Belle Boyd (1843 - 1900)

It is said that at 18 she murdered a soldier. When she was 19, she worked to aid a general in the greatest military success of his career. By the time she turned twenty-one, she'd been arrested four times, incarcerated in federal prisons, and had incurred the personal wrath of the United States' Secretary of War. At 22 she was widowed, a single mother of one, broke and banished from her homeland. Her name was Belle Boyd and before her life ended suddenly at the age of 57, her life's journey had spanned the breadth of the country, across the sea, only to come to her final rest in the land of her adversaries.

As trite as it may seem to say so, she was a legend in her own time. She was a woman of mystery, controversy and notorious adventure. Her name reigns among the halls of infamy as, arguably, the best known of the Confederate female spies in the American Civil War. Her life was a confusing journey of great contradictions and remarkable fortitude. She was a study in the survival and human frailty of an extraordinary woman who lived in extraordinary times. She was Belle Boyd.