SHE SPIED FOR FREEDOM: Mary Richards, A Black Civil War Agent

1-246560

Tells the story of Mary Richards, a Union spy who posed as an illiterate slave during the American Civil War. Spying on the war councils of Davis and his advisers, she risked her life to send vital intelligence to the U.S. military in the ongoing battle to end slavery. Born into slavery herself but freed to be educated in the North, she was sent to Africa as a teenage missionary. On her return to the American South in wartime, she was recruited as a Union spy and sent on her dangerous mission to the 'Confederate White House.' Focuses on Richards's benefactor and spymaster, Elizabeth Van Lew; her fellow agents; her three husbands; and those, like Jefferson Davis and his wife, whom she dealt with in the camp of the enemy.