Belle Boyd

Born:  May 9, 1844, Martinsburg, Virginia (now West Virginia)

Died:  June 11, 1900, Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin

Resting Place:  Spring Grove Cemetery, Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin

Brief History:  After some preliminary schooling in Martinsburg, she attended finishing school at the Mount Washington Female College in Baltimore, Maryland in 1856 at age 12. After Virginia seceded and Boyd's father joined the Confederate army, she returned to Martinsburg and witnessed its occupation by the United States Army early in July 1861. She was active in the Confederate cause from the outset and soon volunteered to nurse sick and wounded Southern soldiers. 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. 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.

Boyd was arrested at least six times but somehow evaded incarceration. By late July 1862, detective Allan Pinkerton had assigned three men to work on her case. She was finally captured by Union officials on July 29, 1862, after her lover gave her up, and they brought her to the Old Capitol Prison in Washington, D.C. the next day. When Boyd returned home to Martinsburg late in the summer of 1863, the town had become part of the state of West Virginia, and she was again arrested. This time her imprisonment in Washington lasted longer, but in December 1863 she was banished to the South. Boyd left for England carrying Confederate dispatches in May 1864, but her ship was stopped on the 10th of that month. On 25 August 1864 she married Samuel Hardinge Jr., the Union naval officer who had seized her ship. Pregnant with Hardinge's daughter, Boyd remained in England and turned to writing to support herself.