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Lieutenant Prentiss, awakened by shouts that there were dispatches outside for General Stoughton, was foolish enough to open the door to
the raiders.
Six men strode in, but it was the smallest of them, the wiry one with the plume in his hat, who stuck a revolver in the lieutenant's ribs while he stood in the entranceway in his nightclothes holding high a smoking oil lamp.
Upstairs the beplumed intruder walked into the bedroom of Brigadier General Edwin H. Stoughton and pulled down the covers.
The brigadier was laying on his side, snoring, but he roused up stupidly, still somewhat intoxicated from his evening's soiree, when Mosby lifted his nightshirt and slapped him on the behind announcing, "Get up General, and come with me!"
The sound of the voice brought Stoughton more fully awake and, when he realized the man bending over him was a stranger, he shouted,
"What is this! Do you know who I am, sir?"
"I reckon I do, General. Did you ever hear of Mosby?"
"Yes, have you caught him?"
"No, but he has caught you."
The March 8, 1863, Fairfax Court House raid that netted Stoughton was actually intended to capture the English soldier of fortune and
Union cavalry commander Colonel Percy Wynham. Wynham had called Mosby "a common horse thief," and Mosby sought to avenge this slur against his honor. "I shall mount the stars tonight," Mosby announced to
his 29 followers as they embarked on their legendary raid, "or sink lower than plummet ever sounded."
Even though Wynham escaped his grasp, news of Mosby's daring midnight raid exhilarated the war-weary Southerners. Jeb Stuart declared it a "brilliant exploit." Robert E. Lee, who mentioned Mosby in his orders and reports more often than any other Southern officer, was heard to exclaim, "Hurrah for Mosby! I wish I had a hundred like him!" The Federals were not as pleased. When Lincoln learned that Mosby had captured not only a brigadier general but also 58 horses, the President sadly reflected, "Well, I'm sorry for that. I can make new brigadier generals, but I can't make horses."
The man who would become the bane of the Union Army in Northern Virginia and a hero of the Confederacy, John Singleton Mosby was born in
Edgemont, Virginia, on December 6, 1833.
In 1849 he entered the University of Virginia where he shot and wounded a fellow student in a quarrel when the student made a "disagreeable allegation." He was expelled, fined $1,000, and sentenced to six months in jail for "unlawful shooting." The sentence was later annulled by the Virginia General Assembly. Mosby did not waste away time in jail. Becoming interested in law during his trial, he persuaded his attorney to lend him some law books. Mosby was admitted to the bar following his release and opened a law office in Bristol, Virginia.
Even though he opposed secession, Mosby enlisted immediately when his state left the Union declaring, "Virginia is my mother, God bless
her! I can't fight against my mother, can I?" He joined the 1st Virginia Cavalry as a private and fought at the First Battle of Manassas. Mosby, at age 27, was an indifferent soldier and chafed under discipline. Nevertheless, he rose to the rank of lieutenant and adjutant of the 1st Virginia. During the Peninsula Campaign, Mosby volunteered to serve as a scout for Brigadier General Jeb Stuart and distinguished himself guiding Stuart's task force around McClellan's army in June 1862. Stuart called Mosby's service "a shining record of daring and usefulness."
Following the end of the Seven Days Battles, Mosby was captured by Union troopers on July 19, 1862, while dozing in the shade at Beaver
Dam Station north of Richmond.
He was held in Washington for ten days and then shipped to Hampton Roads for exchange. While in the harbor he observed the large number of Union transports off Newport News Point and soon learned that the ships contained Major General Ambrose Burnside's command enroute from North Carolina to join Major General John Pope's army near Manassas. Upon his release, Mosby reported this valuable information to General Lee which led to Lee's march against Pope in August 1862.
Mosby, however, sought even greater glory as he yearned to emulate the Revolutionary War partisan hero Francis Marion, the legendary
Swamp Fox.
He believed that small, fast-moving cavalry commands were a more effective method of upsetting enemy plans and communications than large cavalry offensive actions. Accordingly, Mosby entreated Stuart to permit him to organize an independent command in Northern Virginia under the Confederacy's Partisan Ranger Law. Stuart finally agreed in December 1862.
Early in the next year Mosby recruited in Union-occupied northern Virginia a force of irregular troops known as the Partisan Rangers, who
provided their own equipment, raided Union outposts and supply lines, and then dispersed.
Most of the men were volunteers: men on leave from regular army units, convalescents, and civilians unwilling to enlist in the Confederate Army. They boarded in private homes, lived with family, or off the country rather than established camps, and were called together by the grapevine when Mosby needed them. Mosby's tactics - swift night raids by small groups of rangers against trains, wagons, pickets, outposts, and small camps - made the rangers a dangerous menace to Union forces in northern Virginia. In a report to Stuart, Mosby clearly expressed the benefit of his guerilla tactics:
The military value of the species of warfare I have waged is not measured by the number of prisoners and material of war captured from
the enemy, but by the heavy detail it has compelled him to make, and which I hope to make him increase, in order to guard his communications, and to that extent diminishing his aggressive strength.
By his own account, Mosby's operations kept at least 30,000 Union soldiers away from the front lines.
In June 1863 Mosby's command was re-designated the 43rd Battalion of Partisan Rangers and continued its series of lightning raids against the Federals. Catlett Station, Aldie and the "Greenback Raid" were just a few of the many engagements that added to Mosby's fame. The 43rd,
numbering 240 men by 1864, appeared everywhere striking at points where the Federals seemed weakest. The key to Mosby's success was that his "entire force was seldom combined.
Instead of this," Adolphus Richards wrote, "they would be divided into two or more detachments operating in different places. So it was not unusual for an attack to be made the same night upon Sheridan's line of transportation in the valley, upon the pickets guarding the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, upon the outpost in Fairfax County, and upon the rear of the army maneuvering against General Lee." During a six-month period in 1864, Mosby had killed, wounded, or captured 1,200 Federals and had taken more than 1,600 horses and mules, 230 head of cattle, and 85 wagons and ambulances.
The Federals were determined to put an end to Mosby's maraudering, yet they were frustrated in every attempt. "Mosby is an old
rat," Colonel Charles Russell Lowell of the 2nd Massachusetts Cavalry wrote, "and has a great many holes." "The whole country is full of guerillas," reflected Colonel Henry S. Gansevoort of the 13th New York Cavalry. Gansevoort "wearied of the thankless task of fighting guerillas," noting that "Mosby is continually around us." Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant was so distressed by Mosby's successes that he ordered the partisan commander and his men hanged without trial when captured. Major General Philip Sheridan organized a special task force of 100 men armed with Spencer carbines to hunt down and destroy Mosby's command. On November 18, 1864, Mosby killed or captured all but two of this force.
The Rangers were declared outlaws by the Union forces and several were caught and hanged without trial.
Mosby retaliated by hanging an equal number of Brigadier George A. Custer's cavalry men, and the executions ended. Grant ordered other measures to stop the Rangers including the destruction of all forage and supplies in Loudoun County and the arrest of all men under 50. Nothing the Federals tried to do could stop Mosby.
Mosby was promoted colonel in December 1864 and his command had increased to 800 men, however, the war was by now coming to its
conclusion. Twelve days after the surrender of General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox on April 9, 1865, Mosby reviewed his troops for the last time and disbanded them at Salem, Virginia. "I am no longer
your commander," Mosby told his men, "Farewell."
After the war, Mosby resumed the practice of law in Warrenton, Virginia.
He entered politics and alienated many of his friends in the South when he supported Grant's candidacy for president. Mosby served from 1878 to 1885 as U. S. Counsel in Hong Kong and from 1904 to 1910, he was an assistant attorney for the U. S. Department of Justice. Mosby died at Washington, D.C., on May 30, 1916.
John Singleton Mosby never commanded large forces in the field nor did his actions change the war's course.
Nevertheless, Mosby's exploits did create a sensation throughout the southern population and a certain fear amongst the Federals striving to control and pacify Northern Virginia. U. S. Grant perhaps wrote the most telling epitaph about Mosby's partisan service that "there were probably but few men in the South who could have commanded successfully in separate detachment in the rear of an opposing army and so near the border of hostilities as long as he did without losing his entire command."
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