Colonel Charles Russell Lowell to Josephine Shaw Lowell, October 5, 1864

Near Mt. Crawford, Oct. 5, 1864.

I have reveillé about one hour before daybreak, — am always awake, but never get up now, unless there are Rebs round.

Did you see the new moon last night within a quarter of an inch of the evening star, and turning her back on him? They must have been close together an hour before I could see them; for an hour after, they were still less than an inch apart. They looked very strangely calm and peaceful and almost reproachful in the West last night, — with the whole North and East, far and near, lighted up by burning barns and houses. Lieutenant Meigs was shot by a guerrilla, and by order the village of Dayton and everything for several miles around was burned.¹ I am very glad my Brigade had no hand in it. Though if it will help end bushwhacking, I approve it, and I would cheerfully assist in making this whole Valley a desert from Staunton northward, — for that would have, I am sure, an important effect on the campaign of the Spring,— but in partial burnings I see less justice and less propriety. I was sorry enough the other day that my Brigade should have had a part in the hanging and shooting of some of Mosby's men who were taken, — I believe that some punishment was deserved, — but I hardly think we were within the laws of war, and any violation of them opens the door for all sorts of barbarity, — it was all by order of the Division Commander, however. The war in this part of the country is becoming very unpleasant to an officer's feelings.

We have moved camp once every day since Saturday, but only for short distances; so the date is still the same.

I think [the mail-carrier] is miserably timid about guerrillas, — he won't come unless he has at least a brigade for escort, — perhaps he is right, however; important despatches from General Grant to Sheridan were taken, day before yesterday, by guerrillas, — provoking enough when we are hoping to hear that Petersburg is taken, or perhaps to get the orders which instruct us how to cooperate in taking it.²

I think that we shall move soon. As we are foraging our horses entirely upon the country, we have to move frequently, but lately we have done a little too much of it. This is a very scrubby letter and written before breakfast, too.

I do wish this war was over!  . . . Never mind. I'm doing all I can to end it. Good-bye.

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¹ General Sheridan, in a despatch to General Grant, said, “Lieutenant John R. Meigs, my engineer officer, was murdered beyond Harrisburg.  . . . For this atrocious act, all the houses within an area of five miles were burned. Since I came into the Valley from Harper's Ferry, every train, every small party, and every straggler has been bushwhacked by people, many of whom have protection papers from commanders who have been hitherto in that Valley.” It was asserted at the time that the murderer was disguised in the United States uniform. Mr. George E. Pond, associate editor of the Army and Navy Journal, in his book on the Campaign in the Shenandoah Valley (1883), says, “It was ascertained, after the war, that this gallant youth [Lieutenant Meigs], a soldier of brilliant gifts and promise, the son of the Quartermaster-General, fell at the hands of an enlisted Confederate soldier of Wickham's brigade, engaged in scouting.”

² In 1864, the evils of guerrilla warfare rose to high-water mark. The sure demoralization which such a system wrought in those engaged in it, reached such a pitch that even the Confederate authorities could not ignore it. Matters worked in a vicious circle. Murderous marauding drove the Union commanders to devastating the places known to harbour these men. The devastation naturally enraged the inhabitants, and led them even to private bushwhacking. In the late autumn of 1864, bitter retaliations began on both sides. As early as January, 1864, the Confederate General Rosser, who had had opportunity while serving in the Valley to judge the value of “irregular bodies of troops known as partisans,” etc., wrote to General Lee: “I am prompted by no other feeling than a desire to serve my country, to inform you that they are a nuisance and an evil to the service. Without discipline, order, or organization, they roam broadcast over the country, — a band of thieves, stealing, pillaging, plundering, and doing every manner of mischief and crime. They are a terror to the citizens and an injury to the cause.”

He gives the following reasons for his protest: that it keeps men on this service away “from the field of battle, when the life or death of our country is the issue;” that their latitude and many privileges cause dissatisfaction among the regular troops; this encourages desertion.

He says he finds it almost impossible to manage the companies of his brigade that come from the region occupied by Mosby. “They see these men living at their ease and enjoying the comforts of home, allowed to possess all that they capture, and their duties mere pastime pleasures compared with their own arduous ones; and it is a natural consequence in the nature of man that he should become dissatisfied under these circumstances.” He recommends abolishing this “partisan” service, with its privileges. “If it is necessary for troops to operate within the lines of the enemy, then require the commanding officer to keep them in an organized condition, to rendezvous within our lines, and move upon the enemy when opportunity is offered.

“Major Mosby is of inestimable service to the Yankee army, in keeping their men from straggling. He is a gallant officer, and is one that I have great respect for; yet the interest I feel in my own command and the good of the service coerces me to bring this matter before you, in order that this partisan system, which I think is a bad one, may be corrected.” General Rosser says that General Early and General Fitzhugh Lee can testify to these evils.

On General Rosser's communication, General J. E. B. Stuart, the friend and admirer of Mosby, indorses: “Major Mosby's command is the only efficient band of rangers I know of, and he usually operates with only one fourth of his nominal strength. Such organizations, as a rule, are detrimental to the best interests of the army at large.”

The above communication was referred by General Lee to the government at Richmond, with this comment: “As far as my knowledge and experience extend, there is much truth in the statement of General Rosser. The evils resulting from their organization more than counterbalance the good they accomplish.'” Miles, the chairman of the Confederate Military Committee, on February 14, 1864, returns this document to the Secretary of War, saying the House of Representatives has passed a bill abolishing Partisan Rangers.

Yet, in spite of Lee's indorsement of Rosser's communication, he wrote to the Secretary of War, C. S. A., asking that Mosby be made a lieutenant-colonel, and wishing to show him that “his services have been appreciated, and to encourage him to still greater activity and zeal.” (Rebellion Record, vol. xxxiii.)

In April, Lee enumerated to his government the bands of “partisan rangers,” recommending bringing them under the rules and regulations of the regular cavalry, disbanding most of them as organizations, but keeping the men; and adds, with regard to Mosby's battalion, the recommendation that, if they cannot be mustered into the regular service, “they be retained as partisans at present,” expressing his belief that their discipline and conduct is better than that of the other bands.

Mosby's and McNeill's commands were retained as partisan rangers.

But the evil went on increasing through 1864. Two days after General Sheridan's report of the killing of his Lieutenant Meigs, he sends another: “Lieutenant-Colonel Tolles, my Chief Quartermaster, and Assistant Surgeon Emil Oelenschlager, Medical Inspector on my Staff, were both mortally wounded by guerrillas to-day, on their way to join me from Winchester.  . . . The refugees from Early's army, cavalry and infantry, are organizing guerrilla parties, and are becoming very formidable.  . . . I know of no way to exterminate them except to burn out the whole country, and let the people go North or South.”

Yet, bushwhacking aside, Mosby had done great military service to the Confederacy — to quote his own words as to his kind of warfare — “by the heavy details it compels the enemy to make in order to guard his communications, and, to that extent, diminish his aggressive strength.” In August, when Sheridan with his army had gone up the Valley, Mosby with a small force made a dash upon one of his supply-trains proceeding to the front, dispersed a large force of “hundred-days men,” and ran off three hundred and fifty mules, and burned the wagons and what spoil they could not carry off. In October, Colonel Stevenson wrote to Secretary Stanton, that a supply-train of five hundred and sixty-one wagons, which he was despatching to Sheridan's army, would have a guard of two thousand men “unless this should be too few.”

Throughout the campaign, Early was most anxious to keep the rail communications of the Union Army broken, and Mosby harassed the working parties that tried to keep them open. Major John Scott, in his Partisan Life with Mosby, gives the following edifying anecdote. It should be remembered that these trains were used by the local inhabitants: Knowing that the only way to prevent the progress of the work on the road was to keep the force stirred up from below, on the 9th of October he (Mosby) sent a detachment under a lieutenant to throw off the track a train of cars, as it passed between Salem and the Plains. This duty was successfully performed, and many on board were killed and many severely wounded. In retaliation, the Yankees resorted to the inhuman experiment of arresting prominent citizens of the Southern type residing in Fauquier and Alexandria, and making them ride on every train which ran on the Manassas Gap Railroad. In addition, some of the captured prisoners were sent along. But, with the spirit of an old Roman, Mosby declared, ‘If my wife and children were on board, I would still throw off the cars.’”

SOURCE: Edward Waldo Emerson, Life and Letters of Charles Russell Lowell, p. 352-4, 465-70

Colonel Charles Russell Lowell to Josephine Shaw, August 9, 1863

Centreville, Aug. 9, 1863.

After I reached camp at Fairfax Station, I was busy all the evening with parties after Mosby, who again made his appearance capturing wagons, — we retook them all, but didn't take Mosby, who is an old rat and has a great many holes; on Friday moved camp to Centreville, and am not half established yet; my tents are not here. Did I write you, that in our skirmish with Mosby ten days ago, we lost two more men killed and two wounded, also two prisoners, but we followed him so far that we recaptured these and eight others whom he had taken from a Pennsylvania regiment. I dislike to have men killed in such an “inglorious warfare” as Cousin John calls it, — but it's not a warfare of my choosing, and it's all in the day's work.¹

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¹ As, for the following twelve months, the energies of Lowell and the officers and soldiers of his brigade were kept on the strain by day, and more often by night, by the dangerous activity of the guerrilla chief Mosby and his band, it seems well to give some account of them here. By a strict construction of the laws of war, the practices of this and similar bands then operating within our lines would probably have outlawed them. The Administration, however, did not take this stand, probably from the fear of provoking endless retaliation.

John Singleton Mosby, born in Virginia, a lawyer by profession, was a man of intelligence, daring, and great energy, which gifts he devoted to the service of the Southern cause, but in an irregular channel. His first military service was as a private in the First Virginia Cavalry, where he attracted the attention of Colonel, afterwards General J. E. B. Stuart. Seeing the advantage which the operations of a mounted guerrilla force would have, operating within the lines of the armies of the United States in the neighbourhood of the national capital, their main source of reenforcement and supplies; also the romantic and material attraction that such service would offer to young men, in contrast to army discipline and hardship for precarious pay, Mosby drafted a bill authorizing such a force, which was passed by the Confederate Congress in March, 1863.

I quote, with the publisher's permission, from Mosby's War Reminiscences, the following passages as to this bill and the principles (if one may so call them) on which he recruited his command and waged war: —

“The Partisan Ranger Law was an act of the Confederate Congress, authorizing the President to issue commissions to officers to organize partisan corps. They stood on the same footing with other cavalry organizations in respect to rank and pay, but, in addition, were given the benefit of the law of maritime prize. There was really no novelty in applying this principle to land forces. England has always done so in Her Majesty's East India service. . . . Havelock, Campbell, and Outram returned home from the East loaded with barbaric spoils. As there is a good deal of human nature in people, and as Major Dalgetty is still a type of a class, it will be seen how the peculiar privileges given to my men served to whet their zeal. I have often heard them disputing over the division of the horses before they were captured, etc.”

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“To destroy supply-trains, to break up the means of conveying intelligence, and thus isolating the army from its base, as well as its different corps from each other, to confuse their plans by capturing despatches, are the objects of partisan war. . . . The military value of a partisan's work is not reckoned by the amount of property destroyed, but by the number he keeps watching.  . . . I endeavoured, as far as possible, to diminish the aggressive power of the Army of the Potomac, by compelling it to keep a large force on the defensive. . . .

“My men had no camps. If they had gone into camp, they would soon have all been captured. They would scatter for safety, and gather at my call like the Children of the Mist. . . .

“I often sent small squads at night to attack and ran in the pickets along a line of several miles. Of course these alarms were very annoying, for no human being knows how sweet sleep is but a soldier. I wanted to use and consume the Northern Cavalry in hard work. It has always been a wonder with people how I managed to collect my men after dispersing them. The true secret was, that it was a fascinating life, and its attractions far more than counterbalanced its hardships and dangers. They had no camp duty to do, which, however necessary, is disgusting to soldiers of high spirit.”²

General J. E. B. Stuart, the brilliant cavalry leader, a friend and admirer of Mosby, shows, in a letter to him on his appointment to the new command, that he thought it well not to be quite frank as to this new kind of soldier. “Already a Captain,” he writes, “you will proceed to organize a band of permanent followers for the war, but by all means ignore the term ‘Partisan Rangers.’ It is in bad repute. Call your command ‘Mosby's Regulars,’ and it will soon give it a tone of meaning and solid worth which all the world will soon recognize, and you will inscribe that name of a fearless band of heroes on the pages of our country's history and inshrine it in the hearts of a grateful people. Let ‘Mosby's Regulars’ be a name of pride with friends and of respectful trepidation with enemies.” (Rebellion Record.)

Colonel Mosby has the virtue of frankness. He says in his book: “In one respect the charge that I did not fight fair is true. I fought for success, and not for display. There was no man in the Confederate Army who had less of the Spirit of Knighthood in him or who took a more practical view of war than I did. . . . There is no authenticated act of mine which is not perfectly in accordance with approved military usage.”

I am also allowed to quote the following extracts from Major John Scott's Partisan Life with Mosby, partly for the information they give concerning the method of warfare, and partly for their interesting rhetoric and ethics.

“The principle which distinguishes the Partisan Ranger service is the distribution, among the officers and men, of the spoil captured from the enemy, and, though Mosby refuses to avail himself of it, for his own enrichment, he yet values it as a powerful magnet to attract and bind adventurous spirits to his standard. The dreaming statesman may indulge the reverie that, in republics, the patriotic principle is sufficient to impel men to the discharge of military duty, but the practical and clear-sighted genius of Mosby knows that mankind are governed by the grosser motive of immediate self-interest and, impressed by this belief, he made the strenuous effort of which I have told you to construct his command on this basis.”

For the honour of American manhood one wishes here to enter a protest, and call to mind the sufferings and sacrifices of brave Confederate soldiers of the line, by tens of thousands, for their cause.

Major Scott goes on: —

“This system of warfare, defensive in its object, yet aggressive in its principle, has baffled all these attempts [of Federal officers to suppress him], because, as soon as the blow is inflicted, the assailants are at once scattered before time is afforded to strike them in return. The angry cloud gathers, the thunders roll through the sky, the fatal flash is emitted, and the discharged vapours roll into the air.

“Mosby, in an open country, finds security in dispersion among a friendly and chivalrous people. With them the members of the battalion live as boarders and friends; the farmers, for a moderate compensation, and sometimes without compensation at all, providing food and shelter for the soldier and his horse. This familiar association between the soldiers and the citizens has developed a very pleasant and romantic state of society, and its elevating effects on the former are very marked. . . . From their boarding-houses, the men called at various places of rendezvous, which are always selected with reference to the vicinity of a blacksmith's shop. From these places issue, daily, detachments varying in strength.  . . . In addition to his [Mosby's] proper command, there is another element composed of loose and unemployed material, which Mosby is now able to combine and hurl against the invaders of his country. His custom is to advertise about a week in advance a meeting to be held at one of the rendezvous, and to it repair those who love adventure and plunder. But the most abundant and useful source from which these temporary recruits are derived, is from the members of the regular cavalry at home on detail or furlough. . . . Convalescents from the hospitals also will sometimes join him for a single raid; but when the Yankees come in pursuit, . . . they will find them languidly stretched upon their pallets.  . . . You ask if it is by love he controls his men? No, he is not weak enough to be cheated by that fallacy.  . . . Fear and Confidence are the genii he invokes, and, united to a conviction of his incorruptible integrity, they have enabled him to enchain his followers to his standard.”³

Mosby's sphere of operations included these four counties of Virginia, — Fairfax, Loudoun, Fauquier, and Prince William; a region south of the Potomac and east of the Blue Ridge, as large as Worcester County in Massachusetts, lying between Washington and the Army of the Potomac, hence constantly travelled by supply-trains. It was overwhelmingly Confederate in its sympathies. Colonel Lowell, with his small brigade, had the principal responsibility of defending this, picking up such information as he could from the few brave Union farmers, and helped by a few daring local scouts.

² Mosby's War Reminiscences. Boston: George A.Jones &Co., 1887.

³ Partisan Life with Mosby, by Major John Scott. New York : Harper and Brothers, 1867.

SOURCE: Edward Waldo Emerson, Life and Letters of Charles Russell Lowell, p. 294, 434-9