When was mary elizabeth bowser born

Reference: EHistory. Box , Lakewood, OH , Chambers U. Ashes, Lord- But warm still from the fire that cheered us, Lighted us in this clearing where it seems Scarcely an hour ago we feasted on Burnt pig from our tormentors' in willing Bounty Mary Elizabeth remained in the Van Lew household after she was freed and worked as a paid servant.

But Mary Elizabeth dreamed of having an education, and Ms. After graduating, Mary returned to Richmond and married a freeman named William or Wilson Bowser on April 16, — just days before the Civil War began. The ceremony was highly unusual because the church parishioners were primarily white.

The couple settled just outside Richmond, and Mary continued to work in the Van Lew household. However, her views and actions such as attending to Union soldiers at Libby Prison with food and medicine earned her the enmity of her community. She wrote the information she gathered in cipher code, hid the messages in the soles of shoes or hollowed egg shells, then relayed the notes to Union officials through other agents.

Pressed for details about the espionage in the Confederate White House, the niece could provide none, noting that she was a young child during the war, never privy to clandestine information. Born into slavery sometime around , Mary Jane was briefly married to a man named Wilson Bowser, although only his surname, not hers, appears in the church annals listing their nuptials.

John T. As a historian and novelist, I understand both the power and the danger of a compelling story. In my novel The Secrets of Mary Bowser , I use the hook of the slave-turned-spy to teach readers about how activism by 19th-century African Americans shaped U.

Fictional accounts based on real people artfully alter events and invent characters as movies like BlackkKlansman and Vice demonstrate. As a novelist, I creatively departed from my rigorously researched nonfiction recounting of her life. Varon notes in Southern Lady, Yankee Spy , her biography of Van Lew, free blacks and slaves were integral participants in the pro-Union underground, although the precise contributions of individual African Americans remain difficult to discern.

Most generally our reliable news is gathered from negroes, and they certainly show wisdom, discretion and prudence which is wonderful. Regardless of whether the Van Lew women were legally able to free her prior to the Civil War, Bowser gained her freedom with the fall of the Confederacy in April , as did millions of other African Americans. She was probably only twenty-three or twenty-four years old. Whatever her relationship to Wilson Bowser might have been, their marriage apparently ended prior to the Confederate surrender , because although he remained in Richmond, she reverted to using the name Mary Richards and did not thereafter refer to herself as Mary Bowser or Mrs.

Wilson Bowser. Her commitment to the cause of freedom, however, continued. In September , she traveled north once more, giving a series of talks about her antebellum and wartime experiences. Although it was still unusual for women to give public speeches, she was perhaps inspired by a small number of women who earned both political influence and professional fees by taking to the lecture circuit.

Richards used different pseudonyms as a lecturer, likely an indication of how dangerous she perceived life to continue to be for any blacks regarded as having contributed to the Confederate defeat. Thus far, two separate lectures have been documented, the first given at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Manhattan on September 11, using the name Richmonia Richards, and the other given a week or two later at the African Methodist Episcopal Church on Bridge Street in Brooklyn, using the name Richmonia R.

It is possible that she gave other lectures in the North after the Civil War, but her use of different pseudonyms at each of the two known lectures underscores the challenge of unearthing evidence of other speeches she gave. Newspaper accounts of each event provide brief and sometimes contradictory biographical sketches. Richards clearly altered some details of her biography in this talk, playing to rhetorical conventions and calculating what would elicit the most powerful response from her audience.

The Brooklyn Eagle , a white newspaper, compared Richmonia R. Pierre to the prominent white abolitionist speaker Anna Dickinson. It includes details of how the speaker and an unnamed white woman likely Van Lew initiated exchanges with Union soldiers being held prisoner, and their involvement in the famous escape of Union soldiers from Libby Prison.

Both articles reveal how she tailored rhetorical strategies to particular audiences, and how she challenged listeners to support the cause of equal rights as an extension of the efforts that had won the Civil War and abolished slavery. Once again using the name Mary J. Richards, she traveled to various locations in Virginia and Florida in the ensuing years, working as a teacher of newly freed blacks. These are the only known surviving pieces of her correspondence. They describe her struggles as the sole teacher to seventy day students, a dozen adult night students, and Sunday school students, working with few books or other supplies, and often without being paid the salary promised by the bureau.