And so on and on and on until the sun was about to hide its face behind the western slopes, and at four o’clock in the afternoon, on the 14th, the column, now struggling and oppressed with both hunger and weariness, reached Williamsburg, Ohio, and camped for the night, and the greatest single cavalry march of the world, composed of as large a force as twenty-five hundred men, was ended.

Ninety-five and a quarter miles in thirty-two hours of marching! Surely such work was not unworthy of what the Confederacy asked of its sons.

As these hard riders dismounted they stood for a moment helpless with fatigue. Leaning against a horse or a fence they would sleep standing, and in taking food to recuperate their wearied bodies, would sink into slumber. It was a great triumph for Confederate cavalry, and amid all its terrors and horrors it was worth something to realize that the record of human endurance had been lifted several degrees higher. The future had yet in store for some of these men much of hardship and much of renown—imprisonment in the Ohio penitentiary, at Camp Chase, Camp Douglass, Johnson’s Island, Fort Delaware, for many, death under the chafings, starvation and cruelties of Northern prisons; but out of these there would come a remnant who should, when others had capitulated, ride as an escort for Jefferson Davis when Richmond and Columbia would be in ruins and all hope for the nation’s life had fled.

There would yet come a time when to these still hoping men, hope would fail, when the Confederate Armies would be shattered and scattered, when Lee had surrendered and Johnson capitulated, when the western army and the Army of Northern Virginia, its veterans paroled, would turn their tear-stained faces toward their desolated homes and take up anew the burdens of life; when all the mighty legions west of the Mississippi, which had maintained for four years the mightiest conflict of the ages, would stack their guns, sheath their swords, and accept war’s decrees for surrender.

They were yet to see a time when the President of the Confederacy should go forth from the seat of government, and in sadness and gloom ride away from the Confederate capital to seek refuge south of Virginia. There were some of these men who were here at this hour destined and appointed still to cling to Jefferson Davis’ fortunes and defend his person in the period of surpassing disaster and sadness, when with a broken heart he would realize that his nation was dead and he was without a country. There would come a time when a pitying Providence should provide out of these soldiers for the first and only Confederate President a depleted bodyguard, who would go with him in his reverses and humiliation, and who were to stand guard over him and his cabinet, to beat off pursuing foes at a time when every man’s hand would be against him and them, when fate would hide its face and give him over to a cruel, brutal mocking and an imprisonment which would shock the world’s sense of mercy and justice. There were men now closing this great ride who would be present when the wretchedness of death would hover over and around the Southern cause, and would look upon the last council of war. When the greatness of the South should end in desolation and ruin, some of these riders were, in the closing hours of the Confederacy, to offer anew their lives and their all to the cause which they loved to the end, and for which they had sacrificed their fortunes; and yet in the blackness of death and the final agonies of their nation would again cheerfully tender their all, to prolong even for an hour its hopes and its existence. They were yet by their exalted courage to glorify that cause for which the South had endured untold and immeasurable suffering, and would by a crowning act of constancy take a deserved place on the brightest pages of human annals that record patriotic fortitude and valor.

A few hundred of these men now closing this wonderful march would accompany Jefferson Davis in his last effort to avoid capture, and would only leave him and those he loved, when he should plead that their presence would only endanger his escape. They would only depart when he commanded them to go, and urged them by their loyalty and devotion to him to listen to his appeal—that they leave him alone in the supreme hour of his political grief and distress.

Some of these men would also be present when the last sun that ever shone on the Confederate States, as a nation, was lengthening its rays on its western course, and sending forth a fading glow on the sad scenes of national dissolution which would, if it were possible, with nature’s shadings, make glorious and immortal the faces of the heroes who, in anguish and awe, looked upon its death throes, a nation that in its brief days of four eventful years was to make a history that would win the admiration and love of all the people of succeeding ages, who read the story of their suffering, their valor, their loyalty and their devotion to principle and country.

Some of these riders were to be faithful unto death, and have a full share of that glorious crown of immortality which fate would hereafter decree to the men of the South as a compensation for a victory, which, though deserved, should be denied.

Chapter XVII
RICHARDS WITH MOSBY’S MEN IN THE
FIGHT AT MT. CARMEL CHURCH,
FEBRUARY 19, 1864

In all military history, Colonel John S. Mosby and his command had neither a counterpart nor a parallel. Man for man, Mosby and his men did more, proportionately, to damage, to harass, to delay and to disturb the Federal forces than any equal number of soldiers who wore the gray.