Sheridan’s headquarters in the Shenandoah Valley, August 16, 1864
“The families of most of Mosby’s men are known and can be collected,” Ulysses S. Grant brutally telegraphed Sheridan on August 16, 1864. The general further suggested the families could be held hostage at Fort McHenry “for the good conduct” of Mosby and his men. Perhaps most shocking, Grant ended the communication with the order, “Where any of Mosby’s men are caught hang them without trial.”1 After Mosby’s Great Berryville Wagon Train Raid, Grant threw down an iron fist.
Grant followed up with another telegram to Sheridan two hours later, instructing him to send a division of cavalry to Loudoun County, Virginia, “to destroy and carry off the crops, animals, negroes, and all men under fifty years of age capable of bearing arms. In this way, you will get many of Mosby’s men. All male citizens under fifty can fairly be held as prisoners of war.”2
Sheridan partially complied with the scorched-earth policy, issuing orders for Union troops to destroy all “wheat and hay south of a line from Millwood to Winchester. You will seize all mules, horses and cattle that may be useful to our army. Loyal citizens can bring in claims against the government for this necessary destruction.”3 Lacking the extra troops to pull away from the threat of Early’s Army of the Valley District, the Union general demurred and did not carry out Grant’s brutal order to round up families related to the Rangers. Sheridan was also sensitive to the 1864 political climate. Every report of another successful wagon raid by Mosby’s Rangers made Northern victory seem an increasingly elusive goal. The Democrats used the house burnings and loss of personal property that made headlines in Northern newspapers as a cudgel in their campaign against Lincoln. The Shenandoah Valley had become a political and strategic epicenter of the Civil War.
Perhaps to placate Grant’s wrath, Sheridan sent a message to the general the next day claiming to have killed some of Mosby’s Rangers. The report proved false, however, as the men were not Mosby’s. Sheridan deceitfully wrote Grant a day later, “Guerrillas give me great annoyance, and captured a few wagons.” He chillingly added, “I am quietly disposing of numbers of them.” Sheridan later noted, “We hung one and shot six of his men yesterday.”4
On August 18, however, an incident with far-reaching consequences did involve a small group of Mosby’s Rangers. They attacked a four-man Union picket near Castleman’s Ferry—killing one, Corporal Alpheus Day, wounding another, and capturing the remaining two.
To avenge the attack, the commander of the Michigan Brigade, Brigadier General George Armstrong Custer, ordered several family homes of Rangers burned. Over fifty Wolverines rode to obey the directive. By the light of dawn on the morning of August 19, William H. Chapman and a group of Mosby’s Rangers saw the flames and smoke rising from Ranger Province McCormick’s home and found his family weeping outside. The Confederates then rode on to find the wife of Ranger William Sowers and her children sobbing as they watched their home burn. “Those helpless non-combatants crouching in the rain, weeping over their burning homes, wrought up the resentment of the men and we started out to even things up in real guerrilla fashion,”5 wrote Ranger John Munson. The homeless civilians sent the Rangers in the direction of advancing Federals and urged the Rangers to “smite and spare not!”6
“Like bloodhounds on the trail,”7 the Rangers rode toward Confederate colonel Benjamin Morgan’s one-hundred-plus-year-old estate. Chapman urged his fellow Rangers forward: “No quarter! No quarter!”8 Around two in the afternoon, they caught up with the unsuspecting Union soldiers, who were still busy with the burning of Morgan’s estate. The Federals failed to guard against a surprise attack. Stalking their quarry, the Rangers rode slowly down the only entrance and exit—a quarter-mile, tree-lined lane that led to the plantation—then charged when they were within one hundred yards. A bloodbath ensued.
Trapped, the Federals had no way of escape, surrounded as they were by stone fences in a lane accessed by a single gate. As the Rangers descended on the soldiers burning the barn, haystacks, house, and other outbuildings, they refused to give quarter, even when the men begged for their lives. The furious Rangers shot even those taken prisoner. “Ten men were murdered on the ground after surrendering, nearly all of whom were shot through the head. Four have since died and two more cannot live. Some of the fiends, appalled at the bloody agonies, did not shoot their prisoners until ordered to ‘shoot the d—n Yankee son of a b—” by their officers,” the New York Times later reported.9
Mosby sent word to his superiors that “about 25 of them were shot to death for their villainy.”10 And thus began an even more grisly cycle of violence as the Times story and other reports of the incident further inflamed Union forces and begat retaliatory attacks. The Times noted that “Mosby practically raised the black flag”11 in the valley, and the retribution killings continued. Mosby had to be stopped.
The Great Berryville Wagon Train Raid and the killing of the house-burning soldiers triggered an intensive manhunt to kill or capture Mosby and his Rangers. An election year loomed, and the press magnified Mosby’s achievements. Sheridan had to neutralize the Gray Ghost, protect the Army of the Shenandoah’s supply lines, and halt the embarrassing headlines that aided the South’s information war on the North. Seeking a solution, Sheridan turned to his former West Point roommate and friend George Crook, who offered him the unit he took much credit for shaping: Blazer’s Independent Scouts. The mission to neutralize Mosby fell on the shoulders of thirty-five-year-old Captain Richard Blazer.
The Scouts had been operating without rest for months. “In moving with the army … we were constantly in motion and fighting all the time from Winchester to Berryville; hence to Cedar Creek; capturing numbers of Johnnies—then falling back to Winchester and Halltown,”12 recalled Montgomery. The incessant battle had reduced the Scouts’ numbers. At Halltown, West Virginia, Blazer received orders to fill the unit to one hundred Scouts. Men from various units volunteered for the hazardous duty, and from these volunteers, Blazer hand-selected the most qualified men. Sheridan activated Blazer’s hunter-killer team with the sole mission of eliminating the South’s most dangerous men, thereby pioneering the US Army’s counterinsurgency warfare.
Breaking through the bureaucracy that Crook failed to penetrate months earlier, Sheridan ordered these chosen men supplied with the finest rifle in the Civil War arsenal: the Spencer. “I have 100 men who will take the contract to clean out Mosby’s gang. I want 100 Spencer rifles for them. Send them to me if they can be found in Washington,”13 Sheridan wrote in orders to Washington on August 20, 1864.14
The Spencer repeating rifle and shorter-barreled carbine were some of the most advanced small arms in the world at the time. The Spencer Model 1860, the first operational lever-action rifle, fired a .56-56 rimfire metallic cartridge—groundbreaking at a time when most weapons utilized paper cartridges. In the stock, a tube contained a seven-round, spring-loaded magazine that fed cartridges into a breech-loading chamber by cocking and replacing a lever. Now a soldier no longer had to stand up and ram a bullet down the barrel of a rifle. A Spencer had a rate of fire of over twenty rounds per minute; a traditional musket in the hands of a trained soldier could fire only two or three shots a minute.
Department of War chief of ordnance General James Ripley considered the rifles “newfangled gimcracks” and opposed the pioneering technology because the weapon’s rate of fire could waste ammunition. Additionally, the Federal supply system, already overburdened, could not maintain enough ammunition in the field for repeating weapons to be used by the entire Federal force. The repeater was also several times more expensive than a traditional rifled musket. The Confederates did not field a similar counterpart. Among other factors, the rimfire metallic cartridge ammunition was difficult to manufacture. Christopher Miner Spencer, the rifle’s inventor, finally broke through bureaucratic red tape by gaining an audience directly with Abraham Lincoln, a fellow inventor and the only commander in chief to hold a patent in his name, for a device to lift boats over shoals in rivers. He personally test-fired the Spencer near the partially completed Washington Monument on August 18, 1863. On the walk over to the makeshift target range, the group passed by the War Department, and the president sent his son to see if the secretary of war would like to join them. While waiting for a response, the president noticed a tear in his black alpaca coat. He pulled out a needle and started to mend the rip, musing, “It seems to me this don’t look quite right for the chief magistrate of this mighty republic, ha, ha, ha!”15
When Lincoln received word that Secretary of War Edwin Stanton was too busy to join the demonstration, he quipped, “Well, they do pretty much as they have a mind to over there.”16 Spencer handed the rifle to Lincoln, who proceeded to aim.
“The target was a board about six inches wide and three feet high, with a black spot on each end, about forty yards away. The rifle contained seven cartridges. Mr. Lincoln’s first shot was about five inches low, but the next shot hit the bull’s-eye, and the other five were close around it. ‘Now,’ said Mr. Lincoln, ‘we will see the inventor try it.’ The board was reversed, and I fired at the other bull’s-eye, beating the President a little. ‘Well,’ said he, ‘you are younger than I am and have a better eye and a steadier nerve.’ ”17
The Spencer rifle so impressed Lincoln that he directed the War Department to place more orders for the gun.18
Armed with their Spencer rifles and carbines,19 each Scout also had at least a Colt Navy or Army revolver—most men had two pistols. Although Blazer’s men were armed to the teeth, Mosby’s men still significantly outnumbered them. Undaunted, “we felt like trying him” and “flaxing him out,” remembered one Scout. Blazer’s men had spent months honing their skills battling Thurmond’s partisan Rangers and other irregulars, and they felt prepared to battle a foe they considered ruthless, “cutthroats” yet “well trained,” “bound to their oaths to never yield to the Yankee forces, also sworn to spare no energies, going through all the hardships of guerrilla warfare, destroying even home friends to carry the point,” recalled Asbe Montgomery. “[Mosby’s men] became a source of terror, not only to small bodies of the army but to all travelers, and even to some of their own friends.” Sergeant Montgomery was gung ho: “[Taking out Mosby] that was just what we wanted to do.”20
Once the Scouts received their Spencers and provisions, Blazer announced their goal of defeating Mosby. Morale within the Scouts remained sky-high, but many of the men did not fully appreciate just how perilous the manhunt would prove to be. Most of the Scouts had read about Mosby’s exploits, the stuff of legend: raids, train derailments, and high-value captures—the missions appeared in headlines across the North and the South. Mosby’s Rangers had first captivated both populations’ attention in the cold, wintery months of 1863.
Despite the threat to his supply lines, Sheridan still pursued Early, but the wily Confederate general retreated deeper into the valley onto the defensible high ground at Fisher’s Hill. Lee soon reinforced Early’s army. Mistakenly believing Early’s army was larger than his, embarrassingly, on August 21, Sheridan retreated toward Harpers Ferry.
In that third week of August, Sheridan unleashed Blazer’s Scouts. They left Sheridan’s army and set out alone, “struck for tall timber,” as they called it, and infiltrated Mosby’s Confederacy. They entered an area where most forces their size, roughly one hundred men, had been crushed countless times in the past year. But the Scouts operated like the men they hunted. “We moved cautiously, watching every bird, almost, that flew across our path,”21 wrote Asbe Montgomery. In particular, the Scouts monitored the fords, ferries, and crossing points of the rivers.
Building on the Scouts’ months of experience in hunting Thurmond’s Rangers, Montgomery observed that “Mosby learned that somebody else could hide, shoot, and dash, and swim rivers as well as his fellows.”22 In this type of guerrilla warfare, a fast horse became paramount. Scouts seized the best horses they could find; speed, agility, and how a steed performed in combat became matters of life and death for the rider.
A smaller echelon of twelve to sixteen Jessie Scouts roamed ahead of Blazer’s main column as an advance reconnaissance element.
As Montgomery wrote, their mission was hazardous: “Sometimes our small squads ventured further than prudent and this caused us to have to get up the ‘dust’ sometimes like a streak of lighting, for three or four miles. Go out and leave the company four or five miles, and the first thing would be: ‘Halt, you d—d Yankees!’ Then we knew what to do. It was ‘git.’ ”23
On August 25, the Scouts routed a force of renegade partisans under the command of nineteen-year-old John Mobberly. The teen had deserted from Elijah V. White’s 35th Virginia Cavalry, also known as White’s Comanches. The Comanches recruited from Loudoun County and campaigned with the regular army but returned home when not in service. Mobberly deserted from White and set up his own gang. Sadistic, cruel, and “reckless beyond reason and fearless of danger … [Mobberly] courted it.”24 Union brigadier general John Stevenson described Mobberly as a villain in charge of “a gang of murderers infesting Loudoun.”25 While Mobberly is known to have participated in at least one operation with Mosby, the Ranger leader did not tolerate his barbaric methods, especially when it came to those he captured. Mobberly rarely took prisoners, but he savagely transported those he did take to the mountains. He maliciously placed these defenseless individuals supine and mounted boulders on their limbs. The men died of exposure, starvation, or wild animals, and he left their bodies to rot.26 Another atrocity involved Mobberly riding his horse over severely wounded Union soldier Charles Stewart and joyfully firing his pistol into his hapless torso. After firing all six barrels, he loudly laughed and stripped the boots off Stewart’s mangled body. Preternaturally, Stewart would live to tell the tale and even seek vengeance.
But on that late August day, Mobberly’s men met their match. Blazer demolished an element of the cutthroat’s gang. The Scouts had “quite a skirmish” and took six of Mobberly’s guerrillas and “five or six good horses,” after which they felt they were gaining control of the valley, “calling ourselves Boss,”27 remembered Montgomery.
“Every day brought fresh scenes. Almost every day we crossed the river and mountains to hinder the reb cavalry from cutting us off, and Moseby [sic] in the same valley that we were, made pretty scaly times.” The Scouts rode up and down the bucolic Blue Ridge Mountains, forested with verdant pine and hemlock trees. Mountain streams and open meadows were sprinkled throughout the hard rides up and down rugged trails. Despite the paradise-like surrounds of nature’s lush bounty, the land Blazer’s Scouts dared to cross into was some of the most dangerous Confederate territory. Outnumbered and undaunted, they hunted the hunters. The Federals were painfully aware of the annihilation of their predecessors, and yet they believed in the nobility of their cause. Much like today’s special forces, they would operate alone, deep in enemy territory. To prevail they would rely on their own grit and resourcefulness. “Moseby [sic] and his men outnumbered us so materially that we had to look sharp, to save our necks, for it was no use to talk of being captured unless we wanted our throats cut from ear to ear, or to be swung up by the neck,”28 Montgomery recalled.
The eyes from North and South focused on events in the Shenandoah, where unconventional warfare would continue to play a crucial role as the election of 1864 loomed.