The Secrets of Mary Bowser by Lois Leveen

The story of the mistaken Mary Bowser reveals how an interest in history, especially women's history and black history, can blind us to how much about the past remains unknowable.Īs far as I can determine, the photograph began circulating in 2002, when Morning Edition ran a story about Bowser, and NPR included the photograph on their website, with a caption crediting it to 'James A. Online pieces about Bowser could easily include an illustration-if one could be found. The advent of the Internet made it especially easy for the story to circulate, and a growing interest in black history and women's history provided a steady audience for pieces about Bowser.

Numerous books and articles repeated the tale of Bowser's espionage, often embellished and without any verifiable sources. Nearly half a century after the war, Van Lew's niece identified the black woman as Mary Bowser, a revelation included in a June 1911 article in Harper's Monthly. Van Lew's own Civil War-era diary describes her reliance on an African American referred to only as Mary, who was a key source for Van Lew's intelligence network. The young woman later returned to Richmond and was placed in the Confederate White House as part of Van Lew's spy ring. In the story, the reporter included the tantalizing detail that before the war, Van Lew freed one of her family's slaves and sent her North to be educated. One early clue comes from a 1900, Richmond, Virginia, newspaper story about a white Union spy named Elizabeth Van Lew. Mary Bowser left behind a sparse historical trail. There's only one problem: The woman in the photograph was no Union spy. What better representation of a spy who hid in plain sight than a photograph whose subject stares straight at the viewer yet whose features remain largely indecipherable? Small wonder the photograph has been circulated by NPR, Wikipedia, libraries, history projects, and in my book, The Secrets of Mary Bowser. But in some ways that makes it the perfect portrait of Mary Bowser, an African American woman who became a Union spy during the Civil War by posing as a slave in the Confederate White House.

The Secrets of Mary Bowser by Lois Leveen