Isabella Maria Boyd

Background

Isabella Maria Boyd was born on May 9, 1844, in Martinsburg, Virginia. She was the eldest child of Benjamin Reed and Mary Rebecca Glenn Boyd. They were a prosperous family with deep Southern roots.

Education

Belle Boyd attended Mount Washington Female College in Baltimore, Maryland, from 1856 to 1860.

Career

After graduating at 16, Isabella Maria Boyd returned to Martinsburg, which fell to the Union the next year, on July 3, 1861. Boyd initially helped raise funds and sew clothing for the Confederate soldiers and was proud of her forty-five-year-old father’s decision to enlist in General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson’s troops. When a Union soldier invaded Boyd’s home and assaulted her mother, Boyd fatally shot him, which won her favor in the South. Acquitted of the crime, Boyd returned to Martinsburg and began her espionage career.

Daring in a way that scorned the era’s standards for ladies, Boyd took advantage of the common assumption that a woman could not be dangerous. She also defied women’s conventional roles by becoming a messenger for Confederate Generals Jackson and Pierre Beauregard. Unafraid to use her feminine wiles to gain access to Union soldiers and information, Boyd became more daring with each attempt to garner Union secrets and war plans. Union soldiers initially did not expect a girl to be an intelligence agent so even when her messages were intercepted, federal officers simply reprimanded what they assumed was an innocent teenager.

Eventually, however, Boyd became known to Union officials. She was arrested six times, imprisoned three times, and exiled twice. Among her more famous exploits, on May 23, 1862, in Front Royal, Virginia, she listened through a knothole in her hotel room wall to several Union officers next door making plans. Then, she rode between the two armies to deliver a message to a staff officer. Her efforts helped secure a Confederate victory, for which, her memoirs claimed, she received a thank you note from Jackson.

On July 29, 1862, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton issued a warrant for her arrest. She was taken to Old Capitol Prison - now the site of the US Supreme Court - and later banished to the Confederate capital of Richmond. She was arrested again before being exiled to Canada, but she instead headed for England.

To support herself, Boyd published her memoir, Belle Boyd, in Camp and Prison (1865), which exaggerated her exploits but sold well. She also became an actress but gave it up in 1869. She returned to acting in 1886 to reenact her Civil War life. ing the Civil War.

Achievements

• Isabelle Boyd became one of the most famous female Confederate spies, hailed by some as the "Cleopatra of Secession." The story of her achievements for the South rests mainly on her own none too trustworthy account in Belle Boyd in Camp and Prison. It seems that during the early part of the war in conversation with Union officers quartered in Martinsburg, she picked up important military intelligence which she communicated to Southern officers, sometimes at the risk of her life.
  
  But her most important service to the Confederate cause was a communication to General Jackson's forces. She undertook a hazardous journey through the lines to inform General T. J. Jackson of the Union plans to destroy the town’s bridges as part of their retreat. This was the only major success in intelligence work she is known to have had. After her return to Martinsburg, Boyd continued to spy openly for the Confederates and served also as a courier and scout with J. S. Mosby's guerrillas.
  
  In 1865 she published her two-volume memoir, Belle Boyd in Camp and Prison.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Belle Boyd in Camp and Prison

    (First published in 1865, Belle Boyd's memoir of her exper...)

    1865

Politics

Isabella Maria Boyd didn't support Abraham Lincoln's policy.

Views

Quotations: "If it is a crime to love the South, its cause and its President, then I am a criminal. I would rather lie down in this prison and die than leave it owing allegiance to a government such as yours."

"A true woman always loves a real soldier."

"As long as it served his purpose, Mr. Lincoln boldly advocated the right of Secession."

"There are those who maintain that in this world women have no right to interfere in the affairs of state, in politics, in plots and counter-plots. Others that are who, more chivalrous, are willing to admit that women have as much right to act, think, and speak as men."

"Just previous to the birth of my little son, my mind gave way and my child was born in the asylum for the insane at Stockton, Cal. My boy was buried there."

"I do not set myself up as an advocate of the woman's right doctrine, but would rather appear in the character of a quiet lady expressing her sentiments, not so much to the public as to her immediate friends."

"I thank god that I can say on my death bed that I am a virtuous woman."

"What a jolly thing military surveillance is!"

"Politically I did not like Mr. Lincoln for in him I saw the destroyer."

Personality

From the start, Boyd was a strong-willed, high-spirited and quick-witted person. She once rode a horse into the family's home during a party after being told she was too young to attend. According to Karen Abbott's Liar Temptress Soldier Spy, Boyd told her parents and party guests "my horse is old enough, isn't he?"

Growing up a tomboy who enjoyed climbing trees and playing in the woods, Boyd was also a staunch defender of her family. When a union officer spoke unkindly to her mother, she had no problem taking the family pistol and killing the offender. Ultimately, Boyd was exonerated for killing the union soldier but from that point on the union, soldiers began keeping a close eye on her, even keeping watch outside her house.

Boyd's good looks, flirty ways, and fearlessness helped her in her spying activities. On more than one occasion, she was able to charm a union officer into giving her secret information which she then relayed to Stonewall Jackson.

Physical Characteristics: Contemporaries noted that "without being beautiful, she is very attractive... quite tall.. .a superb figure... and dressed with much taste."

Quotes from others about the person

• "It took only a few minutes for my horse to carry me to meet the romantic maiden whose tall, supple, and graceful figure struck me as soon as I came in sight of her." - Henry Kyd Douglas.
  
  "She gets around considerably, is very shrewd, and is probably acting as a spy. She is an open, earnest, and undisguised secessionist, and talks secession on all practicable occasions... informant considers her more efficient in carrying the news to the rebels of our operations than any three men in the valley." - Rose O’Neal Greenhow
  
  "She stole weapons from Union camps, weaving arsenals of sabers and pistols through the steel coils of her hoop skirt, and smuggled precious quinine across the Potomac River to secessionist towns in Maryland. Not all of her endeavors were altruistic; she charged $3 to carry letters across the lines and $2 for liquor, and once attacked a Confederate soldier who refused to pay for his bottle (30 rebel men were badly wounded in the ensuing brawl)." - Karen Abbott
  
  "Female spies typically represented one of two extremes: the seductress who employed her wiles to manipulate men, and the cross-dresser who blended in by impersonating them. Belle was both, often within the same encounter, wheedling information out of Union officers while wearing Confederate garb, often to comic effect." - Karen Abbott

Interests

• Acting, writing

• Sport & Clubs

  Horse riding

Connections

Boyd fell in love with one of her captors, a Union officer named Samuel Hardinge. The pair later married and had a daughter together. As she explained in her memoir, she thought that she might be able to woo him to the Confederate side. Hardinge did serve time in prison for giving aid to Boyd.

Belle Boyd was married a second time to John Swainston Hammond, a former officer in the British army, in 1869. They had four children (three that lived past infancy) but divorced in 1884. In 1885 she married actor Nathaniel Rue High, 17 years her younger.

Father:

Benjamin Reed Boyd

Belle didn't seem to look up to very many people. She was a very independent woman with a dominant personality. If there was one person that she seemed to look up to the most it would be her father Benjamin Reed Boyd. He was the one who taught her all of the confederate ideology that leads her to be so passionate and dedicated to the confederates even though she lived among many union soldiers.

Mother:

Mary Rebecca Glenn Boyd

1826-1880

Brother:

Benjamin Reed Boyd

1845-1846

Brother:

William G. Boyd

1857-1923

Sister:

Fannie Glenn Boyd

1848-1849

Sister:

Anna Reed Boyd

1846-1849

Sister:

Annie Stewart Boyd

1850-1851

Daughter:

Grace Hardinge Bennett

1866-1934

Ex-husband:

John Swainston Hammond

husband:

Nathaniel Rue High

Daughter:

Clara Marie Schroeder Due

1892-1950

Late Husband:

Samuel Hardinge

colleague:

Stonewall Jackson

Isabella Maria Boyd undertook a hazardous journey through the lines to inform General Stonewall Jackson of the Union plans to destroy the town’s bridges as part of their retreat.

colleague:

Turner Ashby

Turner Ashby was a confederate cavalry in the American Civil war. He was the soldier closest to Boyd at the time she heard of the Fort Royal attacks. He was the first one informed of the upcoming attacks so he prepared in advance as well as warned other groups.

enemy:

Nathaniel Banks

Nathaniel Banks was a major general of the union army for the Union Army. His troops were the ones ordered to march on front royal. It is rumored that during the attack that Belle threw herself in, he tried to shot Belle but he failed.

References

• Pictorial History of the Civil War in the United States of America. By B. J. Lossing. Illustrated by many hundred engravings on wood, by Lossing and Barritt, etc.: III
  2010
• America's Military Adversaries: From Colonial Times to the Present
  2001
• On War and Leadership: The Words of Combat Commanders from Frederick the Great to Norman Schwarzkopf
  2002
• Stealing Secrets: How a Few Daring Women Deceived Generals, Impacted Battles, and Altered the Course of the Civil War
  2010
• She Went to the Field: Women Soldiers of the Civil War
  2006
• Lincoln's Spies: Their Secret War to Save a Nation
  2019