Confederate wizards of the saddle /

by Bennett H. Young

John Singleton Mosby was born in Powhatan County, Virginia, in December, 1833, fifty miles south of the scenes of his wonderful military exploits. He came from refined, cultured and well-to-do people, and as was the custom in those days amongst the better class in that State, he was educated at the University of Virginia. His courage early developed itself. Some trouble with a fellow-student suspended his career in the University. He prepared himself for the practice of law, and when the war broke out, he was engaged in his profession at Bristol. He was among the very first men to offer for the Confederate service for twelve months. War, especially partisan war, had peculiar fascinations for this young lawyer. He had read and re-read the history of Sumter and Marion, and he longed for opportunity and occasion to engage in similar work. He knew every detail of the things they had done in the struggle of the colonies for liberty. While his eyes scanned the lines of Blackstone and Story, dreams of military glory flitted before his vision. The excitement, din, rush and fury of war appealed to his nature and he sighed for a chance to see and know what real war was. He shirked no duty, sought every possible opportunity for inflicting loss upon his country’s enemies. Enlisted for twelve months, he refused the furlough accorded men who served that length of time, and he re-enlisted for the war. His enterprise and his daring won him promotion, and by February, 1862, he was the adjutant of his regiment. He resigned because of some misunderstanding between Colonel William E. Jones and General Stuart, but the latter was quick to note men of Mosby’s ability and military aptitude and he put him on his staff as a scout and adviser. He held this position and rode with Stuart on his Chickahominy raid in June, 1862. He was almost the same age as his commander. He was quieter, but none the less brave. He took service more seriously than General Stuart; war with him was a passion, not a pastime. He loved war for the excitement and experience it brought, for the opportunities it offered to his genius for development, and devoid of fear, he was glad when chance brought his way the legal right to fight.

It was only a brief period until his marvelous efficiency and his masterful sagacity, as well as his extraordinary courage, caused General Stuart to give him a small independent command. He used this so effectively that his forces were quickly increased and the area of his operations enlarged. He had men in his battalion from almost all parts of the world, but the majority was composed of young soldiers who came from Virginia and Maryland. There was so much that was fascinating and attractive in the service in which Mosby was engaged that there was no difficulty in finding recruits who were the impersonation, not only of valor, but of dash. He enjoyed in the highest degree the confidence not only of General Stuart, but of General Lee, and the only criticism which General Lee ever passed on Mosby was his ability to catch bullets and win wounds.

In 1863 he engaged in a successful exploit, which largely added to his fame. With twenty-nine men, he penetrated the Federal lines and captured General Stoughton in his headquarters in the midst of his division, at Fairfax Court House, Virginia. This secured promotion for Mosby. Nothing in the war was more skillfully or recklessly done than this capture of General Stoughton. There are no mathematic quantities by which the damage that Mosby inflicted upon the Federals can be calculated. For every one man under his command, he kept one hundred Federals from the front. Had Colonel Mosby enjoyed the opportunities of other Confederate cavalry leaders, he would have won a fame and rank equal to either Forrest or Wheeler or Morgan or Stuart or Hampton. Had he gone to West Point and entered the war with the experience and prestige which came to men who had enjoyed military education, there would have been few officers in the Confederate Army who would have surpassed him in military achievement. At the period when Mosby first began his partisan career, there was no other man in the armies of the South who, with the means at hand, could have inflicted such damage on the enemy, or have accomplished such great results for his country.

A number of books have been written about Mosby and his men, and yet they can only touch a few of the wonderful things done by this wonderful man with his wonderful followers. He had no equipment of any kind. His men knew nothing about tents, and they had substantially no commissary and no quartermaster. They lived largely off their enemies and when not pursuing these, passed the time with their friends.

Mosby operated in four Virginia counties. This country became known as “Mosby’s Confederacy,” and the “Debatable Land.” However often the Federals invaded it they never could feel that their title was secure. This “Debatable Land” was not more than sixty miles long by forty miles wide, and yet in this limited area Mosby and his men subsisted, fought and disquieted the Federal army, in a way that demoralized its trains and kept its soldiers in a state of constant dread and apprehension. While the organization consisted of several companies, never at any one time did Colonel Mosby have more than four hundred men, and most of the time far less. These four hundred men, or whatever their number may have been, destroyed more Federal property than any other equal number of men in the Confederacy; and it is truly said of them that they gave the Federal troops more trouble than any five thousand men of any other command. Most of their work was in the rear of their foes. In a fight, General Forrest said one man in the rear was equal to three in the front, but in Mosby’s operations, one man behind the Federal lines counted more than twenty in front.

Mosby was cool, calm, fearless, dauntless. He inspired his men with his own confidence, faith and hope. They all respected him—most of them feared him—and all were glad to follow him. There was something in his personality that created in the minds of his followers absolute trust. They believed in him and they knew that he could be relied upon in all emergencies and that whether in the storm of battle, in the haste of retreat, or in the rush of the charge, Mosby was always at himself, and he was sure to do the wisest and the most sagacious thing under any contingency that might arise.

In Mosby’s command there was no room for cowardice and no place for cowards. The men who went with him took their lives in their hands. They knew that following him meant constant danger, ceaseless activity, incessant watchfulness and reckless service, and they were willing in exchange for the glory which they might gain, to assume all the risks that were incident to the daily life of the adherents of this silent, bold and fearless man.

Mosby’s operations were largely confined to Fauquier and Loudoun County, Virginia. Occasionally he crossed the line into Prince William County, and sometimes operated in Culpepper, but Fauquier County was the chief scene of his operations. In the later months of the war he was practically always within the enemy’s lines. He never had a camp, except for a small number of his men, and then only for a brief while. There was no place for Mosby to hide himself except among those who loved the Cause in these counties. In cabins and barns and in the forest and among the hills, his command found their home. Rarely more than two or three of them ever remained together. They scattered, as has been said, like the mist when the sun rose. When the Federals undertook to pursue them, the pursuit became like the chase after a phantom. If followed, they dispersed through the country into the crossroads and by-ways and among their friends and sympathizers. The exploits of Marion and Sumter become as a fading light when compared with the glamour and splendor of the work of Mosby and his men for the Confederacy. When they met, it was by preconcerted arrangement, or in answer to the calls of couriers. Much of their work was done at night. For the three years in which Mosby was engaged in active operations, there was rarely a single day that some of his men were not operating somewhere on the enemy’s line and on the enemy’s forces. In the activity of his campaigning the death rate was high, but there was always an abundance of daring spirits that were ready to take the places of those who had fallen in this desperate game of war.

Mosby taught his men to eschew sabres, to use no guns, but to rely upon the pistol alone. This meant fighting at close range, hand to hand combat. He and his men seemed to be everywhere; they were ever the terror and dread of the Federal Army. The men who guarded the wagon trains heard always with tremor the name of Mosby. With the exception of General Forrest, Colonel Mosby was the most feared and hated of all Confederate leaders. The writer of a history of his command says: “He kept in a defensive attitude, according to their own admission, thirty-five thousand of their troops which would otherwise have been employed in the active theatre of war. But this was not all. More than once, with his band, he compelled the invading army to relinquish actual and projected lines of communication, to fall back from advance positions, and, if we may credit the assertion of the Federal Secretary of War, occasioned a loss of an important battle.”

The things done by Mosby and his men were so out of the ordinary that they simply challenge belief and surpass comprehension. In the capture of General Stoughton, two of his staff officers and thirty other prisoners, in the midst of the Federal division, and removing them and their equipment and fifty-eight horses into Confederate lines without the loss of a man, appears impossible.