Mary Elizabeth Bowser: Union Spy

They thought she was dull witted.

But Mary Elizabeth Bowser, a freed slave who was placed as a servant in the Confederate White House in Richmond, was cunning as a fox.

While she cleaned the house and waited on Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his military leaders, she read war dispatches and overheard conversations about Confederste troop strategy and movement. She memorized details and information and sent it to Gens. Ulysses S. Grant and Benjamin Butler, "greatly enhancing the Union's conduct of war," according to the account assembled by the U.S. Army Millitary Intelligence Corps Hall of Fame.
"Jefferson Davis never discovered the leak in his household staff," reads the account, "although he knew the Union somehow kept discovering Confederate plans."
Exact details about Bowser's life and death are sketchy.
According to several accounts, Bowser was born about 1839 on a plantation owned by John Van Lew, a wealthy Richmond hardware merchant. When he died, his wife and daughter, Elizabeth, freed his slaves.
Elizabeth Van Lew, who had been educated by Quakers, was an ardent abolitionist. She noticed that Bowser was quite smart and sent her to Philadelphia to be educated. When war clouds gathered, Bowser returned to Richmond to work in the Van Lew household on Richmond's Church Hill and married William Bowser, a free black.
Van Lew, who was already sending information to Union officials about Southern unrest, reportedly reccommended Bowser for the servant's job in the Davis household.
What Bowser learned in the Confederate White House she would repeat or message to Van Lew or to Thomas McNiven, the Union's Richmond spymaster, who operated a bakery that became a major central exchange point for information. Thomas McNiven credited Bowser with being one of the best sources of wartime information, "as she was working right in the Davis home and had a photographic mind. Everything she saw on the Rebel President's desk, she could repeat word for word. Unlike most coloreds, she could read and write. She made a point of always coming out to my wagon when I made deliveries to the Davis' home to drop off information."
Specific details of Bowser's activities and and the exact information she passed on to Grant are unknown because after the war the U.S. government destroyed records on McNiven, Van Lew, and her agents for their protection.

Nothing is known about where she went or what she did after the war. Her date and place of birth are unknown.

Papers believed to be Bowser's diaries were discarded inadvertently by family members in the 1950s. They said descendants rarely talked about Mary Elizabeth Bowser's work for fear of retaliation from lingering Confederate sympathizers.

~ www.outlawwomen.com/MaryElizabethBowser.htm