Elizabeth Van Lew:
A Spy in Plain Sight

Elizabeth Van Lew was among the most productive Union spies, operating a sophisticated espionage ring in the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia.

Educated in Pennsylvania, Van Lew was unabashedly pro-Union, and her espionage began when she visited captured Union soldiers at the infamous Libby Prison in Richmond. Known for its harsh conditions and brutal guards, the prison held hundreds of starving, diseased men. Van Lew and her agents often brought food and clothing to the prisoners, who then passed valuable intelligence collected from their Confederates captors as well as from their own observations. She facilitated the escape of many of these men with the assistance of Erasmus Ross, a prison clerk who was a Northern sympathizer and Van Lew associate. Ross regularly threatened prisoners with a large knife, summoning them to his office from where they never returned and were presumed to have been killed. In reality, Ross provided the men with Confederate uniforms and aided their escape from the prison, after which they were smuggled out of Richmond and guided to Union lines by Van Lew’s operatives. To dispel any suspicions that she was aiding Union prisoners, Van Lew allowed a Confederate prison warden to live in her house.

In early 1864, after a group of captured Union officers she had helped escape from Richmond vouched for her credibility, Van Lew began receiving intelligence requirements directly from Major General Benjamin F. Butler, commander of the Union Army’s Departments of Virginia and North Carolina. With several dozen operatives working inside the Confederate government, Van Lew’s network supplied timely information about Confederate troop strength and movements, defenses in and around Richmond, and local economic conditions.