THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 17, 1995 TAG: 9509150634
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: George Tucker
LENGTH: Medium: 99 lines
Jefferson Davis - whom Sam Houston, the Virginia-born Texas founding father, once characterized as ``ambitious as Lucifer and cold as a lizard'' - committed many errors of judgment while president of the Southern states that rashly pulled out of the Union in 1861.
One of his more serious blunders - and one that has heretofore received little publicity - was the hiring of Mrs. Mary Elizabeth Bowser, a supposedly dim-witted free African-American woman, as a servant for the White House of the Confederacy in Richmond.
Far from being slow, Mrs. Bowser was highly intelligent and a consummate actress. The secret information she collected while wielding a feather duster in Davis' private office or waiting on the table for his presidential dinners, largely attended by cabinet members and top military brass, contributed significantly to the ultimate downfall of the Confederacy.
Long neglected by Civil War historians, Mary Bowser's espionage activities have finally been recognized. On June 30, 1995, she was posthumously inducted into the U.S. Army's Military Intelligence Corps Hall of Fame at Fort Huachuca, Kan.
At the ceremony, Angela Bowser, a Richmond attorney, eulogized her great-great-great-aunt thus: ``It was a Bowser who helped the Union, and what she did was negative to the Confederacy that fought unsuccessfully to keep black people enslaved.''
Mary Bowser was born a slave around 1839 on a plantation owned by John Van Lew, a prosperous Richmond hardware merchant and prominent Whig, who lived in a white pillared mansion on Church Hill near historic St. John's Episcopal Church, in which Patrick Henry thundered ``Give me liberty, or give me death!'' on the eve of the American Revolution.
When Van Lew died in 1843, his wife and daughter Elizabeth, both ardent abolitionists, freed his slaves. At the same time, Elizabeth Van Lew, who later became a celebrated Union spy, took four-year-old Mary into her mother's household to be trained as a domestic servant. Later, realizing Mary was intelligent, Miss Van Lew sent her to Philadelphia to be educated.
When she returned to Richmond, she married William Bowser, a member of a free black family. He was killed a few years later while fighting for the Union during the Civil War. Meanwhile, Mary Bowser was still living with Miss Van Lew, and it was not long before her employer assigned her a key role in the espionage activities she was master-minding for the Union cause. Learning that the Davis household needed a maid-of-all-work, Miss Van Lew used her influence to get Mary Bowser the job, instructing her protegee to keep a sharp eye out for anything relating to politics or military matters.
Once Mary Bowser became a member of the Davis household, she rapidly became ``one of the highest-placed and most productive espionage agents of the Civil War.'' Like her mentor, Miss Van Lew, who assumed the role of a crazy spinster devoted to ``her boys'' while collecting vital military information from Union prisoners, Mary Bowser put on a similar act at the president's mansion.
Posing as a good-natured but slow-witted servant, she kept her ears and eyes open, and soon Miss Van Lew was as knowledgeable of what went on in the Davis household as President Davis himself. Besides reporting to Miss Van Lew, who then passed on her mole's vital information to the federal forces then besieging Richmond, Mary Bowser also worked with Thomas McNiven, the U.S. Secret Service's Richmond spymaster who operated a bakery in the Confederate capital to cover up his underhanded activities.
Before his death in 1904, McNiven recalled Mary Bowser as a ``bright black women with a photographic memory who could recite verbatim items she had read on President Davis' desk and conversations inside the Davis house.''
But Mary Bowser's brief moment of secret glory was short-lived. When Richmond fell on April 3, 1865, Miss Van Lew alone was publicly honored by General Grant for the invaluable military information she had collected from secret agents like Mary Bowser who had risked their lives to promote the cause of racial freedom.
Ironically, there is no record of Mary Bowser's post-Civil War activities, including the date of her death and place of burial. All that is now known is that her family rarely spoke of her out of concern that Confederate sympathizers would stir up trouble. It is known, however, that before her death, Mary Bowser wrote down an account of her wartime activities, but this document fell into the hands of an unsympathetic relative who tossed it into the trash, believing it to be worthless.
The loss of Mary Bowser's memoirs is a sad blow for those now engaged in documenting African-American activities during the Civil War. Even so, it is good to know that the U.S. Army Military Intelligence Corps has finally recognized that her efforts toward ``a new birth of freedom'' were significant, thereby entitling her to a permanent place in its Hall of Fame. ILLUSTRATION: Drawing
Mary Elizabeth Bowser was inducted June 30 in to the U.S. Army's
Military Intelligence Corps Hall of Fame. Posing as a servant, she
was a mole for the North inside Jefferson Davis' Confederate White
House in Richmond during the Civil War.
by CNB