Belle’s mother worried about her safety in Martinsburg—the village was once again in Union hands—and in mid-May sent her, along with Belle’s servant, Eliza, farther south to stay with relatives in Front Royal. On the way Belle was detained briefly on suspicion of being a spy, but John Adams Dix, the commissioner who had presided over Rose’s hearing, determined that there was no “clear evidence of guilt” and ordered her release. Belle didn’t let the unpleasant incident ruin her trip. She attended every party, whether or not she’d been invited, and boasted indiscriminately of her exploits to acquaintances new and old.
Women, Belle soon learned, made for a surly audience, their lack of interest in her stories directly proportionate to her insistence on telling them. One Front Royal neighbor, Lucy Buck, found Belle “all surface, vain, and hollow” and complained of being carried “captive into the parlor.” Another, a teenager named Kate Sperry, was dismayed when Belle knocked on her door. “Of all fools I ever saw of the womankind she certainly beats all,” Kate wrote. “Perfectly insane on the subject of men . . . she is entirely crazy.” Even when Belle told them they could “write the boys by me” and offered to deliver the letters beyond the lines, the girls were not impressed (“Poor boys!” quipped Lucy Buck).
Front Royal, at the northern reaches of the Shenandoah Valley, spanned 9.5 square miles and had only five hundred residents, but its strategic importance belied its size. This town, too, changed hands often, and it fell under Federal control around the time that Belle and Eliza arrived. Belle’s aunt, Mrs. Fanny Stewart, was proprietor of the Fishback Hotel, a tidy, three-story structure with balconies jutting irregularly from windows, its cheerful yellow facade out of place amid clusters of homes wrecked by warfare. In the rear, tucked away from the bawdy noise of High Street, a winding brick path lined with violets and quaker-ladies led to a private cottage, where Belle stayed during her visits. “It is here,” warned the Philadelphia Inquirer, “that some of the most accomplished women in the valley assemble, with purpose and design to pump from our young lieutenants, who know little of the stern realities of war, the name and number of their regiments—how many effective men their particular regiment can muster, and what their state of efficiency is.”
At that moment Belle was focused on Union general James Shields, who had claimed the Fishback Hotel as his headquarters. One night, after dining with her family in the cottage, she left her calling card for the fifty-one-year-old general, and he came promptly to pay his respects. Unsavory gossip seemed to follow Shields; his men reportedly thought him “disloyal or insane.” He defied the urgent protest of the medical director of his division by attending the examination of a young rape victim, and then insisted upon examining her himself. Nevertheless Belle found him charming: “He was an Irishman, and endowed with all those graces of manner for which the better class of his countrymen are justly famous; nor was he devoid of the humor for which they are no less notorious.”
She chatted casually, asking him how he found the town and his accommodations at the hotel, and inquired if he might be so kind as to grant her a pass to Richmond. Shields laughed and replied that Stonewall Jackson’s army was so demoralized that he dared not entrust her to their “tender mercies.” But, he confided, the rebels would be annihilated in a few days, after which she could wander as she pleased.
Belle smiled and said nothing, giddy because the general had inadvertently tipped his hand. His joking tone betrayed his confidence about a swift and decisive Union victory. “He was completely off his guard,” she thought, “and forgot that a woman can sometimes listen and remember.”
During the next few days Belle socialized with the general and his staff, sharing her stash of cigars, memorizing all their names, and showing off her latest pet, a crow with a split tongue, which she was training to talk; so far its vocabulary included “Miss Belle,” “Stonewall,” and “General Lee.” Harper’s author and illustrator David Hunter Strother, working as a civilian topographer for Shields, found her “looking well and deporting herself in a lady-like manner. I daresay she has been much slandered by reports. She sported a bunch of buttons despoiled from General Shields and our officers and seemed ready to increase her trophies”—tokens she had been given or had taken from Union soldiers she seduced into providing her with information. She managed all of this, one admirer mused, “without being beautiful.”
Another Yankee visitor, a correspondent for the New York Tribune, observed Belle in a different mood, seducing General Shields so thoroughly that she remained “closeted four hours” with him and subsequently wrapped a rebel flag around his head. Next she moved on to Shields’s aide-de-camp, Captain Daniel Keily, who courted her with flowers and love poems. To “Captain K,” as Belle called him, she was “indebted for some very remarkable effusions, some withered flowers, and last, not least, for a great deal of very important information”—most notably the time and location of a Union council of war.
On the specified night Belle crossed the brick path to the Fishback Hotel and crept upstairs. A certain chamber was positioned directly above the drawing room, where the officers planned to gather, and she shut herself in a closet to lie prone on the floor. She knew that someone, sometime, had bored a hole in the wood (for purposes of espionage, she liked to think), and now she pressed her ear tightly against it, pleased to discover she could hear everything unfolding below: the scrape of moving chairs, papers rattling, a closed fist pounding the table.
The men discussed their army’s positions and plans. General McClellan was advancing toward Richmond, and General Irvin McDowell would support his drive. Shields and General John Geary would move to reinforce McDowell, leaving General Nathaniel Banks, currently fifteen miles west of Front Royal, stripped of much of his force. McDowell had wired Shields to say that Stonewall Jackson was on the line toward Richmond, “so in coming east you will be following him.” The men detailed the route they’d take to join McDowell and how, exactly, they could trap Jackson.
Belle had what she wanted. More important, she had what Jackson wanted; the information from this war council was the most important intelligence she’d gleaned thus far. The men finally disbanded at one in the morning. She heard the general lumber upstairs and down the hall to his chamber, yawning and clearing his throat. At the click of his door she tiptoed outside, the flicker of gaslight guiding her back to the cottage. She needed to deliver the information at once to Turner Ashby, Stonewall’s cavalry commander and a friend to her many relatives in the Confederate army.
She transcribed the conversation and gathered a couple of passes, acquired through “various circumstances” from paroled rebel officers returning south. Passes customarily required a specific name, but some Union staff officers used vague wording, making them out to “bearer” or leaving them blank altogether. At this hour of the night, Belle hoped the Union sentinels would be too drunk or too tired to question her. If she carried a pass from divisional headquarters or higher, they would assume she was a Federal agent. For added insurance, she unlaced her corset, kicked off her crinoline, and dressed in the garb of a boy: trousers, shirt, a worn cotton kepi.
She slipped out to the stables, saddled a horse, and headed for the mountains, estimating the route to be about fifteen miles. Twice Federal guards stopped her, and twice they let her through after a quick glimpse at her pass. The path was rough, with hard climbs up the stony beds of brooks and leaps over deep gorges and ravines, and it was around 3:00 a.m. when she arrived at Ashby’s temporary residence, the home of someone she knew as “Mr. M.”
She sprang from her horse and sprinted up the steps. The house was still and dark, and she rapped at the door with tight fists.
“Who is there?” a voice called from a second-story window.
Belle took a step back, lifted her head, and shouted, “It is I!”
“But who are you? What is your name?”
She removed the kepi from her head and called, “Belle Boyd. I have important intelligence to communicate to Colonel Ashby. Is he here?”
“No, but wait a minute. I will come down.”
Mr. M opened the door and pulled her inside. “My dear, where did you come from? And how on earth did you get here?”
“Oh, I forced the sentries, and here I am. But I have no time to tell you the how, and the why, and the wherefore. I must see Colonel Ashby without the loss of a minute. Tell me where he is to be found.”
Ashby himself then appeared at the door.
“Good God!” he exclaimed. “Miss Belle, is this you? Where did you come from? Have you been dropped from the clouds? Or am I dreaming?”
Belle rested a hand on his arm and insisted that, yes, he was wide awake, and that her “presence was substantial and of the earth—not a visionary emanation from the world of spirits.” Quickly she explained the contents of her note, detailing how Union forces intended to trap Stonewall Jackson, and then handed it over.
As she went back to the cottage it began to rain, ragged hot wires of lightning crackling all around her. Belle kept on, soaked to the skin, her horse kicking up divots of mud. As she approached Union lines, a flash of lightning illuminated the figure of a guard, rifle poised.
“Who comes there?” he challenged.
She thrust a hand into her pocket, seeking her pass. Nothing. Somehow she’d lost it during the ride. Her mind cast around for the Union countersign, but for once she couldn’t remember. She felt her throat stitch tight in panic. Another streak of lightning lit the sky, and she saw a corporal standing behind the guard.
“Let the boy pass,” the corporal said. “I know him.”
Belle sped off before he could change his mind. By dawn she was back in bed at the cottage, dreaming of Stonewall reading her words.