Portal:American Civil War/Selected biography/31

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Maria Isabella Boyd (May 4, 1844 – June 11, 1900), best known as Belle Boyd, was a Confederate spy in the American Civil War. She operated from her father's hotel in Front Royal, Virginia, and provided valuable information to Confederate commanders Turner Ashby and Stonewall Jackson during the 1862 Valley Campaign.

Boyd was arrested on July 29, 1862, and held for a month in the Old Capitol Prison in Washington before being released. She was later arrested and imprisoned a second time, but again was set free.

In 1864, she went to England where she met and married a Union naval officer, Samuel Wylde Hardinge, who died shortly after the war's end. After the war, Belle Boyd became an actress in England before returning to the United States. She then married John Swainston Hammond (1869) in New Orleans and, after a divorce in 1884, married Nathaniel Rue High (1885). A year later, she began touring the country giving dramatic lectures of her life as a Civil War spy.