Finally a party came along dressed partly in blue and partly in grey, and asked the same question. Eyeing them critically for a moment and remembering his past unfortunate experience, he replied:
'Well, gentlemen, to tell you the truth, I am nothing at all and d——d little of that.'"
The fact that the Yankees had an abundance of horses is illustrated by the following article found in the Pictorial War Record (March 18, 1882).
"Some people will no doubt be astonished to learn that large fortunes had been made every year from the commencement of the war out of the dead horses of the Army of the Potomac. The popular idea is that when Rosinante yields up the ghost he is buried in some field, or left to moulder into mother earth in the woods somewhere. Not so. He has made his last charge, and gnawed his last fence rail, but there is from $20.00 to $40.00 in the old fellow yet.
A contract for the purchase of dead horses in the Army of the Potomac in the year 1864 was let for that year to the highest bidder, at $1.67 per head, delivered at the factory of the contractor. During 1863, $60,000.00 was cleared on the contract, and that year it is thought $100,000.00 was made on it. The animals die at the rate of about fifty per day at the lowest calculation.
At the contractor's establishment they are thoroughly dissected. First the shoes are pulled off; they are usually worth fifty cents a set. Then the hoofs are cut off; they bring two dollars a set. Then comes the caudal appendage, worth half a dollar. Then the hide—I don't know what that sells for. Then the tallow, if it is possible to extract tallow from the army horse, which I think extremely doubtful, unless he die immediately after entering the service. And last, but not least, the shinbones are valuable, being convertible into a variety of articles that many believe to be composed of pure ivory, such as candle-heads, knife-handles, etc. By this time the contractor gets through the "late-lamented" steed, there is hardly enough of him left to feed a bull-pup on.
Hereafter, kind reader, when you see a dead "hoss", don't turn up your nose at him, but regard him thoroughly, as the foundation for a large fortune in a single year. He may, individually, be a nuisance, but 'there is that within which passeth show'—$100,000.00 a year."
Horses, supplies, good fighting men and pickets were important to the Confederates. So were spies. Mosby was aided greatly by two young ladies who resided in Fairfax. One was Laura Ratcliffe and the other was Antonia Ford.