James William Boyd (1822 – after 1865) was an American Confederate military officer who was alleged in a conspiracy theory to have been killed in the place of John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, due to their resemblance.

Boyd was born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in 1822, and lived in Jackson, Tennessee, where he married Caroline A. Malone in 1845, and had seven children.

[1] Boyd was a captain in the 6th Tennessee Infantry Regiment of Confederate States Army, Company F, during the American Civil War.

According to a theory put forth by the 1977 book and subsequent film The Lincoln Conspiracy, Boyd was mistaken for John Wilkes Booth and killed on April 26, 1865, at Richard Garrett's farm, near Bowling Green, Virginia.

[4] James L. Swanson counters this claim by stating, "The survival myth of John Wilkes Booth, roaming across the land, evokes the traditional fate of the damned, of a cursed spirit who can find no rest.