United States Colored Troops (USCT)

Arlington National Cemetery was segregated until 1948.  Veterans of the United States Colored Troops (USCT) were buried in Section 27.  The 175 regiments of the USCT made up some ten percent of the Union Army.  The unit seen here was stationed near Arlington. Frederick Douglass, the most prominent African-American intellectual of the Civil War era, wrote, “[He] who would be free must himself strike the blow.” The United States Colored Troops (USCT) was the answer to that call.  Some 40,000 gave their lives for the cause.  Douglass wrote, “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters U.S.; let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on the earth or under the earth which can deny that he has earned the right of citizenship in the United States.”After the Civil War, soldiers in the USCT fought in the Indian Wars in the American West. 

TheCivil War Wedding

The Civil War Wedding, an entertaining look at the customs and superstitions of weddings during the Civil War era.

Love, Sex, and Marriage in the Civil War

A brief look at love, sex, and marriage in the Civil War. The book covers courtship, marriage, birth control and pregnancy, divorce, slavery and the impact of the war on social customs.

The Union Spy Ring in Richmond: Black Spy in the Confederate White House

Elizabeth Van Lew

The White House of the Confederacy

Elizabeth Van Lew of Richmond, although from a good family, was an ardent Unionist who refused to leave town even as the Confederate government took up residence. Her continued devotion to the Union cause was considered just another of the eccentricities of the woman her neighbors came to call “Crazy Bet”. Van Lew began to accentuate her eccentricities. As she walked along the street, she mumbled and hummed to herself, head bent to one side, holding imaginary conversations. Her disguise served her well as she set up a wide reaching spy ring within the Confederate capital, and some say within the Confederate White House itself.


Van Lew began visiting Richmond’s Libby Prison, where Union POWs were imprisoned. As a humanitarian gesture, Van Lew brought food, medicine, and books to the prisoners. She came out with military information. Newly arrived Union prisoners secretly recounted the strength and dispositions of Confederate troops they had seen on their way from the front to Richmond. As the war progressed Van Lew was able to place fellow Union sympathizers within the Confederate War and Navy Departments, and regularly smuggled messages out of Richmond in hollow eggs. General Grant would later say of her efforts, “You have sent me the most valuable information received from Richmond during the war.”

Van Lew’s most daring purported accomplishment remains shrouded in mystery and involved insinuating one of her former servants, Mary Elizabeth Bowser (also known as Mary Jane Richards) into the Confederate White House. Bowser had been a slave of the Van Lew family, but Van Lew freed her and sent her North to be educated many years before the war. When Van Lew established her spy ring she asked Bowser to return and work with her for the Union. Van Lew obtained a position for Bowser as a servant in the Confederate White House through the recommendation of a "friend" who provided supplies to that household. Bowser reported conversations she overheard and the content of documents she was able to read while working in the house. Another Union spy, Thomas McNiven, noted that Bowser had a photographic memory and could report every word of the documents she saw. Stories about Bowser appeared as early as May 1900 in Richmond newspapers. In a 1910 interview with Van Lew’s niece, Bowser was revealed as being part of the spy ring. Jefferson Davis' wife, Varina, publicly denied that a black female spy could have infiltrated the Confederate White House and denied any knowledge of such a person as Mary Elizabeth Bowser. Bowser was inducted into the US Army Intelligence Hall of Fame at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, on 30 June 1995.

When the Union army captured Richmond in April 1865, Van Lew was the first person to raise the U.S. flag in the city. After the war she insisted, “I'm not a Yankee”, maintaining that she was only a good Southerner, holding to an old Virginia tradition of opposition to human bondage.

Link to: The Confederate Woman: Soldier and Spy

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The Emancipation Proclamation of 1775

Link to: Secrets of American History

On November 7, 1775 the Royal Governor of Virginia, John Murray, Earl of Dunmore issued a proclamation offering freedom to all slaves and indentured servants belonging to rebels and willing to bear arms in the service of the Crown. The Earl of Dunmore’s proclamation anticipated Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation by some four score and seven years and was done for much the same reason, to cripple the ability of rebels to resist.

Lord Dunmore armed hundreds of runaway slaves in Virginia and formed an all black unit called the “Ethiopian Regiment” which performed distinguished service. The regiment marched under the banner, “Liberty to Slaves”. An estimated twelve thousand ex-slaves served with British forces during the American Revolution in such units as the Ethiopian Regiment and the Black Pioneers.

Some four thousand blacks who had served the Crown were evacuated to England at the end of the war. The presence of the black loyalists on British soil helped swell sentiment in Britian for the end of the slave trade and laid the groundwork for British abolitionism, which eventually spread to America.



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