On the morning of Tuesday, July 29, Belle sat on the balcony of her cottage behind the Fishback Hotel, watching the first sliver of sun crest above the hills, the only sound the steady pounding of hooves. It had been a few weeks since Union spy C. W. D. Smitley had betrayed her, and now came the repercussions: a large body of Union cavalry approaching, the men in twos and threes. Shading her eyes with a hand, she stood and scanned High Street, spotting an empty carriage parked in front of the hotel. She knew it was meant for her.
Eliza called up the stairs: “Miss Belle, de Provo’ wishes to see you in de drawing room, and dere’s two oder men wid him.”
After her initial trepidation Belle had resigned herself to the idea of prison; a part of her even welcomed it. She had read the Southern reports about Rose Greenhow’s imprisonment—the inadequate food, the lack of fresh air and exercise, the generally “outrageous persecutions,” as one newspaper seethed, “which have been inflicted upon this true and noble woman”—and Belle expected the same treatment. She would be elevated to Rose’s status, a true Confederate martyr honored as much for her sacrifice as her daring.
Belle descended the steps slowly, as if her legs had invented walking—legs one rebel soldier declared “the best-looking in the Confederacy.” The assembled men watched and waited: provost marshal Arthur Maginnis, Major Francis Sherman of the 12th Illinois Cavalry, and a civilian with an unruly beard and restless, darting eyes—one of Secretary of War Stanton’s henchman, she assumed. He reminded her of Edgar Allan Poe’s raven.
“Miss Boyd,” the provost marshal intoned, “Major Sherman has come to arrest you.”
Belle lifted an index finger to her chin. “Impossible,” she said. “For what?”
Major Sherman stepped forward with a document:
Sir: You will proceed immediately to Front Royal, Virginia, and arrest, if found there, Miss Belle Boyd, and bring her at once to Washington.
I am, respectfully,
Your obedient servant,
E. M. Stanton
Stanton’s detective, the Raven, followed her to her room, pawing through her dresses and petticoats and undergarments, examining every scrap of paper in her desk. To Belle’s dismay he confiscated the pistol she’d saved as a special present for Stonewall Jackson. Eliza fell to her knees, locking her arms around Belle’s calves until the Raven pried her away.
Citizens and soldiers clogged the streets, waiting to witness Belle’s departure. She saw mostly “sorrow and sympathy” on their faces, but also some looks of “exultation and malignant triumph.” Her neighbor Lucy Buck reflected the latter category, and recorded the scene in her diary: “Belle Boyd was taken prisoner and sent off in a carriage with an escort of fifty cavalrymen today. I hope she has succeeded in making herself proficiently notorious now.” The carriage rattled through Winchester, escorted by a regiment of two hundred soldiers, and stopped at a Union camp just north of Martinsburg. Another carriage pulled up and Belle saw her mother, dressed in deep mourning and wearing a heavy veil. Belle rushed to her, arms outstretched. “My poor, dear child!” Mary Boyd cried. She begged the guards to let Belle await her departure at home, where her siblings wished to say good-bye, but her request was denied. In the near distance Belle spotted a maple tree, its branches stretching long and curling upward, as if beckoning her, and she pictured herself hanging from the highest one.
By nine the next morning Belle’s train had reached Washington, and a carriage waited to convey her to the Old Capitol Prison. She was delighted to learn that Rose’s old cell was directly above her own. The door moaned open to reveal Superintendent William Wood, and she straightened herself to match his modest height. He bowed vaguely in her direction.
“And so this is the celebrated rebel spy,” he said. “I am very glad to see you, and will endeavor to make you as comfortable as possible. So whatever you wish for, ask and you shall have it. I am glad I have so distinguished a personage for my guest.” He promised to send her a servant, and that she would not be there for long if she was a model prisoner.
He shut the door gently behind him.
Belle stopped herself from calling him back and scolding him for his courtesy. She didn’t understand. Could it be that Union authorities considered Rose Greenhow a true and dangerous threat, and her a mere nuisance? She contemplated how to remedy the situation. If she behaved badly enough, if she compounded every demand with another, more absurd demand, perhaps Superintendent Wood would be inspired to do his job and torment her properly.
She paced around her cell, taking inventory of her effects: a washstand, a looking glass, an iron bedstead, a table, a couple of chairs. Two windows stretched the entire length of one wall, giving her a partial view of Pennsylvania Avenue and, in the distance, the home of John Floyd, secretary of war during the Buchanan administration. There she had passed “many happy hours” after her society debut, her hair tied up in combs and ribbons, dancing to “Old Zip Coon” and telling the loudest stories in the room. She pressed her face between the bars and called for a sentry. She needed a rocking chair and a fire immediately, she said; the cell was too gloomy for her to bear.
Wood returned at 8:00 p.m., accompanied by a detective sent by Secretary of War Stanton. Belle ordered them both to sit. Behind them the fire hissed like a perturbed cat.
“Ain’t you tired of your prison a’ready?” the detective asked. “I’ve come to get you to make a free confession now of what you’ve did agin our cause. And, as we’ve got plenty of proof agin you, you might as well acknowledge at once.”
“Sir,” Belle replied, “I do not understand you; and, furthermore, I have nothing to say. When you have informed me on what grounds I have been arrested, and given me a copy of the charges preferred against me, I will make my statement, but I shall not now commit myself.”
He launched into a stuttering monologue about the enormity of her offense and the futility of her cause, and suggested she sign the oath of allegiance.
Belle stepped closer and said, “Tell Mr. Stanton from me, I hope that when I commence the oath of allegiance to the United States Government, my tongue may cleave to the roof of my mouth; and that if ever I sign one line that will show to the world that I owe the United States Government the slightest allegiance, I hope my arm may fall paralyzed by my side.”
The detective scratched her speech across the pages of his notebook. “Well, if this is your resolution,” he said, “you’ll have to lay here and die, and serve you right.”
Once again she thought of Rose, and how the older spy managed to get her bold condemnation of the Yankee government printed in the newspapers. Her next words aligned quickly in her mind, and she recited them at full volume: “Sir, if it is a crime to love the South, its cause, and its President, then I am a criminal. I am in your power; do with me as you please. But I fear you not. I would rather lie down in this prison and die, than leave it owing allegiance to such a government as yours. Now leave the room; for so thoroughly am I disgusted with your conduct towards me that I cannot endure your presence longer.”
Cheers and cries of “Bravo!” rang up and down the floor, and she wished Stonewall Jackson could see her now.
Save for the want of exercise, Belle suffered no privations. Washington secessionists supplied her with meals of soup, beefsteak, chicken, boiled corn, tomatoes, potatoes, Irish stew, bread and butter, and a variety of fruits, all served to her in her room by a contraband whom Wood had assigned as her servant. One of the sentinels brought her every newspaper that mentioned her name and allowed visits from curious journalists, which Belle welcomed. “She was dressed today,” reported a correspondent for the Washington Star, “in a plain frock, low in the neck, and her arms were bare. Jackson, it appears, is her idol. . . . She takes her arrest as a matter of course, and is smart, plucky, and absurd as ever. A lunatic asylum might be recommended for her.” When the new provost marshal, twenty-five-year-old Major William Doster, came to call on her, he found her relaxing by her fire, reading Harper’s and eating peaches.
“I can afford to remain here,” Belle told him, “if Stanton could afford to keep me. There is so much company and so little to do.” Besides, she added, it was an excellent chance to brush up on her literature and get her wedding outfit ready; she was certain one of her fellow inmates was destined to be her husband. The provost marshal laughed, but Belle was serious. If she weren’t going to be tortured, she wanted to at least be pursued.
At first she did the pursuing, slipping her mouth between the bars of her cell and singing:
She is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumb
Huzza! She spurns the Northern scum!
She breathes! She burns! She’ll come! She’ll come!
Maryland! My Maryland!
Every prisoner stopped to listen, entranced. Those somehow unfamiliar with Belle’s name sought to rectify this omission, asking who she was, where she had come from, what she had done. “The pathos of her voice,” wrote one, “her apparently forlorn condition, and at these times when her soul seemed absorbed in the thoughts she was uttering in song, her melancholy manner affected all who heard her, not only with compassion for her but with an interest in her which came near on several occasions [to] bringing about a conflict between the prisoners and the guards.” Another prisoner admitted that Belle’s voice brought “a lump up in my throat every time I heard it. It seemed like my heart was ready to jump out as if I could put my finger down and touch it. I’ve seen men, when she was singing, walk off to one side and pull out their handkerchiefs and wipe their eyes, for fear someone would see them doing the baby act.”
Her intentional emphasis of the words “Northern scum” further enflamed emotions, once prompting a sentry to yell, “Hush up!”
“I shan’t do it!” Belle retorted. Picking up a broom, she repeated the offending line and swept at the guard’s feet, shooing him away.
Sunday morning proved to be the optimal time to assess her romantic prospects. Superintendent Wood (an avowed atheist, it was said) stopped at every floor to announce services: all who wished to hear the Lord God according to Abe Lincoln should convene in Room 16, and all who preferred the Gospel according to Jeff Davis would be accommodated in the yard—the only way, Belle reasoned, to “separate the goats from the sheep.” Wearing a small Confederate flag, the stem tucked in her bodice, she sat near the preacher, close enough for him to reach out and touch her head. She read intently from her prayer book, which she’d inscribed “Belle Boyd, Old Capitol Prison,” and smiled at the rebel prisoners as they passed—a gesture, admitted one, that “did them more good than the preaching.”
She began corresponding with a group of prisoners from Fredericksburg, confined in Rose’s old cell, who’d found a loosened plank in the floor—the one through which Rose had lowered Little Rose. They tied strings around their letters and dropped them through the slat to Belle, and she always made them wait before sending up her reply.
She found herself drawn to one rebel soldier in particular, Lieutenant Clifford McVay, whose acquaintance she’d first made years earlier, during her time as a socialite in Washington. He’d been wounded during the ongoing Peninsula Campaign and left for dead on the battlefield, where Federal forces captured him. His cell conveniently faced hers, and at night, if her favorite guard came on duty, she winked at McVay and signaled for him to open his door. He sang her a love song, and she responded in kind, trilling the lyrics to “My Southern Soldier Boy.” As she hit the final note she peeled off her glove, pausing at her wrist, letting it dangle from the tips of her fingers. She pitched it to him in a graceful arc. He caught it and, keeping his eyes on her, reached into the silk to withdraw a billet-doux. Scribbling a response, he tucked it inside the glove and aimed it at her heart.
One night her servant brought her a sugar loaf with her dinner, a treat she wished to pass to her suitor. She asked the sentry on duty for permission to deliver it across the passage.
He shrugged. “I have no objection.”
As her outstretched hand made contact with McVay’s, the sentry swung his musket, connecting with the points of her knuckles, smashing her thumb. He had set her up. Without meaning to, she began to cry. She faced the sentry and demanded to see the corporal of the guard. The sentry refused, and Belle stepped forward.
“Go back,” the sentry ordered, “or I’ll break every bone in your body.”
He raised and thrust his bayonet, a shiny streak coming straight at her, carving a scoop of flesh from her arm, pinning her to the wall by her dress. He held her there for a moment, like a prize catch on a line, while she screamed and thrashed. She had never been physically assaulted in her (now) eighteen years. Beneath the pain she felt confused, as if the guard had made a mistake, and she wanted him to take it back. When he finally let her go, her mind refocused, shifting back to defiance, its proper and natural setting. The scar from that wound became one of her favorite souvenirs from the war. She rolled up her sleeve for anyone who asked, fingering the scar like a talisman.