![]() ![]() Belle Boydīorn into a Virginia family with strong Southern loyalties, the celebrated beauty Isabelle “Belle” Boyd became one of the Confederacy’s most notorious spies after a skirmish with a drunk Union soldier in July 1861. Later in life, Tubman became a key figure in the suffrage movement. In a shameful coda to Tubman’s wartime exploits, she was paid only $200 during her three years of service, forcing her to scrape together a living selling pies, gingerbread and root beer she was also denied a pension for her spy work. In June 1863, Tubman herself led an armed expedition along the Combahee River, disrupting Confederate supply lines and liberating more than 700 enslaved people. She also organized dangerous missions in which Union troops destroyed plantations and spirited formerly enslaved people away on warships. She soon recruited groups of black men who slipped behind Confederate lines, posing as servants or enslaved people in order to gather military intelligence. In early 1862, with the support of abolitionist friends in the North, Tubman traveled to South Carolina, where she served as a nurse and teacher for the hundreds of newly liberated slaves who had assembled in Union camps. But not everyone knows that the courageous Tubman, who escaped slavery in 1849, set up a vast espionage ring for the Union during the Civil War. One of the most celebrated heroines in American history, Harriet Tubman is perhaps best known for ushering enslaved people to freedom through the Underground Railroad in the 1850s. Trying to escape in a rowboat, she drowned in choppy water, weighed down by gold intended for the Confederate treasury. While returning to America in 1864, Greenhow’s ship ran aground off the cost of North Carolina after encountering Union forces. Despite her confinement, Greenhow still managed to transmit cryptic notes to Confederate leaders.Īfter her release in 1862, Davis sent her on a diplomatic mission to Europe, where she met with Napoleon III and Queen Victoria, became engaged to a British nobleman and published her memoirs. She and her youngest daughter, Little Rose, were placed under house arrest and later sent to prison. On August 23, 1861, Allan Pinkerton, head of the federal government’s newly formed secret service, arrested Greenhow and conducted a raid of her home. ![]() Confederate President Jefferson Davis later credited Greenhow for his army’s success at the First Battle of Bull Run (Manassas). She sent her 16-year-old courier, Bettie Duvall, through 20 miles of Union territory with a coded message for Beauregard tucked into her hair. In July 1861, Greenhow obtained critical information about the Union Army’s planned attack of Manassas, Virginia. Rose Greenhow pictured with her daughter in a Washington prison where she was held as a confederate spy in 1862. ![]()
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