Belle had no desire to leave the Old Capitol Prison, as she was still enjoying the company of Lieutenant Clifford McVay, who had taken to writing amorous notes on tissue paper, wrapping them around marbles, and rolling them across the floor. She let the notes disappear beneath her skirts, keeping her eyes on his as she retrieved them, and mouthed each word as she read it. He seemed close to proposing marriage, and she was confident enough that if she refused him twice, as per Southern custom, he would persist for the third and final time. She wished to stay in the capital long enough to assemble her wedding trousseau: a cloak in dark stamped velvet; an underskirt cut in deep scallops and finished with rows of pale beads; a morning dress trimmed in white lace and pink satin ribbons, the sleeves fixed to reveal her brilliant jewel of a scar.
So she was not at all prepared for the September afternoon, about a month into her imprisonment, when Superintendent Wood stood outside her cell and boomed, “All you rebels get ready! You are going to Dixie tomorrow and Miss Belle is going with you!” The Federal and Confederate governments had arranged for a formal exchange of inmates, two hundred Yankees for two hundred rebels, in an attempt to alleviate overcrowding in their respective prisons, and Belle was specifically mentioned in the order: “I forward likewise Miss Belle Boyd,” wrote Brigadier General James Wadsworth, “a young lady arrested on suspicion of having communicated with the enemy. I have agreed that she shall be placed over the lines by the first flag of truce.” She was not to return to the North for the duration of the war.
Belle suspected that officials were eager to be rid of her because she boosted prisoner morale, and was much gratified when many of the men wept at the news of her departure. McVay was the most despondent of all, rolling several messages across the passage that night, sensing that he’d never again watch her lips form his words. He was right—Belle lost all track of him after her release—but at least she got her trousseau; Superintendent Wood, keeping his infuriating promise to grant her every wish, shopped for her and sent each purchase on to Richmond.
The following morning, Belle and the Confederate prisoners lined up in the Old Capitol courtyard and were hustled out into the street, where throngs of secessionists gathered to cheer them, including a young mother who threw kisses to the departing soldiers using her baby’s hand. Belle treated them to her broad smile and queenly wave and let herself be lifted into her carriage. She had two gold saber knots, one for General Joe Johnston and one for Stonewall Jackson, hidden beneath her skirts.
The steamship Juniata cast off toward the mouth of the Potomac, where it dropped anchor and spent the night, the prisoners taunting the Union officers with rebel songs and cheers for Jeff Davis (“Three cheers for the Devil!” came the ready retort). In the morning it steamed up the murky waters of the James, and the passengers spotted the rebel “Stars and Bars” waving from windows as they rounded the river bend. Belle went straight to the Ballard House, where she was serenaded by the city band and held court in the parlor alongside Rose Greenhow. For Belle the encounter was secondary only to meeting Stonewall Jackson, and she went to sleep marveling that she’d become who she wanted to be before even growing up.
Rose Greenhow and Belle Boyd stayed at the Ballard House, Richmond’s finest hotel.
(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
Elizabeth stepped out into the stifling heat, wagging a palm-leaf fan by her face, taking care to breathe through her mouth. The air so reeked of suffering and death that the city burned barrels of tar, considered an efficient fumigator, in an attempt to clean it. She spotted her next-door neighbor, R. J. White, who was hoping to patent a machine similar to the Union’s “coffee mill” gun, which poured bullets, as from a hopper, at the rate of 120 per minute. He tipped his hat. She nodded in reply, feeling his gaze on her back as she crossed the street to her friend Eliza’s home.
There Mary Jane was waiting with the seamstress, both of them expecting Elizabeth’s visit and aware of the risks involved in her plans. They were among a growing number of servants and slaves working on behalf of the North, passing information to Union engineers, cartographers, generals, and scouts. In rural areas they acted as guides through unfamiliar country, sharing knowledge about water, game, and the habits of the enemy. Escaped slaves, armed with axes, went on expeditions through the woods, hacking at the heavy timber and preparing the way for the advance, leaving the roads strewn with the bodies of bloodhounds sent to track them down. In Port Royal, South Carolina, the great slave rescuer Harriet Tubman organized a band of Negro spies, gaining their confidence through kind words and sacred hymns.
Elizabeth explained that she and Mary Jane needed an intermediary, someone willing to pass information to and from the Confederate White House, someone whose discretion matched her valor. They had come to the right woman; the seamstress even volunteered how it could be done. She held up a gown of purple brocade, the sort Varina Davis wore every day while the poorer classes, suffering from the effects of the blockade, transformed their draperies into dresses.
Cotton dresses were constructed with the skirt attached directly to the bottom of the bodice, but the ones made of finer material, like Mrs. Davis’s, were constructed with the skirt attached to a waistband made from lining or scrap fabric and then attached to the bodice. If Mary Jane had the time and skill, she could partially disassemble the garment to access the inside of the waistband, hide her dispatches inside, stitch it back together, and bring it in for “repair.” But if she was in a rush, she should simply sew the information into a fold in the skirt and package it before dropping it off. Elizabeth would pick it up the following morning and prepare the information for delivery through the lines.
It was settled, but they needed a contingency plan in case the seamstress was unavailable or compromised, or if Mary Jane, for whatever reason, wasn’t able to leave the Confederate White House to drop the dresses off. Elizabeth thought of Thomas McNiven, a Scottish immigrant whom she’d met one recent Sunday at St. John’s Episcopal Church. After the service, a fellow parishioner approached, clutching a young, red-headed man by the arm. The parishioner introduced him as “a friend to be trusted.”
McNiven owned a bakery at 811 North Fifth Street, less than one mile from the Confederate White House, a frequent stop on his route, and Mary Jane could easily arrange to slip him dispatches and drawings during his early morning deliveries. He also had his own burgeoning network of Union sympathizers, people far outside Elizabeth’s usual circles, mostly other Scottish immigrants and prostitutes in the red-light district along Locust Alley. One of his most reliable and prolific sources was “Clara A.,” who always operated alone and catered only to the “carriage trade,” including politicians and both Union and Confederate commanders; “Bull Head” was reportedly a nickname for Confederate colonel Lucius B. Northrop, and “Big Belly” for secretary of state Judah P. Benjamin. She recorded the highlights from some of her sessions in a diary:
General Limpy, the food fop—he must do the undressing. Shoes too.
Big brass, big belly. Since my rule, he brings only Yankee money. Wonder where he gets it. Wonder what old sourface would say if he knew one of his plate-lickers had so much Yankee money.
The Maryland Governor? Do it bending over, bark sometimes.
Four big generals last night came together. Red beard really has red hair all over. They brought two more barrels of wine and twenty blankets. Must sell some of the blankets. Have too many.
Christ! The praying general was brought in today by Preacher H. He is rough and brutal. After I serviced him, he dropped to his knees and asked God to forgive me for my sins!
Elizabeth was pleased that her Richmond Underground was expanding its ranks, although larger numbers carried greater risks—for mistakes, for turncoats, for the lethal consequences of discovery. Her friend Charles Palmer—who, like John Minor Botts, was a wealthy Unionist ex-Whig—had connected with a man named F. W. E. Lohmann, a grocer who himself was the leader of a group of German Unionists in Richmond. Botts recruited William S. Rowley, a New York native who rented a farm on the outskirts of Richmond. He was an odd-looking man, a brunet with a bright red beard that looked like a pinecone made of hair, and he would become Elizabeth’s most valuable spy; she called him “the bravest of the brave, and the truest of the true,” a man of “rare perception and wonderful intuition.” Three new members—ice merchant Burnham Wardwell, carpenter William Fay, and engineer Arnold Holmes—even sent their children on missions to the prisons. Some of the adults created a recognition system, carving favors made from peach pits, little swinging three-leaf clovers in their centers, that dangled from men’s watch chains and ladies’ pendants. When the clover was upside down, it was safe to talk; when it was right side up, it wasn’t.
Elizabeth’s money and family connections gave her entrée into the Confederate Army and Navy departments, where she lured numerous Northern-sympathizing clerks into her confidence. One, a “trusty Union man” in the Adjutant General’s Department, had access to information about the strength of rebel regiments, brigades, divisions, and corps, along with their movements and where they were stationed. There were nameless, faceless members, too, people who were wary of associating with outspoken Unionists but wanted to do their part. They jotted down gossip and observations and snatches of overheard conversation and crept, in the thick of night, to St. John’s, leaving their notes, wrapped around flowers, by certain tombstones in the graveyard.
Mary Jane, meanwhile, played her role inside the Confederate White House, entering each morning through the servants’ door, polishing every inch of mahogany, addressing Mr. and Mrs. Davis as Marse and Mistress, being careful to avert her eyes. She knew which Davis servants were loyal, always looking for another traitor among the staff, and forced herself to join in their condemnation of the Yankees.
She kept the president’s office spotless, taking her time shining his desk, picking up each paper and memorizing it before lowering it back into place. Davis and his top generals employed an encryption system superior to that used by Rose Greenhow. While Rose switched and substituted letters and symbols for only one alphabet, the top-level cipher utilized as many as twenty-six alphabets based on the letters of a key phrase: MANCHESTER BLUFF, COMPLETE VICTORY, or, later in the war, COME RETRIBUTION. Davis wrote drafts of his messages in plain English, and marked sensitive portions “to be placed in cipher,” a task handled by his confidential secretary or a clerk with the Confederate Signal Corps. Leafing through Davis’s papers, Mary Jane saw either the English version of the president’s messages or English written in over the cipher.
There was much for her to report in October. At the end of the month, General McClellan began to cross the Potomac River east of the Blue Ridge, leading the Army of the Potomac southward toward Warrenton, and General Lee felt compelled to act lest he be cut off from Richmond. He ordered Stonewall Jackson to remain in the Valley, in position to confront the right flank of the Union army, while he and General James Longstreet moved eastward into a position to block the Northern advance.
President Davis summoned Lee to Richmond for a conference, during which Mary Jane pressed her ear to the door and heard the general plead for “every support” in the coming conflict. His ranks were depleted by nearly sixty thousand men, one-third of whom had gone absent without leave, “scattered broadcast over the land,” Lee said, engaging in the destruction of private property, feigning illness, and “deceiving the guards and evading the scouts.” Many of them were determined to make it back to distant homes, while others simply remained “aloof” in the vicinity of the army. “Unless something is done,” Lee warned, “the army will melt away.”
At the end of her workday, back in servants’ quarters, Mary Jane transcribed pages of information and maps from memory and sewed them into the fold of a dress. She brought that garment to the seamstress the following morning. If she had crucial information to deliver right away, she hung a red shirt on the laundry line, a signal to Elizabeth to visit the seamstress before the usually scheduled day. The seamstress then unstitched and unfolded those dispatches and prepared them for Elizabeth to pick up, before the final, and most dangerous, phase of the operation.
Her brother John would spread the papers over their dining room table, identifying key points and phrases and numbers. Using a stack of books piled nearby, he carefully pricked the first letters of random words to create precise sentences, just as Elizabeth had shown him, then gathered several blank invoices and purchase orders he used for his small chain of hardware stores.
He would complete these business documents as if they were genuine, encoding information from Mary Jane and from personal observations on his own regular visits to Petersburg and Fredericksburg. Certain quantities of items corresponded with certain military terminology: 370 iron hinges meant 3,700 cavalry; 30 anvils meant 30 batteries of artillery; 40 vises meant 4,000 battle-hardened shock troops. He told friends and associates that he was going either to visit his sister in Philadelphia or on a business trip—not to make new sales, as the Confederate government would target him for trading with the enemy, but to collect on certain accounts from before the war.
He took the next train on the Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac Railroad. Disembarking in Fredericksburg, he spent two days at his office there, doing legitimate business and arranging for his pass to cross the lines, over the Rappahannock River. From there he took a horse to Aquia Creek and then a steamboat north to Washington. Once in the capital, he gathered his false business paperwork and pinpricked books, transcribed the information hidden therein, and headed for the War Department at Seventeenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue.
His departure shifted something inside Elizabeth; she was all in, on every front, unable to stop what she had set in motion even if she wanted to. She had never meant for her little brother to become so enmeshed in her operation as to risk his own life, but after his wife left he’d insisted on helping the Richmond Underground. Doubtless Mary was still furious that he had taken their children. There was no telling how far her anger could reach, what she might do, what she might say and to whom. Elizabeth’s sporadic kindnesses to rebel soldiers did not negate years of speaking openly about abolition. Neighbors had already threatened to shoot her dead. One of General Winder’s detectives had begged to sleep on her parlor floor. Another tried to entrap her on the street.
Her mind had to adapt, acquire new patterns. She kept her notes and plans within arm’s reach, prepared to destroy them quickly if Confederate detectives raided her home. She wore a simple cotton bonnet and calico dresses so that she would not be immediately recognized on the streets; sometimes she even stuffed cotton into her cheeks to distort the shape of her face. If she turned to talk to a friend, she found a detective at her elbow. She saw strange faces peeping around the columns and pillars of the back portico of her home. Every night, before turning down the lights, she lowered herself to hands and knees and checked beneath the bed, certain that someone was waiting to get her.
Belle spent as much time as she could with Rose Greenhow, accompanying her and Little Rose to Richmond’s hospitals, where she cared for the wounded rebel soldiers and entertained them with stories. The work made her miss her own father, temporarily home on sick leave in Martinsburg, which was once again under Confederate control. She decided to return home for a brief visit, and knew exactly what she would do as soon as she arrived.
After she put her younger siblings to bed and kissed her mother good night, she lay down herself and let her mind craft the next day’s drama, imagining the scene, the setting, the lines she would say and hear. The sun seemed to rise just for her, slanting in her direction, flattering her angles and curves. She put on her prettiest riding costume, rebel gray and cut close, with a soldier’s sash encircling her waist and her palmetto pin blooming on her chest. She found the gold saber knot intended for Stonewall Jackson and slid it down her bodice. It was time.
She saddled up Fleeter and rode out to the Confederate encampment at Bunker Hill, about eight miles from Martinsburg. Stonewall had his headquarters in a stately Greek Revival–style brick building with a gabled roof and a small log slave cabin in the back. It was called the Boyd House, after a family unrelated to Belle, but she took the coincidence as a good omen.
Instead of staying inside the house, Stonewall had chosen to camp on the lawn. She approached General Jackson’s tent, hoping that she wasn’t interrupting his daily prayer, and that he would remember her name and her heroic dash across the battlefield at Front Royal. An aide appeared and asked for her name and her business. She answered and waited, pressing her hand against the gold saber knot to make sure it was still there.
The aide emerged from the tent and said that the general refused to see her. Belle demanded to know why. She felt her eyes blurring, her throat caving in. She fought to maintain her expression, a cool leveling of her features, an unspoken insistence that there was surely a misunderstanding. She repeated her name, italicizing each word: Belle. Boyd. Daughter of Benjamin, cousin and friend to countless rebel soldiers. The aide shrugged and said that the general was “not altogether assured” of her loyalty. Her loyalty? She had risked her life for the cause and just spent a month in a Yankee prison. The aide threw up his hands. Her mind groped for reasons: Did he fear that her quick release from prison, by people who had actual proof of her activities, was some sort of trap? Did he believe that she had secured her freedom by vowing to betray him? Had he heard the gossip that some of her associations with Union officers weren’t solely for the benefit of the Confederacy? Was he equally unsettled by the newspaper mentions of her bare arms and low-cut dress, the way she told reporters of her desire to “share his dangers”?
The aide either couldn’t or wouldn’t say. Quietly she mounted Fleeter and peered over her shoulder, her face loaded with a murderous glare. “If I ever catch you in Martinsburg,” she threatened the aide, “I will cut your ears off.”
She rode the ten miles home, brushed past her siblings and the servants, and tumbled backward onto her bed. The sun had shifted position in her window, sharpening the shadows along her wall. She retrieved the saber knot from her corset and made a fist around it. She would try again, and the scene would unfold differently, the dialogue edited, the ending correct.
When she dismounted at Stonewall’s tent he would greet her right away, gently laying his hands upon her head, his long fingers forming a crown. How pleased he was to see her once more well and free. He would advise her, sweetly, that if his troops were forced to retreat she must leave her home again, for the enemies would quickly move in, and it would be foolish for her to expose herself to the caprice or resentment of the Yankees and face more time in prison. He would promise to give her timely notice of his movements so she could plan ahead. He would bestow upon her the title of honorary aide-de-camp, and invite her to attend a review of his troops. She’d thank him, lift the saber knot from her dress, and lower it into his palm. As she turned to leave, he would whisper, “God bless you, my child.” They would never meet again.