The Queen of Hearts: Belle Boyd, Rebel Spy

The Confederate spy Belle Boyd, between 1855 and 1865, from the Brady-Handy photograph collection. Library of Congress. Public Domain

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.”

So began Belle Boyd’s fame and notoriety.

The Artful Dodger

A glass negative of Confederate spy Belle Boyd, between 1855 and 1865, from the Brady–Handy photograph collection. Library of Congress. Public Domain

Maria Isabella “Belle” Boyd (1844–1900) was born into a socially prominent family. In childhood, she adored riding, honing skills that would later serve her well when she became the most famous female spy of the Civil War. At age 12, her parents sent her to Mount Washington College in Baltimore. After graduating in 1860, she spent a winter as a debutante in Washington, polishing her social arts and absorbing the city’s impassioned politics and intrigues.

After the shooting, for which she never showed remorse, Boyd began collecting information about the movements and plans of Union forces, and delivering these details to Confederate military commanders. Northern soldiers were aware of her clandestine activities, and over the next two years, she was arrested six times, imprisoned on three occasions, and was twice exiled, yet she always managed to gain her freedom.

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.”

As biographer C.W. Whitehair noted in “Belle Boyd: The Rebel Spy,” Civil War historian Douglas Southall Freeman described her as “one of the most active and reliable of the many women agents of the Confederacy.” Carl Sandburg, the poet and biographer of Abraham Lincoln, apparently thought the same. He delivered this backhanded compliment to Boyd’s cloak-and-dagger talents: She “could have been legally convicted, shot at sunrise, and heard of no more.”

Brushes With Danger and Death

An illustration of the Battle of Bull Run, circa 1889, by Kurz & Allison. Library of Congress. Public Domain

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.

Photographs of (L) Gen. James Shields and Gen. "Stonewall" Jackson, C.S.A, between circa 1860 and circa 1865, by Mathew Benjamin Brady. National Archives at College Park, Maryland. Public Domain

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.”

Confederate prisoners captured in the Battle of Front Royal look out over a Union camp in the Shenandoah Valley. Library of Congress. Public Domain

Assisted by Boyd’s information, Jackson and his men attacked, drove the Union soldiers out of Front Royal, saved the two bridges, and seized the warehouses intact.

Post-War Adventures

“Belle Boyd, in Camp and Prison,”1865, by Belle Boyd. Internet Archive. Public Domain

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.

Once in England, and in need of money by 1865, Boyd wrote and published her memoirs, “Belle Boyd, in Camp and Prison,” which sold well. In 1867, she returned to the United States and spent the next 33 years of her life in and out of three marriages, bearing and raising four children—a fifth died in infancy—and supporting herself largely from her lectures. She was on tour in Wisconsin when she died, probably from heart failure. In that place so far from home, her gravestone reads “Belle Boyd, Confederate Spy, Born in Virginia, Died in Wisconsin, Erected by a Comrade.”

The Fine Art of Flirtation

An engraving of a man receiving religious tracts from Boyd in the rebel stockade at Manassas Junction, circa 1890. Archive Photos/Getty Images

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.”

The Rebel Spy with her daring and her gifts for flirtation knew precisely how to appeal to that gallantry.

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