“Fighting Memory: What We’re Still Learning about Race, Gender, and the Civil War Lois Leveen, University of California Los Angeles Summersell Lecture Series

One of the most fun things about going around giving talks is hearing old friends introduce you. I did not know is that alt-academic till just now I thought I was an erst academic, like erstwhile academic. Thank you, Lynn, for the lovely introduction and for having me.

So, I’m going to do a talk in three parts today. The first part, I’m going to just give you some background on Mary Bowser. In the second part I'm going to talk about using fiction as a way to teach history with some specific examples, and in the third part, I’m going to reflect on what happens when you do that. How many of you before seeing the poster or hearing about this talk had ever heard of Mary Bowser? The usual number. So, when I was in graduate school working on my dissertation, there was this book that had just come out The Shining Thread of Hope: A History of Black Women in America, and in this book, which is about 300 pages long, there are maybe three or four paragraphs about Mary Bowser. From those paragraphs I learned that Mary Bowser was born into slavery in Richmond, Virginia; she was freed by Bette Van Lew, the daughter of the family that owned her, and sent to the north to be educated; and she later made the rather unusual choice of returning to the south, where during the Civil War, she and Bette worked together in a spy ring for the union. And Mary was spying by pretending to be a slave in the Confederate White House. And it kind of blew my mind for several reasons.

One was Mary's immense bravery. Another was the fact that I had never heard of her, as clearly many have not. The fascinating idea that a slave could be a particularly effective spy. If you think about it, life in slavery depends on your ability to surreptitiously, to be what people say you are not and to not be what they say you are, right? You are regarded as property, but you're actually a person, that you are told there are things you have to do that you might want to avoid doing. You are told there are things that you are not allowed to do, but you are always finding ways to do. And so in some ways, living surreptitiously as a slave may have prepared somebody for what you need to do to be successful spy. Most of all, I think the new way was the way that Mary Bowser challenged the basic assumption at the heart of slavery, that blacks weren’t really human. They were like oxen or horse. You could buy them and sell them and work them because they weren't human, and they weren’t human because they didn't have intelligence. And how did she challenge this. She plays to that stereotype. She goes someplace, and nobody expects her to have intelligence, and that's how she's able to become a spy, showing the value of black intelligence in both senses of the term if you think about intelligence and espionage.

So I was really interested in that story. So I set out to learn as much as I could about Mary Bowser, mostly looking in Richmond. I don’t know if any of you have ever been to Richmond, but you may know that part of the city is called Church Hill. It named for St. John's church. It’s very important in American history because the phrase “give me liberty or give me death” was uttered here, as a Revolutionary war era time, but this is the church that the Van Lew family went to. Mary was first baptized in this church and then later as an adult married in this church, so we know that from the church records. It’s extremely unusual for any black person to be baptized or married in this church, and even other Van Lew slaves were not baptized or married in this church. So we know that she was very special to the Van Lews, and this building still exists. And you can go and stand in it, and I know what day she was there because of the church records. But across the street from the church was the Van Lew mansion. She would have lived there. She would have worked there in her childhood and probably for at least part of the time when she

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“Fighting Memory: What We’re Still Learning about Race, Gender, and the Civil War Lois Leveen, University of California Los Angeles Summersell Lecture Series returned to the South after living in the north. Van Lew mansion you cannot go visit because, when the city of Richmond needed to tear down a house in what was then a very fancy neighborhood to build the school, they chose the one that had been owned by Van Lews because, by that point in the 1920s, they knew that Bette Van Lew had been spying for the union, and she was not the most beloved figure in Richmond at that time. So you can’t go to the house, but I was able to find some old insurance records that describe the floor plan of the house. So I had some sense of the indoor space of house. Now where you can go is the White House of the Confederacy where Mary would have been pretending to be a slave and actually being a spy. It's like we just got to Oz. It is preserved in technicolor perfection, and the rooms all look as they did in that time period. We will return to the White House of the Confederacy at the end of the talk, but this, at least I could imagine, walking through this space pretending to be a slave, working as a slave, being worked as a slave, really being a spy knowing between, after the Revolutionary War, the next time somebody was executed for espionage in the United States was in Richmond during the Civil War. So it was clear that if Mary had been suspected, her life probably would've been on the line.

And that's all I could find out. There were rumors that, when she was sent to the North, did she go to school in Philadelphia, maybe in Princeton, New Jersey. There were these rumors that she had a photographic memory, which I think is interesting term to use if you know what 19th century photography looked like, whether that was really that useful, but that was really about it. And I’ve since learned more about her, and I’ll touch on that in a little bit. And you're welcome to ask me more during the Q&A. That's not a lot of information. It would be very bad news if I wanted to write a biography, but as a novelist, this was fantastic news. And I never thought I was going to be a novelist until I came across this story, but I felt like this was something that, for those of you who are studying about race and slavery in the United States, and particularly the relationship between whites and blacks who were working together to end slavery, this is a fascinating topic, and I thought more people would want to know about it, including people who are never going to take a college class from me or who wouldn’t read an academic article that I might write. This would be a great way to bring this story forward.

So, let me tell you a little bit about how that happens. The novel I decided to structure into three sections doesn't start the Civil War. It starts with Mary's childhood in slavery, in part because I wanted to show the cost of freedom. When we talk about slavery, the assumption is, well, if you were slave you wanted to be free, but often seizing your freedom meant leaving everyone and everything you knew behind. What would it be like to give your family and your community and go someplace you had never seen, with people you didn’t know anybody? That was the cost of freedom, and I wanted to make back there in the first section of the novel.

The second section the novel is in Philadelphia, and that kind of does two things thematically. First, it reminds us that being free is not the same as being equal, that even in Philadelphia, a Quaker city, which we think of as one of the most liberal on race issues in the 19th century, there was no slavery there, but discrimination in housing, in education, and employment, even in who could rid public transit was completely legal. So what would it be like to arrive and think you are finally getting everything you want and realize the reality is like? The other thing that I wanted to do in the Philadelphia section was to think about why somebody would give up their freedom to

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“Fighting Memory: What We’re Still Learning about Race, Gender, and the Civil War Lois Leveen, University of California Los Angeles Summersell Lecture Series go back into slavery. Here's a bit of the spoiler alert. The North wins, and slavery ends. We know that, but obviously at the time nobody did. So if Mary Bowser was going to walk back into slavery, she wasn't sure what was going to happen, and you probably all have a cause you care about. It might be the environment. It might be income inequality. It might be a disease that affects a family member. If somebody said to you, well, you have opportunity to do something that would really help cause, and in order to do that, you need to give up everyone you know, everything you own. You have to go someplace where you absolutely no legal rights. We don’t know how long that will be fore, and we don’t know if it's really going to change anything or not. Would you sign up? But essentially, for Mary Bowser that would have been the choice that she was making, and I wanted to explore that in Philadelphia section.

And then the final section of the novel comes back to the cost of freedom, writ large because it is set during the Civil War back in Richmond where we started, and this is a Civil War novel with essentially no battle scenes in it. But it does show what the war was like on the home front, including in the Confederate capital where there were food riots and food shortages, where there were epidemics, where there was all sorts of hardship, and where, to come back to Lynn’s point, probably about 30% of the population of Richmond during the war was pro-union. And I'm not talking about the black population; I’m talking about the white population of Richmond. So this is a very interesting place to have the Confederate capital, and if you're interested in that I'll talk more about it during Q&A if folks want to ask about it.

Okay, so I've got this novel I want to write. I have sort of the structure, even thought there is not much to know about Mary Bowser that I can find about that time, I depend really heavily on historical research, and I want to take some time to just give a few examples. This is the city of Richmond. I've written a novel about slavery without a single plantation because Mary Bowser grew up in Richmond. Richmond was urban and industrialized, and most of the slaves there were skilled laborers. In fact, many of them were hired out slaves, meaning that the families that owned them, if you think about how the North American continent gets settled by Europeans starts at the coast and moves in, right? So in coastal Virginia, you have families that have owned plantations for generations. They own a lot of people who’ve been working those plantations for generations, but that land is very overworked. They have more slaves than they have land to use those slaves to work, so what they did is they contract out those slaves to people in Richmond. If you own a factory in Richmond, for example, you need labor. Slaves who were hired out were living far from their owners. They might, in fact, be negotiating who they were working for because in January, the first week of the year, every year would be when people were negotiating hiring out contracts, and often the slaves would be in the streets negotiating for themselves. They knew they had to send X number of dollars back to their owners, but they might be able to say, “Oh, I hear so and so is good to work for. So and so’s going to pay me a little more, so I would be able to keep a little bit more.” They would be living far from their owners often in the homes of free blacks because, as skilled laborers they might also be literate because, although it is illegal to teach a slave to read this time period, people will always do what is in their own advantage. And if I own a store and I want my slave who’s working my store to be able to tally accounts, I’m going to teach my slave mathematics, teach him how to write down numbers because that's to my advantage.

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“Fighting Memory: What We’re Still Learning about Race, Gender, and the Civil War Lois Leveen, University of California Los Angeles Summersell Lecture Series

I’ve sort of skipped ahead because I want to talk a little bit about the black population. There’s a substantial free black population in Richmond, probably one out of every five African-Americans in the city was free. Now, if you are enslaved on plantation, you probably never saw free black person. One out of five people might own their own business. They might own their own home. I wouldn't say that they were necessarily middle-class. There were plenty of regulations to keep them from getting too successful economically, but you knew people who were free. You were around people who were free all the time, and that's a very different experience. In fact, there might be families who are part free and part slave. This photo that is up there now is actually a close-up of this picture, and that very large building there is the first African Baptist Church, which was a black church in Richmond. It was started when the first Baptist Church members decided that they were done praying next to black people The whites wanted to have a separate church. There response was this church, but what it meant was that there was an all-black church. As you can see the size of the building is not small. The congregation before the Civil War numbered 3000. Now, have any of you ever been in a 3000 person church today? We call that a mega church now, right? Imagine in a place where like it's illegal for five black people to get together that there was a church where 3000 blacks to come in meeting for worship. The minister is a white man, and he is a slave owner. But he also has written a treatise on the importance of, not just the importance, but he’s written a treatise so that blacks can use it to learn how to read because, though it is illegal in the state of Virginia, he believes the most important thing you can do is read the Bible. And that has to be accessible to anyone. So there are a lot of contradictions about race in America, Richmond in some ways is a real crucible for that.

And so again, being enslaved in this setting is very different than being a slave on a plantation, and yet, you are still a slave. There are slave markets all over Richmond. Every single dog on this map is a place where slaves were bought and sold in the city of Richmond. So, as you can see, it permeated the streets. Everyone in the city knew that. It was a $4 million, in 1860, a year market, second probably only to New Orleans in terms of how big it was economically. So you have these contradictions and that even though you might have the relative freedom, relative liberty, I guess I should say, the relative liberty of being hired out, being far from your owner, being able to negotiate who you work for year-by-year, you still knew that any day you could be are sold, as could members of your family.

I find all this very fascinating, but how do I make it part of Mary's story? I get to invent her family as we don't have any definitive evidence about her family, so in my invented world, she and her mother are both owned by the Van Lews. They are domestic servants. There are other domestic servants in the household as well. Her father is a skilled laborer who was originally hired out, and by this time has been bought and is now owned by a Richmond blacksmith. He lives in part of a cabin that is owned by, inhabited by a free black family. Her mother, now I wanted make sure readers understood that like slave is not one big homogeneous category. Like any other group of people, there were cultural differences. There were personality differences, and I use her parents to kind of show that. Her mother, I decided, would be a slave from New York. Now, part of the reason is that I knew that Bette Van Lew’s father was from New York, and so he might have, as people did, been given a gift of a slave when he moved to Richmond, and that's how her mother arrives in Richmond. I want to be from New York because I wanted people to remember that well into the 19th century there were slaves, not just in border states, but slavery was legal in what we

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“Fighting Memory: What We’re Still Learning about Race, Gender, and the Civil War Lois Leveen, University of California Los Angeles Summersell Lecture Series can think of a solidly northern states well into the 19th century. It also means that her mother's literate, which was much more common among slaves from New York. Her father is from Tidewater, Virginia, so they have very different experiences of slavery and very different personalities. I am from New York. I know that I'm not like my friends from Virginia. They would be happy to say that they are not like Lois of New York.

So I want to think about what would it be like to live this way, to see your father only one day a week. What would it be like as parents to try and make a family in slavery. How can you protect a child when you are so vulnerable yourself? And how can I make readers understand the distinctions of urban slavery without making them think like “Oh, well, urban slaves didn't have it so bad.” So I kind of wanted to bring all of that out, and I'm going to read one scene as an example that. This is a scene pretty early in the novel. You’re going to meet four key characters. You’re going to meet Mary, and its first-person fiction so she’s going to get to tell the story. She's very young at this point. You’re going to meet her mother from New York, who she calls mama and whom the Van Lews call Aunt Minnie, and you're going to meet Mistress Van Lew, the household head because the master has been dead for a few years, and you’re going to meet Bette. None of the characters, including Bette, know this, but she will eventually free Mary, and they will be part of the spy ring. You know, but they don’t. Keep an eye on Bette. She's trying to the right thing. Decide for yourself whether she is or not. And think about, I do give Mary the amazing memory, though I don’t call it photographic, that she’s rumored to have. It’s always nice to give your character a superpower. And think about those two ideas. One is what I said about slaves living surreptitiously and how that might help somebody eventually if they become a spy, and also think about this. Every child wants to be special, and every parent wants to believe that the child is special. But when you're enslaved, being special is a very dangerous thing.

So, here goes. When early spring warmed the Virginia morning, Mistress Van Lew and Miss Bette took their breakfast on the back veranda. The garden just past the house, the fruit arbor that slope to the edge of the property, and the view of Richmond and the James River beyond were also pretty that looking out at them seemed like an hazy slumber dream, until a dull ache in my overworked arms roused me for my reverie. As I found the first flies of the season for the Van Lews, the buzzed around my head instead. I didn't dare swat them away. I’ve been told enough times not to wriggle or shift during these meals, to stand perfectly still except for the movement of my arms. No motion allowed except what served the Van Lews. To distract myself, I listened as Miss Bet read to her mother from the newspaper. Most days she chose dull stories about the Virginia legislature or President Polk, but this morning, she read the report of the dashing swindler who posed as a gentleman to rob travelers on the train between Richmond and Washington. Such a story set my eight-year-old self wide-eyed with wonder, and I hung onto every word. More than that, I remembered every word. This was my solitary amusement, listening as grown-ups spoke and repeating their conversations to myself while I was working. Rehearsing the tale of the train robber in my head, made the rest of the Van Lews breakfast hour pass quickly, and before I knew it, Mistress Van Lew announced she was ready to take her morning stroll about the arbor. As Miss Bet led her mother down the steps to the garden, mama gathered the breakfast things onto the silver serving tray. I hung the fan in its place behind one of the white columns that rose two stories to the veranda roof. Clearing the newssheet from the table, I began to recite the wonderful story out loud. The crash of china startled me. Mama was not a clumsy woman, never

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“Fighting Memory: What We’re Still Learning about Race, Gender, and the Civil War Lois Leveen, University of California Los Angeles Summersell Lecture Series one to drop a cup and saucer. Perhaps it was a trick of the heat, but as I turned to look her way, it seemed the whole world stood still, except for me and the buzzing flies. And then all at once, Mistress Van Lew stormed back up the steps, “Aunt Minnie, we are not in New York. You know the laws of Virginia, and we have made our wishes very clear on this matter. You are not to teach the child to read. Mama fell to her knees.” “Ma’am, I never taught her to read. I swear to Jesus I didn’t. Mistress Van Lew knew mama wasn’t one to swear to Jesus falsely.” Our irate mistress turned to her daughter. “Bette, this abolitionist nonsense of yours has gone too far. How you have managed it I do not know, but now at least you see your feet and the servant is poorly placed. The girl may know how to read, but she does not know enough to keep your secrets. Perhaps sending Mary to Lumpkins Alley will teach you both a lesson.” Fear cramped my stomach catching its echo in mama’s low moan. White Richmond called the public whipping post Lumpkin's Alley after the slave auction house next door, but to colored it folks it was Devil’s half-acre, the most dreaded spot in the whole city. Miss Bet jutted out her chin, “I’m not sorry to see slave learn. This is as strange to me as it is to you. If you have a child went to punish me for something I haven't done, you will only prove that slavery is every bit as evil as I believe it to be.” Mistress Van Lew whirled at me, cracking a hard slap against my cheek. I felt the sudden sting and knew it was a pale promise of the beating I’d get at the whipping post. “Who taught you to read, child? I will stand no lies.” “No one, ma’am. I don't know how to read.” Mama was so near, yet I sensed she didn't dare reach out to comfort me that I needed to say more to make Mistress Van Lew leave us be. “Mrs. Bette read the story to you. I only remembered what she said.” Mistress Van Lew snatched the newssheet from my hand and turned to her daughter. “Tell us now without the paper what Miss Bet read, and so I repeated the story as Miss Bet followed along with the news sheet. After only a few sentences, she burst out, “Mother, this is remarkable. The child recites the article word for word. She wasn’t reading at all. Stranger than that, she can recall exactly what she hears.” Mistress Van Lew spent a long moment considering what this meant. Finally, she looked from me to mama to Miss Bet. “No one is to know of this. Do I make myself clear to all of you? This is a dangerous thing. Do not speak of it again.” She went into the mansion, leaving each of us to make our own sense of what I’d done. Despite the law and Mistress Van Lew’s prohibition, after that morning on the veranda, mama set time aside every Sunday for my lessons. She traced out a few words in the ashes of Papa’s fireplace. Keeping her voice low, she always began, “This being Virginia, I sure can’t teach a slave what this writing means,” and then she’d finish by saying what she’d written. It didn't take any more instruction than that for me to learn to read and write. Miss Bet, eager to flout her mother, took her own interest to me. As I grew older, she pressed books from her father's library to mama, nodding my way. Now and again, she even set me down for an arithmetic lesson while the rest of her family was out, but my memory for Mistress Van Lew’s anger was just as keen as my memory for what I heard and read. I hated her for it until I realized the lesson she taught me was as valuable as any of mama’s. A slave best keep her talents hidden, feigned ignorance being the greatest intelligence in the topsy-turvy house of bondage.

I’ll cram a lot in. And also I set you up because I said every child wants to be special, and every parent wants their child to be special. So I hope that I gave you a way to identify and to feel like, oh yeah, this can feel immediate. This can feel like not something that happened long ago to people I've nothing in common with but to people I might feel some kinship with.

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“Fighting Memory: What We’re Still Learning about Race, Gender, and the Civil War Lois Leveen, University of California Los Angeles Summersell Lecture Series

So the first section, as I said, is set in Richmond. The second section takes us to Philadelphia and what life is like in a free black community there. Now, even if you know nothing about American history, if you ever had to read any Charles Dickens, you know 19th century cities were miserable places. There were slums. There were poor people who were living in horrid, horrid, horrid conditions. Now, that was true for white as well as black poor people in Philadelphia, but in Philadelphia, there was also a vibrant black community. And many of the characters from the novel, whether the readers know it or not, are real people. So there are women like Sarah Mapps Douglass and Grace Douglass who were both schoolteachers. Margaret Fortin, who was from a family prominent abolitionists. Robert Purvis was a prominent abolitionist, and this man David Bustill Bowser, who was a political activist but also a painter, and one of the things that he painted was he designed a bunch of the flags for the U.S. CT, the United States colored trips, which were where, once blacks were allowed to serve in the Union army, they served, including this flag. Sic Semper Tyrannis, which means, does anybody know? Thus always to tyrants. It is a quote from Julius Caesar. Everybody in the state of Virginia would have known it because of the Virginia state motto, and as you can imagine the originals of all of David Bustill Bowser’s flags have been destroyed. There are photographs, black-and-white photographs, of some of them, though not all of them. We actually don't know how many he designed, and this is used by a Civil War reenacting group that reenacts this troupe. And they were kind enough to let me use the image. You can imagine whether you were white or black, slave or free, pro-Union or pro-Confederate, that when the city of Richmond fell to the Union army and one of the first regiments that marched into the city was US ET 22nd, this flag, seeing black men in uniform marching under this flag, must have made rather an impression on the people of Richmond.

I want to return to one of the questions that I posed earlier, which is what would make Mary give up her freedom and risk her life for a war that she did not know would end slavery? And I want to also do this to show how I draw on history, even historical incidents, historical figures, even historical documents, and then use them in a way that is about fiction and creative writing. Anybody know who are looking at? John Brown, and what’s he doing? He’s trying to take Harpers Ferry. So, John Brown had this idea. He was a northern abolitionist. He already had some exciting times in Kansas, and he decided that he was going to take a group of white and black followers into what was the state of Virginia and to the federal armory. They were going to break in, take the munitions at the federal armory, arm the slaves and leave with what would've been the largest slave uprising in American history. Things do not work out as John Brown might have hoped. They are caught pretty quickly, and he is eventually tried and executed. Anybody know who this guy is? And I have to say, I’ve given this talk to literally thousands of people and two have ever known. Dangerfield Newby. That is correct. Now I’m raising it to three. Dangerfield Newby was a black man who was part of the raid on Harpers Ferry, so he was with John Brown. And one of the things, or some of the things, we know about Dangerfield Newby we know because when he died they found on his body letters from his wife Harriet Newby, who was enslaved, and those letters, along with lots of other primary documents, letters, journal entries, things like that from this time period are collected in this wonderful book We Are Your Sisters, which is edited by Dorothy Sterling.

So, I’m going to read you a scene in which you’re going to meet David Bustill Bowser, you’re going to hear about Dangerfield Newby, and you’re going to hear quotes from those letters,

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“Fighting Memory: What We’re Still Learning about Race, Gender, and the Civil War Lois Leveen, University of California Los Angeles Summersell Lecture Series except every fact in the scene is true, except that I made up exactly how you’re hearing about it. So what's going on? At this point in the novel, Mary has been in the north for about 10 years. She is with her best friend Hattie, who, although they are BFFs, they don't have everything in common. Hattie is also African-American, but she was born in freedom, so she has not had the experience of slavery that Mary has. She lives with her family, whereas Mary, when she got her freedom, had to leave her family behind. This scene takes place on the morning that John Brown is about to be executed, and people in Philadelphia had church services on that day sort of in his honor, knowing what was happening in Virginia. So they are at a black church on that morning, and if you have ever been to a black church, you know that the thing that happens in black churches is some serious preaching. So in the novel there are several sermons that take place in the scene, and I’m just going to read you one of them. And it’s going to be delivered by David Bustill Bowser. He didn't give this sermon. I wrote it. I made it up. Every fact in it is true, and I feel like if I ever meet David Bustill Bowser’s spirit, he will, knowing what I know about his politics, not be upset that I put these words into his mouth. But every single thing that he says in the sermon is true. And this is, I should warn you, some pretty brutal stuff, and that's because slavery was a really brutal institution. But it can be a little hard to hear. You’ll hear David Bustill Bowser speaking most of the time, and then he is going to quote from the letters, and then at the end it’s going to switch over, and you're going to hear Mary, thinking to herself about what she's just heard. And remember, why is she going to give up her freedom to go back to the South.

I’m not a minister, and I'm not here to mourn John Brown. I want to speak today of another man, a Negro man, a man whose mother was a slave and whose father was her master, a man whose father freed his own slave children but only after he lived a lifetime on their labor, only after his son was grown to manhood and married to slave woman, property of another master. This man took the freedom his slaveholding father gave him, and what did he do with it? He set out to buy his wife and child. I say wife, though for a slave there is no legal marriage, no bond the slaveowner is lawfully bound to respect. I say child, though this man had more than one. He and his wife six precious children, all in slavery, but the wife's owner said he would sell him one, the youngest, and the wife herself for no less than $1000 cash. What is it for a Negro who can earn so little of the jobs we are suffered to have to save $1000? It is years and it is tears, but this man did it. He returned to his wife's owner and handed him the money. The owner counted out, felt it in his hand, and said, “it is not enough.” This owner of human flesh and blood held the wages of a loving husband's labor and said, “I told you $1000, but now I believe I can make $1500 if I sell them to a trader, so that is what I will do.” This colored man went off the see if he could make another $500, half again as much to satisfy the white man who called himself the owner of this colored man's wife, and all the while, the wife in slavery kept writing to her husband. “Dear husband, I want you to buy me as soon as possible, for if you do not get me, somebody else will. It is said master is in want of money. If so, I know not what time he might sell me and that all my bright hopes of the future are blasted, for there has been one might hope to cheer me in all my troubles. That has been to be with you. Oh, dear Dangerfield, come this fall without fail. Money or no money, I want to see you so much. That is the one bright hope I have before me.” So the husband went back, not with money but with a gun, not by himself but with John Brown, not to take his wife and one child but his wife and all six children. John Brown set out to free the unknown mass of slaves. Dangerfield Newby set out to free his own family, and it was Newby they shot down first. The mad dogs of Virginia were not satisfied to shoot Dangerfield Newby

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“Fighting Memory: What We’re Still Learning about Race, Gender, and the Civil War Lois Leveen, University of California Los Angeles Summersell Lecture Series with a bullet. They shot him with a railroad spike, splitting his throat from ear to ear. They were not satisfied to shoot him dead but ran to the body and stabbed it over and over again with rusty knives. They were not satisfied to stab a corpse, but cut it to pieces hacking off bits of the man's ears, his fingers, his flesh. They were not satisfied to mutilate the corpse themselves but left it in the street that hogs might feed upon it. These are the good people of Harpers Ferry of Virginia of the United States. And oh yes, they found Harriet Newby’s letters on her husband's body, and they brought them to the man who called himself Harriet’s owner. When he read them he sold Harriet south, maybe to Louisiana, maybe to Alabama. We do not know, but wherever she is, Harriet knows and we know too, there is no one left to love and rescue Dangerfield Newby’s wife and children unless we do it ourselves. A friend of ours has lately been to Virginia. They are selling the railroad spikes, along with pieces of what they say are Dangerfield Newby as souvenirs. He brought this stake to me that I might feel the weight of the thing that killed Dangerfield Newby, but this is not the thing that killed Newby. It is slavery and greed and race prejudice that killed Newby, and it will kill us too if it gets the chance. John Brown dies this morning, but Dangerfield Newby is already dead. John Brown did a great thing in the name of justice, but Dangerfield Newby did as great a thing in the name of love. Dangerfield Newby is a hero of our own. It is his death we must mourn and must honor and must be ready to die ourselves if need be.”

Now it goes into Mary’s thoughts. “I hadn't heard about Dangerfield Newby before then, and Mr. Bowser’s preaching on him hit me strong. I was sad and angry and proud all at once. Teary eyes and pounding heart and a mouth torn between resolution and a frown, Harriet Newby, Papa, Dangerfield Newby, me, everything seemed all tangled together. Hattie laid her hand on mine. Though her touch steadied me, I felt more distant from her than I ever had. She sat with husband, father, sisters, and brothers-in-law—a whole family together. Nieces and nephews kept home, protected from what they might hear at the service, but for my family, there had never been a together, never been a protected, for Newby’s family neither. That’s why Mr. Bowser's words resounded for me especially. They made me ask myself what I was ready to do.

So, thus far I’ve talked a little bit about history and tried to give some of the examples of how things come into the novel, and although I'm here purportedly to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, it occurs to me that I’m actually not going to read from the Civil War section of the novel because I wanted to take a little time to kind of reflect on this practice that I’ve engaged in, of using fiction to tell history. And one of the things that almost always happens when I'm talking about this book or readers will contact me and people will ask why haven’t I ever heard of Mary Bowser, to which I often respond, can you name five African-Americans who helped end slavery in this country? And in an audience where somebody has guessed Dangerfield Newbie, I feel like we might do better than most. But let’s try it, and maybe I'll ask the faculty to refrain from speaking. Who can you give me, African-Americans who helped end slavery in this country? Harriet Tubman. Thank you. That’s usually one of two, and it’s like family feud. And the other big one that everybody knows is? Frederick Douglas. And can you give me three more? I just told you the names of some. So this is an astonishing thing, right? We all study the Civil War. We all study slavery. We all study the end of slavery. We study it in maybe even an elementary school, certainly in junior high or high school, probably again in college, and yet we seem to think that one day Abraham Lincoln woke up and thought, “Slavery? That’s not so good. I'll end it.” The ending slavery in the United States took hundreds of years to achieve with thousands of

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“Fighting Memory: What We’re Still Learning about Race, Gender, and the Civil War Lois Leveen, University of California Los Angeles Summersell Lecture Series people, white and black, working to end it, North and South, working to end it in all sorts of ways, and yet, we really think about that. We don't know it. We don't feel like it's important. I hesitate to say if I asked if you could mean five Civil War generals how well we could do with the answer to that question.

So, one of the things that I learned in talking about this book now—it's been three years almost— all over the United States and in some other countries as well, but particularly in the U.S., is that in the United States, there is a hunger for intellectual engagement. You all are at the University. You do not have this problem, but most Americans, once they are in their regular adult lives have what I would think of as extracurricular opportunities to be creative, right? I sing in the church choir. I'm taking a watercolor painting class, right? We can find alternative ways to be creative, but to be intellectually engaged as a person who’s not in school is very hard. And book clubs and libraries are actually one of the places that this is happening, and when I go places, people ask me all sorts of questions. I would give a talk like this, and people asked me about Thomas Jefferson, and people asked me about Barack Obama. I could be talking audiences that were predominately white. I could be talking to audiences that were predominantly African-American. People were really interested in talking about all sorts of aspects of race in American history and other parts of American history, and this was kind of fascinating to me. Perhaps one of the most amazing moments, I was speaking of Richmond at the site of that public whipping post that is mentioned. It was the 150th anniversary commemoration, and nice white woman, probably about 60, stopped me, and she said, “Oh, I love your book.” “Thank you, always nice to hear.” “My book club is reading it.” “Thank you, love book clubs.” “I haven’t finished it because we’re meeting on Thursday, but I'll finish it by Thursday.” “That’s fine. I’m not going to give the plot away. Slavery ends.” Then she said, “And also, I’m very glad to know this because I’m an officer of our local UDC chapter, and were doing a program on spies in January, and now we’ll be able to include Mary Bowser. Now, as you may know, though, when I tell this to an audience in the North. They never do. The UDC is the United Daughters of the Confederacy. I had not expected that the United Daughters of the Confederacy would be moved by Mary’s story, but that was also . . . you know, none of us chose who are ancestors. We’re not responsible for who are ancestors were, so this was really kind of an amazing thing for me.

And I think there's a larger lesson here. I will say to the professors in the room, whatever field you work in, is that we need to figure out a way to make academic research accessible to people outside of academia because, even if all you care about is your budgets, we want people to believe that what we do is relevant and not rarified. And so we have to make it feel relevant to them, and I’ve shared some of my research on Bowser, through The New York Times or The Atlantic on C- SPAN, and yet I always have to think about what it means to do this as a fiction writer, sort of the straddling the world of fiction and history. Certainly, I think about story, and historians create narratives about the past. And those narratives change over time, and any good historian will tell you that that is sort of an evolution and is shaped by many things. And you know, we’re all made to study the Civil War, which can seem like there's so much to memorize. How many people died at that battle? How many were wounded? That was how I was taught to study the Civil War. It seemed like a lot of facts that had to be memorized. I think that we falsely give people the impression that that's what history is. What history is, in fact, mystery and investigation and evidence and discovery, and the plot does not necessarily wrap up as quickly as it does on an

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“Fighting Memory: What We’re Still Learning about Race, Gender, and the Civil War Lois Leveen, University of California Los Angeles Summersell Lecture Series episode of CSI or Law and Order, but it actually is as fascinating as that if we can figure out talk about it. There are I am with Darlene Clark Hine, the woman who wrote A Shining Thread of Hope. This is one of my proudest moments. She loves the novel, and I would say when A Shining Thread of Hope came out—it was maybe 16 years ago—it was groundbreaking, and now we know so much more about black women's experience, not just in slavery and not just in the 19th century, but you wouldn't try and put out a book like that anymore because we know so much more. And that's a relatively short period of time. Over on the other side, I am with Elizabeth Varon and Ed Ayers, who are both Southern historians. Liz wrote a book called Southern Lady, Yankee Spy, which is a biography of Bet Van Lew, that family that woman who owned Mary, who you met in the first scene. It was published by Oxford University Press, and she's a professor UVA. So you don’t get more academically legitimate. In her book, she says, you know, there are these rumors about a Mary who spied with Bet, but I haven’t found enough evidence to say it’s true. That book came out in 2002, and Liz would now say, oh yeah, there's more evidence that we know of, and now I would say that definitely she was part of that spy ring. And so that evolution of what we know is changing all the time, and we do this program together, which, if you are interested, you can see on C-SPAN. And if you can’t write down the whole thing, if you go to C-SPAN and Google my name, C-Span does not cover a lot of my life, so that that is the only thing that will come up. But we did a program together at the Museum of the Confederacy, which is in the old Confederate White House, so Mary gets to come home because we did this program about Bette and Mary and the spy ring. And one of the things that Liz did is that she started and she said here's how historians, or particularly biographers, use fact and conjecture in our work. When you write a biography, you’re saying, oh, they had this conversation and this thing happened. Do you really know how the conversation went? Well, you kind of do but not for certain, and so then I got to talk about fact and conjecture in historical fiction. We had a great conversation.

There is little irony that as a novelist I’m going around correcting some of the history about Mary Bowser, but also these myths that we love to circulate. So on the one hand, we have, as you all know, the Wikipedia, and on the other side, of the African American National Biography edited by Henry Louis Gates and Evelyn Higginbotham and co-published by Harvard University Press and Oxford University Press. If you go to the Wikipedia, you will read, for example, that Bet was a staunch Quaker and that's why she freed Mary. Now, I showed you the church that the Van Lews went to. It was not a Quaker church. If there's anything we know about Bet, we know that she was not a Quaker, but we love that myth. Who opposed slavery? Quakers. So all white people who opposed slavery must have been Quakers. Quakers oppose slavery. Neither of which is true. But if you go to the African American National Biography, they say the same thing, that we like the myth more than the hard work of discovering what's true. So we’re at this moment where people care much more about women's history and about African American history than they ever did before, and it is far easier for things to circulate because more people look at the Wikipedia probably in a minute than will ever look at the dictionary or the African American National Biography.

So the accessibility of information is greater. The interest is greater, but is the information getting better? And I think, again, it is interesting that Lynn and I met just when digital humanities was starting, at the dawn of the 21st century, because for those of us who teach about history, we have to think about what living in a digital moment means about how we think about the past, and I want to give you an example. This is a picture you can find all over the place of Mary Bowser. I

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“Fighting Memory: What We’re Still Learning about Race, Gender, and the Civil War Lois Leveen, University of California Los Angeles Summersell Lecture Series think the first place it was used was on an NPR National Public Radio website They ran a story about Mary Bowser in probably about 2002, and they use this photograph. And I always felt a little weird about this photograph because, when I look at it, the woman in the photograph looks not more than 30 to me, and I look at that dress (Mary would have been in her early 20s during the Civil War) and think that does not look like the right period. And I once showed it to historian who specializes in Civil War clothing, and she said not only is the dress the wrong period, but that chair is also from later in the 19th century. And I spent two years in archive all over the country and writing letters to people, and I called up Kee Malesky, for you NPR fans, the librarian at NPR. She didn’t know where they had gotten it. I did everything I could. Then finally after two years, I found the original. It is held in the State Library of Virginia, and it is not in their catalog. And this is the back of the original picture. You can see it. It’s got the customer’s name, Bowser. It gives her address, Petersburg, Virginia, which is about 30 miles from Richmond, and then you turn it over. The envelope is actually stuck to the original, and there’s the original picture. And here’s the amazing thing about the original picture. Can you see what this says? 1900. Is there any way that this woman was doing anything in the Civil War? No. 35 years after the end of the Civil War, this picture’s taken. This woman probably isn’t even 35 years old. This is a photograph of a woman named Mary Bowser, just not that woman named Mary Bowser. When somebody wanted a picture to put on the NPR website, they cropped out all the unimportant stuff in this picture, which unfortunately was the most important part, what no historian would crop out, the date. Be we are so used to visuals and to believing that you can find a picture of anyone, right? Just google it. It should come. Every every question is answerable.

So once I found this I wrote a nice piece for The Atlantic. I think 20,000 people read this the first day it went up on The Atlantic, so that's pretty good for getting people to read about Civil War history. And I thought, well, this is great. I have given a factual account. I’ve shown when this photograph was taken. Now, if you go to the Wikipedia, fantastic. The first day the photograph comes down; the second day it comes back up. That’s the thing about the Wikipedia. People just put stuff up there, like Bet Van Lew was a Quaker. And now when you go to the Wikipedia page, it’s there with this caption: “A photograph, formerly assumed be of Mary Bowser. This photo is of a different Mary Bowser, taken in 1900, and often and misidentified as being this article’s subject.” And I have to say, we can’t just blame the Wikipedia. Radcliffe Magazine, which is part of Harvard University, did a story about my research for the novel, and they wanted to include that photograph. And they happened to send me the layout of the article to proof, and I said you to take that picture out. And they said why, and I said because it is not of Mary Bowser. And they said, well, do you have another picture you could send us. I said no because most people in the 19th century were not photographed, and most people who were enslaved were not photographed. And most people who were spies weren’t stopping to have their photos taken. They said, well, can’t we just use it anyway? And I said, you could, or you could use a picture of Harriet Tubman or you could use a picture of Michele Obama because they are all black women, but none of them is Mary Bowser. This picture will never stop being mis-associated with Mary Bowswer. In fact, The Root, which is a website, sort of general African-American social interest, just ran a story about Mary Bowser this week. I’m happy to say the person who wrote it did find all my articles. He did read it. They didn’t put this image up, but I found it on lots and lots of websites that were saying, hey, look at this article on The Root, and was directing you to that article, put this picture up because we cannot believe that website could not have a picture. We cannot

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“Fighting Memory: What We’re Still Learning about Race, Gender, and the Civil War Lois Leveen, University of California Los Angeles Summersell Lecture Series believe there could be somebody whose picture we cannot get. In fact, maybe because we live in a moment in which not only government but private companies are collecting every bit of data about us, we cannot believe how hard it is to find out information about people who lived in the past, and I think that that is, again, one of the things that as historians we have to think about sharing.

I’m going to tell you a little bit about the traces of Mary Bowser's post-Civil War life. In September in New York at the Abyssinian Baptist Church, which no longer exists in Manhattan, a woman named Richmonia Richards gave a talk about her experience during the Civil War. Richmonia Richards, Mary often used the last name Richards. I don't quite know why. I haven’t been able to figure that out. But Richmonia Richards was a pseudonym that Mary used, and she gave this talk. And so I was able to find an article about it that was written up in the Anglo African, a black newspaper, and she talks about her life. So this was a great source of information, which I found after the novel was written, about the real Mary Bowser. And then a week later, a woman named Richmonia St. Pierre gave a talk in Brooklyn about her experiences during the War. Now, this is somebody who is frustrating historians because, not only is she speaking under pseudonyms but she’s changing her pseudonym week to week, and it’s not that far to get from Manhattan to Brooklyn. So she really could have kept the same pseudonym, but this article, again, tells us all sorts of things about her life, that she's told the audience as the reporter reports it, except that they are not the same things.

Chick in the middle, anybody know who she is? Harriet Beecher Stowe. On one side is her brother Charles, the less infamous of her brothers, Charles Beecher, and on the other side a man named Crammond Kennedy, who was active in the Freedmen's Bureau. They happened to be traveling through the South, and they stopped there on a ship that stops in a small town called St. Mary’s, Georgian, and they happened to meet a woman who happens to be my Mary. And so there's a journal entry of Charles Beecher’s that I found, and there’s some articles. There’s a letter that Kennedy writes back to the newspaper of the Freedman’s Bureau, and again she's told them about her life, and the facts are not consistent. And the only thing we have directly from Mary Bowser are some letters that she wrote when she was teaching in this school for newly emancipated slaves, and there are maybe five or seven letters. If you want to be historians, I hope you’ve got good eyeballs because that’s the sort of penmanship you will be deciphering, and they’re fascinating. And it's clear from these letters that she is saying things based on her having been a spy, like I have worked as an agent for the federal government. I know how to read people. You better listen to me when I tell you this. So she knows how to use her authority, but she is also always shaping her biography. Why is she sharing details of her life that are not true, or why is she contradicting herself from one speech to another. On the one hand, it's very reassuring for me. She is the first person to fictionalize her life, so I have done nothing that she has not done herself. I am absolved, but I also have to think about how she is strategically playing both to and against type, the way in which somebody who has lived surreptitiously would not necessarily disclose information about themselves, particularly if you're in Georgia in the aftermath of the Civil War, and some of what she’s is talking about is how dangerous it is for the newly freed slaves. But also that she just understood that audiences wanted to hear different things, and if she was trying to figure out how to get Northerners to donate money to help former slaves after the Civil War, she might try one routine on one audience and one routine on another audience to see how they responded. She was

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“Fighting Memory: What We’re Still Learning about Race, Gender, and the Civil War Lois Leveen, University of California Los Angeles Summersell Lecture Series very clear on rhetorical strategy as a way to go, and so even though I want to know everything about Mary Richards Bowser, I have to also respect the fact that she chose to keep details of her life unknown, and that this is true for countless other women, countless other African-Americans, countless other people in American history.

And this is kind of the humbling reminder to all of us who devote ourselves to research that we are trying to be assiduous in unearthing details about people's lives in the past, and yet we also have to accept the fact we are never going to know everything. There is not a ever going to be a Google search that will reveal truly, exactly what happened in any particular moment in history. If you want to know as much accurate about the real person as possible, I wrote an article from Encyclopedia of Virginia, and probably if you just go to EncyclopediaofVirginia.org, you can find that Mary Bowser article, and I also, for those few, this really made my heart sing, I wrote a blog entry saying, if you want to keep researching, here’s some leads. I think there is more to be found and that there will continue to be more to be found, especially as more sources are digitized and we can, you know, a newspaper that there might only be two or three extant copies of in the world can suddenly be searched online. All of this is a fantastic time.

So as you know, I'm happy to answer questions on anything from Thomas Jefferson to Barack Obama, also Shakespeare. Some of your Shakespeare professors are here, and we’ll be together talking about Shakespeare because that’s another book. Then, what would you like to talk about? Thank you.

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