CDV OF FAMOUS CONFEDERATE SPY BELLE BOYD

$500.00

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Item Code: 1139-427

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Image is a bust view lithograph of Belle Boyd.

Contrast and clarity are good. Paper and mount have moderate surface dirt along the bottom also an ID in modern pencil.

Reverse has a photographer’s imprint for E. & H.T. ANTHONY… NEW YORK and a period pencil inscription that reads “BELL BOYD THE CELEBRATED REBEL SPY.”

Maria Isabella "Belle" Boyd was born May 9, 1844 in Martinsburg, Virginia. During the Civil War, her father was a soldier in the Stonewall Brigade, and at least three other members of her family were convicted of being Confederate spies. On July 4, 1861 Belle Boyd shot and killed a drunken Union soldier who, "addressed my mother and myself in language as offensive as it is possible to conceive." She did not suffer any reprisal for this action, "the commanding officer...inquired into all the circumstances with strict impartiality, and finally said I had 'done perfectly right.'" By early 1862 her activities were well known to the Union Army and the press, who dubbed her "La Belle Rebelle," "the Siren of the Shenandoah," "the Rebel Joan of Arc," and "Amazon of Secessia." Boyd frequented the Union camps, gathering information, and also acting as a courier. Learning that Union Major General Nathaniel Banks' forces had been ordered to march, she rode fifteen miles to inform Confederate Major General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson who was nearby in the Shenandoah Valley. She returned home under cover of darkness. Boyd was arrested six or seven times, but managed to avoid incarceration until July 29, 1862, when she was finally imprisoned in Old Capitol Prison in Washington, D.C. She was released after a month as part of a prisoner exchange, but was arrested again in July 1863. In December 1863 she was released and banished to the South. She sailed for England on May 8, 1864 and was arrested again as a Confederate courier. She finally escaped to Canada with the help of a Union naval officer, Lieutenant Sam Hardinge, and eventually made her way to England where she and Hardinge were married on August 25, 1864. Boyd remained in England for two years writing her memoirs and achieving success on the stage. She returned to America, a widow and mother, in 1866 where she continued her stage career and lectured on her war experiences. In 1869, she married John Swainston Hammond, an Englishman who had fought for the Union Army. In November 1884, sixteen years and four children later, she divorced Hammond. Two months later she married Nathaniel High, Jr., an actor seventeen years her junior. She died, in poverty, of a heart attack at age 56 on June 11, 1900 while on tour in Kilbourn Wisconsin. She is buried there, in Spring Grove Cemetery.  [ad][ph:L]

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