Home : America At War : The Civil War : The Guerrilla War :Guerrilla Companies
During the spring of 1861 a Northern army under Major General George B. McClellan occupied western Virginia, thereby gaining control of the strategically vital Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. The majority of the inhabitants of this mountainous region were loyal to the Union and so welcomed the Federal takeover. However, a goodly number of others resisted either out of Confederate allegiance or plain dislike of the Yankee interlopers. By late summer a correspondent of the Cincinnati Times was reporting: ... the war in Western Virginia is far from being at an end. There is not a county in all this part of the Old Dominion that does not contain a greater or less number of Secessionists, who have degenerated into assassins. They are committing murders daily, lying in ambush for that purpose. Not only the union volunteers, but their own neighbors, who peaceably and quietly sustain the cause of the Union, are the victims of their malice and bloodthirsty hate. They steal upon our pickets and murder them. They shoot down their neighbors, daytime and at night, and burn their property to ashes. Hundreds of these villains have been arrested, but, for want of positive proof, discharged on taking the oath of allegiance; and, at this time, no neighborhood is safe from their depredations, unless protected by Federal bayonets. To combat the Rebel bushwhackers the Unionists organized a force of anti-guerrilla guerrillas known as "The Snake-Hunters" and led by hard-drinking, hard swearing Captain John P. Baggs. The "Snake-Hunters" managed to kill or capture scores of bushwhackers, but for every one they put out of action another took his place. The most that they and the regular soldiers accomplished was to prevent Rebel terrorists from driving Union adherents from their homes and doing any major damage to the Baltimore & Ohio. In short, the guerrilla struggle in western Virginia was a standoff - and it remained so throughout the war. Initially there was no place for guerrillas in official Southern military strategy. Thus late in 1861 Secretary of War Judah P. Benjamin stated that "Guerrilla companies are not recognized as part of the military organization of the Confederate States," and early in 1862 General Joseph Johnston ordered from his camps men who were distributing handbills urging soldiers to join up for "local service." But the pleas of Southern adherents in areas dominated or threatened by Yankees produced a change of policy. In March 1862 Governor John Letcher of Virginia issued a proclamation calling on the people in occupied sections to "form guerrilla companies, and strike when least expected." And soon afterward the Confederate Congress passed the Partisan Ranger Act of April 21, 1862, which authorized the organization of independent units for the waging of irregular warfare under the supervision of departmental commanders. Quickly dozens of partisan ranger outfits sprang into being in Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Arkansas, Missouri, and Mississippi (in the last-named state they were headed by Colonel John Falkner, grandfather of the novelist, a "u" being subsequently added to the name). Potential recruits were numerous and eager, for partisan service enabled a man to fight for the cause while remaining near his home, it promised adventure and had an aura of romance, and it offered an escape from the discipline and drudgery of regular army life. Furthermore, under this Partisan Ranger Act, partisans were to receive "the full value of money of all arms and munitions captured from the enemy" - an application of the rules of privateering to land war designed to attract those whose patriotism needed bolstering by the prospect of profit! In Virginia Colonel John D. Imboden recruited a partisan ranger regiment for "very active service" in the Union-occupied western mountains. "It is only men I want," he proclaimed, "... men who will pull a trigger on a Yankee with as much alacrity as they would on a mad dog; men whose consciences won't be disturbed by the sight of a vandal carcass." At the same time Harry Gilmor, a dashing Baltimorean, and "Lige" White, another native of Maryland, organized companies for operations along the Potomac, although technically they remained part of Brigadier General Turner Ashby's cavalry serving in the Shenandoah Valley under Jackson. Late that summer Lee's invasion of Maryland drove the Federals out of northern Virginia and caused them to reduce their forces in the western part of the state. As a consequence Imboden's partisans, Confederate cavalry raiders, and local bushwhackers went on a rampage in those areas. But the failure of Lee's campaign at Antietam ended any Confederate chance of completely regaining control of the Old Dominion. In November the Federals reoccupied northern Virginia, including Harpers Ferry, and in January they restored the Baltimore & Ohio to service along its entire length despite repeated efforts by the guerrillas to cut the line. At the end of 1862 - just as McCabe's play glorifying them was being shown in Richmond - the Confederate high command decided that partisans were of little military value. Hence the companies of White and Gilmor (the latter had been captured raiding in Maryland but was soon exchanged) were ordered back to their regiments and Imboden's men were incorporated into the regular cavalry. The only exception made in the latter instance was Captain John "Hanse" McNeill, who was allowed to continue his independent operations in western Virginia. As glides in seas the shark, Rides Mosby through green dark. 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. | ||||||||||
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