Content area
Full Text
Southern Lady, Yankee Spy: The True Story of Elizabeth Van Lew, A Union Agent in the Heart of the Confederacy. By Elizabeth Varon. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. 317. Cloth, $30.00.)
As recent scholarly attention to southern Unionism expands and deepens, we are discovering the extent to which Confederate cities were often strongholds of dissent and subversion. Just as Thomas G. Dyer used the anonymous diary of Cyrena Stone to reveal a significant circle of Unionists in Atlanta in his secret Yankees (1999), so Elizabeth Varon draws on the life and activity of the far more pro-active and better-known Elizabeth Van Lew (1818-1900) to shed considerable new light on Richmond's wartime underground movement.
A Richmond native whose parents were among the city's socially prominent slaveholders, Elizabeth, along with her mother, showed some abolitionist tendencies after her father's death in !843. Although they did not sell the family's slaves, they hired them out and allowed them to earn wages for their labor; sold property to two free black women; and hosted Fredicka Bremer, a Swedish feminist and outspoken critic of slavery, when she visited Richmond in !849. Most intriguing was the special treatment accorded one of their female...