Despite Sheridan’s victory at Winchester and Blazer’s manhunt, Mosby continued to hit Federal supply lines. Three days after the battle, on September 22, 1864, a large force of Rangers, led by Sam Chapman, unexpectedly collided with nearly an entire brigade of Yankee cavalry. A desperate firefight and chase ensued; Lewis Powell, riding his favorite blood bay, fled the scene. According to one account, “The speed of Powell’s mare was all that saved his neck from being stretched on that occasion. He escaped with seventeen bullet holes through his clothing.”1 Six other Rangers weren’t as lucky. In the melee, one Union officer tried to surrender and was allegedly shot down by the Rangers. Remarkably all but six Rangers were able to shoot their way out of the hoard of Federal soldiers.
Boiling with rage from the perceived murder of the officer, some Union soldiers pushed three of the Rangers behind the Front Royal courthouse and, while their superiors looked the other way, shot them. While Custer may not have directly ordered their execution, he commanded the brigade. Two other Rangers were questioned and then hanged, and a sign attached to one read, “Such is the fate of all Mosby’s men.”2
Most tragically, sixteen-year-old Henry Rhodes was caught running down a stream bed and dragged behind Union cavalry horses through the streets into Front Royal with his wailing mother following behind, pleading for his life. He had never ridden with the Rangers before this day and had gone this time hoping to find a mount. A soldier ordered the bleeding, battered Rhodes to stand and, while he was struggling to do so, executed him with a pistol shot to the face.
In a ravine shrouded by a canopy of conifers outside Salem, Virginia,* Lieutenant Ed Thompson had gathered his Rangers in early autumn. The officer addressed his men and asked for three volunteers “to undertake the rather risky job.” Without hesitation, Lewis Powell and two other men stepped forward “before the others could answer.”3
Within the confines of Salem and along a route that stretched for miles, pockets of hundreds of Union troops guarded gangs of workers as they painstakingly laid steel rails. The fresh track was part of efforts to complete the unfinished Manassas Gap Railroad, a supply line for Sheridan’s army into the Shenandoah Valley and to support its advance south. In September 1864, Sheridan focused on the Manassas Gap, which would terminate in Strasburg and allow his forces to be supplied by rail instead of the long, tortuous wagon route that first went to Harpers Ferry and then through territory infested by Mosby’s Rangers.
Mosby made disruption of the rails his top priority. In one of the countless engagements that made up Mosby’s war on the Manassas Gap, Thompson wanted to draw the Federals out of Salem and into an ambush. The incessant attacks were working, and progress on the iron road slowed to a snail’s pace. Union losses mounted, and the Rangers cowed some Federals into submission. Casualties and lack of progress forced General Henry Halleck, the chief of staff, to consider depopulating Mosby’s Confederacy of Rebel inhabitants and sending them south as he urged Sheridan to deploy his cavalry to “clean out Mosby’s gang of robbers.”4 Sheridan felt he could not spare the troops. He still had to not only guard outposts and supply lines but also fight Early’s considerable army. His plan remained to employ Blazer’s Scouts to contend with Mosby. In desperation, the Union used civilians as human shields. “Your plan of putting prominent citizens on trains is approved, and you will carry it into effect. They shall be so confined as to render escape impossible, and yet be exposed to the fire of the enemy,”5 Halleck callously wrote. The ploy failed to deter the attacks, and the Rangers continued to rip up rails at night.
Thompson’s three volunteers did their part in the war on the rails on that autumn day. The “first class men, always ready for any duty and game,” acted as bait to lure the Yankee cavalry out of Salem. Powell itched for action, “always keyed up for any new sensation,”6 wrote one Ranger.
His blood bay had a menacing “habit of foaming at the mouth and exposing the white of her eyes.”7 That day, Powell rode right into scores of Yankee cavalry bristling with weapons. The three Rangers fired on the Federal pickets and made the ride of their lives as a swarm of mounted Yankees sped off in hot pursuit of the riders.
Concealed in bushes, the balance of the Rangers waited for Thompson’s signal for the trap to be sprung. Attacking the front and back of the column of Union riders, Munson recalled, “our men got them … and killed, wounded, and captured all but one of them.”8 A lone trooper escaped. Thompson killed the Union trooper’s horse, but the Federal jumped a fence and scampered away.
The violence surrounding the rails continued. On October 8,† near Piedmont,‡ Big Yankee Ames, now promoted to second lieutenant in F Company, rode off to gather more of his men to counter an approaching Federal patrol bearing down on them. For Ames, war was kill or be killed—if captured, he knew he would be executed on the spot for desertion and the path of Union dead bodies he left in his wake. A year and a half in the saddle riding into the heart of the Ranger’s fiercest engagements had hardened the New Englander into a ruthless and efficient killer.
Likely a lone Jessie Scout spotted Ames. Getting an advantage, from the Confederate butternut he wore, the Scout mortally wounded Big Yankee. Ames’ men heard the pop from the Jessie Scout’s weapon, saw the smoke rising in Shacklett’s orchard, and spotted Ames’ riderless horse running down the lane from the house. William Chapman caught the animal, and several Rangers galloped toward the house, where they saw the Jessie Scout’s horse tied at the gate. They quietly approached to find him rifling through Ames’ pocket and called out, “Are you a Yankee?”9
The Jessie Scout jumped up and shouted “no” but ran down toward his horse. One of the Rangers dismounted and ran after the Scout and shot him as he tried unsuccessfully to vault over a fence.10 Rangers tearfully buried the thirty-eight-year-old Ames under a large oak tree nearby.§
Eventually, Mosby’s war on the rails caused the exasperated Federals to abandon the completion of the Manassas Gap Railroad. Instead, they continued funneling supplies through Harpers Ferry and overland to the valley rather than through Manassas Junction. Thousands of troops had to be moved off the main battle line to guard the effort. Most importantly, from the Confederates’ perspective, Mosby and Early helped delay Sheridan’s army from joining Grant in Petersburg. As Sheridan conceded in his later memoir, “During the entire campaign, I had been annoyed by guerrilla bands under such partisan chiefs as Mosby, White, Gilmore [sic], and others, and this had considerably depleted my line of battle strength, necessitating as it did, large escorts from my supply trains. The most redoubtable of these leaders was Mosby.”11
* Salem has been renamed Marshall, Virginia.
† Varying sources report Ames’ death on October 8 or 9, 1864. The individual who killed Ames could have also been a member of the 8th Illinois Cavalry.
‡ It is now known as Delaplane, Virginia.
§ I frequently travel by a roadside marker designating the site of his death located at Winchester Road in Delaplane, Virginia. Decades after the war, his comrade-in-arms Ranger A. G. Babcock removed his remains from the spot where he fell and reinterred him in Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia, where a granite marker memorializes his service to Mosby’s Rangers.