Mysteries of the Confederacy: The Fates of Spies and of Statues

In spring 2020, respected documentarian Pamela Mason Wagner was in the field in Richmond, Virginia, working on a new piece for the Smithsonian Channel’s series, America’s Hidden Stories. Wagner already had produced a program for the series that aired in January 2021, called Madam President, about First Lady Edith Wilson, who took over the White House behind the scenes after President Woodrow Wilson was incapacitated by a stroke.

Wagner’s new film, Southern Women, Union Spies, aired this week on Monday, Feb. 1. It’s the story of two seemingly well-behaved Southern women in Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, who spied for the Union.

Elizabeth Van Lew was a dignitary in Confederate society, an aristocratic woman whose father had been a prosperous businessman, and who lived in the family’s impressive three-story mansion on the highest of Richmond’s seven hills. About 20 years younger than Elizabeth, Mary Bowser had been born to one of Elizabeth’s father’s slaves. But Mary grew up in the family mansion, was not considered a slave, and referred to Elizabeth as her “foster sister.”  Perhaps the two women were related.

Educated in a Quaker school in Philadelphia, Elizabeth returned home an abolitionist. After her father died, she persuaded her mother and her brother to free the roughly 20 slaves they had inherited from Mr. Van Lew. Mary Bowser stayed on in the Van Lew household as Elizabeth’s paid servant.

In late 1863, Van Lew set up a Union spy network in Richmond and sent Bowser into the household of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, a Mississippian, to work as a maid. Trained to be unobtrusive, passing around platters at dinner parties to distinguished visitors like Gens. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, Bowser gathered crucial information about military movements from party chatter.

If they noticed Mary at all, Davis’ family and guests assumed the new servant was an illiterate former slave. But Van Lew had arranged for Bowser’s education up North, even though it was illegal in Virginia to educate a Black person. Besides, Bowser may have had a photographic memory and a talent for acting slow and dim-witted. Her copies of plans, letters and maps made their way from the Confederate White House across the James River, sometimes between the thick double soles of shoes worn by the Van Lew family’s other former slaves, to Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, often with a rose from Elizabeth’s garden.

After Union victory, her fortune gone to her cause, Van Lew died penniless in her vast family mansion. Bowser was last spotted in Georgia in 1867, meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. No one knows what became of Bower afterwards.

While filmmaker Pamela Mason Wagner was in Richmond, she photographed a sentinel statue keeping watch over the modern city. Not long afterwards, in June 2020, the sentinel statue came down during Black Lives Matter protests, along with other Confederate memorials in Richmond. One of them was the enormous bronze statue of Davis that had loomed at the foot of Richmond’s Monument Avenue.

This memorial for Confederate president Jefferson Davis in Richmond, Virginia, was toppled by protesters during Black Lives Matter protests in June 2020. Wikipedia

What will become of Davis’ statue now? Should it vanish, the way Mary Bowser did?

It was sculpted by Richmond native Edward Virginius Valentine, who carved and cast many heroic Confederate monuments in the early 20th century to commemorate the “Lost Cause.” Valentine’s former studio is now The Valentine, a museum in Richmond whose board is headed by his direct descendent. While the museum has been shut down by the pandemic, it devoted this down time to examining how to use Valentine’s works to provoke conversations about the disagreeable history they evoke.

The museum has petitioned Richmond city government to allow it to display the Davis statue, not the triumphal way it stood on Monument Avenue, but toppled over and covered with protestors’ painted graffiti. Josh Epperson, a Richmond consultant, has organized focus groups for the museum with Richmond community leaders, ranging from business people to activists.

Far away in Lithuania, after Communist statues were torn down in the early 1990s when the Soviet Union dissolved, an enterprising businessman collected them and opened Grutas Park or Stalin’s World, a sculpture-garden theme park of Soviet-era sculptures. On the outskirts of Budapest is Memento Park, a similar sculpture garden of Hungary’s Communist period. This park features a statue of Marx and Engels that once stood outside the Hungarian parliament. Both parks are very popular with young tourists.

Over the phone, Epperson frowns at my suggestion of a similar Confederate theme park. Some Richmond citizens think Valentine’s statues belong on Civil War battlefields, or should stay where they are with some explanations and context. I will report back to you on the mystery of what happens to Davis’ statue, and what The Valentine decides to do. Meanwhile, Pamela Mason Wagner’s film is a valuable reminder of the bravery of two other Richmond residents: Elizabeth Van Lew and Mary Bowser.

 Ann Marie Cunningham is a Columbia University Lipman Fellow for 2020 who will be working with the Mississippi Center for investigative Reporting. She is a veteran journalist/producer and author of a best-seller. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Technology Review, The Nation and The New Republic. Contact her at amc@mississippicir.org.