Confederate Spy Belle Boyd Arrested - July 29, 1862

Confederate spy Belle Boyd was arrested on this day in 1862.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to this day in history class. It's July. Confederate
spy Belle Boyd was captured on this day in eighteen
sixty two. Let's start with a tiny bit about her life.
She was born in Martinsburg, Virginia, which is now in
West Virginia, on May night of eighteen forty four. She
was the oldest of eight children, kind of a tomboy,

(00:24):
was also at same time raised to be a proper
Southern lady. She attended Mount Washington Female College, and she
had a formal society debut in Washington, d c. In
eighteen sixty, but the Civil War started not long after
her debut. She was seventeen at the time. She came
back home to Martinsburg to raise money for the war

(00:44):
and to serve as a nurse. Her father had also
volunteered for the Confederate army. They were kind of an
outlier in Martinsburg, though there were a lot of Union
supporters in Martinsburg and in all of the territory that
would become West Virginia. West Virginia would become a state
on June eighteen sixty three after seceding from Virginia and

(01:06):
West Virginia didn't join the South in the fight for slavery.
On July three, Federal troops occupied Martinsburg, and then, according
to Boyd's own account, they heard that she had a
bunch of Confederate flags hanging in her room. They came
to her house to take the flags down and then
to replace them with a Union flag, but her family

(01:27):
got rid of all those flags before they got there.
They raised their Federal flag anyway, and then during the
argument that followed, a soldier from the north quote addressed
my mother and myself in language as offensive as it
is possible to conceive, was from Boyd's own writing, so

(01:47):
according to Boyd's account, she shot him and he died,
but a Union officer ruled this to be a justifiable homicide,
so Boyd was allowed to remain free. But a detail
of Union's soldiers were put around her home, either to
protect her or to keep an eye on her, it's
not clear which, and she started talking to them, listening

(02:08):
to them eves, dropping on their conversations, and then passing
that information onto the Confederacy. By the fall of eighteen
sixty one, she was working as a career for Confederate intelligence,
but she wasn't using any kind of code or disguising
your handwriting in any way, so when someone found a
letter in her handwriting signed with the name Belle, they

(02:31):
naturally questioned her. Apparently, though they didn't think a seventeen
year old girl could do that much damage, so they
didn't take her into custody. She kept on flirting and
eavesdropping and her efforts to get more information and pass
it on to the Confederacy. In eighteen sixty two, she
learned that General James Shields was planning to take most
of his troops out of Front Royal to aid in

(02:52):
an assault on Richmond, so she passed that information along
this time though in code, along with some of their
tidbits she had heard about what's going on. Then she
heard that the Union was going to burn the bridges
around Front Royal, and she tried to get that message
to General Thomas J. Jackson that Stonewall Jackson. Nobody was

(03:13):
willing to get in between the two armies to deliver
that message, though, so she did it herself under fire
the whole time. Jackson speeded up his attack. He managed
to save the bridges and capture some weapons and supplies,
and then Belle Boyd continued on with her spy work.
She earned nicknames like LaBelle Rebel and the Cleopatra of

(03:34):
the Secession. All this went on until the Secretary of
War and when Stanton issued a warrant for her arrest
and she was captured on July sixty two. She was
taken to the Old Capital Prison in Washington and then
released after a month in a prisoner exchange. She was
arrested again though, in July of eighteen sixty three, and
then served for six months before she became ill with typhoid.

(03:56):
After all of this, she really could no longer work
as spy for the Confederacy anymore. She was way too recognizable.
She left for England, taking some messages to Confederate supporters
there with her. She got married in England, but her
husband died not long after, and she was pregnant at
the time. She wrote a two volume book called Belle

(04:17):
Boyd in Camp in Prison to try to support herself
and her child. Then she also tried to support herself
through a stage career. She got married a second time
and then later died of a heart attack on June tenth,
nine hundred. You can learn more about Belle Boyd in
the July four episode Stuffy Miss in History Class, and
you can subscribe to This Day in History Class on

(04:39):
Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, and whatever else you get your podcasts.
Tomorrow we'll go to South Africa for a short lived
republic