The Spymistress (48 page)

Shaking off her mournful reverie, Lizzie sighed, rose from the table, and bade her nieces and mother good-bye. She had lingered over breakfast too long, and she would have to walk briskly if she did not want to be late for work.

As she made her way down Church Hill toward Capitol Square, her thoughts returned to the aftermath of the war—her brother John’s return home from exile in April, Jefferson Davis’s capture near Irwinville, Georgia, in May. Later that summer, when General Grant had toured Richmond for the first time since the end of the war, she had been honored when the general and his wife called on her at home. “My husband was most eager to meet you, as was I,” Mrs. Grant had confided over tea in the parlor. “He insists that you provided him and his generals with the most valuable intelligence ever to come out of Richmond during the war.”

Flattered, Lizzie had thanked her for her kind words, to which General Grant had added his own. “You rendered valuable service to the Union, and to me, at no small risk to yourself,” he had told her somberly. “I will never forget that. You will always find a friend in me.”

Deeply moved, Lizzie had thanked him and said it had been her great honor and duty, and as a loyal Union woman, she could not have done otherwise.

Soon after that visit, life had become increasingly difficult for Unionists in Richmond. Although many former members of Lizzie’s intelligence network had been appointed to important federal, state, and municipal offices, resentment against loyalists flourished in the corners and shadows of the city. Indeed, throughout the South, Confederate defiance had soared as Mr. Lincoln’s successor, President Andrew Johnson, had demonstrated leniency toward former rebels, indifference for Southern Unionists, and absolute contempt for freedmen. In Richmond, harsh Black Codes were enacted, requiring people of color to carry passes or be arrested for vagrancy, despite protests that such laws hearkened back to slavery. In October, conservatives had swept local elections and had immediately passed several compulsory labor laws giving white former slaveowners control over colored workers. Lizzie had joined Mr. Botts, Mr. Palmer, and other like-minded allies in denouncing the measures and condemning the persecution of Richmond’s loyalists. Although she could not vote, Lizzie could make her opinions known, and she had joined in a vigorous letter-writing campaign to demand federal intervention.

Eventually Lizzie and her allies were heard. Their persistent complaints had shifted the mood in the United States Congress by casting doubt upon President Johnson’s claim that the former Confederate states could be trusted to manage their affairs justly without federal involvement. In April and July of 1866, over Mr. Johnson’s vetoes, the Congress had passed the Civil Rights Bill and the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill, extending the protection of the law and the courts to former slaves.

It had been a remarkable triumph, but it had not improved daily life in Richmond for Lizzie and her compatriots, as their neighbors’ unwavering hostility took its toll upon their peace of mind and their livelihoods. John’s hardware store faltered, and since Lizzie and her mother had severely depleted their fortunes during the war, Lizzie searched with increasing desperation for some other means of support for her family.

The months of struggle stretched into years, but just as she reached the limits of her resources and endurance, Lizzie learned that General Grant had not forgotten her, and that he indeed was her friend.

Remembering his faithful generosity, Lizzie paused outside the old Custom House, the stately edifice facing Main Street between Tenth and Eleventh. It was thanks to Mr. Grant’s patronage that she had come there that day, and almost every day for the past six years. She marveled to think that ten years before, in the midst of war, Mr. Davis had kept his presidential offices on the third floor of the historic building—and now, in peacetime, Lizzie kept her offices on the first.

She entered the post office to find the morning shift of employees already busily engaged in their tasks. “Good morning, Postmaster,” one of her newest clerks greeted her.

“Good morning, George,” she replied, and smiling all around, added, “Good morning, everyone. Beautiful day, isn’t it?” Without interrupting their work, they returned her smile and agreed that it was, indeed, a lovely spring day in Richmond.

After the war, Lizzie had needed employment, and like many other loyalists and veterans, she had petitioned the federal government to help her obtain a position in acknowledgment of the sacrifices she had made on behalf of the Union. Only a trickle of reimbursement for her expenses had followed, and the Van Lews’ circumstances had become alarmingly straitened leading up to the presidential elections of 1868. Lizzie was elated when Ulysses S. Grant won the presidency, her only regret being that she had not been permitted to vote for him.

She soon had more reason to rejoice: Fifteen days after his inauguration, President Grant appointed Miss Elizabeth Van Lew the new postmaster of Richmond.

A postmastership was without question one of the most coveted appointments in the federal government. Not only did it provide an excellent salary, but it also bestowed considerable political clout upon the fortunate appointee. Postmasters hired clerks and carriers, controlled the distribution of political information, and possessed the same franking privileges congressmen enjoyed—and therefore could dispense patronage generously to one’s own benefit.

And when it came to her, Lizzie had dispensed it—firmly, often, and unapologetically—to right grievous wrongs in her beloved city.

She had begun by hiring loyalists and men of color as carriers and clerks, and women too as clerks. She counted her dear friend Eliza Carrington and her former butler William Roane as two of her most productive employees, and her brother John had worked at the post office until he and Augusta, whom he had married after his troubled wife Mary passed away, had moved to a pretty farm in Louisa Court House. Compelled by her usual tireless determination, Lizzie had expanded and modernized the Richmond post office—implementing citywide letter deliveries, enlarging the facilities for money orders and registered letters, and installing convenient public mailboxes on the city’s main thoroughfares. In 1871, she published a post office manual that soon became known as the best and most comprehensive in print. In the first two years of her tenure alone, she had increased the number of letters delivered in the city from about fourteen thousand to eighty-three thousand each month.

She was enormously proud of her accomplishments, not only because a more efficient, productive postal service benefited the entire community, but also because her hiring practices had shattered traditional restrictions of race and sex. Throughout her tenure, she had been an excellent postmaster, and she was proud to know that no one could honestly claim that a man would have done better.

Along the way, and not surprisingly, she had made enemies among those who coveted her power and position. They tried to discredit her, and they argued that as a woman and a radical she could not be trusted with such authority, but although they obliged Lizzie to spend far too much time and energy defending herself, they did not triumph. When President Grant won a second term in office, he extended her term as well.

President Grant was her most powerful friend, but she found support in other quarters too. Even as many white citizens of Richmond shunned or openly despised her, the people of the North who knew of her wartime activities became her champions, rallying to her cause when her political enemies in the South tried to tear her down, and soliciting funds for her support when her financial circumstances were at their most desperate. She also found strength and consolation in knowing that the colored community regarded her as a champion for equal rights, and she was proud that they considered her a friend in need, which she vowed she would be until the end of her days.

For while the war to abolish slavery had ended ten years before, the struggle for freedom and equality continued. Although the triumph of the Union had wrought wonderful deliverance for a people held in bondage, Lizzie realized that the nation would know no lasting peace until it truly did enjoy a new birth of freedom, and became at last a government of
all
the people, by
all
the people, and for
all
the people—men and women, black and white, all of them as equal before the law as they were in the sight of God.

To see that dream fulfilled, in the words of the martyred president she had helped to save the Union, she would gladly give the last full measure of her devotion.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The Spymistress
is a work of fiction inspired by history. Some events and people from Elizabeth Van Lew’s wartime years, though noted in the historical record, have been omitted from this book for the sake of the narrative. While many characters appearing in this novel are based upon historical figures, in some cases two or more individuals have been combined to form a single composite character.

Readers familiar with Elizabeth Van Lew may wonder why I do not refer to her as “Crazy Bet,” as the vast majority of authors who have written about her have done, or why I have not portrayed her feigning mental impairment to divert suspicion. I made this choice because nothing in the historical record during the Civil War and its aftermath supports this characterization—not her wartime “occasional journal,” nor the memoirs of the Union soldiers she assisted, nor even the writings of her numerous critics. The concept that Elizabeth Van Lew succeeded in her espionage work because of her ability to disarm her enemies by acting daft first appeared in a
Harper’s Monthly Magazine
article published in 1911, written eleven years after her death by someone who had never met her. The author was heavily influenced by a man who had met Elizabeth Van Lew after Reconstruction, when she was in her late sixties and age, poverty, political troubles, personal heartbreak, and isolation had taken their toll. For an excellent analysis of this matter, please see “The Myth of ‘Crazy Bet’” in Elizabeth R. Varon’s book
Southern Lady, Yankee Spy: The True Story of Elizabeth Van Lew, a Union Agent in the Heart of the Confederacy
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

In the years that followed the final scene of
The Spymistress
, Elizabeth Van Lew successfully fought off local attempts to replace her and continued as postmaster of Richmond throughout President Grant’s administration. In 1877, Grant’s successor, Rutherford B. Hayes, bowed to pressure from conservative Republicans and Democrats and appointed a man considered more politically moderate in her place, making Van Lew one of the hundreds of progressive Southern Republicans who lost their appointments during Hayes’s first five months in office. A writer for the Richmond
Whig
could barely contain his glee when he reported that the news of “the downfall of the masculine VAN LEW [had] spread like wild-fire from one end of the city to the other” and had put the citizens in an “unusual good humor,” but even the
Whig
soon conceded that “Miss Van Lew accepts her removal with quiet and becoming dignity.”

For years thereafter, Van Lew petitioned the government to reinstate her, but although she was eventually given a clerkship in Washington, DC, when the working conditions proved demoralizing, she resigned and returned to Richmond. Though she never again held the influence she had possessed as postmaster, she continued to work diligently on behalf of progressive Republican causes, women’s suffrage, and civil rights for African-Americans, driving a wedge ever more deeply between herself and most of Richmond society.

In the early morning hours of September 25, 1900, Elizabeth Van Lew died at home in the Church Hill mansion, impoverished and ostracized at the age of eighty-one. She was laid to rest in Richmond’s Shockoe Cemetery near the graves of her mother and father, her casket interred vertically rather than horizontally because the family plot lacked sufficient room.

Determined that Van Lew’s grave would be marked by a memorial worthy of her courage, loyalty, and wartime contributions to the Union, her longtime admirers in Boston arranged for a boulder from the grounds of the Massachusetts State House to be shipped to Richmond to serve as her headstone. Upon it, a bronze tablet is inscribed:

E
LIZABETH
L. V
AN
L
EW

1818–1900

S
HE RISKED EVERYTHING THAT IS DEAR TO MAN—FRIENDS—FORTUNE—COMFORT—HEALTH—LIFE ITSELF—ALL FOR THE ONE ABSORBING DESIRE OF HER HEART—THAT SLAVERY MIGHT BE ABOLISHED AND THE UNION PRESERVED. THIS BOULDER FROM THE CAPITOL HILL IN BOSTON IS A TRIBUTE FROM MASSACHUSETTS FRIENDS

In 1993, in recognition of her daring espionage work on behalf of the United States, Elizabeth Van Lew was inducted into the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame, established by the Military Intelligence Corps of the United States Army to honor soldiers and civilians who made exceptional contributions to the profession of military intelligence.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I offer my sincere thanks to Denise Roy, Maria Massie, Liza Cassity, Christine Ball, Brian Tart, Kate Napolitano, and the outstanding sales teams at Dutton and Plume for their support of my work and their contributions to
The Spymistress
.

I am very grateful for the people who generously assisted me during the research and writing of this novel. Geraldine Neidenbach, Marty Chiaverini, and Brian Grover were my first readers, and their comments and questions were, as always, insightful and helpful. I appreciate the support and encouragement of Heather Neidenbach, Nic Neidenbach, and Marlene and Len Chiaverini. Christina Hillgrove of the Museum of the Confederacy and Doug Crenshaw of the American Civil War Center at Historic Tredegar provided me with tours and graciously responded to my many questions, and Mike D. Gorman’s outstanding website on Civil War Richmond proved invaluable throughout. Many thanks to you all.