A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [347]
The jailer, Mr. Laurence, took a hearty dislike to the new prisoner and her repeated declarations of British nationality. He boarded up Mary’s window, removed the sheets from her bed, and prevented her from having contact with her sister or brother. “I often wonder since [how] I kept my senses,” she wrote later, “for many have lost their reason for less cruelty.” The main charge against her, she eventually learned, was passing information to the enemy. “I wrote to Mr. Coppell, acting Consul, who wrote me word he would attend to my case: it was not necessary to see me. I differed with him. It was his duty to see me and hear what I had to say, he knowing me to be a British subject.”29.7 41 After three weeks of solitary confinement, Mary was allowed a visit from her sister and brother-in-law, who were so appalled by her condition that they forced the authorities to allow her to be seen by a doctor. “Had it not been for him, I would have died,” she wrote.42 She was held in prison without being officially charged or given a date for her trial, while she grew weaker and more desperate by the day.
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Mary Sophia Hill was not the only nuisance to the Federal authorities. Belle Boyd, the Confederate spy and heroine of the Battle of Front Royal in 1862, was also in custody. Her ability to pry information out of impressionable Federal soldiers was legendary. It was only with the greatest reluctance that Stanton had sanctioned Belle’s release from prison the previous December after she contracted typhoid.
Belle had recuperated in Mobile, Alabama, under the care of Mary Semmes, the wife of Captain Semmes, who “treated me with as much attention as though I had been her own daughter.” Mary’s tales of the Alabama inspired Belle to try a new kind of adventure, and she wrote to Judah P. Benjamin offering to carry Confederate dispatches to England. Benjamin was delighted and provided her with $500 in gold, a letter of introduction to Henry Hotze, and passage on a blockade runner out of Wilmington. As dawn broke on her twentieth birthday, May 9, 1864, the Greyhound carried Belle and two other passengers past the blockade out into the open sea. She did not get far; USS Connecticut captured the Greyhound at 1:40 P.M. on the following day.
The U.S. naval officer in charge of taking the Greyhound to Boston, Lieutenant Samuel Hardinge, was a handsome young fellow without a girl back home. He did not know, at first, that the widowed “Mrs. Lewis” was the infamous Belle Boyd—and by the time he discovered her true identity he was so besotted that she was able to persuade him that the captain of the Greyhound ought to be released. Hardinge took Belle shopping for clothes when the Greyhound stopped briefly in New York, and finished by proposing marriage to her when the vessel docked at Boston. “So generous and noble was he in every thing,” Belle wrote later, “that I could not but acknowledge that my heart was his. I firmly believe that God intended us to meet and love.”43
This had not, however, been the intention of the Navy Department. Gideon Welles ordered Lieutenant Hardinge’s arrest. “My dear Miss Belle, It is all up with me,” Hardinge wrote dejectedly on June 8. “The Admiralty says that it looks bad for us; so I have adopted a very good motto, viz: ‘Face the music!’ ”44 Welles and the war secretary, Edwin Stanton, were incensed that Belle had managed to make both their departments look foolish and were determined it should never happen again. The provost marshal in Boston received a telegram ordering her immediate removal to Canada, and “if I was again caught in the United States, or by the United States authorities, I should be shot,” she wrote. Two days later she was on the train to Montreal, missing Hardinge but excited at the “delightful prospect of breathing free Canadian air.”45
Stanton had been in the midst of deciding