Genteel rebel

the long version

"This biography depicts the combined effect of social structure, character, and national crisis on a woman's life. Mary Greenhow Lee (1819-1907) was raised in a privileged Virginia household. As a young woman, she flirted with President Van Buren's son, drank tea with Dolley Madison, and frolicked in bedsheets through the streets of Washington with her sister-in-law, future Confederate spy Rose O'Neal Greenhow. Later in life, Lee debated with senators, fed foreign emissaries and correspondents, scolded generals, and nursed soldiers. As a Confederate sympathizer in the hotly contested small border town of Winchester, Virginia, she ran an underground postal service, hid contraband under her nieces' dresses, abetted the Rebel cause, and was finally banished."--Jacket.