0:04 [SPEAKER_00]: She was known by many names, the siren of Shenendawa, the rebel Joan of Arc, the Cleopatra of Session. 0:11 [SPEAKER_00]: But when the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, in April 1861, she was just 17-year-old, Bell Boyd, of Martin'sburg. 0:20 [SPEAKER_00]: By the time the Civil War was over, she would be one of the most dangerous women in America. 0:25 [SPEAKER_00]: Bell would use her beauty and charm for the cause of the Confederacy throughout the Civil War, seducing and betraying one union man after another. 0:34 [SPEAKER_00]: Her intelligence would determine the outcome of battles and while her cause was unjust, she remains one of the most memorable and dashing figures of the Civil War. 0:44 [SPEAKER_00]: Even as a child, Bell showed signs of being unusually feisty in a tension hungry. 0:49 [SPEAKER_00]: She had once been excluded from a dinner party, her parents were throwing, and rather than salt in her room, she saddled up her horse and rode into the center of the party, forcefully making herself part of the festivities. 1:01 [SPEAKER_00]: For those who knew her, this story summed up her character and unwillingness to sit back and be the well-behaved ornament, the world expected her to be. 1:10 [SPEAKER_00]: It is no surprise that when the war came, she was not content with sewing, 1:18 [SPEAKER_00]: Bell didn't have to go looking for war, it landed on her doorstep when the union army occupied her hometown of Martin'sburg, Virginia, in July 1861, mere months after the war began. 1:30 [SPEAKER_00]: The streets were crawling with Union soldiers, and Belle was a pretty charismatic teenager who support for the Confederacy was deep and unwavering. 1:39 [SPEAKER_00]: The setup could not have been better. 1:41 [SPEAKER_00]: Early in the war, the Union forces were full of optimistic young men, eager for heroism, travel and excitement. 1:48 [SPEAKER_00]: Many of them were also eager to meet a Southern Bell. 1:51 [SPEAKER_00]: The popular term at that time for pretty Southern girls of high school age, usually of the upper class. 1:57 [SPEAKER_00]: The Antebellum Southern Bell was already a mythic figure, said to be more Gentile, more feminine, and more fun than her northern sisters, union men, like the idea for her, and when they came south, they sought her out. 2:10 [SPEAKER_00]: Bell Boyd was more than happy to play the part. 2:13 [SPEAKER_00]: Throughout Belle's career, much of her spy work was accomplished with the unintentional assistance of Union Boys. 2:20 [SPEAKER_00]: They trusted her, flirted with her, loved her. 2:23 [SPEAKER_00]: They were so distracted by her smile and her eyelashes, in the way that she seems so impressed when they told her about the battles they'd fought and were going to fight, about the strategies they planned in the reinforcements. 2:34 [SPEAKER_00]: that they had forgotten. 2:36 [SPEAKER_00]: She was not on their side. 2:37 [SPEAKER_00]: Even when she was under arrest, later in the war, the soldiers tasked with moving her between prisons, couldn't resist her charms. 2:45 [SPEAKER_00]: One of these men, a Captain Kay, was mentioned in her diary where she said she was indebted to him for, quote, some very remarkable effusions, with some withered flowers. 2:55 [SPEAKER_00]: And last, not least, for a great deal of important information which was carefully transmitted to my 3:04 [SPEAKER_00]: The country meant she's talking about, we're none other than Confederate generals J.E.B. 3:09 [SPEAKER_00]: Stewart and Stonewall Jackson, the later of whom admired Belle so much that he made her a captain in honorary aid to camp. 3:16 [SPEAKER_00]: From this snapshot, you could be forgiven for thinking Belle was the ultimate female spy stereotype, a flirty femme fatale whose career was made of honey and traps and coded messages. 3:27 [SPEAKER_00]: But look a little closer, and she is so much more, take for example the events of the 4th of July, 1861. 3:34 [SPEAKER_00]: Martin'sburg was newly occupied, and a pack of soldiers had been dispersed to find and destroy rebel flags. 3:40 [SPEAKER_00]: They appeared at Bell's Mother's House. 3:42 [SPEAKER_00]: Having heard, it was decorated with rebel insignia. 3:45 [SPEAKER_00]: They were right, but the Boyd women wouldn't let them know that. 3:48 [SPEAKER_00]: Any flags were found, and burned, as soon as they saw the soldiers approaching. 3:52 [SPEAKER_00]: However, that was not enough to turn them away, the soldiers had their own flag, a federal flag, and they were intent on seeing a fly above the Boyd House, the women refused, and one of the soldiers barged forward. 4:05 [SPEAKER_00]: According to Bell's Diary, he was drunk, course, and repudged. 4:09 [SPEAKER_00]: The exact opposite of the so-called gentleman of the antebellum south. 4:13 [SPEAKER_00]: He insulted her mother in language as offensive 4:16 [SPEAKER_00]: As it is possible to conceive, Enbell took matters into her own hands. 4:20 [SPEAKER_00]: She was outraged. 4:21 [SPEAKER_00]: Her blood was boiling and her veins. 4:23 [SPEAKER_00]: She reached into her skirts, wrapped her uncloused, upper-class hand, around cold metal. 4:29 [SPEAKER_00]: Pulled out her pistol and shot him straight in the chest. 4:35 [SPEAKER_00]: He died within the day. 4:37 [SPEAKER_00]: Enbell felt no remorse. 4:40 [SPEAKER_00]: According to her diary, the murder, quote, left no stain on my soul, imposed no burden on my conscious. 4:47 [SPEAKER_00]: Despite a house full of witnesses, she was never prosecuted for this crime. 4:51 [SPEAKER_00]: She was a pretty, young southerner, defending herself and her mother, not a real criminal. 4:56 [SPEAKER_00]: The Union's commanding officer decided that she had done perfectly right and placed a guard around the house to ensure that her and her mother received proper treatment and were protected from future roughness. 5:07 [SPEAKER_00]: Ironically, it was one of them who became one of Belle's key sources. 5:12 [SPEAKER_00]: Through most of the war, Bell's key role was informative, was information gatherer and carrier. 5:18 [SPEAKER_00]: She used her feminine charms to learn military information and smuggled the messages to generals or middlemen. 5:24 [SPEAKER_00]: This brings us to the most cinematic moment of her career. 5:28 [SPEAKER_00]: It was May 1862, and Bell was living in the Union Occupy Town of Front Royal, Virginia. 5:34 [SPEAKER_00]: On May 23, the Battle of Front Royal would commence, and as usual, Bell would be at the center of the action. 5:40 [SPEAKER_00]: As it happened, she was living in the same house, the Union Generals, were using as their headquarters, and had miraculously found a hole in the floor above the drawing room, where strategy meetings were held. 5:52 [SPEAKER_00]: She spent hours lying on the floor, ear pressed to the hole, as the men below her laid out their battle plans. 5:58 [SPEAKER_00]: On the morning of the 23rd, New Spread through front-wheel, that Stonewall Jackson was approaching with a small confederate force to meet the Union Army at Fort Royale. 6:08 [SPEAKER_00]: Bell knew the assault would fail. 6:10 [SPEAKER_00]: The Union had been preparing for exactly this approach, and had three parties of reinforcements nearby. 6:15 [SPEAKER_00]: Jackson was riding into a trap, and Bell saw herself as his only hope. 6:20 [SPEAKER_00]: She scrolled the locations of the reinforcements on a scrap piece of paper, dawned a white sun bonnet, and leaving her house in front of Royale, broken to a run in the direction of the approaching Confederates. 6:31 [SPEAKER_00]: She was wearing a navy blue dress with a white apron and must have been a striking image as she ran across the field outside of town. 6:38 [SPEAKER_00]: Bullets and shells whizzing past, piercing her skirt and exploding around her. 6:44 [SPEAKER_00]: By sheer luck she made it to the Confederate lines and harmed. 6:47 [SPEAKER_00]: and told the first man she saw to deliver a message to Stonewall Jackson, she told him to target the bridge's first, so Union reinforcements had no way into town. 6:57 [SPEAKER_00]: As a result of Bell's intelligence, rather than losing the battle, Jackson won in a route, he only lost 36 men, the Union lost 773. 7:08 [SPEAKER_00]: But the impact of this battle extended far beyond front Royale, the sheer number of casualties alarmed the Union, which then pushed its main force based at nearby Strasbourg into retreat. 7:20 [SPEAKER_00]: They arrived in Winchester, disorganized and confused, where Jackson followed his first victory with another. 7:26 [SPEAKER_00]: At the first battle of Winchester, two days later, on May 25th, Jackson would later write a letter to Bell, thinking her for, quote, immense service. 7:35 [SPEAKER_00]: After being arrested for spycraft, 7:38 [SPEAKER_00]: Belle spent a significant time in different prisons during the war before being released after becoming ill with typhoid fever. 7:45 [SPEAKER_00]: Eventually she decided to leave America and take refuge with Confederate sympathizers in Europe. 7:51 [SPEAKER_00]: She was too famous to keep spying effectively and was sick of prison. 7:55 [SPEAKER_00]: Confederate President Jefferson Davis supported her decision but wasn't ready to let her retire just yet. 8:01 [SPEAKER_00]: He gave her a folder of confidential dispatches. 8:04 [SPEAKER_00]: to deliver to his European allies. 8:06 [SPEAKER_00]: Bell agreed to play messenger one last time, made her goodbye, and boarded a Confederate blockade runner named the Greyhound, bound for England. 8:14 [SPEAKER_00]: She barely made it out of America. 8:16 [SPEAKER_00]: As soon as it left, the Greyhound was chased down, and boarded by a Union crew. 8:21 [SPEAKER_00]: Bell was once again under capture. 8:24 [SPEAKER_00]: It would have been the end if not for the character of the Union Lieutenant in charge of the ship, and man named Sam Hardenj. 8:32 [SPEAKER_00]: Sam Hardens liked Belle, and in an episode straight out of a James Bond movie, he ignored her allegiance. 8:38 [SPEAKER_00]: In quarter-ter, the entire time she was under his command, he proposed on board the ship and spent as much time with her as he could. 8:46 [SPEAKER_00]: Belle, the consummate spy, wrote about their love affair with a calculating edge. 8:51 [SPEAKER_00]: For example, 8:52 [SPEAKER_00]: Her account of his proposal recalled, quote, a very practical thought flitted through my brain. 8:58 [SPEAKER_00]: If he felt at all that he was professed to feel for me, he might in future be useful to us. 9:04 [SPEAKER_00]: Bell's calculating approach to Sam didn't stop with words. 9:08 [SPEAKER_00]: She manipulated his affection for her if you distract him, so the ship's captain could escape while they were at anger in New York. 9:16 [SPEAKER_00]: In the end, Sam was framed for crime. 9:18 [SPEAKER_00]: Further, 9:19 [SPEAKER_00]: While Belle waited for the union to decide what to do with her, Sam traveled to Washington to petition on her behalf for a lighter sentence. 9:26 [SPEAKER_00]: He succeeded and she was exiled to Canada before sneaking into Europe. 9:31 [SPEAKER_00]: Sam met her in Europe and they had a celebrity wedding. 9:34 [SPEAKER_00]: It was written about in newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic, with the morning post calling it the result of her latest captivity, the making captive of the federal officer. 9:44 [SPEAKER_00]: We don't know if it was a love match or not, but we can be sure there was a strategic angle. 9:49 [SPEAKER_00]: When Bell wrote about her decision to marry him, she said, women can sometimes work wonders. 9:55 [SPEAKER_00]: It may not be he who was of the northern birth. 9:57 [SPEAKER_00]: Combined degrees to love for my sake, the ill-used south. 10:06 [SPEAKER_00]: Sam did exactly what she hoped. 10:08 [SPEAKER_00]: He deserted the Union and shifted his allegiance to the Confederacy. 10:12 [SPEAKER_00]: A couple of months after the wedding, he returned to America to visit both their families and was quickly placed under arrest. 10:19 [SPEAKER_00]: Serving time for both his crimes and bells, they never saw each other again. 10:24 [SPEAKER_00]: We don't know how or where Sam died, but he never made it back to England, and to Bell, who was carrying his child. 10:31 [SPEAKER_00]: The war ended when Belle was in England, and so did her career. 10:35 [SPEAKER_00]: She was a widow, a mother, and a traitor to the United States. 10:39 [SPEAKER_00]: She was spent the rest of her life revisiting her glory days on page and stage as a writer, lecturer, and performer trying to make ends meet. 10:48 [SPEAKER_00]: She married another two times, divorced both her husbands and raised five children before dying in 1900. 10:55 [SPEAKER_00]: She was buried in the West Conson Dells, nearly 1,000 miles from her hometown and confederate soil. 11:02 [SPEAKER_00]: Belle is a fascinating figure, she is also a problematic one. 11:06 [SPEAKER_00]: Everything she did during the war was in support of the slave owning South, and a woman willing to betray her husband, to betray every person and relationship in her life for the cause of the Confederacy, her behavior was either heroic or pathological, depending on how you feel about the cause for which she fought, but like Elizabeth Van Lue, who we covered last week, Belle Boyd was another young woman. 11:30 [SPEAKER_00]: making her own rules in a world that took her for granted. 11:34 [SPEAKER_00]: She was on the wrong side of the war and the wrong side of history. 11:38 [SPEAKER_00]: But remains without her doubt, one of the most singular and interesting spies in American history.
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