Home : America At War : The Civil War On The Fringe :

The Guerrilla War 1863

Taking the Oath John Singleton Mosby administers the oath at Mount Zion, Virginia. Colonel John Singleton Mosby, the war's outstanding guerrilla leader, actually contributed but little to influence the main war.

Virginia

So wrote Herman Melville in his Civil War poem The Scout Toward Aldie, conveying vividly the aura of menace and mystery that in Northern minds surrounded John Singleton Mosby, the most able and successful of Southern partisan leaders, a man who became a legend even before the war ended and who has remained one ever since.

A native of Virginia born in 1833, Mosby early revealed the pugnacity and no-nonsense attitude towards fighting which characterized him later. When a much larger fellow student at the _University of Virginia threatened to "eat him blood raw," he simply pulled out a pistol and shot (but not fatally) his would-be assailant! This escapade led to a half-year in the Charlottesville jail and to the study of law under the attorney who put him there. After being admitted to the bar he married and hung up his shingle in Bristol, Virginia, where he prospered in his profession and fathered two children.

He opposed secession, but when Virginia joined the Confederacy he enlisted in the cavalry as a private. Before long he displayed an innate genius for war. Serving as a scout, he discovered the gap in the enemy lines, enabling Jeb Stuart to make the first of his celebrated rides around the Army of the Potomac. Later he brought Lee the information, which set the stage for the Confederate victory at Second Bull Run. These and other exploits won him the friendship of Stuart, who late in 1862 gave him permission to conduct guerrilla operations in Yankee-held north Virginia.

On January 24, 1863 he and fifteen other troopers crossed the Rappahannock River and headed toward the Potomac. At the time he did not even hold a commission, although Stuart addressed him as "Captain." But he did possess enormous energy and stamina in his wiry body, a razor-sharp intelligence, and "deep blue, luminous, clear, piercing" eyes, which one of his followers later stated were the "secret of his power over men." Also, in his saddlebags, he had a small library, which included the works of Shakespeare, Plutarch, Washington Irving, and Hazlitt's Life of Napoleon. (Interestingly enough, of the two most famous Southern partisan leaders, one, Quantrill, was a teacher who liked to quote Byron; the other, Mosby, a lawyer who sprinkled his writings with passages from the classics.)

Mosby's purpose was to "threaten and harass the enemy on the border and ... compel him to withdraw troops from his front to guard the line of the Potomac and Washington." Using the Blue Ridge Mountains as his main base, night after night he struck at Union patrols and outposts west and south of Washington. Like Quantrill he relied upon stealth, surprise, and the shock of mounted attack with revolvers against Union troops whose standard-issue carbines and sabers rendered them practically defenseless against such tactics. Like Quantrill too he enjoyed the support of the local population, that sine qua non of effective guerrilla warfare, and he soon attracted growing numbers of recruits from the area - youths who not only knew every bridle path but even the rabbit trails. However, unlike the Missouri bushwhackers, he and his men did not kill except in actual combat, and at least when on missions they wore Confederate uniforms.

Mosby's most spectacular exploit during the early phase of his guerrilla career was to capture on March 8, 1863 Brigadier General Edwin H. Stoughton at Fairfax Court House, a mere ten miles from Washington. Using information supplied by a Yankee deserter, he and twenty-nine followers slipped through the pickets guarding the town and entered the house where Stoughton was sleeping off a drunk. Mosby pulled off the bedclothes, whacked the general on his bare rump, and told him he was a prisoner. He then delivered Stoughton plus two captains and thirty enlisted men to the Confederate army. Stuart issued an order praising him, and Lee had him promoted to major in the partisan rangers.

The nocturnal forays of Mosby and his "grey ghosts" so alarmed the Federals that every evening they removed the planks from the bridges over the Potomac out of fear that he might raid Washington itself and carry off the government. They also tried hard to track him down, spending sleepless nights galloping about the Loudoun Valley, the main center of his activities. Although he eluded them, several times he had some narrow escapes, once being obliged to hide in a tree, clad in his underwear, while the Yankees searched the house where he had been sleeping with his wife. Her presence, by the way, indicates how secure he felt despite being deep behind enemy lines.

Late in the spring, on instructions from Stuart, Mosby and the other Virginia partisan leaders accelerated their operations in preparation for Lee's forthcoming invasion of the North. In the western mountains McNeill's Rangers captured Romney, drove off livestock from Pennsylvania, and burned water tanks and trestles along the Baltimore & Ohio. Attacking the same line, White's "Comanche's," back now on independent service, destroyed a twenty-two-car train near Catoctin Station and bushwhacked a company of Virginia Unionist cavalry.

As for Mosby, on May 30 he used a howitzer (provided at his request by Stuart) to blast a train at Catlett Station, then fought a fierce running battle with Federal cavalry. Two weeks later he led his men, now 100 strong and organized into the 43d Battalion of Partisan Rangers, on a dash into Maryland where they routed an enemy detachment at Seneca Mills. And finally he provided both the information and the idea that resulted in Stuart's making his ride around the Union army - a ride which, owing to an unanticipated northward movement by the enemy plus Stuart's mistakes, deprived Lee of the reconnaissance he so badly needed in Pennsylvania.

Following Lee's defeat at Gettysburg the prime mission of the partisans was to interrupt traffic on the B & O and the Orange & Alexandria railroads-the first to delay the transfer of Union troops to Tennessee, the latter to hamstring a Federal offensive against the depleted Army of Northern Virginia. However, Imboden and Gilmor (who headed an independent company in the Shenandoah) reported that the B & O was too well protected, and Mosby, despite derailing several trains and burning some bridges, was unable to stop traffic on the Orange & Alexandria for more than a day at any time. Acutely aware of the danger, the Federals stationed an entire infantry corps along the line, placed soldiers aboard every train, and developed special techniques for repairing or replacing damaged rails.

Disappointed, Lee criticized Mosby for not using his full strength and for plundering wagon trains when he should have been wrecking railroad trains. Apparently he did not understand that in guerrilla warfare large units usually are more of a liability than an asset, and that circumstances required Mosby's men to live off enemy supplies.

For a while late in the summer the Yankees gleefully believed that they had "got" Mosby. On August 24 in an attack on a Union detachment at Annandale he was shot through the side and thigh. At once stories appeared in Northern papers that his leg had been amputated, that he was dead or soon would be. But a month later he demonstrated that reports of his demise were, as Mark Twain would have said, greatly exaggerated. Boldly riding into Alexandria, just across the Potomac from Washington, he captured Colonel D. H. Dulaney, aide to the governor of the recently established state of West Virginia, and burned a railroad bridge!

Theoretically Virginia between the Blue Ridge Mountains on the west and the Potomac to the north and east was Union-occupied territory. But in actuality it was, as both Yankees and Rebels began to call it, "Mosby's Confederacy." And it would remain so until the war ended.

West Missouri

The Union commander at Lexington, Missouri reported early in May 1863, "Quantrill is here." He was right. With the budding of the sheltering foliage of spring, the bushwhackers left Arkansas and filtered back into west Missouri, where they at once resumed their ambushes and raids. First Dick Yeager, one of Quantrill's sub-chieftains, rampaged 130 miles westward into Kansas. Then Quantrill himself waylaid a militia patrol at Independence and sacked Shawneetown, Kansas. And on June 16 his main lieutenant, fearless but brutal George Todd, routed 150 Kansas cavalry outside of Westport, Missouri.

Frightened Kansans clamored for protection against guerrilla forays, and a correspondent of the Kansas City Journal of Commerce reported that Unionists in west Missouri "are very discouraged, as it is impossible for them to raise a crop this season. They dare not show their faces outside of our military lines. . . . It is a fact beyond doubt that ... Quantrill & Co. do rule in this section of the state."

The commander of the District of the Border was Brigadier General Thomas Ewing, Jr., brother-in-law of General William T. Sherman. Concluding that unless his 2,500 troops were tripled he could never suppress the guerrillas by purely military means, Ewing decided to strike at the very roots of their power-the support given them by the civilian population. Hence on August 14, after receiving permission from General Schofield, he issued Order No. 10, which directed the arrest and deportation from Missouri of all men, and women "not heads of families," who willfully aided bushwhackers.

Even before this order the Federals had arrested a number of wives, sisters, and other female relatives of prominent guerrillas, and imprisoned them in a dilapidated building in Kansas City. On August 13 the structure collapsed. Five of the women were killed, another crippled for life.

Three days prior to this tragedy Quantrill held a meeting of bushwhacker chieftains. There he proposed raiding Lawrence, Kansas. A town of 3,000 forty miles from the Missouri border, Lawrence was the citadel of Kansas abolitionism and the headquarters of the Red Legs, a gang of Jayhawkers so-named because of the red leather leggings they wore. Led by George S. Hoyt, a crony of Jennison, they made frequent raids into Missouri, killing and plundering, then sold their loot at public auctions in Lawrence.

After twenty-four hours of "spirited discussion," the other guerrilla leaders agreed to hit Lawrence. Although it would be risky they could, as Quantrill pointed out, "get more revenge and more money there than anywhere else" - words which revealed the primary motivations of the bushwhackers. News of Order No. 10 and of the collapse of the women's prison in Kansas City removed any lingering hesitation.

Lawrence, Kansas

On August 19 three hundred bushwhackers began marching westward from the Blackwater River in Johnson County, Missouri. Along the way they added 150 more men, making them the largest such force to be assembled at one time during the Civil War. Late in the afternoon of August 20 they crossed the Kansas border south of Aubry. The Union post commander spotted them, but instead of alerting the countryside he merely forwarded word of the incursion to district headquarters in Kansas City - a blunder, which proved fatal for many people.

All through the moonless night Quantrill's column rode steadily across the Kansas prairie "like a monstrous snake, creeping upon its prey." At daybreak, August 21, it halted on a hill southeast of Lawrence. Some of his men urged Quantrill to turn back - surely the townspeople had been warned and would be waiting for them. "You can do as you please," replied Quantrill, "I am going into Lawrence!" Then, drawing a revolver, he shouted "Charge!"

Moments later hundreds of longhaired, wild-looking men in slouch hats and sweat-stained shirts pounded down the main street of Lawrence, yelling and shooting. The inhabitants, taken completely by surprise, offered no resistance. Neither did the only soldiers present, two squads of Negro and white recruits who were slaughtered in their tents.

As soon as he saw that the town was his, Quantrill shouted to his men: "Kill! Kill! Lawrence must be thoroughly cleansed, and the only way to cleanse it is to kill! Kill!"

With a triumphant yell the raiders fanned out, ransacking stores, shops, saloons, and houses, then setting them afire. Every man they encountered they shot down. They did not, however, kill or rape women.

All the while Quantrill enjoyed his return to the town where he had lived as "Charley Hart" and which had driven him away as an outlaw. He ate a hearty breakfast at the hotel of some old friends, then paraded through the streets in a buggy. At 9 a.m. his lookouts reported troops approaching. Quickly the bushwhackers reassembled, then rode out the same way they came in. Behind they left devastation and horror. The business district was in ruins, two hundred houses burned, and the bodies of 150 men sprawled in the streets or under smoldering rubble. An overhanging shroud of smoke darkened the entire town, the "sickening odor of burning flesh" filled the air.

The bushwhackers evaded their wrathful but outnumbered pursuers and by the next morning were back in their favorite haunts in west Missouri. Tactically the raid on Lawrence was a masterpiece, and Quantrill deserves recognition as a highly able cavalry commander. But it was also the most atrocious event of the Civil War. And it gave to Quantrill a reputation that still stands unchallenged - "the bloodiest man in American history."

West Missouri

On August 25, four days after the Lawrence Massacre, General Ewing published Order No. 11: All persons living in Jackson, Cass, and Bates counties (each of which bordered the Kansas line), with the exception of those residing within one mile of Union-held towns, were to leave their houses by September 9. Those who established their loyalty by that date would be allowed to remove to a military station or to the interior of Kansas, but everyone else was to evacuate the District of the Border.

Order No. 11 was the harshest military measure imposed on civilians during the Civil War. Like its predecessor, Order No. 10, it was based on the premise that the bushwhackers' sway could be broken by depriving them of their civilian support.

During the next two weeks a mass exodus took place from the area covered by the order. Marauding by Kansas troops and Red Legs intensified the suffering of the refugees. Ewing's efforts to prevent plundering and suppress the Red Legs proved unavailing.

By September 9 most of Jackson, Cass, and Bates counties was a silent desert dotted by chimneys standing above the charred debris of farmhouses. Yet the bushwhackers remained in their customary hideouts, although forced to stay low during the daytime by heavy Union patrolling. Hams and bacon still hung from the rafters of abandoned smokehouses and the countryside was full of stray cattle and chickens left behind by their owners and overlooked by the Red Legs. Hence the guerrillas had no trouble getting plenty to eat, and Quantrill spent most of his time quite comfortably at a house near Blue Springs with his mistress, Kate King.

Late in September Quantrill decided to head south for the winter - not because of Order No. 11 or pressure from Federal troops-but because cold weather had come early and the season for profitable operations was ending. On October 1, with 400 men, he began marching down the border towards the Indian Territory, crossing after several days into Kansas south of Fort Scott.

Baxter Springs, Kansas

0n the morning of October 6 Quantrill's scouts reported that there was a small Union fort ahead at Baxter Springs. Sniffing an easy victory, Quantrill sent part of his band under Dave Poole to strike the fort from the south while he moved in with the main body on the other side. Poole, who already was in advance, got there first and attacked, but the ninety-man garrison drove him back with the aid of a cannon.

Thirty minutes later Quantrill emerged from some timber several hundred yards north of the fort. Instantly he drew rein. Approaching down the Fort Scott road was a column of wagons escorted by cavalry. By sheer coincidence he had come upon the headquarters train of Major General James G. Blunt, Union commander of the District of the Frontier!

Blunt's soldiers thought that the bushwhackers, who wore Federal uniforms, were cavalry from Baxter Springs out drilling. Before they realized their mistake Quantrill's men charged, screaming and firing their revolvers. The Union troops broke in panic. Rapidly the better-mounted guerrillas overtook and killed most of them - 89 out of 100. Later the slain were found with their heads pulverized by bullets, their bodies stripped and castrated. Blunt himself escaped only through the speed of his horse.

Quantrill, finding a demijohn of whiskey in Blunt's buggy, proceeded to get drunk - the only time his men ever saw him in that condition. First Lawrence - now Baxter Springs! He had reached the pinnacle of his career, carried there on a wave of blood.

Civil War Times

North Texas

From Baxter Springs the bushwhackers marched through the Indian Territory. On the way, Quantrill informed Sterling Price in the only military report he ever filed that they had killed "about 150 Federal Indians and Negroes." Late in October they crossed the Red River and camped near Sherman, Texas.

On November 2 Price, who now commanded Confederate forces in Arkansas, congratulated "Colonel" Quantrill on his Baxter Springs victory and thanked him for his "gallant struggle" in Missouri. However, he asked for a report on the Lawrence raid so that "your acts should appear in their true light before the world." Like most Southerners, Price discounted Northern stories of wholesale butchery at Lawrence, but he was worried by the charges against the bushwhackers and also uneasy over their "no quarter" policy.

Indeed, the Confederate military authorities did not know quite what to make of Quantrill and his men. Brigadier General Henry McCulloch, commander of the Sub-District of North Texas, who from his headquarters at Bonham had the closest view of them, definitely did not like what he saw. Their mode of warfare, he wrote Lieutenant General Edmund Kirby Smith, head of the Trans-Mississippi Department, "is like that of the savages," and he recommended that the Confederate Government disavow their acts and tell them to stay clear of the Army.

Kirby Smith, however, disregarded McCulloch's advice. The Trans-Mississippi needed fighting men, and whatever else they were the bushwhackers were that. Hence he recommended that McCulloch employ "Colonel Quantrill" to round up deserters, large numbers of whom lurked in the hills and forests of north Texas, a region where many of the settlers were German immigrants and opposed to secession.

Until the Confederate conscription law of 1862 most of the Texas Unionists remained passive. But when faced with the prospect of being forced into the Rebel army, hundreds of them fled to the North or else formed bands, which defied enlistment officers and harassed Secessionists. In the summer of 1862 they set in motion a "peace plot" whereby north Texas would break away from the rest of the state. The Confederates suppressed the conspiracy ruthlessly, hanging sixty-five "renegados" in one day at Gainesville and imprisoning scores of others. Later, in the spring of 1863, another attempted Unionist "counterrevolution" was put down by a regiment of Texas partisan rangers made up of veteran Indian fighters who "never took prisoners but did take scalps." Even so, the "Tories" continued to be so strong in north Texas that McCulloch expressed fear that they might take over the region completely.

Hence he adopted Kirby Smith's suggestion and sent Quantrill's men after deserters. But not only did they fail to accomplish their assignment, they themselves began marauding in and around Sherman, which they shot up during a drunken Christmas Day spree (Quantrill apologized and paid for the damages). Thoroughly disgusted, McCulloch early in 1864 proposed that the Missourians be disarmed and arrested. They were, he declared, "but one shade better than highwaymen."

Albert Castel. The Guerrilla War 1861-1865. Civil War Times Illustrated. Gettysburg, PA. 1974.

Civil War Kansas Reaping the Whirlwind. Castel. Recognized as a key study on the war in the trans-Mississippi West, this book describes the political, military, social, and economic events of the state's first four years. You'll read about the Kansas-Missouri border conflict; the operations of the Missouri guerrillas under Quantrill; the Union and Confederate military campaigns in Missouri, Arkansas, the Indian Territory, and Kansas itself; and more.

---

top of page

back a page