Ghostly Spy

BELLE BOYD IN CAMP AND PRISON, edited by Curtis Caroll Davis. 448 pages. Yoseloff. $9.50.

In 1863, when Belle Boyd was 19, she was captured and imprisoned in Washington, D.C., as a Confederate spy. Her memoir records the following dialogue with the prison's superintendent:

"Tell Mr. Stanton from me, I hope that when I commence the oath of allegiance to the United States Government, my tongue may cleave to the roof of my mouth; and that if ever I sign one line that will show to the world that I owe the United States Government the slightest allegiance, I hope my arm may fall paralyzed to my side."

"Well, if this is your resolution, you'll have to lay here and die; and serve you right."

"Sir, if it is a crime to love the South, its cause, and its President, then I am a criminal. I am in your power; do with me as you please."

Not even a vastly romantic 19-year-old girl, could have uttered the bombastic speeches credited to her by the memoir. But the book was written in 1865, only two years after Belle was released from prison, by a ghost named George A. H. Sala. His style is implacably flossy; a hole in a prison wall, through which Belle passed notes, is referred to as a "mural disturbance."

Belle was a big girl with a good figure and a strong but not especially pretty face. She is supposed to have shot a Union soldier who invaded her parents' house in Martinsburg, W. Va. She claimed to have supplied Stonewall Jackson with information that led to a victory at Front Royal. She was a nurse, a courier, a smuggler of currency and, the reader suspects, a pest to both sides. Her several imprisonments were presumably more the result of impudence than real danger to the Union. After the war, she toured the lecture circuit as "the Rebel spy," giving dramatic readings of her "perilous" experiences. In 1900, still lecturing, Belle Boyd died and was buried in Wisconsin, far behind the enemy lines.

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