Civil War CDV Confederate Major John Mosby the Grey Ghost

Because of his small stature and frail health, Mosby was the victim of bullies throughout his school career. Instead of becoming withdrawn and lacking in self-confidence, the boy responded by fighting back. The editor of his memoirs recounted a statement Mosby made that he never won any fight in which he was engaged. The only time he did not lose a fight was when an adult stepped in and broke it up.

In 1847, Mosby enrolled at HampdenSydney College, where his father was an alumnus. Unable to keep up with his mathematics class, [4] Mosby left the college after two years. On October 3, 1850, [5][6][7] he entered the University of Virginia, taking Classical Studies and joining the Washington Literary Society and Debating Union. He was far above average in Latin, Greek, and literature (all of which he enjoyed), but mathematics was still a problem for him.

About this time, Mosby met Pauline Clarke (March 30, 1837 - May 10, 1876), who was visiting from Kentucky. Although he was Scots-Welsh Protestant (nominally Methodist or agnostic) and she was Catholic, courtship ensued. Her father was Beverly L. [13] They were married in a Nashville hotel on December 30, 1857. After living for a year with Mosby's parents, the couple settled in Bristol, Virginia, which was near a road connecting into Tennessee and Kentucky over the Cumberland Gap.

The Mosbys had two children before the Civil War (May and Beverley). [14] John Singleton Mosby Jr. Who like his father became a lawyer, and later worked for mining companies in the west, was born in 1863 during the war. The Catholic Church established a mission in Warrenton by 1874, which is now known as St.

John the Evangelist Catholic Church. [15] Mosby was dedicated to his family and paid to have them educated at the best Catholic schools in Washington, D.

Mosby spoke out against secession, but joined the Confederate army as a private at the outbreak of the war. He first 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 thought the Virginia Volunteers lacked 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 (First Manassas) in July 1861. In April 1862, the Confederate Congress passed the Partisan Ranger Act which provides that such partisan rangers, after being regularly received into service, shall be entitled to the same pay, rations, and quarters, during their term of service, and be subject to the same regulations, as other soldiers.

Even as a prisoner Mosby spied on his enemy. When he was released, Mosby walked to the army headquarters outside Richmond and personally related his findings to Robert E. After the Battle of Fredericksburg, in December, 1862, Mosby and his senior officer J.

Stuart led raids behind Union lines in Prince William, Fairfax and Loudoun counties, seeking to disrupt federal communications and supplies between Washington D. And Fredericksburg, as well as provision their own forces. As the year ended, at Oakham Farm in Loudoun County, Virginia Mosby gathered with various horsemen from Middleburg, Virginia who decided to form what became known as Mosby's Rangers.

Mosby's Rangers-Top row (left to right): Lee Herverson, Ben Palmer, John Puryear, Tom Booker, Norman Randolph, Frank Raham. # Second row: Robert Blanks Parrott, John Troop, John W. # Third row: Walter Gosden, Harry T.

In January 1863, Stuart, with Lee's concurrence, authorized Mosby to form and take command of the 43rd Battalion Virginia Cavalry. This was later expanded into Mosby's Command, a regimental-sized unit of partisan rangers operating in Northern Virginia.

The 43rd Battalion operated officially as a unit of the Army of Northern Virginia, subject to the commands of Lee and Stuart, but its men (1,900 of whom served from January 1863 through April 1865) lived outside of the norms of regular army cavalrymen. The Confederate government certified special rules to govern the conduct of partisan rangers. These included sharing in the disposition of spoils of war.

Mosby required proof from any volunteer that he had not deserted from the regular service, and only about 10% of his men had served previously in the Confederate Army. In March 1863, Mosby conducted a daring raid far inside Union lines near the Fairfax County courthouse. He was helped, according to his own account, by a deserter from the 5th New York Cavalry regiment named James Ames, who served under Mosby until he was killed in 1864. [21][22] He and his men captured three Union officers, including Brig. Mosby wrote in his memoirs that he found Stoughton in bed and roused him with a spank on his bare back.

Thus, some analysts claim Lee stumbled into the battle without his cavalry, partly because of Mosby's successful skirmish at Seneca three weeks earlier. Mosby endured his first serious wound of the war on August 24, 1863, during a skirmish near Annandale, Virginia, when a bullet hit him through his thigh and side.

Mosby endured a second serious wound on September 14, 1864, while taunting a Union regiment by riding back and forth in front of it. A Union bullet shattered the handle of his revolver before entering his groin. Mosby's successful disruption of supply lines, attrition of Union couriers, and disappearance in the disguise of civilians caused Lt. The families of most of Mosby's men are know[n] and can be collected.

On September 22, 1864, Union forces executed six of Mosby's men who had been captured out of uniform i. As spies in Front Royal, Virginia; a seventh (captured, according to Mosby's subsequent letter to Sheridan, "by a Colonel Powell on a plundering expedition into Rappahannock") was reported by Mosby to have suffered a similar fate. [35] William Thomas Overby was one of the men selected for execution on the hill in Front Royal. His captors offered to spare him if he would reveal Mosby's location, but he refused.

Lee and Confederate Secretary of War James A. Seddon of his intention to respond in kind, Mosby ordered seven Union prisoners, chosen by lot, to be executed in retaliation on November 6, 1864, at Rectortown, Virginia. Although seven men were duly chosen in the original "death lottery, " in the end just three men were actually executed. One numbered lot fell to a drummer boy who was excused because of his age, and Mosby's men held a second drawing for a man to take his place.

With both camps treating prisoners as "prisoners of war" for the duration, there were no more executions. On November 18, 1864, Mosby's command defeated Blazer's Scouts at the Battle of Kabletown. Mosby had his closest brush with death on December 21, 1864, near Rector's Crossroads in Virginia. While dining with a local family, Mosby was fired on through a window, and the ball entered his abdomen two inches below the navel. [32] He managed to stagger into the bedroom and hide his coat, which had his only insignia of rank.

The commander of the Union detachment, Maj. Douglas Frazar of the 13th New York Cavalry, entered the house andnot knowing Mosby's identityinspected the wound and pronounced it mortal. Several weeks after General Robert E. Lee's surrender, Mosby's status was uncertain, as some posters above the signature of Gen. Hancock stated that marauding bands would be destroyed and specifically named Mosby as a guerrilla chief and not included in the parole, although Mosby received a copy on April 12 at a letter drop in the Valley along with a letter from Hancock's chief of staff, Gen.

Morgan, calling on Mosby to surrender and promising the same terms as extended to Gen. Further negotiations followed, at Winchester and Millwood. Finally, on April 21, 1865, in Salem, Virginia, Mosby disbanded the rangers, and on the following day many former rangers rode their worst horses to Winchester to surrender, receive paroles and return to their homes.

Some proposed that they return to Richmond and capture the Union officers who were occupying the White House of the Confederacy, but Mosby rejected the plan, telling them, Too late! It would be murder and highway robbery now. We are soldiers, not highwaymen.

When Mosby finally confirmed the arrest order had been rescinded, he surrendered on June 17, one of the last Confederate officers to do so. As the Civil War ended, Mosby was just 31, and would live another five decades in his own individualistic style. He resumed his law practice in Warrenton, and by December 1865 was prosecuting the internal revenue collector in Prince William County for mule-stealing. Nonetheless, during the year after receiving his parole, Mosby often found himself harassed by occupying Union forces, arrested on petty or trumped-up charges, until his wife and young son Revardy, after being rebuffed by President Andrew Johnson despite their mutual kinship ties, met General Grant in January 1866 and secured a handwritten exemption from arrest and guarantee of safe conduct.

Mosby's former residence at Washington, D. S Logan Circle in August 2008. On May 8, 1872, as covered by the Washington Star, Mosby personally thanked then-U. Mosby also told Grant he believed vehemently that election of Horace Greeley (a long-time editor of the New York Tribune detested in the South) would be worse for the South because the men surrounding him were worse than those surrounding his old benefactor Grant.

A few days later, Massachusetts Congressman Benjamin Butler presented an amnesty bill for former Confederates, as Mosby had suggested in that meeting, and soon President Grant signed it into law. After Greeley became the Democratic party's nominee in July, Mosby became Grant's campaign manager in Virginia, and an active Republican, although he also made sure the Republicans would not run a candidate against his friend and fellow Warrenton attorney Eppa Hunton, who campaigned and won as a Democrat. [51] In his autobiography Grant stated, Since the close of the war, I have come to know Colonel Mosby personally and somewhat intimately. He is a different man entirely from what I supposed. He is able and thoroughly honest and truthful.

Kemper, a Confederate Major General and Conservative elected the following year and whom Mosby also supported. His Republican political activity diminished Mosby's popularity in Warrenton; many considered him a turncoat. Many Southerners still considered Grant "the enemy". Mosby received death threats, his boyhood home was burned down, and at least one attempt was made to assassinate him. Later reflecting on the animosity shown to him by his fellow Virginians, Mosby stated in a May 1907 letter that There was more vindictiveness shown to me by the Virginia people for my voting for Grant than the North showed to me for fighting four years against him.

He also courted powerful Ohio Congressman James Garfield, telling him his desire for a government position, preferably in the Justice Department. He was instead offered a position as trade representative to Canton, but ultimately confirmed by the Senate as United States consul to Hong Kong (a position he held from 1878 to 1885).

Seward's replacement in Shanghai, John C. Myers of Reading, Pennsylvania, had reported to State Department superiors that George Seward and his vice-consul Oliver Bradford had been engaging in land and capital speculation in China that seemed to violate the Burlingame Treaty of 1868, but had been suspended, as had his successor Wiley Wells, ex-Congressman from Mississippi. Wells and Myers then sought redress from Congress, which was considering impeaching George Seward, but Bailey traveled to Washington to defend his crony. Mosby's initial letter to his superior Frederick W. Seward, son of the former secretary of state and who had been wounded by Mosby's ex-subordinate while defending his father from an assassination attempt on the night of President Lincoln's assassination languished.

However, Special Treasury Department Inspector DeB. Randolph Keim made a whirlwind inspection of Far East consulates and found many similar bookkeeping irregularities. Eventually, in March 1879, Mosby wrote to General Thomas C. Smith, a friend of President Hayes, about a similar embezzlement scheme operated by David B.

Consul at Bangkok and his vice-consul Torrey (a Hong Kong native whose correspondence to the fired Loring Mosby accepted and read). Meanwhile, consul Mosby was occupied entertaining his old friend President Grant, who spent the two years after his retirement touring the world as a semi-private citizen.

By January 1880, Grant and journalist John R. Young (who would become consul at Shanghai two years later) briefed Secretary of State William M. Evarts about Sickels and Torrey. [59] George Seward resigned well before the 1880 election, followed by Bailey and Sickels as the President "at last swept the China coast".

Nonetheless, Mosby was unhappy, despite the electoral victory of his friend Garfield in November and his son Beverley joining him as vice-consul. His repeated requests for leave to return home and visit the rest of his family kept being denied, as were most requests for supplies or funds, and one relative was removed from the Lighthouse Board. In addition to the press and bureaucratic sniping, Mosby found his salary insufficient to support socialization among the local merchant class.

Garfield died on September 20, and President Chester Arthur considered promoting Mosby to the similar post at Shanghai (with higher living expenses), but Mosby wanted to either return home or remain in Hong Kong. Thus he remained in exile and dealt with the implications of the Chinese Exclusion Acts, the growing opium trade and the brewing war between France and China. Mosby left China after the election of Democrat Grover Cleveland led to a change in administrations. He was replaced by fellow Virginian Robert E.

Mosby also wrote articles for Eastern newspapers about his escapades during the Civil War, and traveled to New England on a speaking tour where he met Oliver Wendell Holmes (both father and son). [64] He also befriended the Patton family and spent time at their ranch with their young son, George S. Patton, recreating Civil War battles, with Mosby playing himself and George playing Robert E. [65] Also, he tried to volunteer for the SpanishAmerican War, but Mosby's Hussars who trained in Oakland, California never disembarked for Cuba nor the Philippines. After McKinley's assassination, President Theodore Roosevelt instead sent Mosby west as a special agent of the Department of the Interior.

However, other attorneys were sent out, who secured indictments. Richards and his English brother in law William G. Comstock were convicted in 1905 despite their argument that the government land hadn't been surveyed.

After three years of appeals, the convictions and sentences were upheld, so they were sent to prison in Hastings, Nebraska for a year beginning in 1901, and Richards died in a hospital a month before the sentence would end. Mosby finally got the Department of Justice post he wanted as Philander Knox ended his term as attorney general. Russell from 1904 to 1910. [69] In 1905 President Roosevelt again sent him to Alabama to troubleshoot allegations of irregularities at the Port of Mobile. Next, he was sent to Oklahoma to investigate charges against U.

Marshal (and former Rough Rider) Benjamin Colbert. He also secured an indictment of McAlester attorneys George Mansfield, John F.

McMurray and Melvin Cornish for misappropriation of Indian Trust funds, but his superior Russell thought the evidence insufficient and ultimately dropped the charges two years later. Meanwhile, Mosby went back to investigate charges of land frauds against Indian minors, and on his return found little to do. Mosby was forced to retire from his Justice Department post at age 76, under the William Howard Taft administration. Blind in one eye and cantankerous, he spent his final years in Washington, D. Living in a boardinghouse and watched over by his remaining daughters to the extent he would let them or others.

Mosby and his former lieutenant, John S. Mosby also continued writing about his wartime exploits, as he had been in 1887 Mosby's War Reminiscences and Stuart's Cavalry Campaigns, which had defended the reputation of J.

Stuart, who some partisans of the "Lost Cause" blamed for the Confederacy's defeat at the Battle of Gettysburg. Mosby had served under Stuart and was fiercely loyal to the late general, writing, He made me all that I was in the war. But for his friendship I would never have been heard of.

In January 1915 the University of Virginia awarded Mosby a medal and written tribute, which touched him deeply. Throughout his life, Mosby remained loyal to those he believed fair-minded, such as Stuart and Grant, but refused to cater to Southern sympathies. He proclaimed that there was no man in the Confederate Army who had less of the spirit of knight-errantry in him, or took a more practical view of war than I did. [76] He died of complications after throat surgery in a Washington, D.

Hospital on May 30, 1916, noting at the end that it was Memorial Day. He is buried at the Warrenton Cemetery in Warrenton, Virginia.

Mosby's grave in Warrenton, Virginia. "War Loses Its Romance": Inscription of military quotation by John S.

John Mosby Highway, a section of US Route 50 between Dulles Airport and Winchester, Virginia, is named for Colonel Mosby. Mosby Woods Elementary School in the Fairfax County Public Schools system is named in his honor. The segregation academy John S. Mosby Academy operated in Front Royal, Virginia from 1959 to 1969.

Mosby Woods subdivision in Fairfax City is also named in his honor. The Mosby Woods Pool, located in the Mosby Woods subdivision, is named in his honor as is its swim team, the Mosby Woods Raiders, who compete in the Northern Virginia Swim League. Loudoun County High School's (Leesburg, Virginia) former mascot was the Raiders after Mosby's Raiders. Mosby was named in his honor. The item "Civil War CDV Confederate Major John Mosby the Grey Ghost" is in sale since Tuesday, August 25, 2020.

This item is in the category "Collectibles\Militaria\Civil War (1861-65)\Original Period Items\Photographs". The seller is "civil_war_photos" and is located in Midland, Michigan. This item can be shipped worldwide.

• Modified Item: No
• Country/Region of Manufacture: United States
• Conflict: Civil War (1861-65)