In an academic article in 1976, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich wrote, “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” Southern Belle Elizabeth Van Lew, the eponymous spymaster in Gerri Willis’ Lincoln’s Lady Spymaster, certainly fit this bill, making history as one of the “Big Five” female spies of the American Civil War. In an engrossing and thoroughly researched narrative that practically writes itself, Willis chronicles Van Lew’s evolution from Union sympathizer to Union spy to Union spymaster and ringleader. Van Lew had “a contrary nature and [a] gift for organization,” Willis writes, both characteristics that made her “the perfect spymaster.”
Van Lew was not your stereotypical Belle. The granddaughter of a Revolutionary War hero, she was educated in Philadelphia and was a staunch abolitionist. But she was raised in one of the finest mansions atop Church Hill, an elite address in Richmond, Virginia, where she enjoyed a position at the pinnacle of society.
As I read Willis’ biography, it became clear how much Van Lew and her hometown of Richmond had in common. Both existed in a sort of in-between space, not quite North and yet not quite South either. As the nineteenth century wore on, after all, Richmond “more and more resembled the Industrial North rather than the South.” And yet, when the Civil War broke out in 1861, it was the political capital of the Confederacy…