Belle Boyd Research Papers

Belle Boyd was a famous spy for the Southern army during the Civil War. She was born in May, 1844 in Virginia to a wealthy Southern family. Belle Boyd, or Maria Isabella Boyd began to stand up for the Confederates at age 17. She shot and killed a drunken Union soldier at that age, and thus began to gain notoriety. She often spied on the Union army camps, sometimes acting like a courier for the North. She eavesdropped on Union meetings and relayed the information back to the Confederate army, so that they were prepared. She once rode 15 miles to inform the general that the Union troops were marching towards them. But mostly, she acted smitten with the enemy soldiers. She gathered information while staying in their camps, which she yet again

Her supporters would send messages covered in yarn and shot with arrows, and she would throw the answers back out of the prison grounds. She got out of prison in December of that year. She later got married to some Sam Hardinge in 1864, in England. They stayed there for two years, but when she moved back to America, she was a widow and a mother. John had died due to a disease, which is not clarified. Then, in 1869, she married John Hammond, a former soldier for the Union army, but ended up getting divorced five years later. She yet again remarried to Nathaniel High, two months after she and John divorced. High was seventeen years younger than her when she got married. She died in 1900 due to a heart attack at the age of 56. She lived a short life, but helped the Confederate army out massively when she

He was the Confederate president at the time, and being in their house, she managed to glean plenty of information from them. She made them think that she was illiterate, even though she could write, read, and speak perfectly. All of the information she got, she relayed back to Thomas McNiven. He was a baker in Richmond, and went to the Davis house everyday, even before Mary got there. No one ever thought that Mary was the one giving information to the Union army, and she managed to stay without blame until 1865. She was suspected, and decided to run away from the house. However, before she left, she tried to burn the mansion to the ground. That attempt was unsuccessful. It isn’t clear to anyone when she died, for the government destroyed her documents after her death. She asked them to do that for