Bowser, Mary Elizabeth, 1841?-

Mary Elizabeth Bowser served as a Union spy during the Civil War in the Confederate White House of President Jefferson Davis. Born into slavery on a plantation outside of Richmond, Virginia in 1839 to the Van Lew family, she was freed in 1851 by Elizabeth Van Lew, daughter of her owner John Van Lew and a Quaker abolitionist. Bowser was sent to Philadelphia by Elizabeth Van Lew where she received her education, but was summoned back to Richmond to assist Van Lew, a Northern sympathizer and Union spy. Van Lew's contacts placed Bowser in the Virginia home of Jefferson Davis, where she labored as an uneducated, domestic servant under the alias "Ellen Bond." She passed along Confederate strategic and military plans to Van Lew who in turn sent the information to Union military commanders. The collection also contains information on Arthur A. Schomburg and the Schomburg family.

Mary Richards Bowser was born into slavery and later became a missionary to Liberia, a Union spy in the Confederate White House during the American Civil War (1861–1865), and a teacher at freedmen’s schools. As a child, she was enslaved by the Van Lew family of Richmond; Elizabeth Van Lew, who had arranged for her to be educated in the North and provided her with de facto freedom prior to the war, ran a pro-Union intelligence ring in which Bowser played an important role. After the war, Bowser gave a series of talks in New York about her wartime espionage and worked with the Freedmen’s Bureau as a teacher, first in Virginia and then in Florida and Georgia. She last appears in the historical record in 1867, when she wrote a letter describing her plans to join her new husband “in the West Indies.” Whether she did is not known. Despite Bowser’s accomplishments, many claims regarding her, even those made in purportedly nonfiction accounts, are untrue or remain unsubstantiated. 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.
ary 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 Van Lew’s intent that once educated, the girl, then using the name Mary Jane Richards, would become a missionary in Africa. In December 1855, at age fourteen, according to the manifest, she sailed with a group of missionaries from Sandy Hook, New Jersey, to Monrovia, Liberia. She was apparently unhappy in Liberia, because Van Lew arranged with the American Colonization Society for her return, citing Richards’s displeasure. She sailed back to America in early 1860, landing in Baltimore, Maryland, before returning to Richmond. On August 21, 1860, the Richmond Whig reported “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.” Although a substantial network of pro-Union agents operated in Richmond during the Civil War, its activities were by necessity surreptitious and thus difficult for historians to document. Historians have corroborated pro-Union activities that included smuggling information to and from Union military leaders positioned outside the city, providing supplies to Union soldiers held prisoner within the Confederate capital, aiding prisoners to escape, and disrupting Confederate military and government operations. As the historian Elizabeth R. Varon notes in Southern Lady, Yankee Spy (2003), her biography of Van Lew, free Black and enslaved people were integral participants in the pro-Union underground, although the precise contributions of individual African Americans remain difficult to discern.

Elizabeth Van Lew and Mary Richards Bowser
Bowser’s involvement can be tracked through disparate sources. In a diary entry dated May 14, 1864, Van Lew wrote, “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.” A more public attesting came decades later. On July 27, 1900, when Van Lew was dying, an article in the Richmond and Manchester Evening Leader recounting her life described a “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‘s family in the Confederate White House during the war. In a 1910 interview, Van Lew’s niece Annie Randolph Hall identified this servant as Mary Bowser, a revelation shared in a June 1911 article in Harper’s Monthly entitled “Miss Van Lew.”
In the years immediately following the Civil War, Bowser recounted her own espionage, variously claiming to have “clandestinely entered in the Rebel Senate while [it was] in secret session”; helped capture Confederate officers and contraband tobacco in Fredericksburg; aided Union soldiers being held prisoner; and met with “the Provost Marshal” appointed by Union forces following the fall of Richmond—as well as spying within the Confederate White House. Regardless of whether the Van Lew women were legally able to free her prior to the Civil War, Bowser gained her freedom with the fall of the Confederacy in April 1865, as did millions of other African Americans. She was probably twenty-three or twenty-four years old. Whatever her relationship to Wilson Bowser might have been, their marriage apparently ended prior to the Confederate surrender, because although he remained in Richmond, she reverted to using the name Mary Richards and did not thereafter refer to herself as Mary Bowser or Mrs. Wilson Bowser. Her commitment to the cause of freedom, however, continued. Freedmen’s Bureau records show that within days of the fall of Richmond, Mary Jane Richards was working as a teacher to former formerly enslaved people within the city.

In September 1865, she traveled north once more, giving a series of talks about her antebellum and wartime experiences. Although it was still unusual for women to give public speeches, she was perhaps inspired by a small number of women who earned both political influence and professional fees by taking to the lecture circuit. Richards used different pseudonyms as a lecturer, likely an indication of how dangerous she perceived life to continue to be for any Black people regarded as having contributed to the Confederate defeat. Thus far, two separate lectures have been documented: the first given at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Manhattan on September 11, using the name Richmonia Richards, and the other given a week or two later at the African Methodist Episcopal Church on Bridge Street in Brooklyn, using the name Richmonia R. St. Pierre. (It is possible that she gave other lectures in the North after the Civil War, but her use of different pseudonyms at each of the two known lectures underscores the challenge of unearthing evidence of other speeches she gave.) Newspaper accounts of each event provide brief and sometimes contradictory biographical sketches.

Libby Prison Tunnel
Libby Prison Tunnel
The Anglo African, a Black newspaper published in New York, described Richmonia Richards as “very sarcastic and at times quite humorous.” The article details the speaker’s travels to Liberia and her wartime activities; it also includes her condemnation of how Union soldiers stationed in Richmond after the fall of the Confederacy harassed African Americans and her tart criticism of northern Black people, whom she felt were overly concerned with fashion and social status rather than education and social service. Richards clearly altered some details of her biography in this talk, playing to rhetorical conventions and calculating what would elicit the most powerful response from her audience. The Brooklyn Eagle, a white newspaper, compared Richmonia R. St. Pierre to the prominent white abolitionist speaker Anna Dickinson. This article also describes the speaker’s education and travels to Liberia, but focuses more prominently on her life in Richmond during the war. It includes details of how the speaker and an unnamed white woman (likely Van Lew) initiated exchanges with Union soldiers being held prisoner and their involvement in the famous escape of Union soldiers from Libby Prison. It also details her work as a teacher with the Freedmen’s Bureau and her assertion that even that organization discriminated against Black people. According to the Eagle, the speaker forthrightly asserted that Black people should be given the right to vote and that in the wake of emancipation there was still a need for “justice” to achieve equal treatment for Black people in the North and the South. Both articles reveal how she tailored rhetorical strategies to particular audiences and how she challenged listeners to support the cause of equal rights as an extension of the efforts that had won the Civil War and abolished slavery.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Once again using the name Mary J. Richards, she traveled to various locations in Virginia and Florida in the ensuing years, working as a teacher of newly freed Black people. Early in 1867, she founded a freedmen’s school in Saint Mary’s, Georgia. While teaching there in March 1867, she had a chance meeting with Harriet Beecher Stowe, Stowe’s brother Charles Beecher, and Crammond Kennedy, a Freedmen’s Bureau official. Descriptions of this encounter in Beecher’s journal and in a letter from Kennedy published in the Freedmen’s Record provide further evidence of how Richards portrayed her experiences in Richmond and Liberia to different audiences.

While running the school in Saint Mary’s, Richards sent a series of letters to Gilbert L. Eberhart, the superintendent of education for the Georgia Freedmen’s Bureau. These are the only known surviving pieces of her correspondence. They describe her struggles as the sole teacher to seventy day students, a dozen adult night students, and 100 Sunday school students, working with few books or other supplies and often without being paid the salary promised by the bureau. As eager as Black people in rural areas like Saint Mary’s were to secure education for themselves and their children, they had few resources to support a school, often relying on inconsistent donations from northerners. But the biggest challenge was the threat of violence faced by students and teachers alike. “I wish there was some law here, or some protection,” she wrote to Eberhart, describing local whites who exhibited a “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.” She references “secret societies” of hostile whites, anticipating the violence the Ku Klux Klan and other groups would perpetrate in the coming years.

In a letter dated June 1, 1867, she informed Eberhart that she had married, asking him to address her thereafter as Mary J. R. Garvin. She said little about her new husband other than that he had gone to Havana, Cuba. By the end of June, she had been officially directed to close the school, and in her final surviving letter to Eberhart, dated June 27, 1867, she asks for payment of the full salary owed her for her five months in Georgia so that she can leave the area, her husband being “in the West Indies.” Whether she joined him there or whether he returned and they settled somewhere in the United States is unknown. Historians have found no evidence of what she did after leaving the school in Saint Mary’s. She was about twenty-six years old at the time.

Mary Richards, also known as Mary Jane Richards Garvin and possibly Mary Bowser (born 1846), was a Union spy during the Civil War.[1] She was possibly born enslaved from birth in Virginia, but there is no documentation of where she was born or who her parents were. By the age of seven, she was enslaved by the household of Elizabeth "Bet" Van Lew, in Richmond, Virginia. The Van Lew family sent Richards to school somewhere in the north, and then to Liberia via the American Colonization Society. Richards returned to Richmond shortly before the outbreak of the American Civil War, where she was one of many black and white Richmond residents who collected and delivered military information to the United States Army under the leadership of Elizabeth Van Lew.[2]

Richards is often referred to as Mary Bowser. She was likely married to a Wilson Bowser at the start of the Civil War. A 1911 article about her in Harper's Monthly, which was based in part on the faulty memory of Bet Van Lew's niece, popularized Richards' story, and was the source of much of the ensuing lore around Richards, including a 1987 TV movie, A Special Friendship. The Harper's article included details that are not known to be accurate, such as that Richards had worked undercover directly in the Confederate White House, that she had a photographic memory, and that she tried to set fire to the Confederate White House at the end of the war; and other details that are clearly false, such as that her name was "Mary Elizabeth Bowser".[1][2][3] Mary Jane Richards was likely born in Virginia, and was possibly enslaved from birth by Eliza Baker Van Lew and John Van Lew (parents of Elizabeth) or their extended family.[4][5] The first record directly related to her is her baptism, as "Mary Jane" at St. John's Church in Richmond, on May 17, 1846.[2] In 1855, Richards went to Liberia in West Africa, to join a missionary community, as arranged by Elizabeth Van Lew. By spring of 1860, Richards had returned to Richmond On April 16, 1861, Mary wed Wilson Bowser. The ceremony took place in St. John's Church, just four days after Confederate troops opened fire on Fort Sumter, the first battle of the Civil War.[2] The marriage was relatively short lived, and by the time the war ended, she was once again using the surname Richards.

Throughout the war, Mary participated in the pro-Union underground espionage ring organized by Elizabeth Van Lew.[1] She engaged in a variety of pro-Union activities.[6] On at least one occasion she went, as she later put it, "into President Davis's house while he was absent," pretending to be getting laundry, in order to look for documents related to the war effort.[8] Although exactly what intelligence she collected is unknown, the value of this espionage ring was noted by Generals Benjamin Butler, Ulysses S. Grant, and George H. Sharpe.[2] Even just a few days after the fall of Richmond, Mary Jane Richards worked as teacher to former slaves in the city.[1]

Richards gave at least two lectures in the North in 1865 about her education, travel to Liberia, and wartime exploits.[1] In September, a reporter claimed that she and the famed white political orator Anna Dickinson "might, indeed, easily be mistaken for twin sisters," likely referring to the strangeness of a woman speaking about political issues to a group.[3] While speaking in New York, Richards protected her identity by using pseudonyms at both lectures, calling herself Richmonia Richards at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Manhattan on September 11 and Richmonia R. St. Pierre a week or two later at the African Methodist Episcopal Church on Bridge Street in Brooklyn.[1]

Again using the name Mary J. Richards, she founded a freedmen's school in St. Marys, Georgia in early 1867.[1]Her school served day students, adult night students, and Sunday school students, all taught by herself.[2]

In a June 1867 letter to the superintendent of education for the Georgia Freedmen's Bureau, she requested that he refer to her as Mary J. R. Garvin.[1] A later letter may imply that she intended to join her new husband in the West Indies after St. Mary's school closed.