#aboltionists

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March is Women’s History Month

Mary Elizabeth Bowser-Freed Slave, Union Spy, and Abolitionist

Mary Elizabeth Bowser was born Mary Jane Richards on May 17, 1846, near Richmond, Virginia.  She was born a slave to the Van Lew family, Eliza Baker and John Van Lew, of Richmond, Virginia.

Records show that Mary was baptized at St. John’s Church, the white congregation of the Van Lew family, as opposed to the First African Baptist Church in Richmond. This fact proves that Mary was treated differently by other slaves, by the Van Lew family from birth.

When she was of age, Eliza and John’s daughter, Elizabeth, sent Mary north to get an education. In 1885, she sent her to Liberia for missionary work and she did not return to the Van Lew home until 1860 again.

A few days after the battle of Fort Sumter, Mary married Wilson Bowser on April 16, 1861, in the same church she was baptized in.  The Civil War had just begun.

During the war, Mary was instrumental in helping Elizabeth with her spy operation and aided her in helping escaped slaves take refuge in the Van Lew mansion.  Mary, as well as many of the slaves freed by the Van Lew family, completed dangerous missions to get information to General Grant about the movements of the Confederate army. Mary even managed to obtain a position as a servant in the household of Jefferson and Varina Davis. She worked directly for Varina Davis and managed to learn about important strategies and plans of the Confederate government.

Soon after the war, Mary Bowser worked as a teacher to freed slaves in Richmond and, in 1867, founded her own school in Georgia.  She alone taught young children and adults, all former slaves, to read and write.

A letter surviving with the date, June 1867, stated her new name as Mary Garvin and the intention that she would be joining her new husband in the West Indies.

The year of her death is unknown, but a memorial plot was placed in her memory at Woodland Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia. It honors her memory as an agent who helped saved the Union during the Civil War.  The stone reads, “Mary Elizabeth Bowser, Born 1840, Union Military Intelligence Agent, She risked her life and liberty so that all could know freedom.” 

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Juneteenth 2021

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Frederick Douglass-”Life and Times”-“The Black Man at the White House” (Part 1)

“My efforts to secure just and fair treatment for the colored soldiers did not stop at letters and speeches. At the suggestion of my friend, Major Stearns, to whom the foregoing letter was addressed, I was induced to go to Washington and lay the complaints of my people before President Lincoln and the Secretary of War and to urge upon them such action as should secure to the colored troops then fighting for the country a reasonable degree of fair play. I need not say that at the time I undertook this mission it required much more nerve than a similar one would require now. The distance then between the black man and the white American citizen was immeasurable. I was an ex-slave, identified with a despised race, and yet I was to meet the most exalted person in this great republic.

It was altogether an unwelcome duty, and one from which I would gladly have been excused. I could not know what kind of a reception would be accorded me. I might be told to go home and mind my business, and leave such questions as I had come to discuss to be managed by the men wisely chosen by the American people to deal with them. Or I might be refused an interview altogether.”

-Frederick Douglass, “Life and Times”-”Secession and War”, August 1, 1863 (Rochester, NY)

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“The early years of my life, which were spent in the little cabin, were not very different from those of thousands of other slaves. My mother, of course, had little time in which to give attention to the training of her children during the day. She snatched a few moments for our care in the early morning before her work began, and at night after the day’s work was done. One of my earliest recollections is that of my mother cooking a chicken late at night, and awakening her children for the purpose of feeding them. How or where she got it I do not know. I presume, however, it was procured from our owner’s farm. Some people may call this theft. If such a thing were to happen now, I should condemn it as theft myself. But taking place at the time it did, and for the reason that it did, no one could ever make me believe that my mother was guilty of thieving.

She was simply a victim of the system of slavery. I cannot remember having slept in a bed until after our family was declared free by the Emancipation Proclamation. Three children--John, my older brother, Amanda, my sister and myself--had a pallet on the dirt floor, or, to be more correct, we slept in and on a bundle of filthy rags laid upon the dirt floor.”

-Booker T. Washington, “Up from Slavery”, 1901

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5th Massachusetts Colored Volunteer Cavalry-Union Army, Civil War

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