Slavery in America before the Civil War included the slavery of illiteracy.

In the Dixie South especially, it was illegal to teach black slaves how to read and write. Illiteracy was meant to foster ignorance, and in ignorance is how most white slave-owners wanted their slaves. In that respect the household of Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy during the Civil War, was the slave owners’ model.

Mary Bowser, a young black woman born into slavery, appeared in the Davis household typically docile and illiterate. Like most household slaves, she had been trained to be quiet, unobtrusive, nearly invisible, almost part of the furniture while performing the household drudgeries. Most white folk just ignored them.

Guess who hid in plain sight as a Union spy? Yep, right in the Confederate White House. Mary Bowser wasn’t really a slave: her previous household had freed her. And she wasn’t illiterate: her previous household had financed her attendance at a Quaker-run school in Philadelphia, where she excelled. When President Davis was away from his office, Bowser went inside and read through every secret document she could lay her hands on, memorizing its contents. Literally word for word. When Davis dined with his generals, discussing military strategy and troop movements, Bowser was there too, attending to the diners’ needs and overhearing what they said.

“My name is Bond, James Bond.”

Or pretty close to that. The reason is because when Mary Bowser was granted her freedom, that process entailed a legal procedure that left legal documents in the public record. To operate as a spy, Bowser needed to hide the fact she had been freed, and therefore she had to hide the fact she was Mary Bowser. So she assumed a false identity: Ellen Bond.

Throughout her career in espionage, this secret freewoman still had a master. Not a slavemaster but a spymaster: a white Virginian woman named Elizabeth Van Lew, whose efforts had freed Bowser. The Van Lew family was one of Richmond’s most prominent families — wealthy and slave-owning. But Elizabeth herself despised slavery and she likewise despised the Confederacy, even as she insisted she was not a Yankee. She called herself a proud Virginian adamantly opposed to human oppression — as every good Virginian should be, she said. Mary Bowser agreed to be one of several agents in Elizabeth’s extensive spy ring in Richmond. And became her best.

Well, in the capital of the Confederacy, you might think that an outspoken abolitionist like Elizabeth Van Lew would arouse a little suspicion. Well, she did. What was she to do? Hide her beliefs? Too easy. Be quiet? She was a woman. So, just as Bowser the spy exploited the South’s blatant bigotry, Van Lew the spymaster exploited the South’s rampant male chauvinism.

“She’s a woman. How much trouble can she be?”

To deepen that complacency, Elizabeth walked the streets of Richmond while openly babbling to a companion not physically there. Today people do that and nobody notices, even without a cellphone, but back then Elizabeth’s behavior looked downright loony. Indeed, it so bemused Richmond society that she became known as “Crazy Bet.”

Well, just how crazy, bet you, Crazy Bet really was? Crazy like a fox. And so, too, was Mary Bowser. A serving tray with food sometimes concealed secret messages in a false bottom. In a basket of eggs, one eggshell might hide secret military plans. Even wet laundry hung up to dry could convey coded messages: for example, a white shirt hung beside an upside-down pair of pants could signal “Confederate General Hill is moving troops to the west.”

Eventually Mary Bowser fell under suspicion of being the spy she was. Only then did she flee the Confederate White House, although not before she tried to burn it down. The fire made her point. Still, the mansion survived, fortunately for today’s tourists.

In 1995, more than a century after the war, both Mary Bowser and Elizabeth Van Lew were inducted into the U.S. Army’s Military Intelligence Hall of Fame.

Respectfully (because all my readers deserve respect),

Reginald Dipwipple

Secret Agent Extraordinaire