A Black Union Spy in the Confederate White House Almost Burned It Down In Her Escape

Mary Jane Richards was born into slavery as a young girl, but by the time she started working at the White House of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia, she was just posing as one. With a photographic memory and the ability to remember long conversations in passing, she made an excellent spy.

As a servant to Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, she spent nearly the entire Civil War passing information to a network of other Union spies throughout the rebel capital. Placing her at the highest level of the enemy was an intelligence coup unrivaled until World War II, but it nearly cost her life. She set fire to the building to make her escape.

Born into slavery around 1840, she was emancipated by the abolitionist Van Lew family of Richmond. Elizabeth "Bet" Van Lew became close friends with Richards and sent her to school at Princeton. Later, Richards went overseas to Liberia as a missionary. Though it was technically illegal for her to come back to Virginia after being educated in the North, she returned anyway, and not a moment too soon.

Not long after returning to Richmond, Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in South Carolina. The South was in full rebellion against the United States. Captured Union soldiers were imprisoned, starved and shot by their rebel jailers. Union sympathizers, especially Black activists, could expect beatings, torture and death. The people of Virginia, even civilians, were violently anti-Union.

That is, the people except for Van Lew and the underground of secret Union sympathizers and informants. Longtime abolitionists, the family felt their duty to work against the rebellion and help end slavery, so when Richmond was named the Confederate capital in 1861, Van Lew stayed put. Jefferson Davis and his family moved into the Confederate White House in Richmond in August 1861.

Not long after the Davis family moved to Richmond, Elizabeth Van Lew offered her slave, Ellen Bond, as a house servant to the first lady of the Confederacy, Varina Davis. Ellen Bond was illiterate and slow, but reliable. She was also the highly educated and experienced Mary Richards in disguise, so when Davis accepted, the Union spy network suddenly had an operative with a photographic memory listening to the enemy's plans.

Bet Van Lew became one of the most important sources of information from inside the Confederacy, and she was mentioned specifically by Union generals Benjamin Butler, Ulysses S. Grant and George Sharpe. Much of the information she gleaned came from the Black population of Richmond, and none more important than Mary Richards.

Richards had various means of communicating with Van Lew. Some say that when Richards had important information to pass, she would hang red clothes to dry with the whites. It's said she would sew coded messages inside Varina Davis' clothes when sending them out for alterations. All the information was passed to the Union through Van Lew.

Many details remain murky about Richards' efforts during the war, which is unsurprising for such a high-placed spy, an effort to conceal her identity.

In January 1865, Confederates arrested a spy in Van Lew's ring, a baker who corresponded with Richards. Knowing her cover was likely blown, she set fire to the Confederate White House and made her way north in a truck bed under a pile of horse manure. Richards's exploits went unheralded until 1900, when Bet Van Lew was on her deathbed.

Without naming Richards, she told the story of Jefferson Davis' maid, who fed her information about Confederate plans. Van Lew's niece later confirmed it was Richards inside the mansion. Harper's Magazine told the story in a 1911 publication, but little was known about Richards or her life, as efforts to hide her identity resulted in the destruction of a lot of her biographic information.

It's widely believed that Richards told her story using the pen name Richmonia Richards following the war and taught classes for the Freedmen's Bureau for newly freed former slaves in Virginia, Florida and Georgia. She also spoke out about the violence of racism, briefly marrying John Denman (a white man) while in Georgia. The last historical record of Richards is a letter she sent to Van Lew in 1870, saying she became a seamstress in New York City.

In recognition of her intelligence contributions, Richards was inducted into the U.S. Army Intelligence Hall of Fame at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, in 1995.

-- Blake Stilwell can be reached at blake.stilwell@military.com. He can also be found on Twitter @blakestilwell or on LinkedIn.

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