![]() ![]() ![]() “One particularly drunken and unruly group invaded the Boyd home and tried to raise a Yankee flag over its door,” Abbott writes. The soldiers looted homes and businesses. Although Boyd was able to transcend the social expectations of her as a wealthy white woman and do something that she felt was meaningful, she was never able to see or acknowledge the double standard of her treatment of Eliza Corsey, a black woman who was at first her slave and then after the war stayed on as her servant.īoyd, then 18, had only recently returned from going to a finishing school and making her formal society debut when her hometown of Martinsburg was captured by Union forces, writes Karen Abbott for The New York Times. After the war, she was able to monetize her reputation with writing and speaking tours. Until she wasn’t.īoyd, who was born on this day in 1844, became one of the Civil War’s best-known Confederate spies. Belle Boyd was just a normal woman living the life of a slaveholder’s daughter in Martinsburg, Virginia. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |