- A vital contribution to the re-evaluation of the legacy of the American Civil War

- Comes at a time of widespread reassessment about the roles and status of people of African descent and their place in the history of Western nations

- Draws on unpublished and little-known sources, correcting myths and inaccuracies

- Written by an accomplished academic and biographer, with three other biographies to her name

- A compelling, fast-paced narrative featuring a host of famous characters, including Confederate President Jefferson Davis, General Robert E. Lee, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin Harriet Beecher Stowe, and legendary spymaster Elizabeth Van Lew

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.