On the Fourth of July 1861, Belle Boyd shot a Federal soldier who insulted her mother. After that, Belle's deadly weapon was her disarming charm. Eighteen and very pretty, "the Secesh Cleopatra" teased and laughed with the Yankee officers who visited her home in Martinsburg, West Virginia. When they let war secrets slip, she coded the information, tucked it inside a watch case and sent it by black courier to Stonewall Jackson for his Shenandoah Valley campign.
When Union officers used her aunt's house in Front Royal, Virginia, as headquarters to plan a major offensive, Belle snuck inside and lay hidden in an upstairs closet, with her ear pressed against a floor hole. When they finished at 1 a.m., she raced her horse recklessly through Union pickets to a Confederate colonel. Another time, she ran across an open, raging battleground to warn Jackson of a Yankee plan to surround and trap his army.
By the time she reached twenty-one, Biyd had been arrested six or seven times and imprisioned twice. During her stay in Washington D.C.'s Old Capitol Prison, jailed Rebel passed messages to her that were tied around rolling marbles or pushed through floor cracks and a hole they managed to drill in a wall. She hid the information in rubber balls that she tossed through the bars to a Southern admirer below.