The Civil War Parlor

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”The dead continue to live by way of the resurrection we give them in telling their stories” -Stories of Real Human Beings Make History Powerful~Photographs Make it Immediate.

A Blog Remembering the Men and Women of the American Civil War, North & South, people, faces, and a unique culture we will never see again. Photos and stories about the people that lived it, including African American Photographs, Pre-Civil War history & the period in cultural history that began just after the Civil War. The historical info, photos and documents on this blog reflect the attitudes, perspectives, and beliefs of different times. This blog does not endorse the views expressed in some posts, which may contain materials offensive to some readers. You cannot compare the beliefs, values, politics, ethical values of today to the people of the 1800's.

Every effort is taken to remember the men and women of the Union and Confederacy equally with dignity and respect. The men and women who's photos are posted on this blog have living relatives today, please respect the families and their memory~

The events of the war, and the men of the war, are fast fading from the public attention. Its history is growing to be an “Old, Old Story.” Public interest is weakening day by day. The memory of march, and camp, and battle-field, of the long and manly endurance, of the superb and uncomplaining courage, of the mass of sacrifice that redeemed the Nation, is fast dying out. Those who rejoice in the liberty and peace secured by the soldier’s suffering and privation, accept the benefits, but deny or forget the benefactor-1877 National Tribune

(IF I HAVE MADE AN ERROR ON A HISTORICAL FACT PLEASE CONTACT ME DIRECTLY SO I CAN CORRECT IT) if I posted something unknowingly that you own copyright to, I will remove it immediately.

“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted."― D.H. Lawrence

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Mary Elizabeth Bowser- The Union’s Secret Weapon- Courageous Freed Slave Who Worked as a Union Spy During the Civil War

Placed as a servant in the Confederate White House in Richmond..

While she cleaned the house and waited on Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his military leaders, she read war dispatches and overheard conversations about Confederate troop strategy and movement. She memorized details and passed them along to Union spies, who coded the information and sent it to Gens. Ulysses S. Grant and Benjamin Butler, “greatly enhancing the Union’s conduct of the war,” according to the account assembled by the U.S. Army Military Intelligence Corps Hall of Fame. As recorded by Waitt, Thomas McNiven credited Bowser with being one of the best sources of wartime information, “as she was working right in the Davis’ home and had a photographic mind. Everything she saw on the Rebel President’s desk, she could repeat word for word

“Jefferson Davis never discovered the leak in his household staff,” reads the account, “although he knew the Union somehow kept discovering Confederate plans.”

Papers believed to have been Bowser’s diaries were discarded inadvertently by family members in the 1950s. They said descendants rarely talked about Mary Elizabeth Bowser’s work for fear of retaliation from lingering Confederate sympathizers.

Her grave was re-discovered in 2000 in Richmond, Virginia.