Belle Boyd (Confederate Spy): The Cleopatra of Secession

By this time her family had moved from Martinsburg to Front Royal in the Shenandoah Valley where they had opened a small hotel. Belle went to join them there. One evening in May, 1862, the Union General James Shields and his Staff were meeting in the hotels parlour. Belle hid in the closet undetected and listened intently to everything they had to say. Shields had orders to march the bulk of his army out of Front Royal leaving just a token force behind. The following night, having acquired some kind of false papers in case she was caught, she managed, at great danger to herself, to sneak past the Union pickets. Riding around rather aimlessly in the dark she finally ran into the cavalry of the Confederate Colonel Turner Ashby, to whom she reported that the Union Army had left and that General Jackson must come at once. 

General Thomas J “Stonewall” Jackson’s Valley Campaign in the Spring of 1862, has become legendary in he annals of war. Ordered to simply contain Union forces in the Shenandoah Valley and prevent them from marching on the Confederate capital at Richmond, in three months of brilliant maneuvering and decisive action he defeated four separate Union armies each of whom was larger than his own. By 9 June, 1862, all Union forces had been forced to retreat from the Shenandoah Valley, and Belle Boyd was to play her part in this.

On 23 May, Jackson’s entire army, 14,000 strong, converged on Front Royal. Belle, seeing them moving on the town rushed out to meet them, even as bullets were ripping through her skirt, shouting, ” The Yankee force is very small, charge now and you will catch them all.” Jackson did just that. All the 1,000 Union soldiers defending the town were either killed or captured. So impressed was the great General with the tenacity and courage of this brave young woman that he later pinned a note to her dress which read, ” I thank you for myself and for the army, for the immense service you have rendered your country this day.”

Belle continued her spying activities but was betrayed by one her many lovers and arrested by the Federal Authorities on 29 July, 1862. She was taken to Washington and incarcerated in the Old Capitol Prison. This time she truly did fear for her life but was again lucky when on 29 August she returned south as part of a prisoner exchange.

Her latest brush with death in no way deterred her from her activities and she was even captured and briefly imprisoned again. It was decided, however, that she was too well known to continue and was becoming a danger to both herself and those who worked with her. In 1864, she travelled to England as an unofficial advocate of the Southern cause. Once in the country she embarked upon a lecture tour detailing her exploits as a Confederate spy and encouraging her audience to support the Confederacy and to lobby their Government to do the same.

Whilst in England she married a Union Naval Officer Samuel Wylde Hardinge, whom she converted to the Southern cause, and for a brief time worked as an actress. When her husband died in 1866, she returned to America and to a defeated South. She was heartbroken. Though she was to marry twice more things were never quite the same as those heady-days of danger, hope, and aspiration. As much as to relive those moments as anything else, in 1867, Belle had published her autobiography, “Belle Boyd, In Camp and Prison.

She had not been forgotten, however. The Confederacy had not issued medals for valour or any other contribution to the war effort. The highest commendation you could receive was to be mentioned in dispatches. In 1898, a number of female children of ex-Confederate Officers formed The United Daughters of the Confederacy in Atlanta, Georgia, to remember and acknowledge the service of combat veterans. One of the first things they did was to award Belle, the Southern Cross of Honour.

Though it is doubtful how hard she tried, Belle could never escape her past. On 11 June, 1900, at Kilbourne City, Wisconsin, having embarked upon yet another gruelling lecture tour, she died of a heart-attack, aged 56.