“SIR, - Your readers cannot have forgotten the glowing description of the recent romantic wedding of ‘Belle Boyd’ (La Belle Rebelle), so pleasantly celebrated a few months since at ‘a fashionable hotel in Jermyn Street.’

Alas, poor Belle! Her bridal bliss was ‘like the snow-fall on a river.’ Her husband of a day is now tasting the sweets of a Yankee prison, and she (who ‘was made his wedded wife yestreen’) all the bitterness of poverty and exile. After enduring for many a long and weary month the insults, sufferings, and persecutions of the ‘Old Capitol Prison,’ I heard the afflicted lady say yesterday that she ‘had rather be there as she was than here as she is.’ And why? Cut off from all pecuniary resources at home, she has had to part with her jewellery piece by piece, including her ‘wedding presents,’ to pay her weekly bills.

“We can well understand how trouble like that would smite the heart of a high-toned woman, the daughter of affluence and luxury, even more cruelly than the tortures of a Federal prison.

“Without further comment, I will only add that Madame Hardinge (Belle Boyd) has prepared for publication a narrative of her adventures, imprisonment, and sufferings, for which there are no lack of publishers ready to advance a handsome sum; but she has recently received threatening intimations that her husband's life depends upon the suppression of her story!

“The father of ‘Belle Boyd,’ a most respectable Virginian gentleman, has lately died, at the age of forty-six, from a disease induced by his daughter's sufferings. These are the sad, simple facts of the case, and I commend them to the kind consideration of Confederate sympathizers in England. Surely poverty, in a young and accomplished woman, is not only a sacred claim to the protection of society - it is also the very highest credential of honour.”

The above was copied by one of the London morning papers, with the following sympathetic comments: -

“We are in a position to verify all that is here stated, and a great deal more. Probably the history of the world does not contain a parallel case to that of this newly married lady, who has just only emerged from her teens. Her adventures in the midst of the American war surpass anything to be met with in the pages of fiction. Her great beauty, elegant manners, and personal attractions generally, in conjunction with her romantic history before her marriage, which took place only three months ago at the West End, in the presence of a fashionable assemblage of affectionate and admiring friends, concur to invest her with attributes which render her such a heroine as the world has seldom, if ever, seen in a lady only now in her twentieth year.”

Several of the New York journals also copied the above, and one of them, “The World,” published the following communication: -

“I would respectfully ask the use of a small space in the columns of ‘The World’ to say a word regarding these statements.

“Within the past few months Mrs. Hardinge's agent in the United States has sent her bills of exchange on London bankers to the amount of eight hundred pounds sterling, or nearly ten thousand dollars in greenbacks. She has never received a sou of this money. Her letters have been opened here and the drafts extracted before going on to her, and this is the reason she is in distress. Too proud to beg, too honourable to borrow, she pawned her jewels and wedding presents, piece by piece, until her situation became known to her friends. Cut off from pecuniary resources, a stranger in a strange land, her husband in a Northern prison, what could she do? ‘Surely poverty in a young and accomplished woman is not only a sacred claim to the protection of society, but is also the very highest credential of honour.’

“I received during the week a letter from this poor lady; and she says, ‘I think it is so cruel in the Yankees to intercept my letters and stop my money, and I don't know why I am thus persecuted.’ It is cruel, and it is beneath the dignity of any Government to stoop to such means of revenge. Such things in the dark ages would be called unchivalrous. Good God! can this be the nineteenth century?

“Mr. Hardinge came here, as a peaceable citizen would come, to attend to his private business and return to England. He had no Confederate duties. Having nearly completed his labours, he went to Martinsburg to see his wife's mother, and, while returning thence, with all the necessary papers and passes in his possession, was arrested this side of Harper's Ferry. Confined in nondescript guard-houses, in jails, and dragged about like a convicted felon, he was finally lodged in the Carroll Prison at Washington, and from thence taken to Fort Delaware. After suffering two months' confinement, he was unconditionally released, and sailed for Europe on the 8th February. She will not be in want or distress when he arrives in London. For what he was arrested and confined is to him yet a mystery.

“The intimation to Mrs. Hardinge that the publication of her work would endanger the life of her husband was not without foundation, as there are officials high in power at Washington of whom she knows more than is generally known, and who will be shown up in their true light and colours in her book. They fear the truth.”

It is pleasant to add, that the moment Belle Boyd's necessities became known in London the most generous offers of assistance were literally showered upon her by ladies and gentlemen of the highest and best classes in England. And here I cannot refrain from saying that, after several years of observation and experience, I cannot but regard the real nobility of England as the noblest and most hospitable people in the world. The Southern planters rank - or, alas! did rank - next.

But this is a digression. Let us glance a moment at Belle Boyd in prison, sketched by other hands than her own.

In the month of August, 1862, the editor of the “Iowa Herald,” D. A. Mahony, Esq., a strong Anti-Black Republican, but an able and eloquent supporter of the Constitution and the Union, was taken from his bed, and, without arraignment or trial, and without even being informed of “the things whereof he was accused,” hurried away to Washington, and thrust into the “Old Capitol Prisons.” What he saw and suffered there he has already told the world, in words that ought to burn and brand for ever his lawless and infamous persecutors.

The following extracts from Mr. Mahony's journal, published by Carleton, of New York, give us characteristic glimpses of Belle Boyd in prison: -

“Among the prisoners in the Old Capitol when I reached there was the somewhat famous Belle Boyd, to whom has been attributed the defeat of General Banks, in the Shenandoah Valley, by Stonewall Jackson. Belle, as she is familiarly called by all the prisoners, and affectionately so by the Confederates, was arrested and imprisoned as a spy....

“The first intimation some of us new-comers in the Old Capitol had of the fact of there being a lady in that place was the hearing of “Maryland, my Maryland,” sung the first night of our incarceration, in what we could not be mistaken was a woman's voice. On inquiry, we were informed that it was Belle Boyd. Some of us had never heard of the lady before; and we were all inquiring about her. Who was she? where was she from? and what did she do?....

“Belle was put in solitary confinement, but allowed to have her room-door open, and to sit outside of it in a hall or stair-landing in the evening. Whenever she availed herself of this privilege, as she frequently did, the greatest curiosity was manifested by the victims of despotism to see her. Her room being on the second story, those who occupied the third story were civilians from Fredericksburg.....

“But we must not lose sight of Belle Boyd. I heard her voice, my first night in prison, singing ‘Maryland, my Maryland,’ the first time I had ever heard the Southern song. The words, stirring enough to Southern hearts, were enunciated by her with such peculiar expression as to touch even sensibilities which did not sympathize with the cause which inspired the song. It was difficult to listen unmoved to this lady, throwing her whole soul, as it were, into the expression of the sentiments of devotion to the South, defiance to the North, and affectionately confident appeals to Maryland, which form the burden of that celebrated song. The pathos her voice, her apparently forlorn condition, and, at those times when her soul seemed absorbed in the thoughts she was uttering in song, her melancholy manner, affected all who heard her, not only with compassion for her, but with an interest in her which came near, on several occasions, bringing about a conflict between the prisoners and the guards.

“Fronting on the same hall or stair-landing on which Belle Boyd's room-door opened, were three other rooms, all filled to their capacity with prisoners, mostly Confederate officers. Several of these were personally acquainted with Belle, as she was most of the time, and by nearly every one, called. In the evenings these prisoners were permitted to crowd inside of their room-doors, whence they could see and sometimes exchange a word with Belle. When this liberty was not allowed, she contrived to procure a large marble, around which she would tie a note, written on tissue-paper, and, when the guard turned his back to patrol his beat in the hall, she would roll the marble into one of the open doors of the Confederate prisoners' rooms. When the contents were read and noted a missive would be written in reply, and the marble, similarly burdened as it came, would be rolled back to Belle. Thus was a correspondence established and kept up between Belle and her fellow-prisoners, till a more convenient and effective mode was discovered. This occurred soon after some of us were transferred from room No. 13 to No. 10.

“One day Mr. Sheward and I were rummaging in an old, dirty, doorless closet in No. 10, when we discovered an opening in the floor, and, looking down, perceived the light in the room below, which happened to be that occupied by Belle Boyd. Here was a discovery! No sooner was it made, than we set to writing a note, which was tied to a thread and dropped down through the discovered aperture. It happened to be seen by Belle, who soon returned the compliment. Thenceforth a regular mail passed through the floor in No. 10; and though Lieutenant Miller and Superintendent Wood prided themselves on being well informed of every occurrence which took place in prison contrary to the rules, with all their vigilance, aided by the presence, as they admitted, of a detective in every room of the prison, except that of Belle Boyd, they never discovered this through-the-floor mail. It would not be the least interesting chapter in the history of the Old Capitol to give in it these letters of Belle Boyd. But the time is not yet.”

These last words of Mahony remind me of the fact that Belle Boyd, the “rebel spy,” is in possession of a vast amount of information implicating certain high officials at Washington, both in public and private scandals, which she deems it imprudent at present to publish. “The time is not yet.”

“Belle usually commenced her evening entertainment,” writes Mahony, “with ‘Maryland.’ ” Up to this time this patriotic and spirit-stirring song, written by young Randall, of Baltimore, must be regarded as the “Marseillaise” of the South. As it is as yet but little known in England, I will here quote it entire -

“The singing of this song,” says Mahony, “often brought Belle in collision with the guard who passed to and fro in front of her room door. It was, of course, provoking; but was such a place a proper one in which to imprison a female, and especially one who, whatever may have been her offence, was in the estimation of the world, a lady?”....

Many a patriotic lady of Baltimore has been arrested by Federal officers for singing the patriotic song of “Maryland.” But what will the English reader say when he learns the following fact? At one of the most celebrated eating, drinking, and singing saloons in London, the classical resort of authors, actors, poets, and wits, for these hundred years at least, the famous band of boys, who sing better than any choir outside the Sistine chapel in Rome, after having got “the words and air of ‘Maryland’ by heart,” are not allowed to sing it, for fear of giving offence! OFFENCE TO WHOM? It might possibly “offend”somebody were they to chant the “Marseillaise.”

To return again to our caged bird: -

“Belle was allowed to go in the yard on Sundays, when there was preaching there. On these occasions she wore a small Confederate flag in her bosom. No sooner would her presence be known to the Confederate prisoners, than they manifested towards her every mark of respect which persons in their situation could bestow. Most of them doffed their hats as she approached them, and she, with a grace and dignity that might be envied by a queen, extended her hand to them as she moved along to her designated position in a corner near the preacher. We Northern prisoners of State envied the Confederates who enjoyed the acquaintance of Belle Boyd, and who secured from her such glances of sympathy as can only glow from a woman's eyes.

“Belle's situation was a peculiarly trying one. If she kept her room, a solitary prisoner, her health, and probably her mind, would become affected by the confinement and solitude; and if she indulged herself by sitting outside her room door, she became exposed to the gaze of more than a hundred prisoners, nearly all of them strangers to her, and many of them her enemies by the laws of war. Nor was this all. She could not help hearing the comments made on her, and the opinions expressed of her, by passers-by; some of them complimentary and flattering, it is true, but oftentimes couched in expressions which were not what she should hear. The guards, too, were sometimes rude to her both by word and action. One time, especially, one of the guards presented his bayoneted musket at her in a threatening manner. She, brave and unterrified, dared the craven-hearted fellow to put his threat into execution. It was well for him that he did not, for he would have been torn into pieces before it could be known to the prison authorities what had happened.

“Belle was subjected to another worse annoyance and indignity than even this. Her room fronted on A Street, and, as usual with all the prisoners whose rooms had windows opening towards the street, Belle would sit at her window sometimes, and look abroad upon the houses, streets, and people of the city named after Washington. It happened frequently that troops were moving to and fro, and it was on such occasions especially that Belle, prompted by that curiosity which seems to be a law of nature in mankind, would look through her barred window at the soldiers. No sooner would they perceive her than they indulged in coarse jests, vulgar expressions, and the vilest slang of the brothel, made still more coarse, vulgar, and indecent by the throwing off of the little restraint which civilized society places upon the most abandoned prostitutes and their companions....

“Did the officers of the troops passing by permit the soldiers to thus insult a female, and subject themselves to such scornful and contemptuous reproof? the reader will be apt to inquire. Yes; and participated with the soldiers in uttering the most vulgar language and indecent allusions to the imprisoned woman; and that, too, without having the remotest idea of who she was, or of what she was accused. It was enough for them that she was a defenceless woman, to insult and outrage her by such language as they would not dare to apply in the public streets to an abandoned woman who had her liberty. And these men were going forth to fight the battles of the Union! They had just parted with mothers, wives, and sisters. It would seem that, in doing so, they turned their backs upon the virtues which give beauty to woman and dignity to man....

“At the general exchange of prisoners which took place in September Belle Boyd was sent to Richmond. As soon as it became known in the ‘Old Capitol’ that she was about to leave, there was not one, Federalist or Confederate, prisoner of state, officer of the ‘Old Capitol,’ as well as prisoner of war, who did not feel that he was about to part with one for whom he had, at least, a great personal regard. With many it was more than mere regard.

“Every inmate of the ‘Old Capitol’ tried to procure some token of remembrance from Belle, and there was scarcely one who did not bestow on her some mark of regard, esteem, or affection, as their sentiments and feelings influenced them severally, and as the means of their disposal afforded them an opportunity to manifest their sensibility. While every man who had any delicacy of feeling for the apparently forlorn prisoner rejoiced at her release from such a loathsome place, and from being subjected, as she continually was, to insult and contumely, there was not a gentleman in ‘Old Capitol’ whose emotions did not overcome him as he saw her leave the place for home.”

Thus kindly and warmly writes the veteran editor of the “Iowa Herald,” one of the victims of Seward's “little bell,” for whose imprisonment and release the “Powers” at Washington, “clothed with a little brief authority,” have given no reason or explanation. But was not Mr. Mahony “guilty” of being the Democratic nominee for Congress?

A somewhat more poetic picture of “La Belle Rebelle” is given by the accomplished author of “Guy Livingstone,” in his “Border and Bastille,” written while tasting the sweets of Federal tyranny in that same “Old Capitol” Prison: -

“Through the bars of a second-story window that fronted each turn of my tramp, I saw - this: a slight figure, in the freshest summer-toilette of cool pink muslin; close braids of dark hair shading clear pale cheeks; eyes that were made to sparkle, though the look in them was very sad; and the languid bowing down of the small head told of something worse than weariness.

“Truly a pretty picture, though framed in such a rude setting; but almost startling, at first, as the apparition of the fair witch in the forest to Christabelle....

“No need to ask what her crime had been: aid and abetment of the South suggested itself before you detected the ensign of the South that the démoiselle still wore undauntedly - a pearl solitaire, fashioned as a Single Star. I may not deny that my gloomy ‘constitutional’ seemed thenceforward a shade or two less dreary; but, though community of suffering does much to abridge ceremony, it was some days before I interchanged with the fair captive any sign beyond the mechanical lifting of my cap, when I entered and left her presence, duly acknowledged from above. One evening I chanced to be loitering almost under the window. A low, significant cough made me look up; I saw the flash of a gold bracelet, and the wave of a white hand; and there fill at my feet a fragrant, pearly rose-bud, nestling in fresh green leaves. My thanks were, perforce, confined to a gesture and a dozen hurried words; but I would the prison-beauty could believe that fair Jane Beaufort's rose was not more prized than hers, though the first was a love-token to a king, the last only a graceful gift to an unlucky stranger. I suppose that most men, whose past is not utterly barren of romance, are weak enough to keep some withered flowers till they have lived memory down; and I pretend not to be wiser than my fellows. Other fragrant messengers followed in their season; but if ever I ‘win hame to my ain countrie,’ I make mine avow to enshrine that first rose-bud in my reliquaire with all honour and solemnity, there to abide till one of us shall be dust.”

With this explanatory introduction, I have now only to commend “La Belle Rebelle” to the kindly sympathies of her readers - not as an authoress (to this she makes no pretensions); nor as a partisan soldier, although as such she has done good service in the cause; nor even as a freed bird from the “Old Capitol” cage; but simply as a woman - a warm-hearted, impulsive, heroic woman of the South, who, maddened by the wrongs and cruelties inflicted upon her people, and exalted, by the love she bore them, above the common cares and considerations of life, dashed into the field, bearing more than a woman's part in her country's struggle for liberty.

Like the flashing of the plume in the helmet of Navarre, the glancing of the Confederate ensign, when waved by a woman's hand, has never failed to fire the soldier's heart to “lofty deeds and daring high;” and on more than a hundred Southern battle-fields that proud banner, consecrated by prayers and kisses, baptized in tears and blood, has been greeted by the closing eyes of its dying defenders as the oriflamme of victory. Though lost for the moment in clouds and darkness, prophetic Hope, the last solace of the unfortunate, still waits and watches for its re-appearance as the harbinger of Southern liberty and independence: -

Since the above was written the Southern people have suffered a heavy calamity in the assassination of the President of the United States. Not that Mr. Lincoln was their friend: on the contrary, every man and woman in the South, and every child born within the last four years, regarded him as the official head and personal embodiment of all their enemies. But, by the removal of the Commander-in-Chief of the great army and navy with which they were contending, a far more vindictive and unrelenting man is invested with the supreme power of the nation. Abraham Lincoln, -with all his faults and fanaticism, his angularities of character and vulgarities of manner, had a sunny side to his nature; and there is every reason to believe that, with his idol Union once nominally restored, he would have adopted an indulgent, humane policy towards the brave and vanquished South, believing, with the great poet, that -

The suspicion which has been officially and wickedly thrown upon an honourable and heroic people, touching “the deep damnation of his taking off,” is sufficiently answered by the universal regret expressed throughout the Confederacy at President Lincoln's death, the public denunciation of his murderer, and the horror everywhere felt at the idea of being “ruled with a rod of iron” by such an unprincipled demagogue as Andrew Johnson! It is usual in cases of murder to look for the criminal among those who expect to be benefited by the crime. In the death of Lincoln his immediate successor in office alone receives “the benefit of his dying.”

While deploring the event which places the reins of power in the hands of one as unfit to control the destinies of a great nation as was the reckless youth to guide the chariot of the Sun, there can be no injustice in alluding to the fact that the Northern Powers and the Northern Press have much to answer for on the head of assassination. I have yet to learn that the written programme of Colonel Dahlgren, which designed the burning of Richmond, the ravaging of its women, and the murder of President Davis and all his cabinet, has ever been disavowed or denounced by the Washington Government, or by the newspapers that support it. Philosophy and religion alike teach us that, while crime only belongs to the act, the sin of murder consists in the intent. In the light of this judgment, faint in comparison with that “awful light” yet to be thrown, not only upon all human actions, but upon “the very thoughts and intents of the heart,” both North and South, friend and foe, rebel and loyalist, the victim and the victor, the living and the dead, must all be tried and sentenced by ONE who “judgeth not as man judgeth.”

In the meantime, let us pray, and hope, and labour for liberty, love, and peace.