The year is 1864, Elizabeth Van Lew sits in her 3 story southern mansion in the prestigious Church Hill neighborhood of Richmond, Virginia. She glances out the window in the direction of the Confederate White House just blocks away and taps her fingers nervously upon the table. Just then, a door clicks open and a woman slips in, her dark skin shimmering with beads of sweat. She’s had to exercise restraint to keep from running the the one mile distance between the White House and the Van Lews. She joins Elizabeth at the table by the window. “What news, Mary?” Elizabeth asks, breathless. The hint of a smile emerges at the corners of Mary Richard’s mouth, she can’t help herself. “You’ll want to write this down,” she says to Elizabeth. Two women, one White and one Black, sitting at a table in the parlor of a lavishly decorated manor house. They wear floor length gowns, their hair pulled back as is expected of any proper lady. They speak in quiet, subdued voices and always mind their manors, moving gracefully about life. As the Civil War rages outside these walls, uniformed men stride importantly into rooms, and fight each other to the death on the battlefield. In contrast, the two women sitting at this table seem far from threatening. But did you know, these women, Elizabeth Van Lew and Mary Richards are working together, undercover, to help bring down the Confederacy from the inside? Let’s fix that. 

 

Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I discuss lesser known true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. The story I have for you this week reads like the greatest of historical dramas. I honestly can’t believe it isn’t a movie already. Someone needs to make a movie about this or, I mean, are movies even still a thing? Perhaps a mini series. I’m calling this episode, Mary Richards, and I’m choosing to focus on her because it’s Black History Month but honestly it’s equally about Elizabeth Van Lew because together these women did truly remarkable things. 

 

I have to preface this by saying, as I so often do, that there is a lot of misinformation out there regarding this story. History has gotten it wrong so many times and a lot of those mistakes are still circulating. That being said, I have tried my absolute best to separate the fact from the fiction here. It was incredibly difficult with Mary Richards, though. For one, she was a woman. Two, she was a black woman. And three she was a spy. Accurate history was rarely recorded about women or Black people, and it certainly wasn’t recorded about spies. So uncovering the truth about Mary Richards means sifting through plenty of red herrings and sensationalized half-truths, some of which she planted herself. 

 

Even her name is difficult to pin down. If you look into this story, you will see the name Mary Bowser or even Mary Elizabeth Bowser over and over again. Mary Richards, I’m just going to call her Mary, Mary was married to a man named Wilson Bowser for a brief time and perhaps she did take his last name, Bowser, for like a hot minute, but she barely used it and I don’t think it was the name she wanted to be remembered by. It wasn’t really who she was. That name came from a 1910 article for Harper’s Magazine by William Beymer. He had received some erroneous information from a niece of Elizabeth Van Lew who identified Mary as Mary Elizabeth Bowser. And even though this niece admitted she was a young child during the Civil War and didn’t remember much, Beymer ran everything she said as absolute truth and it stuck. But I can’t really blame any of them for messing her name up. Mary used many different versions of her name and aliases during her lifetime - Mary Jane Richards, Mary Elizabeth Bowser, Mary Jane Bowser, Mary Jane Henley, Mary Jane Henry, Mary Jones, Mary J. R. Richards, Mary. J. Garvin, Mrs. John T. Denman, M. J. Denman, Richmonia Richards, and Richmonia R. St. Pierre, to name a few. 

 

She also sowed a lot of conflicting information about her life. At one point she stated that her mother was enslaved by the Van Lews and her father was a mix of Cuban-Spanish and Black. Another time she claimed her mother was white and her father Black and on a third occasion she said that she never knew who her parents were. So really she made her own history that much harder to figure out but, you have to remember, Mary was a spy. I would expect no less from a spy. According to Encyclopedia Virginia quote “Originally known as Mary Richards, she used at least two different married names and several pseudonyms throughout her life. She also made contradictory claims about herself, frequently embellishing, altering, or omitting biographical details to appeal to particular audiences. Her biography exemplifies the challenges historians continue to face in uncovering the experiences of individuals whose race, class, and gender limited the way their lives were documented.” end quote. And that’s, yeah that’s definitely part of the challenge - an enslaved black woman in the 1860s is not going to be well documented. But also, she was a spy. Let’s not forget that. 

 

So what do we know about Mary Richards? Her exact birthdate and birthplace are not known but a ship manifest from 1855 lists her age as 14. So working backwards from that, if that was correct, she was most likely born in 1841 probably in Richmond, Virginia. According to Encyclopedia Virginia, she may have been born enslaved by some of the Van Lew family’s extended relatives because they had some cousins with the last name Richards and quite often people who were enslaved by a family would take the family’s last name. So that is speculation that may explain why Mary’s last name was Richards and also how she ended up with the Van Lews. 

 

So let’s talk about the Van Lews. John and Eliza Van Lew were upper-class, white folk living in Richmond. Although they were both from the north originally, which I think is significant. Eliza was from Philadelphia and John was from New York City. Now John Van Lew was a prominent businessman in the hardware industry and also enslaved people because that was just sort of what you did as a rich white man in Virginia. John and Eliza had three children, the oldest was Elizabeth who was born in 1818. Elizabeth had been educated in the north where there was much more anti-slavery sentiment. In a Smithsonian Magazine article about Elizabeth Van Lew, Cate Lineberry writes quote “Educated in the North, Van Lew took pride in her Richmond roots, but she fervently opposed slavery and secession, writing her thoughts in a secret diary she kept buried in her backyard and whose existence she would reveal only on her deathbed.” end quote. Which, um, a secret backyard diary, yes please. So Elizabeth was anti-slavery she was a covert abolitionist and Union supporter situated within a prominent, slave owning family in the capital of the Confederacy. However, according to historian Elizabeth Varon who wrote a book about Elizabeth called Southern Lady, Yankee Spy, she quote “always pretended to be a loyal Confederate.” 

 

So Elizabeth was born in 1818, that makes her 28 years old when Mary comes on the scene. The first official document that mentions Mary Richards is from Saint John’s Church in Richmond which is the church that the Van Lew family attended. There is a baptism record dated May 17, 1846 reading quote “Mary Jane, a colored child belonging to Mrs. Van Lew.” And if her age on that ship's log I mentioned earlier was correct, we can presume that Mary was around 5 years old when she was baptized at Saint John’s Church, but according to Encyclopedia Virginia, this is incredibly rare. Quote “ It was extremely unusual for the wealthy and socially prominent white members of this congregation to have enslaved people baptized or married in their church. Other people enslaved by the Van Lew family were baptized at Richmond’s First African Baptist Church, indicating that the widowed Mrs. Van Lew, like her daughter Elizabeth, singled out Mary for special treatment.” end quote. 

 

John Van Lew died in 1843, three years before Mary was baptized leaving Eliza, who is referred to as “Mrs. Van Lew” a widow. And something tells me that baptism would not have taken place at Saint John’s Church if John Van Lew were still alive. I get the feeling Eliza, like her daughter Elizabeth, was not a fan of slavery. Several of my sources suggest that Eliza and Elizabeth wished to free the enslaved people of their household after John’s death but quote “both Virginia law and stipulations in John Van Lew’s will made it difficult for the Van Lew family to free any of their enslaved people.” end quote. Which, I don’t know man, that seems crazy to be like forced to continue enslaving people. But I think they sort of did free them in practice, it just wasn’t like legit, legal because of all this red tape or whatever. 

 

But that did not stop Eliza and Elizabeth from giving Mary Richards special treatment. And I really wish we knew more about who Mary’s parents were or how she came to live with the Van Lews. I feel like it would shed some light. Why is Eliza having her baptized in the white church when all of the other enslaved people of their household go to the Black church? Why did Mary once say that her mother was white? That doesn’t make any sense. Enslavement by birth was based on the race of the mother. If your mother was an enslaved Black woman, you were born enslaved, even if your father was white. The reverse was not necessarily true. It was all about the race of the mother. So it doesn’t make sense for Mary’s mother to have been white but for her to be born enslaved. Then again, she changed that story up later so who knows but physical descriptions of her suggest that she was mixed race, half white and half Black. I have this crazy speculative theory, and there is nothing to substantiate this. This is pure speculation. I’m just trying to make it make sense. What if, you guys, what if Mary was actually Elizabeth’s daughter? Elizabeth was 23 when Mary was born. There were enslaved Black men in her household. What if she kindled a relationship with one of them? What if it was this big scandal that got covered up? Or maybe something similar happened with one of these Richards cousins. I don’t know but I feel like Mary was of some blood relation to the Van Lews and that is why Eliza and Elizabeth gave her special treatment. 

 

Because it wasn’t just the baptism. A few years later, Elizabeth took Mary to the north - either New Jersey or possibly Philadelphia to get an education. Mary was supposedly incredibly intelligent. She was said to have a photographic memory. So, okay, maybe Elizabeth just saw potential in her and was like “hey this girl can do a whole lot more than scrubbing floors, let’s send her to school.” That just doesn’t check out. Mary clearly meant something to Elizabeth. 

 

When she was 14, Elizabeth arranged for Mary to go to Monrovia, Liberia, in Africa. This is where that ship manifest from 1855 comes in listing her age as 14. According to Encyclopedia Virginia quote “Virginia law in this period forbade any Black people who left Virginia seeking an education from returning.” end quote. So she can’t legally go back to Virginia right now. Why Liberia? Well that’s a whole can of worms but basically Liberia was founded in the early 1800s as a place to essentially get rid of free Black people from the United States. More and more African Americans were obtaining their freedom, and some perceived this growing population as a problem. So they were like “I know, we’ll just send them back to Africa. It’s perfect.” It wasn’t, but that’s what they did. Liberia declared its independence in 1847 so by the time Mary sailed there in 1855 it was its own sovereign state. 

 

Mary sailed with a group of 55 black emigrants and missionaries from the American Colonization Society. I feel like Elizabeth just wanted to get her out of the US. Maybe she thought Mary would have a better life in Liberia, I don’t know. But Mary was not into it. She stayed for 5 years, writing letters back to the Van Lews about how difficult life there was. She was apparently so miserable in Liberia that Eliza paid for her return passage to the US and she arrived in Baltimore, Maryland in 1860 before making her way back down to Richmond. 

 

As I mentioned before, Virginia forbade Black people who left the state to seek an education from returning. So Mary is not exactly welcomed back with open arms. An August 21, 1860 article in the Richmond Whig reported quote “Mary Jones, alias Mary Jane Henley a likely mulatto girl, about twenty years of age, arrested for being without free papers, was committed for nine days. She was sent to the North about nine years ago, by a highly respectable lady of this city, for the purpose of receiving a thorough education, after completing which she went to Liberia… The laws of Virginia positively prohibit the return to this State of any free negro who has lived in a free State,” end quote. 

 

There was a second article in the Whig 9 days later when Mary was released from jail describing Mary as a quote “dark mulatto girl, who gave her name as Mary Jane Henry, but whose real name is Mary J. Richards.” The article also mentions that Mrs. Van Lew (so that’s Eliza) had been summoned for quote “permitting her slave to go at large.” It also reiterated the fact that Mary was highly educated and states that she worked as a teacher while in Liberia. So, to be clear here, Mary is not technically free. She is still enslaved by the Van Lew family even though Eliza and Elizabeth are basically treating her like a free person of color. But, legally, she is not actually free. 

 

Despite all of that legal trouble upon her return, Mary is able to stay in Richmond and remains with the Van Lews. She is their property in the eyes of the state of Virginia, after all. There is another record from Saint John’s Church concerning Mary from April 16, 1861. She marries a man named Wilson Bowser who was also part of the Van Lew household. The record describes them as quote “colored servants to Mrs. E. L. Van Lew.” April 16, 1861, that date is significant because the very next day, on April 17th, Virginia officially seceded from the Union, joining the Confederacy. So Mary marries this Bowser guy right at the start of the Civil War. But according to the American Battlefield Trust, there is no evidence that Mary ever used the last name Bowser. And apparently their marriage did not last long.  

 

So the country is torn in two and the war is on. 11 states have broken away from the other 25 states that remained part of the United States. Those 11 states - Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia - form the Confederate States of America and elect Jefferson Davis as their president. The Confederacy set up its capital in Richmond, Virginia, which is kind of insane considering the US capital, Washington DC is only around 100 miles away. A good horse can cover that distance in a single day, so not much of a buffer there. 

 

The Van Lew house was just a mile away from the Confederate White House and Elizabeth, we know, is already anti-slavery and was against secession. This makes her a Union supporter in the heart of the Confederate capital. She is poised and ready to take action and her prominent social status as a member of the white Richmond elite is the perfect cover. For some context real quick, at this point, 1861, Elizabeth is 43 years old and Mary is 20. 

 

After the Confederacy won the Battle of Manassas In July of 1861, they had a bunch of Union soldiers as prisoners with nowhere to put them. Manassas, Virginia is less than 40 miles from Washington, DC. It’s a hop, skip, and a jump from the Union capital so it makes sense that they would have clashed there. It is surprising to me that the Confederacy won the battle though. They were a major underdog in this war. They were extremely outnumbered with 18.5 million people living in the Union and only 5.5 million free people living in the Confederacy. Plus another 3.5 million enslaved people but if you listened to last week’s episode about Buffalo soldiers then you know the Confederacy did not allow Black men to fight in the war. Whereas the Union welcomed fugitives from the south who took advantage of the chaos of war to slip away to Union lines. 200,000 Black soldiers fought for the Union army. So the south was mega outnumbered plus most of the weapons were made in the north, that’s where all the industry was. That’s where the metal foundries were, that’s where they made the guns and cannons. The south had cotton and tobacco. You can’t win a war with cotton and tobacco. They couldn’t even sell it once the north set up its blockades. But they had confidence. My God they had confidence. They thought they were going to win this war handily and in short order. They hopped on their horses and rode off to war like “BRB, let me go take care of this real quick.” Talk about illusions of grandeur. But I think it helped them at first. Confidence is a big deal. It’s half the battle. But men and guns are the other half, so. Anyway, they won the Battle of Manassas and a lot of the earlier battles. 

 

After Manassas, they have all these Union prisoners pouring into Richmond with nowhere to put them. They started putting them in tobacco warehouses cause that’s what they had - tobacco warehouses. One of these warehouse prisons came to be called Libby Prison and it was like 5 blocks from the Van Lew house. Libby Prison was known for its especially harsh conditions. It was not a great place to be. Elizabeth saw this as an opportunity to help the Union. She attempted to volunteer as a nurse at Libby Prison but was initially denied by the prison overseer Lt. David H. Todd who was actually a half brother of Mary Todd Lincoln, the wife of the US president Abraham Lincoln AKA commander in chief of the whole Union military which is just, wow, that they’re on completely opposite sides. I found that interesting. 

 

But Elizabeth did not take no for an answer. According to Lineberry in that Smithsonian Magazine article quote “Van Lew went over his head and used flattery and persistence to persuade Gen. John H. Winder to allow her and her mother to bring food, books and medicine to prisoners. Van Lew and her mother were vehemently criticized for their efforts. The Richmond Enquirer wrote, “Two ladies, a mother and a daughter, living on Church Hill, have lately attracted public notice by their assiduous attentions to the Yankee prisoners…. these two women have been expending their opulent means in aiding and giving comfort to the miscreants who have invaded our sacred soil.” end quote 

 

Elizabeth wrote in her diary during that time, quote “I have had brave men shake their fingers in my face and say terrible things… We had threats of being driven away, threats of fire, and threats of death.” end quote. And The Richmond Dispatch wrote that the Van Lews would be quote “exposed and dealt with as alien enemies of the country.” end quote. So it was not without opposition that Eliza and Elizabeth Van Lew aided the Union prisoners in Libby Prison. Elizabeth soon took it a step further, passing messages to prisoners using a custard dish with a secret compartment and messages hidden in books. She used her financial means, bribing guards to give prisoners extra food and clothing and to transfer them to hospitals when their health was in jeopardy. Once there, she had access to them and helped them plan escapes, even temporarily hiding them in her home. 

 

So how was she able to do all of this just in plain sight? According to Elizabeth Leonard, author of the book All the Daring of the Soldier: Women of the Civil War Armies quote “One of the things that made women so effective as spies during this time period was that few people expected them either to engage in such ‘unladylike’ activity, or to have the mental capacity and physical endurance to make them successful,” end quote. Sometimes it pays to be underrated. Elizabeth was also a talented actress. She put on an act that she was, gosh I hate to use the term, but “feebleminded,” like she wasn’t all there mentally. This actually earned her the nickname “Crazy Bet,” but it also made people less concerned about what she was doing at Libby Prison. It made her less of a threat. 

 

So for the first couple of years, that was the extent of her intervention in the war - helping Union prisoners at Libby Prison. In 1863, two Union soldiers who had escaped from Libby Prison with Elizabeth’s help told Union General Benjamin Butler about her. Butler sends a man to Richmond to recruit Elizabeth as a legit Union spy which she agrees to. And, remember we have her diary, a lot of this was recorded in her diary so I feel pretty good about the accuracy of the Elizabeth details. It’s the Mary details that get a bit eh, sketchy. According to Lineberry, Elizabeth becomes head of Butler’s spy network in Richmond and the main source of information about what was happening in the Confederate capital. Elizabeth gains access to this intel by assembling a group of mostly Black men and women who acted as spies, secretly gathering information and relaying it to Elizabeth who then passed it on to Butler. She supposedly used a sort of invisible ink, writing in code in a colorless liquid that turned black, revealing the writing, when milk was applied. That’s like some Harriet the Spy stuff I don’t know how accurate that is but it’s in like all the sources. Maybe it was in the diary, I don’t know. 

 

One of the most valuable members of this spy team was Mary Richards. And we have documentation of this. Elizabeth wrote in her diary on May 14, 1864 quote “When I open my eyes in the morning, I say to the servant, ‘What news, Mary?’ and my caterer never fails! Most generally our reliable news is gathered from negroes, and they certainly show wisdom, discretion and prudence which is wonderful.” end quote. An article in the Richmond and Manchester Evening Leader newspaper dated July 27, 1900 recounts Elizabeth’s life just before she died. It reports a quote “‘maid of more than usual intelligence’ whom Van Lew had educated in Philadelphia and sent to Liberia—and who was then placed as a servant to Jefferson Davis’ family in the Confederate White House during the war.” end quote. And then we have Elizabeth’s niece somewhat incorrectly identifying Mary Elizabeth Bowser as that spy in the 1910 Harper's article. So all of this points to Mary Richards as the spy planted in the Confederate White House just down the street. But a handful of sources say this is not true, that Mary never worked for the Davis family but they don’t exactly say what disproves it. So I don’t know. They don’t argue the fact that Mary passed Confederate secrets on to Elizabeth though, just that she wasn’t in the White House.

 

But if it is true, if Mary was planted in the Confederate White House, playing the role of ignorant slave to the Davis’ family, this is really brilliant. Because Mary is highly educated, she can read and write, she was said to have a photographic memory. She’s overhearing sensitive conversations, she’s seeing confidential documents, letters laid out on desks as she’s dusting and whatnot. And they have no idea. They don’t know she can read. She’s not supposed to be able to read. In their minds, she’s enslaved. Enslaved people can’t read. Mary relays this information to Elizabeth who passes it on to Union forces. In January of 1864, they informed General Butler that the Confederacy was planning to transfer prisoners from Richmond’s overcrowded prisons to Andersonville Prison in Georgia. Based on this information, the Union attempts to intercede this transfer but the Confederacy had been tipped off and it’s unsuccessful. But through a team of around 12 operatives and 5 dispatch stations, they were able to pass a lot of useful information to the Union. So much so that Union General Ulysses S. Grant supposedly told Elizabeth after the war quote “You have sent me the most valuable information received from Richmond during the war.” end quote. 

 

After the war, Elizabeth had pretty much exhausted all of her family fortune operating this spy ring. She was given some money by the US government for her efforts but it wasn’t enough. On top of that, her social standing in Richmond was completely destroyed. She wrote in her diary quote “[I am] held in contempt & scorn by the narrow minded men and women of my city for my loyalty … Socially living as utterly alone in the city of my birth, as if I spoke a different language... I do not know how they can call me a spy serving my own country within its recognized borders… [for] my loyalty am I now to be branded as a spy—by my own country, for which I was willing to lay down my life? Is that honorable or honest? God knows.” end quote. So despite her devotion to her country, her real country, she’s practically destitute after the war. When she was in her 70s and barely holding on, she reached out to Paul Revere, not the one you’re thinking of, actually that guy’s grandson by the same name. He was one of the Union officers she had helped during the war and he regularly gave her money, along with some wealthy Boston families she had also helped, sustaining her until she died, an outcast, in 1900. 

 

But what of Mary? Well she was officially, legally free after the Civil War ended in 1865. She’s around 24 years old now and no longer seems to be married to Wilson Bowser. According to Freedmen’s Bureau records, she begins working as a teacher to formerly enslaved people in Richmond. In September of 1865, she goes north and gives a series of speeches about her involvement in the war but she uses different alias to do this, probably just to protect herself. She spoke at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Manhattan on September 11, 1865 using the name Richmonia Richards. Then she spoke again a week or two later at the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Brooklyn, using the name Richmonia R. St. Pierre. And she probably gave more lectures as well but she seemed to use a different name each time so, who knows. 

 

After teaching in Richmond and traveling north to give lectures, she taught in Florida and then established a freedmen’s school in Saint Mary’s, Georgia. While there, Mary met Harriet Beecher Stowe, an abolitionist who wrote the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin about the harsh treatment of enslaved African Americans. We know this because Harriet wrote about her meeting with Mary in her journal. While she’s running the freedmen’s school in Georgia, Mary writes a series of letters to Gilbert Eberhart who was the superintendent of education for the Georgia Freedmen's Bureau. These letters are basically an SOS. She describes the challenges she faces as the only teacher to 70 day students, a dozen night students, and 100 Sunday school students. Which, holy moly, yeah. The most I had at one time was 33 fourth graders and it almost broke me. She also complains that they have few books or supplies and that she isn’t being paid the salary she was promised for the job. Because of course there was no actual funding for Black schools. They relied on inconsistent donations from the north. It’s also a dangerous job. Mary writes in these letters quote “I wish there was some law here, or some protection,” she describes the white Georgians as having a quote “sinister expression about the eye, and the quiet but bitterly expressed feeling that I know portends evil … with a little whiskey in them, they dare do anything.” end quote. She also writes about secret societies of hostile white people, foreseeing the violence of the Ku Klux Klan that would soon come. 

 

In a letter dated June 1, 1867, she tells Eberhart that she had remarried and asks him to address her as Mary J. R. Garvin. She also says that her new husband, this Garvin fellow, is going to the West Indies and that she plans to join him there. She asks him for the last 5 months salary that she is owed and then closes the school, which, I mean can you blame her? But there is no evidence that she actually went to the West Indies and she obviously didn’t stay married to this Garvin guy for long. The following year she is back in Georgia and using the name Mrs. John T. Denman to request a transfer to a school closer to Atlanta where this new Denman husband is supposedly stationed. And there was a man named John T. Denman stationed in Atlanta in 1868 but no marriage certificate has been found. And that’s probably because Denman was white and interracial marriage was not legal. So it’s likely a common law type marriage. 

 

The last evidence of the existence of Mary Richards is a letter from 1870 that she wrote to Elizabeth Van Lew. She signs the letter M. J. Denman but the handwriting matches samples we have of Mary Richards handwriting. In this letter, Mary thanks Elizabeth for money she has sent but asks her not to send more. She says she is working as a seamstress and teacher in New York City. And that’s it. That’s the last known record of Mary Richards. She would have been 29 years old when that letter was written in 1870. 

 

Two of my sources mention that Mary may have kept a diary. One said it was left with the Bowser family who had accidentally thrown it out at some point. Another said it was left with the Bowser family and that descendants still had it but were unwilling to share it. I don’t know. I don’t think they have it. Why would the Bowser’s have Mary’s journal? She was only briefly married to Wilson Bowser and, from my research, there’s nothing to suggest they had any children together. She wasn’t even with him anymore by the time all the spy stuff went down so how would his family have ended up with her diary? But who knows, maybe they still had some form of a relationship? I won’t hold my breath waiting for Mary’s diary, though, she muddled her own story so much anyway, changing details and twisting facts to suit whatever audience she spoke to. Her own account is wholly unreliable as one would expect from any halfway decent spy. 

 

What do I even say about this one? The risks these women took, the sacrifices they made, just to end up the way they did. Elizabeth gave it all up, her money, her reputation, her prestige in the community. She willingly gave it all away to do what she thought was right. She died alone and penniless in a dusty old broken down southern mansion that had once been the site of antebellum social gatherings and soirees, relying on the charity of strangers for survival. She saved lives, bringing food and medicine to the prisoners in Libby Prison, arranging for transfers to hospitals, breaking them out and helping return them to their families. She helped the Union win the war, passing sensitive information - confidential Confederate plans and secrets - to General Butler - risking her own life should she be found out and tried for treason. And after all that, the government gave her some money but nothing even close to repayment for all she had done and all she had given up. Not even enough to make ends meet. It just makes me wonder, if Elizabeth had been a man, if it was her younger brother, John, doing all this in her place, would there have been more fanfare? Would he have received the recognition, as an American hero, that she was denied? 

 

And then I think about Mary and all the risks she took in being the one to actually uncover the intel they were passing to the Union, Mary in the lion’s den, and the incredible bravery that took. And also the restraint and humility she showed, convincingly playing the role of uneducated, ignorant slave when she was secretly smarter than all of them. Mary, who never got any recognition at all - not even the piddly bits of government money and thanks from General Grant that Elizabeth got. No one even knew her name until 1910 and when they finally did, it wasn’t even the right name. They couldn’t even do her the honor of getting her name right. And I feel for Mary on a personal level because even after all that - after helping to save the country - she continues to serve as a teacher educating formerly enslaved people after the war. She goes months without being paid, there are no books, no supplies, no funding, she’s responsible for hundreds of students, she’s subjected to threats of violence from White neighbors who still believe Black people had no right to be educated. She’s trying her best, taking on all this weight, and it just feels like no one cares. And then she just disappears in 1870 at the age of 29, poof, just gone, after all that. We may never know what became of Mary Richards. All we can do is honor her memory and try our best to spread the truth about what she did, truth that honestly gets more muddled and confusing the harder you dig. But, you know, maybe Mary would have wanted it that way. Maybe she likes watching us scratch our heads as we try to figure her out - her final act of deception. 

 

Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix, I hope you found this story interesting and maybe you even learned something new. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow History Fix on whatever app you’re using to listen, and help me spread the word by telling a few friends about it. That’ll make it much easier to get your next fix.  

 

Information used in this episode was sourced from Encyclopedia Virginia, the American Battlefield Trust, History.com, Time Magazine, The Journal of the Civil War Era, Smithsonian Magazine, the US Office of the Historian, and the National Park Service. As always, links to these sources can be found in the show notes.