John Singleton Mosby
December 6, 1833 – May 30, 1916
John S. Mosby,also known as the "Gray Ghost," was a Confederate partisan ranger in the American Civil War.
He was noted for his lightning quick raids and his ability to successfully elude his Union Army pursuers and disappear (like a ghost) with his men, blending in with local farmers and townspeople.
Mosby was born in Cumberland County, Virginia. His parents were Virginny McLaurine and Alfred Daniel Mosby, a graduate of Hampden-Sydney College. Mosby started his education at a school called Murrell's Shop, but about 1840, his family moved to an area of the Blue Ridge Mountains, four miles from Charlottesville, in Albemarle County, Virginia. John attended school in Fry's Woods, but when he turned ten, he transferred to a Charlottesville school.
In 1849, Mosby entered the University of Virginia. Always hot tempered, on March 29, he shot George R. Turpin, a medical student at the university. He was fined 500 dollars (which was later rescinded) and sentenced to 12 months in prison. While in prison, Mosby passed his time by studying law. On December 23, 1853, the governor pardoned him. After studying for months in William J. Robertson's law office, Mosby was admitted to the bar. After setting up his own practice in nearby Howardsville, also in Albemarle County, Mosby met Pauline Clark, a Catholic, who was visiting from out of town. (He himself was a Methodist.) The couple moved to Bristol, Virginia, (close to her hometown in Kentucky), and were married in a Nashville hotel on December 30, 1857.
Mosby spoke out against secession, but joined the Confederate army as a private at the outbreak of the war and initially served in William "Grumble" Jones's Washington Mounted Rifles. (Jones became a major and was instructed to form a more collective "Virginia Volunteers", which he created with two mounted companies and eight companies of infantry and riflemen including the Washington Mounted Rifles.) Mosby was upset with the Virginia Volunteers' lack of congeniality and he wrote to the governor requesting to be transferred. However, his request was not granted. The Virginia Volunteers participated in the First Battle of Bull Run.
Mosby's Men
After impressing J.E.B. Stuart with his scouting ability, Mosby was promoted to first lieutenant and assigned to Stuart's cavalry scouts, helping the general develop attack strategies. He was responsible for Stuart's "Ride around McClellan" during the Peninsula Campaign. Captured by Union cavalry, Mosby was imprisoned in the Old Capitol Prison in Washington, D.C., for ten days before being exchanged. Even as a prisoner, Mosby spied on his enemy. During a brief stopover at Fort Monroe, he detected in unusual buildup of shipping in Hampton Roads and further inquiries convinced him that they were carrying thousands of troops under Ambrose Burnside from North Carolina on their way to reinforce John Pope in the Northern Virginia Campaign. When he was released, Mosby walked to army headquarters outside Richmond and personally related his findings to Robert E. Lee.[1]
In January 1863, Stuart, with Lee's concurrence, authorized Mosby to form and take command of the 43rd Battalion, Partisan Rangers, of the 1st Virginia Cavalry. The Confederate government certified special rules to govern the conduct of partisan rangers, and these included sharing in the disposition of spoils of war.
Initially, Mosby's group consisted of Fount Beatie, Charles Buchanan, Christopher Gaul, William L. Hunter, Edward S. Hurst, Jasper and William Jones, William Keys, Benjamin Morgan, George Seibert, George M. Slater, Daniel L. Thomas, William Thomas Turner, Charles Wheatley, and John Wild. He and his men carried out the Greenback Raid and attacked Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan's wagon train at Berryville.
Mosby is famous for carrying out a daring raid far inside Union lines at the Fairfax County courthouse in March 1863, where his men captured three high ranking Union officers, including Brig. Gen. Edwin H. Stoughton, whom Mosby allegedly found in bed, rousing him with a slap to his rear. Upon being so rudely awakened, the general shouted, "Do you know who I am?" Mosby quickly replied, "Do you know Mosby, general?" "Yes! Have you got the rascal?" "No but he has got you!"
The disruption of supply lines and the constant disappearance of couriers frustrated Union commanders to such a degree that Sheridan ordered the summary execution of all captured partisan rangers. When Union Brig. Gen. George A. Custer did execute several of Mosby's men in 1864 in Front Royal, Virginia, Mosby threatened retaliation by execution of prisoners from Custer's command. However, Mosby never carried through on that threat. Instead, he wrote a letter to General Ulysses S. Grant stating that he vehemently objected to such tactics, and pointing out that he had taken far more Union prisoners than they had ever taken of his men, and that he had scrupulously treated them as prisoners of war. By Grant's orders, there were no more executions of prisoners.
Several weeks after Robert E. Lee's surrender, Mosby simply disbanded his rangers, refusing to surrender formally.
After the war, Mosby became a Republican, saying it was the best way to help the South. He became a campaign manager in Virginia for President Grant, a U.S. consul to Hong Kong (1878–1885), a lawyer in San Francisco with the Southern Pacific Railroad, an employee with the Department of the Interior first enforcing federal fencing laws in Omaha then evicting trespassers on government-owned land in Alabama, and assistant Attorney General in the Department of Justice (1904–10). He died in Washington and is buried in Warrenton Cemetery.
During his time in San Francisco, he told his war stories to a young boy, George S. Patton, Jr., the future general.
The area in Virginia, primarily around Centreville, in which Mosby conducted most of his behind-the-lines activities was called "Mosby's Confederacy", even in the Northern press. Such was the fame of this unit that after the war, reunions of "Mosby's Rangers" always drew many times the number of men who actually served in that unit.
Some sources give Mosby credit for coining the term "the Solid South." He used it in an 1876 letter to the New York Herald, supporting the candidacy of Republican Rutherford B. Hayes for president.
Herman Melville's poem "The Scout Toward Aldie" is about the terror a Union brigade feels upon facing Mosby's men.
Virgil Carrington Jones published Ranger Mosby (1944) and Grey Ghosts and Rebel Raiders (1956). He also wrote the late-1950s television program, Ranger Mosby.
Mosby Woods Elementary School, an elementary school in Fairfax County Public Schools, is named after Mosby.
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