This episode of Mailin' It! celebrates Women's History Month by exploring the extraordinary life of Elizabeth Van Lew, a prominent Richmond socialite who risked everything to operate a successful Union spy ring from the heart of the Confederacy. Joined by historian and former postmaster Sara Martin, hosts Karla Kirby and Jeff Marino uncover the story of how Van Lew's espionage and unwavering loyalty led to her groundbreaking appointment as the postmaster of Richmond, Virginia, after the Civil War.
In the capital of the Confederacy, wealthy socialite Elizabeth Van Lew had a secret. She was one of the Union’s most effective spymasters. From her family’s antebellum mansion in Richmond, Van Lew built a sophisticated intelligence network sharing vital information with Union generals, including Ulysses S. Grant. After the war, she was rewarded with a presidential appointment as the first female postmaster of a major Southern city. In this role, she modernized the Richmond Post Office by introducing free city-wide mail delivery, installing collection boxes, and championing diversity by hiring women, African Americans, the city’s first Black letter carrier. Be sure to listen in as this episode uncovers the risks she took, the spy skills she used, and the legacy she left on both the Postal Service and American history.
Karla:
Hello and welcome to Mailin’ It!, the official podcast of the United States Postal Service. I'm Karla Kirby.
Jeff:
And I'm Jeff Marino. Karla, let's set the stage for today's episode because it's like something out of a spy novel. It's 1864. We're in Richmond, Virginia—the capital of the Confederacy. While Confederate soldiers are out patrolling the streets, a 43-year-old unmarried socialite is quietly running one of the Union's most effective spy networks out of her home. Her name is Elizabeth Van Lew, and she uses her status in Richmond's top social circles as a cover for her work against slavery and in support of the Union. Eventually, when the Civil War ends, that loyalty opens the door for her appointment as Richmond's first woman postmaster.
Karla:
Okay, Jeff, I'm hooked. Elizabeth Van Lew's life and labors are a great way to honor women's History Month for being such a monumental figure in both American history and postal history. It's hard to believe that more people don't know about her. To help us unpack Miss Van Lew's amazing story, we're thrilled to welcome historian and author Sara Martin to the show. Sara, welcome to Mailin’ It!
Sara:
Glad to be here. Thanks.
Jeff:
Thanks for joining us, Sara. Now, before we find out more about Elizabeth Van Lew, let's talk a little bit about your work, both as a historian and someone who's had a long career with the Postal Service.
Sara:
Thank you. I retired from the Postal Service after 35 years. I was a postmaster in Illinois for several years, then transitioned into corporate communications, and I finished my career as a senior public relations representative at Postal headquarters in DC. Some of the skills I learned while working for the Postal Service continue to help me. Now that I'm retired, I've done a lot of things in history, and I am currently the newsletter editor for the Virginia Genealogical Society.
Karla:
So, Sara, when it comes to Miss Van Lew, you've certainly done your homework. In fact, you wrote your Master's Thesis about her. How did you become interested in her story?
Sara:
That's a good question. I have a special interest in women in American history. Women in history is a topic that receives significantly less recognition than any other genre. And while studying the Civil War from a master’s degree in American history, I discovered several women operated as spies on both sides of the conflict. Some were more successful than others, but only one received a presidential appointment as postmaster— Elizabeth Van Lew. I finished my Master's Thesis early last year. It was the fourth paper I have written on Ms. Van Lew. I've also written a couple of articles about her that have been published, and I'm currently working towards a master's in military history with a concentration on the Civil War and hope to discover even more to write about her.
Karla:
What is it about her story that still resonates today?
Sara:
Elizabeth Van Lew did more than take a principled stance during the Civil War. She put herself in extreme danger to do what she thought was right after the war. She was the first woman to serve as a postmaster in a major southern city, and she was more than just a manager. She brought diversity and innovation to her Post Office by hiring minorities and by introducing postal selection boxes and mail delivery to Richmond.
Jeff:
Well, Elizabeth sounds like a fascinating person, and there's an awful lot to talk about there in her history. So why don't we just start at the beginning.
Sara:
Both of her parents came from the north. Her father John, was from Jamaica, New York. That's the part of Queens of New York City. Her mother, Eliza, was from Philadelphia, and she was the daughter of a prominent Quaker family. Eliza's father had been a highly respected mayor of Philadelphia. John Van Lew was a highly respected owner of mercantile business. He sold items such as bricks, glass panes for windows, and that sort of stuff, not just hammers and nails. Many of the materials that came from John Van Lew's store were used to build most of the buildings in Richmond at the time, and the University of Virginia. Elizabeth and her mother opposed slavery, although John owned slaves. Elizabeth did not consider her and her mother to be abolitionists, however, because she viewed abolitionists as extremists. She was just there doing what she thought was right.
Jeff:
So that last part is really interesting because Ms. Van Lew was active in the underground activity near Richmond to help enslaved people escape to the North. Is that right?
Sara:
Yeah, that's right. Shortly before John Van Lew died, he created a will and later the same day included a codicil which forbade selling or freeing the people that he enslaved. He knew Elizabeth and her mother disagreed with his views regarding slavery at the time of his death. In 1843, 15 slaves were included in the Van Lew household, and a few others resided on the Van Lew farm outside of Richmond. His will specifically stated their slaves were not to be sold or freed, but the Van Lew women found ways around that and helped many earn wages to buy their own freedom.
Karla:
Richmond was the capital of the Confederacy. If your neighbor suspected you were helping the Union, that wasn't just gossip, that was dangerous. How risky was what she was doing?
Sara:
It was very risky. Although they lived in the South, the Van Lew family did not support the Confederacy. Her brother was coerced to join the Confederate army, but tried to desert more than once, claiming he was needed to run the family business. The family tried to stay low key about their Unionist views to avoid controversy as much as possible. But everybody in town from the North was suspected of being a Northern sympathizer, even if they weren't, and that could be deadly. One of the things that they did to deflect suspicion was to board Confederate prison warden Captain George C. Gibbs at their house. That kind of disguised the fact that they were Unionists and it worked. Elizabeth and her mother also worked in some of the makeshift hospitals and offered care to both Confederate and Union soldiers. They passed off their work to provide medical care to Union soldiers and aid Union prisoners as Christian hospitality. Elizabeth wrote that she was motivated by a female benevolence, entirely appropriate for a Christian lady.
Jeff:
I understand Elizabeth and her mother did more to help the Union besides boarding a Confederate soldier and helping in the hospitals.
Sara:
Oh, yes. One of the things that they did was to arrange to have a body dug up. John A. Dahlgren, a Union Admiral, had a son who was killed, and the body of this boy was desecrated. Elizabeth arranged to have his body dug up and moved to a secret location where the Confederates couldn't find it. Her efforts to help Union soldiers were noticed by Union General Benjamin Butler. He learned from Union soldiers who had escaped from the Confederate prisons that she had been instrumental in helping with their escape. Butler recruited her as a spy master in 1864; she then relayed communications vital to the Union and had a network of spies inside the Confederacy.
Part of what she did, she devised a cipher to send coded messages that were secreted in things like the soles of shoes. They hollowed out the shoes and put the messages in there, or hems of dresses would contain little notes. Empty eggshells would contain notes. She had a quite a bit of different ways to get these messages across the Confederate lines to the Union officials. She also used invisible ink to write in between the lines on notes that she sent and the notes would appear to be saying something else. But the receivers knew how to make the invisible ink visible. So she got a lot of her messages to them that way.
Jeff:
So that's fascinating that a woman in her forties living with her mother managed to do all of this right under the noses of the Confederate Army in Richmond.
Sara:
Yes. That was not the typical profile for a Union spy. Not at all. Elizabeth didn't do a lot of the work herself, however, she was more or less the spy master, the manager, more so than being a spy. She set up a network of people who could carry out the work without being suspected. And a lot of these people she later ended up using to work for her at her Post Office. One person of great interest that she had as part of the network was a young black girl in the Van Lew household named Mary Jane Richards. Before the war, Mary Jane was freed and sent to Philadelphia to be educated, and then she sailed to Liberia to teach at a colony, established there for freed blacks, but she didn't like living over there, and she wrote to Elizabeth and asked if she could come back home. And so Elizabeth arranged for her passage back and she came back to Richmond, but she had to pretend to be a slave in order to live in Virginia. There were laws against that at the time. Elizabeth managed to place her with Jefferson Davis's family as a servant in their home, which also served as the Confederate headquarters. Mary Jane was able to garner information she read or heard and saw, and relay it back to Elizabeth because she was a slave. No one suspected her.
Karla:
So, Sara, in 1865, the war ends. Richmond is devastated. And then just days after taking office, President Ulysses S. Grant nominates her as a postmaster. How did she go from spymaster to postmaster?
Sara:
Her intelligence from Richmond was regularly delivered to then-General Grant during the war. By late in the war, Elizabeth was corresponding with him directly as Richmond was falling. Grant actually sent soldiers to the Van Lew Mansion to protect their home from Confederates who were threatening to burn it down. Grant personally thanked her for her service after the war and remained in contact with her. He helped to get the Van Lew family some reimbursement for the money they spent on their spy network during the war, but it was nothing compared to the amount they had spent. On March 17th, 1869, just days after his inauguration, President Grant nominated Elizabeth to be postmaster of Richmond, VA. Its nomination was approved, making her Richmond's first female postmaster. She served as postmaster of the Richmond Post Office from March, 1869 to March, 1877, but she was a controversial choice at the time of her appointment. Less than 1% of all postmasters were women. Some served in place of men who had gone off to fight war, but after the war, a lot of the Southern offices had difficulty finding postmasters because they had to swear an oath to the Union to get a government job.
Jeff:
Well, being a former Union spy and running the Post Office in the former Confederate capital was pretty controversial, but that was only part of it. What else made Miss Van Lew's tenure such a big deal?
Sara:
Postmaster was the highest federal office that could be held by a woman in the 19th century, and Richmond was a large first-class post office. Elizabeth earned a salary of $4,000 as postmaster, which was good money. The Post Office Department at that time did not discern salary in accordance with gender. She was 50 years old at the time, unmarried and known for her progressive ideas. Once her activities during the Civil War became known, it was even more controversial. A lot of people in Richmond were unaware of her activities until after Grant's nomination.
Jeff:
Well, I am kind of curious as to how people found out that she was a spy
Sara:
Yeah, Grant made that part of his nomination and that's how a lot of people found out about it.
Karla:
So once she was in the job, she didn't just hold the title, she changed things. What made her such an innovator?
Sara:
Elizabeth successfully expanded and modernized the Richmond Post Office. For instance, she hired seven more clerks than were already there, two of which were women, and they were the first two women to work in the Richmond Post Office. She also initiated citywide free mail delivery, a relatively new service that began during the Civil War. For the first time, mail carriers delivered to people's homes and businesses, whereas before they had to go to the post office to pick up the mail to deliver the mail. She hired 14 men to be letter carriers, the first ever in Richmond. She also placed mail collection boxes on principal streets throughout the city. Also, a relatively new idea at the time. Collection boxes were introduced in the late 1850s.
She was noted for not discriminating when hiring employees. Among those she hired were immigrants, women, and people of color, including the nation's first Black letter carrier, James B. Christian, who was hired in 1869 shortly after her appointment.
Jeff:
So she served as postmaster for roughly eight years. What happened after that?
Sara:
Well, Grant's presidency ended. He recommended Elizabeth be allowed to continue her work in Richmond, and Elizabeth campaigned to keep her position, as did several groups of people from Richmond. But the new President, Rutherford B. Hayes, ultimately declined. And that was his option because the, the postmasters were of that level appointed by Presidents. David B. Parker, Superintendent of the Mailes of the Army of the Potomac during the war, and Chief Post Office Inspector afterwards, encouraged her to seek a position at Postal Headquarters. So she interviewed for a position at the Appointment Office and was hired in 1883. There she worked as a requisition clerk for the third assistant postmaster general at the Post Office Department in DC and earned a salary of $1,200 per year. Three years later, she found herself and other women clerks under the tyranny of a sexist supervisor, George A. Howard, an unreconstructed Tennessee rebel. Howard's wrath against the former Union spy was grossly apparent to all. In 1877, she was demoted for no particular reason to the Dead Letter Office with an annual salary of only $720 a year. There was no advance warning that proceeded the demotion. So she went back to the White House to speak with President Cleveland about the injustice, but he refused to see her. She put in for her accrued vacation leave the next day, quit her job and moved back to Richmond.
Karla:
So what was her life like after she returned to Richmond?
Sara:
Elizabeth tried to be involved in public life, but was shunned for being given privileges and for being a Union spy. She knew several influential people who visited her, including Edgar Allen Poe, who had once read “The Raven” in the family parlor. Elizabeth never married, she was said to die alone and penniless. Although that wasn't entirely true. She had a small circle of friends, including former slaves, and she had a little bit of money, but nothing like what she'd had before the war. She was buried vertically and initially without a headstone. Later, former Union prisoners from Boston that she had helped, sent a boulder from New England to be used as her headstone. It included a brass plaque to honor her. One of those friends from the North was the great-great-grandson of Paul Revere.
Jeff:
Wow. You know, when you step back from her life, a spy, a reformer, a postmaster, what do you think defined her the most?
Sara:
That's a good question. She greatly opposed slavery and secession. Although she did not consider herself an abolitionist. She saw this more as a human rights issue. She was innovated in her approach to challenges. She was educated and spent most of her performative years with her Quaker family. She was an inspiration to many other women. For instance, one of the cooks in her house had a daughter named Maggie Lena Walker. Maggie was born in 1864 and raised in Elizabeth's household. In 1903, Walker charted the St. Luke Penny Bank in Richmond becoming the first black woman to own a bank in America. Elizabeth wrote her thoughts in a secret diary she kept in her backyard and whose existence she would reveal only on her deathbed. She was very protective of the identities of those who had been part of her network of spies.
Jeff:
Well, Sara, I can certainly understand why you have written four papers, done a Master's Thesis on Elizabeth Van Lew. There's a lot going on in that woman's life.
Karla:
Very much an interesting life.
Jeff:
Well, thanks for joining, Sara. It was really nice talking to you again and thanks for filling us in on Elizabeth Van Lew.
Sara:
You're welcome. I'm glad to do it.
Karla:
It's time for another edition of Did You Know? when we share interesting facts about the Postal Service.
Jeff:
What's new and surprising today, Karla?
Karla:
Well, Jeff, we've talked before about some famous people who worked at the Postal Service, but there's an exclusive group within that group, those who worked at the Postal Service and were later featured on their own stamp. And in that group there's an even more elite group, people who have had their own stamp honoring the work they did at the Postal Service. Today we're talking about the inventor Samuel F.B. Morse.
Jeff:
The inventor of the Morse Code, right?
Karla:
Exactly, Jeff. Along with another man named Alfred Vail. More than that, he also helped develop a practical single-wire electric telegraph system, which became the standard system for telegraph communication. Between that and Morse code, it was like inventing a programming language and the computer it was used on.
Jeff:
Incredible. So when did all of this happen?
Karla:
Morse was born in Boston in 1791. He started out as a fine-arts painter, but everything changed in 1832. On a ship back from Europe, he learned about a new invention called the electromagnet. That sparked an idea: using electricity to send messages. He spent the next few years working with partners on an electric telegraph, and by 1838 it was ready to demonstrate.
Jeff:
And that's when most people found out about it?
Karla:
It took a few years, but in 1844, Congress funded the first electric telegraph line, connecting Baltimore to Washington DC. It was placed under the direction of the U.S. Post Office Department and Morse was paid a salary as the Postal Superintendent to oversee its operation.
Jeff:
So he went from engineer right into management.
Karla:
He absolutely did. For his contributions as an inventor and Postal Service employee, Morse was honored with a postage stamp in 1940. It was a red, two-cent stamp featuring an artistic interpretation of photos taken of him when he was in his seventies.
Jeff:
And that wraps up this episode of Did You Know?
Jeff:
So, what did you think about this story about Elizabeth Van Lew?
Karla:
Definitely was a history lesson. No clue that women were even in that spy field at the time.
Jeff:
Yeah, that's crazy that she was able to keep that under everybody's nose right there at the capitol of Confederacy for so many years. Just a fascinating story.
Karla:
Absolutely. I think what was disappointing if you look at the whole story was when she returned to Richmond just back in that area and after being revealed as a spy, that absolutely probably put a damper on her social life.
Karla:
And that's all for this episode of Mailin’ It! Don't forget to subscribe to Mailin’ It! wherever you get your podcast to make sure you don't miss the next episode, and follow along on Instagram @USPostalService, X@USPS, Facebook and YouTube.com @usps.