Gerri Willis is the author of the new biography Lincoln's Lady Spymaster: The Untold Story of the Abolitionist Southern Belle Who Helped Win the Civil War. A longtime journalist, she lives in New York, Massachusetts, and South Carolina.
Q: What inspired you to write a biography of Civil War spy Elizabeth Van Lew (1818-1900)?
A: Well, I started research for the book during the COVID pandemic. Many of the young women I worked with were terrified. For them, the pandemic lockdowns felt like a death sentence. Their social lives abruptly ended. They were isolated.
I wanted to introduce them to women who had beaten back challenges and defied the odds. American history is full of women like that. I found Elizabeth Van Lew's name during that period. And, she was a natural. Bold, brilliant and persistent, she was the perfect role model and trailblazer.
Q: How did you research her life, and what did you learn that particularly surprised you?
A: The research took me to libraries in New York City and Richmond, Virginia, her hometown. I walked the streets she walked as a spy, and visited the prison sites where she assisted Union officers, helping some of them escape. I read scores of Civil War histories and packed my head as full of regional knowledge as I could.
That information turned many of my assumptions of the era on their head. I had assumed that it was a foregone conclusion that the North would win the war, because Lincoln had a bigger population and a more industrialized economic base.
What I learned, though, was that to win Lincoln had to subdue an era the size of Czarist Russia, a high hurdle. What's more, secessionist sentiment wasn't universal in the South. There were plenty of objectors, most of whom kept their political views quiet, some of whom assisted Elizabeth.
Q: The writer William B. Feis said of the book, “With a keen eye for historical detail, Willis spins a yarn with enough real-life colorful characters and cloak-and-dagger twists to make even Ian Fleming blush.” What do you think of that description?
A: I think it's true! Every time I thought I had her figured out, she would do something that surprised me. Elizabeth kept me on my toes.
I had expected her to be a quaint Southern belle, but what I got was far different. She fended off Confederate investigators, assembled a spy network, bribed Confederate officers, sheltered Union officers on the run, and placed a black female agent inside the Confederate White House.
Q: What do you see as Elizabeth Van Lew’s legacy today?
A: Elizabeth was a daring and bold patriot who refused to back down even when threatened. She despised slavery and used her position in Southern aristocracy to aid the Union cause.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I am looking for my next subject! Please suggest a woman you found inspirational!
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Some stories take a long time to surface. Elizabeth's story was nearly lost to history.
Not until nearly 100 years after the war was her story recovered when an NSA analyst found an abandoned storeroom full of the reports produced by the Bureau of Military Intelligence, the spooks of the Union. Elizabeth's name popped up again and again in those documents.
The analyst later described Elizabeth's Richmond spy ring as the most productive on either side, North or South, during the Civil War.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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