Belle Boyd

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Belle Boyd
Martinsburg, Virginia (now West Virginia), US
DiedJune 11, 1900(1900-06-11) (aged 56)
Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin
, US
Other namesBelle Boyd, Cleopatra of the Secession, Siren of the Shenandoah, La Belle Rebelle, Rebel Joan of Arc
OccupationConfederate Spy

Maria Isabella Boyd (May 9, 1844

Front Royal, Virginia, and provided valuable information to Confederate General Stonewall Jackson in 1862.[citation needed
]

Early life

Maria Isabella "Belle" Boyd was born on May 9, 1844, in

Baltimore, Maryland in 1856 at age 12.[13]

Southern spy

Belle Boyd (age 21), Confederate spy (circa 1865).

Boyd's espionage career began by chance. According to her 1866 account, a band of Union army soldiers heard that she had Confederate flags in her room on July 4, 1861, and they came to investigate. They hung a Union flag outside her home. Then one of the men cursed at her mother, which enraged Boyd. She pulled out a pistol and shot the man, who died some hours later. A board of inquiry exonerated her of murder, 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 whom she named in her memoir as Captain Daniel Keily,[14]

She wrote in her memoir that she was indebted to Keily "for some very remarkable effusions, some withered flowers, and a great deal of important information."

sentenced to death.[citation needed
]

General

James Shields and his staff gathered in the parlor of the local hotel in mid-May 1862. Boyd hid in the closet in the room, eavesdropping through a knothole that she enlarged in the door. She learned that Shields had been ordered east from Front Royal, Virginia. That night, she rode through Union lines, using false papers to bluff her way past the sentries, and reported the news to Colonel Turner Ashby, who was scouting for the Confederates. She then returned to town. When the Confederates advanced on Front Royal on May 23, Boyd ran to greet Stonewall Jackson's men, avoiding enemy fire that put bullet holes in her skirt, as according to her memoir.[citation needed][16] 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."[17]

Jackson did and wrote 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."[18][19] For her contributions, she was awarded the Southern Cross of Honor.[20] Jackson also gave her captain and honorary aide-de-camp positions.[21]

Boyd was arrested at least six times but somehow evaded incarceration.

Old Capitol Prison in Washington, D.C. the next day.[24][25] An inquiry was held on August 7, 1862, concerning violations of orders that Boyd be kept in close custody.[26] She was held for a month before being released on August 29, 1862, when she was exchanged at Fort Monroe.[27] She was arrested again in June 1863, but was released after contracting typhoid fever.[28]

In March 1864, Boyd attempted to travel to England, but she was intercepted by a Union blockade and sent to Canada where she met Union naval officer Samuel Wylde Hardinge. The two married in England.[when?][28] and had a daughter, Grace.[29] Boyd became an actress in England after her husband's death to support her daughter.[citation needed] Following the death of her husband in 1866, she and her daughter returned to the United States.[29]

Boyd assumed the stage name Nina Benjamin to perform in several cities, eventually ending up in New Orleans where she married John Swainston Hammond in March 1869, a former British Army officer who fought for the Union Army during the Civil War. They had two sons and two daughters; their first son died as an infant. Boyd divorced Hammond in 1884 and married Nathaniel Rue High in 1885. She subsequently began touring the country giving dramatic lectures of her life as a Civil War spy.[30]

Postwar years and death

Belle Boyd's grave

Boyd published a highly fictionalized narrative of her war experiences in the two-volume Belle Boyd in Camp and Prison.[31] She died of a heart attack in Kilbourn City, Wisconsin (Wisconsin Dells) on June 11, 1900, at age 56. She was buried in the Spring Grove Cemetery in Wisconsin Dells, with members of the Grand Army of the Republic as her pallbearers.[32] For years, her grave simply read:

BELLE BOYD
CONFEDERATE SPY
BORN IN VIRGINIA
DIED IN WISCONSIN
ERECTED BY A COMRADE[33]

In popular culture

  • Boyd's life inspired the silent film series The Girl Spy.[34]
  • The Smiling Rebel (1955) is a Harnett Kane novel about Boyd.[35]
  • Boyd is a main character in the Cherie Priest steampunk novel Clementine (2010) and its sequel Fiddlehead (2013).[36]
  • Boyd appears as a master-spy in the Firaxis computer game
    Civilization 4 Beyond The Sword.[citation needed
    ]

See also

References

  1. OCLC 425072.) See also Hay 1975, p. 215. Despite Boyd's assertion, many sources give the year of birth as 1844 and the date as May 10 (Barnhart, Clarence L.; et al., eds. (1954). "Boyd, Belle". The New Century Cyclopedia of Names. Vol. 1. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts., "Belle Boyd: Chapter No. 2620"
    . Belle Boyd Chapter of the Louisiana Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy via RootsWeb of Ancestry.com.)
  2. ^ Trust, Civil War (2014). "Maria "Belle" Boyd". Civilwar.org. Retrieved 2014-07-29.
  3. Newspapers.com. Open access icon
  4. Newspapers.com. he devoted his sixth chapter to 'Cleopatra of the Secession,' Belle Boyd Open access icon
  5. Newspapers.com. Southerners called her ... 'Siren of the Shenandoah' Open access icon
  6. Newspapers.com. She was known as the 'Siren of the Shenandoah' Open access icon
  7. Newspapers.com. Open access icon
  8. Newspapers.com. Open access icon
  9. Newspapers.com. Open access icon
  10. ISBN 978-1576076033
    .
  11. ISBN 978-1630760878
    .
  12. ^ Boyd, Belle; Hardinge, Sam Wilde (1865). Belle Boyd in Camp and Prison. Saunders, Otley, and Company. p. 38.
  13. ISBN 978-0865545557
    .
  14. ^ Bakeless, p. 155
  15. ^ Boyd, p. 102
  16. ^ Boyd, Isabella. Belle Boyd In Camp And Prison.
  17. ISBN 978-1400825165
    .
  18. ISBN 978-1402242861
    .
  19. OCLC 560396348
    .
  20. ^ "The underground work of Belle Boyd and how she changed the Civil War". We Are The Mighty. 2021-06-09. Retrieved 2023-01-26.
  21. ^ Smith, Vicki. "Civil War guide touts spy, life off battlefields". WTOP. Associated Press. Archived from the original on June 16, 2013. Retrieved April 21, 2011.
  22. ISBN 978-1612348315
    .
  23. ISBN 978-1501126840
    .
  24. ^ Official Records, p. 310, Series 2, Vol. 4
  25. ISBN 978-1851098071
    .
  26. ^ Official Records, p. 349, Series 2, Vol. 4
  27. ^ Official Records, p. 461, Series 2, Vol. 4
  28. ^
    ISBN 978-0762743841
    .
  29. ^ a b Scarborough 1997, p. 179.
  30. ^ Scarborough 1997, p. 180.
  31. ISBN 978-0762743841
    .
  32. ^ The GPS coordinates for Spring Grove Cemetery are 43.6256, −89.7528 and for the grave of Belle Boyd are 43.625695, −89.754068
  33. ^ Wisconsin Historical Society
  34. S2CID 148252931
    .
  35. ^ "Hartnett T. Kane (1910–1984)". librarything.com. Retrieved 2014-08-02.
  36. ISBN 978-1474414869
    .

Bibliography

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Maria Isabella Boyd.
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