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“No one will walk with us on the street,” she writes; “no one will go with us anywhere…. It grows worse and worse as the years roll on….”

And so the weary months and years went by, and at last, in the old mansion with its haunting memories, nursed by an aged negress to whom she had given freedom years before, Elizabeth Van Lew died. Among her effects there was found on a torn bit of paper this paragraph:

“If I am entitled to the name of ‘Spy’ because I was in the Secret Service, I accept it willingly, but it will hereafter have to my mind a high and honorable significance. For my loyalty to my country, I have two beautiful names; here I am called ‘Traitor,’ farther North a ‘Spy,’ instead of the honored name of Faithful.”

And well may she be called “Faithful” by both friend and enemy, for she gave freely of youth and strength, of wealth and her good name, of all that human beings hold most sacred, for that which was to her a consecrated and a just cause.

In the Shockhoe Hill Cemetery of Richmond, there is to be seen a bronze tablet, erected to the noble woman who worked tirelessly and without fitting reward for a cause which she believed to be righteous. The inscription on the tablet reads:

Elizabeth L. Van Lew

1818           1900.
 

She risked everything that is dear to man–friends,
fortune, comfort, health, life itself;
all for the one absorbing desire of her
heart–that slavery might be abolished and
the Union preserved.

————

This Boulder

from the Capitol Hill in Boston, is a tribute
from Massachusetts friends.

Elizabeth Van Lew was indeed a Spy working against the city of her birth, and the friends of her love and loyalty,–a traitor in one sense of the word; but above all was she tireless in working for her highest ideals, and so is she worthy of respect and honor wherever the Stars and Stripes float free over united America.