Actors - Belle Boyd

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	Actors - Belle Boyd

Maria Isabella Boyd (May 4, 1844 – June 11, 1900), best known as Belle Boyd, born in Martinsburg, West Virginia, was a Confederate spy in the American Civil War. Eldest child of Benjamin Reed and Mary Rebecca (Glenn) Boyd, she operated from her father's hotel in Front Royal, and provided valuable information to Generals Turner Ashby and Stonewall Jackson during the 1862 Valley Campaign. She was arrested on July 29, 1862, and held for a month in the Old Capitol Prison in Washington.

Belle Boyd's espionage career began by chance. On the fourth of July, 1861, a band of drunken Union soldiers broke into her home in Martinsburg, intent on raising the U. S. flag over the house. When one of them insulted her mother, Belle drew a pistol and killed him. A board of inquiry exonerated her, but sentries were posted around the house and officers kept close track of her activities. She profited from this enforced familiarity, charming at least one of the officers, Captain Daniel Keily, into revealing military secrets. "To him," she wrote later, "I am indebted for some very remarkable effusions, some withered flowers, and a great deal of important information." Belle conveyed those secrets to Confederate officers via her slave, Eliza Hopewell, who carried the messages in a hollowed-out watchcase.

Then, one evening in mid-May, General James Shields and his staff conferred in the parlor of the local hotel. Belle hid upstairs, eavesdropping through a knothole in the floor. She learned that Shields had been ordered east, a move that would reduce the Union Army's strength at Front Royal. That night, Belle rode through Union, using false papers to bluff her way past the sentries, and reported the news to Colonel Turner Ashby, who was scouting for the Confederates. She then returned to town. When the Confederates advanced on Front Royal on May 23, Belle ran to greet General Stonewall Jackson's men. She urged an officer to inform Jackson that "the Yankee force is very small. Tell him to charge right down and he will catch them all." Jackson did and that evening penned a note of gratitude to her: "I thank you, for myself and for the army, for the immense service that you have rendered your country today."

She was awarded the Southern Cross of Honor.

In 1864 she went to England where she met and married a Union naval officer, Samuel Wylde Hardinge, who died shortly after war's end. She then married John Swainston Hammond (1869) in New Orleans and, after a divorce in 1884, married Nathaniel Rue High (1885).

After the war Belle Boyd became an actress. She died in Kilbourne City, Wisconsin (now known as Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin) while touring the United States. She is buried in the Spring Grove Cemetery in Wisconsin Dells.

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