Richmond union spy network11/4/2022 “To remember Van Lew as Crazy Bet is misleading, counterproductive, and indeed unjust,” she wrote in her 2003 biography of Van Lew. Varon, however, has argued that no evidence exists for this account of Van Lew’s methods. Supposedly nicknamed “Crazy Bet,” she is said to have wandered Richmond in shabby clothes, muttering to herself or singing nonsense songs. According to many histories, she turned this to her advantage by exploiting people’s belief that her Unionism was merely a symptom of mental instability. Still, Van Lew’s politics always made her suspect in the Confederate capital. Messages also were hidden in the soles of shoes and the shells of eggs. Before developing her own cipher, she tore important messages into pieces and transported them by multiple couriers and through various relay stations, including a small family farm south of the city. Van Lew, codenamed “Babcock,” was always meticulous. Butler, she may have helped some of the 109 prisoners who tunneled out of Libby. In 1864, as the head of a Richmond spy network managed by Union general Benjamin F. In several cases, she passed information to inmates using a custard dish with a secret compartment. Van Lew never was able to gain entrance there, however, and instead bribed guards for various purposes, such as having prisoners transferred to hospitals where she might visit them. Prisoners were an important source of information, and Libby Prison, which housed hundreds of Union officers, often in desperate conditions, was located just six blocks from the Van Lew mansion. If their motivation was at first compassionate-they brought the men food and tended to their wounds-it soon turned tactical. During the summer of 1861, Van Lew and her mother visited captured Union soldiers being held in Richmond prisons. Rowley-banded together to form an underground network, which eventually targeted the Confederate prison system in particular. Instead, she immediately committed herself to finding ways to undermine Confederate war aims.Įarly in the war, Van Lew and other Richmond Unionists-including John Minor Botts, F. When Virginia seceded in the spring of 1861, Van Lew did not succumb to Confederate patriotism as so many other Southern Unionists did. After attending a Quaker school in Philadelphia, however, Elizabeth Van Lew began to develop antislavery views, and following the death of her father, her mother freed some of the family’s slaves. Despite their Northern roots, the Van Lews owned slaves, lived in a mansion on Church Hill, and belonged to Richmond society. Van Lew was born on October 15, 1818, in Richmond, to John Van Lew of Long Island, New York, and Eliza Baker of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
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