By Melissa A. Winn
The morning of July 4, 1861, “dawned brightly,” according to the postwar memoir of Maria Isabella “Belle” Boyd. However, this anniversary of the country’s independence was overshadowed by a dark event that forever changed the course of her life. Just 17 years old, the self-professed Southern enthusiast shot and killed a drunken Union soldier that day who, she claimed, “addressed my mother and myself in language as offensive as it is possible to conceive. I could stand it no longer.”
In her memoir, Boyd recounted the dramatic events that unfolded “without one shadow of remorse.” Union soldiers occupying her hometown of Martinsburg, Va., (now West Virginia), had brought with them a large federal flag and were preparing to “hoist [it] over our roof in token of our submission to their authority; but to this my mother would not consent.” When the Union soldier thrust forward with his offensive words, Boyd said, “my indignation was roused beyond control; my blood was literally boiling in my veins; I drew out my pistol and shot him. He was carried away mortally wounded, and soon after expired.”
Commanding officers determined Boyd had done nothing improper and to protect her further, appointed sentries around the house and daily check-ins with federal officers. This relationship, she wrote, “enabled me to gain much important information as to the position and designs of the enemy. Whatever I heard I regularly and carefully committed to paper, and whenever an opportunity offered I sent my secret dispatch by a trusty messenger to General JEB Stuart, to some brave officer in command of Confederate troops.”
Boyd frequented area Union camps in the Shenandoah Valley, gathering information and acting as a courier. Though some consider her memoir exaggerated, she recounts many factual incidents, including eavesdropping on a Council of War while visiting relatives in Front Royal, Va. On May 23, 1862, she reportedly ran to the battlefield near Front Royal and provided Lt. Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson with intelligence about enemy troop dispositions. Jackson’s aide, 1st Lt. Henry Kyd Douglas, later described seeing “the figure of a woman in white glide swiftly out of town…she seemed…to heed neither weeds nor fences, but waved a bonnet as she came on.” Jackson captured the town and acknowledged her contribution and courage in a personal note.
Boyd exploited soldiers’ expectations that women could not be dangerous, and that they could not act as intelligence officers. Though an adept and smart negotiator, her flirtations with Union officers proved her most valuable tactic. Officers and soldiers described her as attractive though not beautiful, a tall and superb figure who dressed well.
Boyd’s clandestine activities became well known to the Union Army and the press, who dubbed her “La Belle Rebelle,” “the Siren of the Shenandoah,” “the Rebel Joan of Arc,” and “Amazon of Secessia.”
Though Union authorities arrested Boyd six or seven times for charges related to espionage, she avoided incarceration until July 29, 1862, when Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton issued a warrant for her arrest. Imprisoned in Old Capitol Prison—now the site of the U.S. Supreme Court—she gained her release a month later at Fortress Monroe. Though part of a prisoner exchange, there is no evidence that authorities traded her for a Union soldier.
Authorities arrested and imprisoned Boyd again in July 1863. She sang “Maryland, My Maryland” nightly and endured harassment by male prisoners and passersby. Released from the Old Capitol Prison in December 1863, authorities banished her to Richmond.
Her final arrest occurred after sailing for England in May 1864. Arrested as a Confederate courier, a U.S. Naval officer, Acting Ensign Samuel Wylde Harding, Jr., (also spelled Hardinge) of the steamer Connecticut, helped her escape to Canada. They made their way to England where they married on August 25, 1864.
Boyd remained in England for two years writing her memoirs, Belle Boyd in Camp and Prison, and working as an actress. She returned to America in 1866 with a daughter, Mary, and without her husband, who died in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1879. Her memoir sold well, and she pursued an acting career in the States, including a lecture series of her wartime exploits. She billed her show as “The Perils of a Spy” and herself as “Cleopatra of the Secession.”
In 1869, Boyd married another Union military veteran, John Swainston Hammond, a British-born man who had served as a first lieutenant in the 17th Massachusetts Infantry. They had four children and a seemingly happy marriage until they divorced in 1884. Soon after, she married Nathaniel High, Jr., an actor 17 years her junior.
Ironically, this Southern spy is buried in the far north. On June 11, 1900, while on tour in Kilbourn, Wis., (now Wisconsin Dells), Boyd suffered a heart attack and died at age 57. She is buried in Wisconsin’s Spring Grove Cemetery. Her childhood home in Martinsburg, W. Va., is now a museum.
Melissa A. Winn has been enchanted with photography since childhood. Her career as a photographer and writer includes numerous publications, among them Civil War Times, America’s Civil War, and American History magazines. She is currently Director of Marketing and Communications for the National Museum of Civil War Medicine. Melissa collects Civil War photos and ephemera, with an emphasis on Dead Letter Office images and Gen. John A. Rawlins, chief of staff to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. Melissa is a MI Senior Editor. Contact her at melissaannwinn@gmail.com.
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