CDV of Belle Boyd. Bust view. Mount is very clean with crisp edges. No backmark.

Isabella Maria Boyd (May 9, 1844 – June 11, 1900), best known as Belle Boyd (and dubbed the Cleopatra of the Secession or Siren of the Shenandoah, and later the Confederate Mata Hari) was a Confederate spy during the Civil War. She operated from her father's hotel in Front Royal, Virginia, and provided valuable information to Confederate General Stonewall Jackson in 1862.

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, and they brought her to the Old Capitol Prison in Washington, D.C. the next day. She was held for a month before being released on August 29, 1862, when she was exchanged at Fort Monroe. She was arrested again in June 1863, but was released after contracting typhoid fever.

In March 1864, Boyd attempted to travel to England, but she was intercepted by a Union blockade and sent to Canada where she met Union naval officer Samuel Wylde Hardinge. The two later married in England. Following the death of her husband in 1866, she and her daughter returned to the United States. Boyd assumed the stage name Nina Benjamin to perform in several cities, eventually ending up in New Orleans where she married John Swainston Hammond in March 1869, a former British Army officer who fought for the Union Army during the Civil War. Boyd divorced Hammond in 1884 and married Nathaniel Rue High in 1885. She subsequently began touring the country giving dramatic lectures of her life as a Civil War spy.

Boyd published a highly fictionalized narrative of her war experiences in the two-volume Belle Boyd in Camp and Prison. She died of a heart attack in Kilbourn City, Wisconsin on June 11, 1900, at age 56. She was buried in the Spring Grove Cemetery in Wisconsin Dells, with members of the Grand Army of the Republic as her pallbearers.  [jet] [ph:L]

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