Belle shut her eyes, arms still outstretched, waiting for the click of a musket. Instead, beneath her mother’s soft whimper and Eliza’s prolonged and piercing wail, she heard short, jagged intakes of breath. She opened her eyes. The Union soldier was still alive at her feet, blood bubbling from his neck, and she was no longer the focal point of the room. His comrades fashioned a stretcher with their arms and carried him to the surgeon’s tent, where he died later that day.
Soon after the burial of twenty-five-year-old Private Frederick Martin, Company K, 7th Pennsylvania Volunteers, General Patterson and several of his staff paid a visit to Belle’s home. She watched them approach the door, her breath quickening. They could throw her into prison or try to kill or rape her, a violation that would degrade and declass even a so-called fast girl. Her mother allowed them in, positioning herself close to the door. Once again Eliza had hidden Belle’s collection of rebel flags. Belle kept her purse nearby, her pistol stashed inside.
The men questioned Mary Boyd, Eliza, and Belle, all of whom recounted the deceased private’s coarse language and threatening gestures and insisted that Belle had no choice but to shoot him. As they interrogated her, Belle confessed—silently, to herself—that she had not “one shadow of remorse” for killing the Yankee, that the blood she’d shed “left no stain” on her soul. She had saved her mother from “insult and outrage,” perhaps even from death.
Fortunately for Belle, Washington was still practicing appeasement; Lincoln was intent on keeping the border states of Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, and Kentucky in the Union and didn’t want to stir up a revolt among their secessionist citizens. Knowing that the Shenandoah Valley (which offered a potential backdoor route to Richmond) was strategic territory, and reluctant to turn this teenager into a Confederate martyr, Patterson declined to take any action and declared the case closed. Belle would recall a more exuberant exchange, with the general deeming her a “plucky girl” and advising her to “do it again if any more such brutal fellows came around.” Hoping to avoid further trouble, he stationed Federal sentries around the Boyd home and ordered them to keep close watch on her.
Belle welcomed the increased attention, waving to the Yankees from her balcony, piquing their interest and horrifying the neighbors. She noticed that the town was growing accustomed to Union control, easing back into routine. Patterson had even issued strict orders to shoot the first man caught stealing private property, and announced that any soldier who insulted a lady on the street would be confined in the guard house. The Union blockade, which stretched along 3,500 miles of Confederate coastline, was intended to deprive the rebel army of goods and supplies but had a direct impact on civilians as well. Coffee and sugar were suddenly scarce, and housewives complained of shortages and rising prices. Publicly, though, Southerners dismissed the blockade as ineffective. “The old ass,” one Charleston resident said of Lincoln, “thinks he can starve us out, but he never made a greater mistake.” Merchants reopened for business and appreciated the Union army payment in gold and silver instead of shinplasters, the only currency of the rebel troops. A Federal flag hung in the public square unmolested, and women and children, according to one Northern report, “thronged the streets in perfect security with joyous hilarity.”
Belle sensed an opportunity in the newly relaxed atmosphere. The war seemed to have a place for any prospective spy, even one more concerned with recognition for her deeds than with the deeds themselves. There was ceaseless movement and confusion, armies scattered across miles, the border between North and South riddled with holes. Even accents couldn’t betray allegiances. Rebel spies lurked in the pro-Union counties in western Virginia, and Union spies in the staunchly Confederate counties farther south. They operated on varying levels of importance and authenticity: “walk-in” friends with potentially useful information; couriers who traveled their routes with eyes open; and trusted individuals actually tasked to go and procure information.
Most of the spies Belle knew were of the first, informal variety, women who considered spying as much a part of their patriotic duty as making bandages and stitching uniforms. Some merely stood on front porches, counting Federal troops as they marched (one regimental historian wryly noted that the ladies of Winchester, Virginia, “did a little spying in which they were almost always perfectly safe”). Others, like Belle herself, vied to uncover something that mattered, a piece of the war that would remain wholly theirs even after they passed it along.
At night, as the 21st Pennsylvania’s regimental band gallantly honored requests for “Dixie,” Belle chatted with her guards, slipping questions between the pauses in the music, etching flattery around the edges of her words. What a relief to see that the Union boys truly meant Martinsburg no harm! Were they all very lonesome, so far away from their sweethearts and wives? How were the Union troops faring over at Rich Mountain? How many thousands were camped there? And was it true that General George McClellan was reorganizing his scouts, having decided that his current ones were careless and useless? She ran her hand along the sleeve of a frock coat, touched a fingertip to a gleaming brass button, retracting all traces of the bold, hard girl who had shot their Yankee comrade dead—although she kept the pistol that killed him with her at all times.
Alone in her room, long after her mother was asleep, Belle lit a candle and transcribed everything she’d been told or gleaned from eavesdropping: Union troop movements, troop numbers, the state of troop morale. There was no sure way to ascertain the value of her information, so it would be up to the generals to sift through the scraps. She gave the notes (or lettres de cachet, as she preferred) to Eliza and instructed her to walk to Stonewall Jackson’s camp seven miles away, reasoning that no one would suspect mischief from a Negro servant running an errand. Sometimes she enlisted the help of a teenage neighbor, a “lovely girl” named Sophia B., who seemed thrilled to do Belle’s bidding. Belle congratulated herself on her cunning and deceit until, one mid-July afternoon, Captain James Gwyn, the third assistant provost marshal of the Federal army, appeared on her doorstep and demanded she accompany him to headquarters.
Belle’s initial trepidation dissolved once she reminded herself that she’d been in trouble with Union officials before—and literally gotten away with murder. On West King Street, with Captain Gwyn at her side, she smiled at every soldier she passed (“large teeth,” one noted, “and a loud, coarse laugh”) and took her time walking along the aisle inside the Berkeley County Courthouse, stopping to pause beneath the stained glass dome, framing herself in a brilliant halo of light. The captain led her to the office of a colonel. Belle missed his name but noticed a piece of paper on the center of his desk. The door shut behind her and the colonel stood, trapping the paper beneath his hand.
He said a letter of hers had been intercepted.
Her mind spun with theories about how that happened. Perhaps Eliza lost a dispatch on the way to Stonewall’s headquarters and was afraid to tell her. Or Sophia B. grew jealous of Belle’s popularity among the soldiers and betrayed her.
It occurred to Belle, too, that she had crafted every one of her notes in her own handwriting. Several of her neighbors were familiar with her light, looping script, and the ones who sympathized with the North would be all too willing to identify her. The colonel insisted that her offense was very serious and recited a condensed version of the fifty-sixth and fifty-seventh Articles of War, dealing with espionage and treason:
“Whosoever shall give food, ammunition, information to, or aid and abet the enemies of the United States Government in any manner whatever, shall suffer death, or whatever penalty the honorable members of the court-martial shall see fit to inflict.”
If Miss Boyd repeated this behavior, the colonel concluded, she would suffer the punishment prescribed.
Belle sat silently, studying the pressed tin ceiling while the colonel read his script. She summoned the bravery and spirit of her Revolutionary War ancestors, telling herself she wasn’t frightened. She did not know that Ward Hill Lamon, a bodyguard of Lincoln’s who also happened to be an old friend of the Boyd family, had intervened on her behalf, asking Union officials to treat her with leniency.
When it was clear that the colonel had finished, Belle stood, lifted the sides of her hoop skirt, and bowed as if overcome with reverence and awe.
She said, “Thank you, gentlemen of the jury,” and showed herself out.
“My little ‘rebel’ heart was on fire,” she wrote, “and I indulged in thoughts and plans of vengeance.”
When Patterson’s troops departed Martinsburg, leaving behind only the 1st Pennsylvania Regiment to maintain order, Belle and her mother packed up their carriage to visit relatives at Front Royal, about forty miles south. They rejoiced when the Confederates won the crucial engagement of Manassas, thwarting the Union plan to push forward and capture Richmond. There were rumors, whispered by the ladies of Martinsburg with either pride or disgust, that a rebel woman, Rose Greenhow, had contributed to the victory. Belle was familiar with Rose’s name and reputation as a prominent Washington hostess—her parties during the winter of 1860–61, when Belle made her formal debut, were the most coveted invitations in town—and she knew personally of Rose’s emissary, Bettie Duvall: “Miss D. was a lovely, fragile-looking girl . . . remarkable for the sweetness of her temper and the gentleness of her disposition. . . . [She] had passed through the whole of the Federal army.” Belle admired the girl’s “intrepidity and devotion,” and saw no reason why she, too, couldn’t facilitate a major victory for the rebels. She yearned for grander, more official involvement than Eliza’s occasional run to Stonewall’s camp, and determined to find herself a place with the Confederate secret service.
Ignoring her mother’s tearful protests, Belle visited her uncle, a lieutenant in Stonewall Jackson’s 12th Virginia, and told him that she wanted to be a courier and spy for the rebel army. Her first cousin, William Boyd Compton of the 31st Virginia Militia, was a spy himself; he would keep an eye on her and, she hoped, use her for missions. She believed she had the requisite skills for the job, having been, she said, “at home on a horse’s back from my earliest girlhood” and “a good deal of boy myself,” spending her days galloping far and away over miles of rough country, chasing foxes with the neighborhood boys. She knew her way around the Valley, from the Blue Ridge to the Appalachian Mountains and all of the gaps in between, every spot where turnpikes or railroads sliced through, every stream and rocky ridge, every broken range and scattered spur. She had hidden inside the Grand Caverns, where Confederate soldiers engraved their names beneath the stalactites. She even trained her beloved horse Fleeter to kneel on command, so that she might evade detection by Union patrols—the only instance in her life when she wished to remain unseen.
Belle’s uncle mentioned her name and ambition to Turner Ashby, Stonewall Jackson’s cavalry commander and head of Confederate military scouts, and she began riding as a courier between Generals Jackson, Beauregard, and J. E. B. Stuart, carrying commands for the movements of the army back and forth, charging alone through country infested by Yankee scouts and guerrillas. Sometimes the commands were written, either in plain text or in a substitution cipher, not unlike the one used by Rose’s ring; on other occasions she was told the gist of the message and expected to deliver it orally. During these excursions she allowed but one thought to possess her mind: “that I was doing all a woman could do in her country’s cause.”
Her Confederate relatives taught her the signs and countersigns required to pass through the lines. These changed frequently and constituted simple word exchanges—the challenge being “Stonewall” and the response “Jackson,” for example—or a series of intricate physical maneuvers requiring not only memory but coordination. “We have the same old signal,” wrote a private in the 5th Virginia Infantry. “Halt anyone, throw up the left arm. He whom you halt must then take off his hat or cap and pass it down below his face. If he fails to do this, fire. This is the day signal. The night signal is the sentinel strikes his leg two or three times with his hand. The person whom he halts has to cough two or three times or clear his throat. If he fails to do this, fire at him.” Belle proved equally adept at coaxing Union sentinels into revealing their own secret signals.
She was thrilled by the danger of the job, by the reports in the papers—daily, it seemed—of “bearers of dispatches” being arrested; one, a boy exactly her age, had been caught with papers outlining a plan to capture Union steamships in California, and his fate was yet uncertain. She waited for something to happen, willed it to happen, and one night, after she’d leaped over a gloomy and precipitous ravine, it did.
Seven Union men stood facing her in the road, fanning out and blocking her path. The captain ordered her to dismount. She obeyed without protest, and reminded herself that she had prepared for such an encounter.
“Where are you going?” he asked. “Do you have papers?”
She did, hidden inside her bodice—exchanges detailing a coordinated effort among the Confederates to repair nine miles of railroad track above Martinsburg on the route to Richmond, and to remove a considerable portion of the Union telegraph wires in the same vicinity.
“I have no papers,” she answered, “and I’m going home.”
“Then we will search you.” He started toward her.
She spoke her line softly, as if sharing a shameful secret: “Captain, I’ve but one little paper that my father told me never to give up except to save myself from death in dishonor.”
She handed him a chamois bag. He opened it and found a Knights Templar cross wrapped in paper, which stated she was a Knight’s daughter. Belle waited while he read the message, turning her eyes skyward to study the moon, silently praying he was a Mason.
He looked up at Belle, down at the paper, and back at Belle. He nodded once and said, “Don’t let me ever see you again around here.”
She went out again the very next night with new lines memorized, a new lie to tell.