Belle Boyd (1844-1900)

DOSSIER:
Isabella "Belle" Marie Boyd, daughter of Benjamin Reed Boyd and Mary Rebecca Glenn, was born on 4 May 1844 in Martinsburg, VA. She died on 11 Jun 1900 in Wisconsin Dells, WI.

Despite her family's lack of money, Belle received a good education. Her influence of becoming a spy was by her family: Her father was a confederate soldier and the rest of the members were Confederate spies.

ALSO KNOWN AS:
Cleopatra of the Secession

Belle Boyd's espionage career began by chance. According to her 1866 account, on 4 Jul 1861, a band of Union army soldiers heard she had Confederate flags in her room, and they came to investigate. They hung a Union flag outside her home. This made her angry enough, but when one of them cursed at her mother, she was enraged. Belle pulled out a pistol and shot and killed the man. 

A board of inquiry exonerated her, but sentries were posted around the house and officers kept close track of her activities. She profited from this enforced familiarity, charming at least one of the officers, Captain Daniel Keily, into revealing military secrets. "To him," she wrote later, "I am indebted for some very remarkable effusions, some withered flowers, and a great deal of important information." Belle conveyed those secrets to Confederate officers via her slave, Eliza Hopewell, who carried the messages in a hollowed-out watch case. On her first attempt at spying she was caught and told she could be sentenced to death, but was not. She was not scared and realized she needed to find a better way to communicate.

One evening in mid-May 1862, Union General James Shields and his staff gathered in the parlor of the local hotel. Belle hid in the closet in the room, eavesdropping through a knothole she enlarged in the door. She learned that Shields had been ordered east from Front Royal, Virginia, a move that would reduce the Union Army's strength at Front Royal. That night, Belle rode through Union lines, using false papers to bluff her way past the sentries, and reported the news to Col. Turner Ashby, who was scouting for the Confederates. She then returned to town. 

When the Confederates advanced on Front Royal on 23 May Belle ran to greet General Stonewall Jackson's men, braving enemy fire that put bullet holes in her skirt. She urged an officer to inform Jackson that "the Yankee force is very small. Tell him to charge right down and he will catch them all." Jackson did and that evening penned a note of gratitude to her: "I thank you, for myself and for the army, for the immense service that you have rendered your country today." For her contributions, she was awarded the Southern Cross of Honor. Jackson also gave her captain and honorary aide-de-camp positions.

After her lover gave her up, Belle Boyd was arrested on 29 Jul 1862, and brought to the Old Capitol Prison in Washington 30 Jul 1862, where there was an inquiry on 7 Aug 1862 concerning violations of orders that Boyd be kept in close custody. Boyd was held for a month before being released on 29 Aug 1862, when she was exchanged at Fort Monroe. She was later arrested and imprisoned a third time, but again was set free.

In 1864, she went to England where she met and married a Union naval officer, Samuel Wylde Hardinge. Belle became an actress in England. Following the death of her husband in 1866, she returned to the United States on 11 Nov 1869 and married John Swainston Hammond in New Orleans. After a divorce in 1884, she married Nathaniel Rue High in 1885. A year later, she began touring the country giving dramatic lectures of her life as a Civil War spy.

While touring the United States (she had gone to address members of a GAR post), she died of a heart attack in Kilbourne City, Wisconsin (now known as Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin) on 11 Jun 1900. She was buried in the Spring Grove Cemetery in Wisconsin Dells, with members of the Local GAR as her pallbearers. For years her grave simply read:

BELLE BOYD

CONFEDERATE SPY BORN IN VIRGINIA

DIED IN WISCONSIN AND WAS BURIED IN 

SPRING GROVE CEMETERY

ERECTED BY A COMRADE