Varon, Elizabeth R.

Chronicles the life of Elizabeth Van Lew, a woman who defied the conventions of the nineteenth-century South by becoming a Union spy during the Civil War.

Presents Yankee sympathizer Elizabeth Van Lew focusing on her early years, her espionage organization, assistance to Union soldiers who escape from a Richmond prison, and her appointment as postmaster of Richmond.

A reinterpretation of the origins of the Civil War, focusing on the debate over disunion which escalated in the 1840s and 1850s to the point at which war seemed the only way to resolve the question of whether the United States could survive intact.