Belle Boyd is taken by Union troops, her own lover the informant
By the summer of 1862, Belle Boyd had spent a year passing Confederate intelligence out of occupied Virginia, most famously riding through Union lines in mid-May to warn Colonel Turner Ashby that General Shields was pulling out of Front Royal, then later that month running toward Stonewall Jackson's advancing men under fire that put bullet holes in her skirt. Allan Pinkerton's detectives had been building a case against her since late July. On July 29, 1862, her own lover turned her in to Union officials, and she was arrested and taken to the Old Capitol Prison in Washington, D.C. the following day. She spent a month behind bars before being exchanged at Fort Monroe.
Boyd's arrest forced the Union to decide, in practice, how to handle a female Confederate operative: an inquiry into her custody was convened while she sat in prison, and she was exchanged rather than tried. That precedent of treating captured women spies as prisoners for exchange, not criminals for trial, set the pattern the Union followed in her own later arrests.
QWho exactly was watching Boyd before her arrest?
Allan Pinkerton, the detective who ran the Union's early intelligence and counter-espionage operation, had assigned three of his own men to Boyd's case by late July 1862. A private detective agency, rather than the Army itself, was tasked with tracking a single young Virginia woman. Pinkerton's operatives worked the case for weeks before an informant, not surveillance, finally cracked it open.
QWhat happened to Boyd the second time she was arrested?
Boyd's Old Capitol Prison stay in 1862 was not her last brush with Union custody. She was arrested again in June 1863, but this time was released not through an exchange but because she contracted typhoid fever. Union authorities released her rather than continue holding a prisoner sick with typhoid.
QWhat set Boyd on the path to espionage in the first place?
Boyd's career as a spy traces back to July 1861, more than a year before her arrest, when a Union soldier entered her family's home and cursed her mother. Boyd responded by shooting him. Rather than facing lasting consequences, she used the incident and the leniency that followed to begin cultivating relationships with Union officers, gathering the intelligence that reached Colonel Ashby and General Jackson.
