Belle Boyd
Belle Boyd, born Maria Isabella Boyd in 1844, was a prominent Confederate spy during the American Civil War. Raised in a prosperous family in Virginia, she displayed a spirited nature and received an education that included studies in literature and music. When Virginia seceded from the Union, Boyd became an ardent supporter of the Confederate cause. Her espionage career began dramatically when she defended her family home from Union soldiers, leading her to gather intelligence from troops stationed nearby.
Boyd played a significant role in the Confederate victory at Front Royal in May 1862, using her connections and charm to relay crucial information to Confederate generals. She was imprisoned for her actions but continued her activities until she was ordered to leave the U.S. in 1864. After marrying a former Union soldier and later becoming a stage actress, Boyd published her memoirs and remained a figure of intrigue in American history. Her legacy endures as a symbol of women's involvement in the military and political spheres, challenging the norms of her time and capturing the interest of historians and the public alike.
Belle Boyd
- Born: May 4, 1844
- Birthplace: Martinsburg, Virginia (now in West Virginia)
- Died: June 11, 1900
- Place of death: Kilbourn (now Wisconsin Dells), Wisconsin
American spy for the Confederate States of America
Cause of notoriety: Boyd supplied Confederate officers with information on Union troop movements during the American Civil War and helped turn the tide of the Battle of Front Royal in the rebels’ favor.
Active: 1861-1864
Locale: United States, mainly Shenandoah Valley
Early Life
Maria Isabella (Belle) Boyd was the first of eight children born to farmer and shopkeeper Benjamin Reed Boyd and his wife, Mary Rebecca Glenn. She was a spirited child skilled in riding horses. The Boyd family was relatively prosperous and owned several household slaves, including Belle’s personal attendant, Eliza Hopewell Corsey.
Belle Boyd attended school in Martinsburg until age twelve. In 1856, her parents enrolled her in the Mount Washington Female Seminary near Baltimore, Maryland, where she studied French, literature, and music. Boyd graduated in 1860 as sectional tensions worsened between the Northern and Southern states. Keenly aware of the conflict, Boyd allied herself with the Southern cause of states’ rights. On April 17, 1861, Virginia seceded from the Union, and Boyd’s father joined the Confederate army.
Espionage Career
Strategically poised at the entrance to the Shenandoah Valley, Martinsburg was frequently occupied by Northern troops during the war. On July 4, 1861, Union soldiers came to the Boyd home and attempted to force the family to display an American flag. As her mother argued with one of the soldiers, Boyd shot and killed him. Though she was not punished for the incident, Union commanders placed troops around the family home. Boyd would flirt with these sentries in order to extract information on troop locations and plans. She would then dispatch an ally, such as her slave Eliza, with the information to Confederate officers. In October, 1861, Boyd was commissioned a courier in the Confederate Intelligence Service. In this capacity, Boyd transmitted information and stole medicine and other supplies for the Confederate army.
On May 23, 1862, Boyd accomplished her most celebrated act of espionage as Union troops advanced on Front Royal, Virginia, where Boyd was staying with family members. She ran through gunfire and artillery to the camp of Confederate general Stonewall Jackson. The information that she provided secured a Confederate victory at Front Royal and kept Union forces from capturing the rest of the Shenandoah Valley.
Boyd’s deeds were well publicized in the press, and she was imprisoned in 1862 and 1863 for the threat that she posed to Union military efforts. After attempting to sail for England to act as a Confederate ambassador in 1864, Boyd was ordered to leave the United States. She moved to London and married a former Union soldier, Samuel Wylde Hardinge, in 1865. That same year, Boyd had a daughter, Grace, and published her memoirs, Belle Boyd in Camp and Prison. After her husband’s death, Boyd became a stage actor. She returned to the United States in 1866 and worked as an actor until 1869, when she married another Union veteran, named John Swainston Hammond. The couple had four children, one of whom died in infancy, before divorcing in 1884. The following year, Boyd married the actor Nathaniel Rue High and returned to the stage, performing dramatic adaptations of her wartime exploits. She was in Wisconsin to give one of these performances when she died of a heart attack.
Impact
Heralded in her lifetime as a Confederate heroine, Belle Boyd continued to fascinate historians into the twenty-first century as a woman who used her femininity to participate in the masculine realms of warfare and espionage. The United Daughters of the Confederacy preserved Boyd’s memory in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even if there is no uniform agreement regarding the importance of her espionage to Confederate war aims, Boyd challenged the nineteenth century assumption that women were uninterested in politics.
Bibliography
Kennedy-Nolle, Sharon. Introduction to Belle Boyd in Camp and Prison. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998. This introduction to a revised edition of Boyd’s memoirs emphasizes Boyd’s use of conventional understandings of womanhood to accomplish quite unconventional ends.
Leonard, Elizabeth D. All the Daring of the Soldier: Women of the Civil War Armies. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. Leonard places Boyd in the company of other women, Northern and Southern, who participated in the Civil War as soldiers or spies and explores their varied reasons for doing so.
Sigaud, Louis A. Belle Boyd: Confederate Spy. Richmond, Va.: Dietz Press, 1944. In one of the first scholarly biographies of Belle Boyd, Sigaud confirms the historical accuracy of much of Boyd’s autobiography.