Books: Born for War

RANGER MOSBY—Virgil Carrington Jones—University of North Carolina Press ($3.50).

In the summer of 1862, a Union cavalry patrol galloping by the deserted station of Beaver Dam, Va. almost rode down a meek-looking little Confederate scout day dreaming in the sun. In his haversack they found a single, unimportant-looking letter and a newly-published copy of Napoleon’s Maxims of War. Unimpressed, they read and destroyed the letter, sent the scout off to jail in Washington.

Had they paid more attention to their find, the Union patrol might have shortened the Civil War by several months. They might also have halted one of the most colorful military careers in U.S. history. The dreamer they captured, and soon exchanged for a Union soldier, was John Singleton Mosby, a 28-year-old Virginia lawyer and natural-born guerrilla.

The letter carried plans for the formation of a unit under his command which was to operate behind Union lines. Mosby’s Tarn O’Shanter Rebels became a bugbear to the Union, a delight to Robert E. Lee, who cited Mosby oftener than he did any other Confederate officer.

Swift and elusive, they penetrated enemy territory almost at will, harassed outposts, kidnapped officers, captured fabulous booty. More important, their accurate reconnaissance figured in some of the South’s major victories. Ranger Mosby is a brisk, readable account of their adventures and of their extraordinary leader.

Pimpernel plus Superman. In his bearing and behavior, small (125 lbs.), stooped Mosby resembled a cross between the Scarlet Pimpernel and Superman. Against the enemy his unvarying rule was to do what was least expected of him. When he rode, his cape “was turned back always in a flow of scarlet. A curling ostrich plume extended over his shoulder from a gray felt hat, and at each side hung a large Colt revolver, suspended in holsters well studded with brass.” He was always kind to women & children.

One of his first big coups took place in the dead of night when he led 29 men through a maze of picket lines to the headquarters of Brigadier General Edwin H. Stoughton, captured the whole post. First thing the Union General knew about the raid was when Mosby pulled up his nightshirt, slapped him on the behind.

Later, with a single shot from a captured howitzer, Mosby smashed a locomotive, got away with a $173,000 Union payroll. Often trapped, he invariably escaped by charging headlong into his would-be captors. Often wounded and reported dead, he always turned up again more daring and dangerous than before. His name became “a synonym in the South for brave deeds and daring escapades, a byword in the North for fear and hatred and chagrin.”

Born for war, Mosby fared far less famously in peace. He served seven years as U.S. Consul at Hong Kong, returned to enjoy a modest success in the North as author and lecturer. But “the reckless abandon with which he attacked and galloped away as a Partisan could not be repeated as a citizen.” Sunk in irascible senility, he died at Washington in 1916, aged 82, his glory all but forgotten.