 1901 I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for fifty years. Two years later we ourselves made flights. This demonstration of my impotence as a prophet gave me such a shock that ever since I have distrusted myself and avoided all predictions.” …Wilbur Wright, 1908.