Though the Civil War was only a few months old, the Fourth of July in 1861 found some soldiers in Martinsburg, Virginia, celebrating Independence Day.
As the day wore on, the celebration got out of hand, when undisciplined and drunken Union soldiers began abusing civilians and ransacking houses. Hearing of one home sympathetic to the South, they approached it and demanded entry. One of the soldiers, a “huge Dutchman,” a term then used to describe someone of German descent, roundly cursed the grandmother living there, and soldiers entered the house with the intent of raising an American flag over it.
Inside, they confronted a mother and her 17-year-old daughter. When the Dutchman seized the older woman and attempted to kiss her, her daughter pulled out an 1849 Colt pistol left to her by her father and shot her mother’s assailant in the neck, mortally wounding him. “I could stand it no longer,” the girl later said. “My indignation was aroused beyond control, my blood was literally boiling in my veins.”
After interviewing the teenager and several witnesses, the commander of the Union troops, Gen. Robert Patterson, declared that the girl had behaved properly and had acted in self-defense. Meanwhile, news of the shooting reached several newspapers in both the South and the North, with The Daily Register in Knoxville, Tennessee, proclaiming her “a fair and fearless Virginia heroine.”
The Artful Dodger
From her exploits, both real and those conjured up by rumor, Boyd acquired a half-dozen or more titles, like “Joan of Arc of the South,” the “Cleopatra of the Confederacy,” and the “Siren of the Shenandoah.” Some French newspapers called her “La Belle Rebelle,” or “the Beautiful Rebel.” Her favorite was the simple tag given her by Yankee soldiers, “The Rebel Spy.”
Brushes With Danger and Death
Boyd’s most daring exploits occurred in the late spring of 1862, during Stonewall Jackson’s Shenandoah Valley campaign. Earlier, her parents sent her to live with an aunt and uncle in Front Royal, Virginia, population less than 500. There she tended soldiers wounded in the First Battle of Bull Run (Battle of First Manassas), continued her spying, was briefly detained, and was packed off to Baltimore but released due to lack of evidence.
For a time, Front Royal was under the control of Union forces led by Gen. James Shields. Boyd befriended the general and one of his young aides, learned of a council of war to be held in the town’s Fishback Hotel, and slipped into a room above the meeting place. She found a hole in the floor of a closet and, by listening closely, learned of upcoming campaign tactics. After writing out in code what she had heard, she rode at night through the Union lines and delivered Gen. Shields’s plans to Confederate forces.
On the heels of this escapade, as Stonewall Jackson advanced toward Front Royal, Boyd learned that the Union forces there intended to burn the supply depot and two bridges, then retreat and connect with a larger force in nearby Winchester. This time, she set off on foot, running from the town and through a skirmish line in broad daylight, writing later, “Numerous bullets ... whistled by my ears, several actually pierced different parts of my clothing, but not one reached my body.”
Years after the war, one of Jackson’s aides, Henry Kyd Douglas, recorded her arrival in Confederate lines that day. “Nearly exhausted, and with hand pressed against her heart, she said in gasps, ‘Go back and tell him (Jackson) that the Yankee force is very small. ... Tell him I know, for I went through their camps and got it out of an officer. Tell him to charge right down, and he will catch them all,’” Douglas wrote.
Another officer later related, “All this she told with the precision of a staff officer making a report, and it was true to the letter.”
Post-War Adventures
In 1864, released from prison once again and carrying papers from Confederate sources, Boyd sailed aboard a blockade runner for England. When a Union vessel captured her ship, she not only figured out a way to sail by another means to England, but also ended up marrying one of the Yankee naval officers.
The Fine Art of Flirtation
Boyd’s adventures as a spy bring questions. How was it that a 17-year-old girl—she was only 21 at the war’s end—was able again and again to lift information from the enemy and deliver it to the Confederates? How was it that her captors, who knew of her spying, released her several times?
For one thing, security at that time was less of a concern than today. The World War II warning—“Loose lips sink ships”—was not in play during the Civil War. On several occasions, Union officers and soldiers openly discussed plans for maneuvers and battle with Boyd present.
Coupled with this sketchy security were that era’s beliefs regarding women. According to Mr. Whitehair, Boyd once stated, “Sometimes a man forgets that a woman can listen.” Boyd proved not only an excellent listener but an acute observer as well, as evidenced by her contacts with Union soldiers in Front Royal. She knew the units by name and tallied up the numbers of the soldiers, reporting them to Stonewall Jackson.
Most importantly, Boyd was a world-class charmer, a Southern Belle, if you will. On a plaque standing today near the Front Royal Visitors Center, we find this brief description taken from a Confederate who had known her: “(Boyd was) not beautiful but she was attractive and fascinating to a degree that would charm the heart out of a monk and cause him to break his vows of celibacy.”
Many were the men who succumbed to her flirtations and her youth. As Mr. Whitehair quoted from an 1862 article in the Philadelphia Inquirer: “This woman I saw participating her arts upon our young lieutenants and inexperienced captains, and in each case I uniformly felt it my duty to call them aside and warn them of whom she was.” In the summer of 1862, when she was arrested and sent to Washington’s Old Capitol Prison, the superintendent was so enamored with her that he regarded Boyd as more a daughter than an inmate.
After her death, the Washington Evening Times perhaps best summed up these talents by writing of these men that their “gallantry got the better of their discretion.”
