Belle Boyd

Early in the warm afternoon, Generals Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson and Richard S. Ewell and their staffs stopped here at the head of Jackson’s army and studied the ground leading to Front Royal. Captain Henry Kyd Douglas, one of Jackson’s aides, noticed Captain G. Campbell Brown of Ewell’s staff looking toward a woman running down a nearby hill and gesticulating wildly. At Ewell’s request, Douglas rode to meet the young woman, whom he recognized as Belle Boyd, whom he had known from her earliest girlhood. Winded and gasping, Boyd urged him to advise Jackson that the Federal forces in Front Royal were minimal and that a charge would catch them all. Jackson had already begun deploying his command, with a company of the 6th Virginia Cavalry, the Wise Troop, in the lead and Colonel Bradley T. Johnson’s 1st Maryland Infantry (CSA) moving into line of battle. The Louisiana Brigade, including Major Chatham Roberdeau Wheat’s New Orleans battalion, Wheat’s Tigers, formed behind the Marylanders, with part of the brigade in immediate support and the rest assembling in open fields west of Gooney Manor Road, now Browntown Road. Jackson soon ordered his force to advance. Belle Boyd, eighteen years old at the time of the battle, had moved to Front Royal in 1861 after being acquitted of murder charges in her hometown of Martinsburg, now West Virginia, where she had been accused of killing a Union soldier attempting to hoist a national flag above her house.

Virginia · United States