Notes

hello boys and girls. today i will be talking about Mary bowser. Mary bowsers real name is Mary jane Richards Denman. she was born in 1839 to plantation owner john van lew. when she was a baby, she got baptized. when john van Lew died, his daughter Elizabeth van Lew freed all his slaves and began educating them in private. they had to do this because others said that black literacy would prove a threat to the slave system so whites in many colonies instituted laws forbidding slaves to learn to read or write and making it a crime for others to teach them. then, Mary was arrested for being without free papers. she then worked as a paid servant in 1851. after this, she went to Philadelphia to get an education at a quaker school for negroes. in 1862 she was hired in the confederate white house and worked to spy on jefferson davis. she was a source of constant frustration for jefferson davis and she read very important documents jefferson davis left out. she had to spy on him because he was suspected of treason. treason is the act of betraying ones country by leaking goverment secrets or overthrowing the government. At dawn on May 10, 1865, Davis was captured in Georgia. He was imprisoned in a damp casemate at Fort Monroe, Virginia for 2 years, and was put in leg-irons, and mary bowser got away with spying on him. After the war, Bowser gave a series of talks in New York about her experience in the war and worked with the Freedmen's Bureau as a teacher, first in Virginia and then in Florida and Georgia. she was last seen in a meeting with Harriet Beecher Stowe
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