She Spied for Freedom : Mary Richards, A Black Civil War Agent

In the U.S. Civil War, Mary Richards, a free Black woman, risked her life posing as an illiterate slave to spy in the home of rebel President Jefferson Davis. Whether as a Union agent sending vital intelligence to the U.S. military or facing down the Klan while teaching freed slaves in postwar Georgia, hers was a heroic one-woman fight for justice.

During the American Civil War, an educated Black woman posed as an illiterate slave in the home of the rebel President Jefferson Davis. Spying on the war councils of Davis and his advisers, she risked her life to send vital intelligence to the U.S. military. This was Mary Richards' one-woman fight 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'. She risked her life again after the war, teaching freed former slaves in rural Georgia, in the face of growing threats from the Ku Klux Klan. 'She Spied for Freedom' is about those who shaped Richards' world-among them, her benefactor and spymaster, Elizabeth Van Lew; her fellow agents; her three husbands; and those, like Jefferson Davis and his wife, she dealt with in the camp of the enemy. 'She Spied for Freedom' is the story of a lone warrior for justice who faced poverty, illness, brutal racism, and life-threatening danger-but never surrendered.