What did mary bowser do
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African American Spy During the Civil War
Mary Elizabeth Bowser was a freed slave who worked with Elizabeth Van Lew as a Union spy in Richmond, Virginia during the Civil War. Van Lew sent Bowser to the Quaker School for Negroes in Philadelphia in the late 1850s. After graduating, she returned to Richmond, where
Early Years
Mary Elizabeth Bowser was born a slave on the plantation of John Van Lew, a wealthy hardware merchant in Richmond, Virginia. The exact time of her birth is uncertain, but believed to be about 1840. After Mr. Van Lew died in 1851, his daughter, Elizabeth, a staunch abolitionist, freed all of their slaves.
Mary Elizabeth remained in the Van Lew household after she was freed and worked as a paid servant. But Mary Elizabeth dreamed of having an education, and Ms. Van Lew paid her tuition to the Quaker School for Negroes in Philadelphia in the late 1850s.
After graduating, Mary returned to Richmond and married a freeman named William or Wilson Bowser on April 16, 1861 – just days before the Civil War began. The ceremony was highly unusual because th
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Mary Elizabeth Bowser (c.1839 – unknown) was an educated American freed slave who worked in connection with Elizabeth Van Lew as a Union spy during the American Civil War. Placed as a servant in the home of Confederate States of America President Jefferson Davis at the Confederate White House, she gathered much useful information which was passed on to the Union Army intelligence.
Unsuspected because of her supposed status as an illiterate slave, Bowser was able to gain access to sensitive military information, which she provided to Van Lew both through direct messages and an ingenious system of codes and signals. After three years of spying, she fled Richmond as the war came to a close and was not heard from again.
For centuries, her role as one of the Union's most effective and courageous spy remained untold. In 1995, she was admitted to the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame as "one of the highest placed and most productive espionage agents of the Civil War."
Early life
Born in Richmond, Virginia around 1839, Mary Elizabe
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Early Life
Mary Richards’s exact birthdate and birthplace are not known. A ship manifest dated December 24, 1855, gives her age as fourteen, so she was likely born in 1841 in or near Richmond. Nothing definitive is known about her family, and no known evidence explains her use of the surname Richards before and after the Civil War. She may have been born enslaved by John and Eliza Van Lew’s extended family, which included cousins with the last name Richards, or perhaps she was the child of one or more of the Richards family’s enslaved laborers. Later in life, she gave contradictory information about her parents, claiming variously that her mother was an enslaved woman owned by the Van Lews; that “her father was a mixture of the Cuban-Spaniard and Negro” and her mother was white; and that she “never knew who her parents were.”
The earliest-known record relating to her comes from Saint John’s Church, in Richmond, where, on May 17, 1846, “Mary Jane, a colored child belonging to Mrs. Van Lew,” was baptized. It was extremel
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