During the American Civil War, loyalty could determine everything: your friends, your enemies, your reputation and sometimes whether you lived or died. In Columbia, South Carolina, one beautiful young woman became notorious for crossing those lines.
Her name was Marie Boozer.
With strawberry-blonde hair, striking blue eyes and a reputation as one of Columbia's great beauties, Boozer looked every bit the privileged Southern belle. But as the Confederacy collapsed around her, she and her family helped Union prisoners, associated with Union officers and ultimately left South Carolina with the army of General William Tecumseh Sherman.
To many Confederate supporters, it amounted to betrayal.
But Marie Boozer's real story is considerably more complicated—and far more fascinating.
The Belle of Columbia
Born in South Carolina in 1846, Marie was originally known as Mary. She grew up in Columbia in a world where a young woman's beauty, family connections and social standing could determine much of her future.
And Marie's beauty apparently attracted attention wherever she went.
Contemporary diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut, who was certainly no admirer of every woman she encountered, nevertheless acknowledged Boozer's remarkable appearance. Later writers would describe her thick strawberry-blonde hair and blue eyes, and stories about her beauty became intertwined with her legend.
Marie also wasn't quite the delicate Southern flower people might expect. Accounts describe her as spirited and somewhat tomboyish when young, and she reportedly knew how to handle firearms.
During the early years of the Civil War, Marie appears to have supported the Confederate cause. She helped tend wounded Confederate soldiers at Columbia's Wayside Hospital and participated in activities intended to boost Confederate morale.
Then something changed.
Falling for the Enemy
Columbia became a holding place for Union prisoners during the war, including officers imprisoned under miserable conditions.
Marie's mother, Amelia Feaster, had Northern connections and became increasingly sympathetic toward Union prisoners. She visited prisoners and provided assistance, with Marie accompanying her.
It was through this work that Marie reportedly became romantically attached to Lieutenant Samuel W. Preston, a Union naval officer being held prisoner.
For a young South Carolina belle during the Civil War, falling in love with a Union officer was no minor social indiscretion.
It was fraternizing with the enemy.
The relationship appears to have been serious. Preston and Marie reportedly planned to marry following his release in a prisoner exchange.
They never had the chance.
Preston returned to military service and was killed during the attack on Fort Fisher, North Carolina, in January 1865.
Marie was still only about eighteen years old.
His death seems to have been a turning point. Whatever Confederate sympathies Marie had once possessed were disappearing just as the Confederacy itself was beginning to collapse.
Hiding Union Officers
The Boozer family's support for Union prisoners went beyond friendly visits.
As Sherman's army approached Columbia in early 1865, Confederate authorities attempted to move Union prisoners away from the advancing Federal troops. Some escaped.
Marie and her mother helped hide escaped Union officers in their home, reportedly concealing men in the cellar and feeding them while they waited for Sherman's forces to arrive.
This was dangerous.
Helping enemy prisoners escape or evade Confederate authorities could have brought serious consequences. Other civilians accused of assisting Union prisoners faced punishment.
Marie and Amelia nevertheless continued helping them.
By this point, the beautiful young woman who had once assisted wounded Confederate soldiers had crossed firmly into territory that many of her neighbors would consider treasonous.
Sherman Comes to Columbia
On February 17, 1865, Union forces entered Columbia.
What followed became one of the most controversial episodes of Sherman's Carolinas Campaign.
Fires swept through the city, destroying a large portion of Columbia. For generations, popular memory placed responsibility squarely on Sherman and his troops. Modern historians paint a more complicated picture involving Union soldiers, retreating Confederate forces, burning cotton, alcohol, looting, strong winds and the general chaos surrounding the city's occupation.
For Columbia's Confederate population, however, the sight was devastating.
And amid the destruction stood Marie Boozer and her family.
They had a decision to make.
Staying behind could be dangerous. Their assistance to Union prisoners was known, and once Sherman's army departed, retaliation from Confederate supporters was a real possibility.
So they left.
Not southward with the Confederates.
Northward with Sherman.
Riding Away With the Union Army
Marie, her mother Amelia, her half-sister Ethland and Ethland's African American nurse Lizzie joined the Union column leaving Columbia.
It was an extraordinary sight.
Here was one of Columbia's most celebrated young belles traveling under the protection of the army that had just occupied her hometown.
General Oliver O. Howard reportedly arranged a suitable carriage for the women, and they were permitted to travel relatively close to his headquarters rather than among the enormous mass of camp followers trailing Sherman's army.
Sherman himself remembered the family. In his memoirs, he referred to Amelia and her beautiful daughters and described arranging for them to continue toward safety.
But another Union general would become forever entangled with the Marie Boozer legend.
Marie Boozer and General Kilpatrick
Major General Hugh Judson Kilpatrick commanded Sherman's cavalry and had a reputation nearly as colorful as Marie's.
Known as an aggressive and sometimes reckless cavalry commander, Kilpatrick was nicknamed "Kill-Cavalry" by some soldiers because of his willingness to throw mounted troops into dangerous situations.
Stories soon circulated that Marie became Kilpatrick's companion—and perhaps his mistress—during the campaign.
One particularly dramatic episode occurred at Monroe's Crossroads in North Carolina in March 1865, when Confederate cavalry launched a surprise attack on Kilpatrick's headquarters.
Kilpatrick barely escaped.
Later versions of the story placed Marie with him during the attack, adding another delicious layer of scandal to her already growing reputation.
Whether every sensational detail repeated over the following decades was true is another matter. Marie Boozer became the kind of historical figure around whom people loved to tell stories, and separating documented fact from gossip has occupied historians ever since.
What is certain is that she traveled north with Sherman's forces and that her association with Union officers became a defining part of her reputation.
From Southern Traitor to Northern Heroine
The irony is remarkable.
In South Carolina, Marie and her mother could be viewed as women who had turned against their own people.
In the North, they were celebrated.
After reaching Union-controlled territory, the family eventually arrived in Philadelphia and later New York. Union officers testified to the assistance the women had provided prisoners during the war.
More than thirty officers reportedly supported statements attesting to the women's courage and assistance.
The same actions that made Marie notorious in the defeated Confederacy helped transform her into something approaching a heroine among Union supporters.
It illustrates one of the uncomfortable realities of civil war:
A traitor on one side can be a hero on the other.
The Scandals Didn't End With the War
If Marie Boozer's story ended in 1865, she would still be fascinating.
It didn't.
Her postwar life became almost unbelievably colorful.
Marie married John S. Beecher and entered New York society, but the marriage eventually collapsed amid accusations of infidelity. She became involved with wealthy socialite Lloyd Phoenix, believing he would marry her after her divorce.
He did not.
The resulting romantic disaster contributed even more material to the Boozer legend.
She traveled internationally, appeared in society circles and became connected to scandals reported by newspapers in New York and London.
At various points, wild stories even associated her with stolen Russian jewels—claims modern biographical research has rejected.
Marie had become a nineteenth-century celebrity before the modern concept of celebrity truly existed.
People whispered about her.
Newspapers wrote about her.
Men pursued her.
Society judged her.
And Marie continued moving.
From Columbia Belle to European Countess
Perhaps the strangest transformation was still ahead.
The young Southern belle once accused of betraying the Confederacy eventually established herself in Europe and married Arthur de Pourtalès, becoming Countess de Pourtalès-Gorgier.
Think about that journey.
She began life as Mary Boozer in antebellum South Carolina.
She tended Confederate wounded.
She fell in love with a Union prisoner.
She helped Union officers.
She escaped Columbia with Sherman's army.
She became notorious in New York society.
She traveled through Europe.
And eventually she became a countess.
Marie Boozer died in Tuscany, Italy, in 1908, more than forty years after the Civil War had transformed her life.
Was Marie Boozer Really a Traitor?
Calling Marie Boozer "the Southern belle who betrayed the South" makes a wonderfully dramatic headline—but history deserves the footnote.
She wasn't simply a lifelong Union loyalist secretly plotting against the Confederacy.
Her loyalties evolved.
Early in the war, she participated in Confederate relief efforts. Later, through her mother's activities and her encounters with suffering Union prisoners, she became increasingly sympathetic toward the North. Her romance with Samuel Preston almost certainly made the conflict deeply personal.
By 1865, she was willing to help Union prisoners and ultimately leave South Carolina under Union protection.
Confederate loyalists could certainly consider that betrayal.
But another interpretation is possible.
Marie chose individuals over governments.
She helped men she believed were suffering. She loved a man who happened to wear the enemy's uniform. And when remaining in Columbia became dangerous, she left.
That makes her harder to squeeze into the familiar Civil War categories of loyal Confederate belle or heroic Union patriot.
She was something messier.
She was human.
The Real-Life Scarlett O'Hara?
Marie Boozer has sometimes been compared with Scarlett O'Hara, and historian Manly Wade Wellman even suggested that she helped inspire the famous fictional character.
The comparison is irresistible.
Both were beautiful Southern women whose lives were shattered and transformed by war. Both attracted men and scandal. Both possessed a stubborn instinct for survival. And neither fit comfortably within the expectations society placed upon respectable Southern women.
But Marie didn't need Scarlett O'Hara to make her interesting.
Scarlett was fiction.
Marie Boozer actually did it.
She watched the Confederacy crumble, crossed enemy lines both emotionally and physically, rode away from her devastated hometown with Sherman's army, survived scandals on two continents and reinvented herself in European society.
More than 150 years later, historians are still untangling the gossip from the evidence.
Perhaps that's the perfect legacy for Marie Boozer.
The celebrated Confederate beauty who became a Union heroine, a scandalous divorcée and finally a European countess refused to remain what the nineteenth-century South expected a proper young lady to be.
And history has been gossiping about her ever since.
