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During the American Civil War, an educated black woman posed as an illiterate slave in the home of the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis. Spying on the war councils of Davis and his advisers, she risked her life to send vital intelligence across the lines to Union generals.
Born into slavery, but freed to be educated in the North, Mary Richards, also known as Mary Bowser and Mary Denman, was sent to Liberia as a teenage missionary. Having returned to Richmond, Virginia, by the start of the Civil War, she was recruited as a Union spy by her friend and patron, abolitionist spymaster Elizabeth Van Lew, who sent her on her perilous mission to the White House of the Confederacy. After the war, Mary continued her fight against slavery and its legacy, risking her life in rural Georgia, where she established a school to teach freed former slaves amid growing threats from the Ku Klux Klan.
Margaret C. Jones lived in the US for nine years, and taught literature and history at Central Washington University (1990–92). She later lived in Bristol, UK, where she was employed as a senior lecturer at the University of the West of England. Her PhD (in American Studies) is from Purdue University, Indiana. In addition to She Spied for Freedom, she is the author of three biographies: The Adventurous Life of Amelia Edwards (Bloomsbury, 2022); Founder, Fighter, Saxon Queen: Aethelflaed, Lady of the Mercians (Pen & Sword, 2018); and Heretics and Hellraisers (U. of Texas Press, 1993). She lives and writes in Stroud, UK, but spends part of each year in Alexandria, Egypt.
