Belle Boyd, in Camp and Prison

With the help of English journalist George Augustus Sala, Confederate spy Belle Boyd wrote her two-volume memoir from London at the end of the American Civil War (1861–1865). While the book attracted international attention at the time, and launched Boyd on a series of tours around the United States, the stories contained within were such that it became fashionable for historians to dismiss them outright, as the Dictionary of American Biography did in 1929. Historian Louis A. Sigaud has argued, however, that her account is basically accurate.