They supported African colonization, the controversial movement to deport blacks to Liberia. At the same time, Van Lew and her mother privately lamented the evils of slavery and hoped that through individual acts of manumission they could contribute to the gradual erosion of slavery. The family lived in a mansion in Richmond's elegant Church Hill neighborhood, attended historic Saint John's Episcopal Church, and made every effort to assimilate fully into southern society, acquiring as many as twenty-one enslaved laborers by 1850. She attended a local academy before being sent to Philadelphia to complete her education. Her father was a prosperous hardware merchant until his death in 1843. She was born in Richmond in 1818 and was the daughter of John Van Lew, a native of Long Island, New York, and Eliza Louise Baker Van Lew, a native of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. VARON: Van Lew was a Union espionage agent in the Confederate capital of Richmond. Her next book, Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press in 2018.ĬWI: Who was Elizabeth Van Lew? Why and how did she become a Union spy while living in the capital of the Confederacy? On whom did she spy/whom did she help, and what impacts did she have on Union military policy? Appomattox was also named one of Civil War Monitor’s “Best Books of 2014” and one of National Public Radio’s “Six Civil War Books to Read Now.” Varon’s public presentations include book talks at the Lincoln Bicentennial in Springfield, at Gettysburg’s Civil War Institute, and on C-Span’s Book TV. Appomattox won the 2014 Library of Virginia Literary Award for Nonfiction, the 2014 Dan and Marilyn Laney Prize for Civil War History from the Austin Civil War Roundtable, and the 2014 Eugene Feit Award in Civil War Studies from the New York Military Affairs Symposium.
Southern Lady, Yankee Spy won three book awards and was named one of the “Five Best” books on the “Civil War away from the battlefield” in the Wall Street Journal.
A specialist in the Civil War era and 19 th-century South, Varon is the author of We Mean to be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (UNC Press, 1998) Southern Lady, Yankee Spy: The True Story of Elizabeth Van Lew, A Union Agent in the Heart of the Confederacy (Oxford University Press, 2003) Disunion!: The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789-1859 (UNC Press, 2008) and Appomattox: Victory, Defeat and Freedom at the End of the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2013). Williams Professor of American History at the University of Virginia. Nau III Center for Civil War History and Langbourne M.
Elizabeth Varon is Associate Director of the John L.
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