Rangers rounded up the captured and wounded Scouts and moved the most severely injured to a church near Kabletown. Local families took in others. Richard Blazer received special treatment. After his capture, Dolly Richards’ men took $152 from Blazer. The Union Scout also carried Confederate script that “was of no use to [the Rangers],” and they allowed him to keep it along with $12 they “afterward generously returned to him.”1 The money would save his life.
After the shakedown, the Rangers detailed a special guard to the Federal commander, which included Ranger Lewis Powell, to travel to Richmond, the location of the infamous Libby Prison and the headquarters of the Confederate Secret Service. Richard Blazer remembered Lewis Powell escorted him on his long journey to prison in Richmond. As a third party related, “Captain Dick Blazer of the Blazer Scouts was captured … taken to Richmond by one Payne* [Powell], belonging to Mosby’s gang. Captain Blazer is well-acquainted with the man.”2 One of the very men Blazer’s Scouts was formed to capture or kill now escorted the chief of Blazer’s Scouts to Richmond. Here, Powell would receive orders for his next mission.
Blazer’s men were not afforded the comfort of horses and arduously walked to Richmond via another route.3 It was the beginning of another long journey.
Along the way south to Richmond, the guards and Blazer stopped at the home of a lawyer and “violent secessionist” for dinner. The slaveholder went on a racist, curse-filled rant directed at Blazer and African Americans. Blazer inquired what he had ever done to him and why he was so “bitter against the race.” The lawyer responded, “Oh! [I] lost one hundred and twenty n—ers.” “How many do you have left?” asked Blazer. “About twenty,” responded the secessionist. Blazer acidly retorted, “Well, you have twenty more to lose.”4 The men got back on the trail to Richmond after their tension-filled dinner.
Hundreds of men captured by Mosby made the long journey to Richmond down winding mountain trails. Weeks earlier, the Rangers had snared six-foot-tall, gray-eyed Private Joseph A. Brown of Blazer’s Scouts, who provided a detailed version of the sojourn, the same route to Richmond that Powell would travel with Richard Blazer as his prisoner.
“I bridled and saddled my horse called ‘Mosby’ having captured him at Meyer’s Ford.… I had ridden about four miles, or a little beyond Warrenton when I saw five soldiers about one-fourth of a mile ahead of me.” Passing a man with a cartload of sugar cane, Brown asked him if the five men were Yanks. He responded affirmatively. “Fearing treachery, I pulled my revolvers around to the front and opened the holsters.” The five riders, wearing Federal overcoats, approached and called out, “Good Day.” “Their response was three cocked revolvers at my head.”5 Outgunned and knowing the result of noncompliance, Brown surrendered.
The Rangers took Brown’s revolvers, Spencer rifle, and cartridge box. After riding into the woods east of the pike and unloading the weapon, the Confederates handed Brown his Spencer: “This is no good without ammunition.” Brown’s captors pressed him, asking if he was a Scout, and informed him that he was headed toward Confederate cavalry headquarters for the area under the command of Major General Thomas Lafayette “Tex” Rosser. Armed to the teeth, more than a common soldier, and knowing the penalty of being caught as Scout or spy, Brown told them he was a “safeguard at Winchester.”6 Amid Brown’s interrogation by Rosser’s staff, Mosby’s men brought in several new prisoners: Captain Nicholas Badger and his orderly, as well as a free African American civilian named George Washington, or “Wash,” who acted as a paid servant for Badger. The haul also included an aging mail carrier of General Powell’s division; Thomas Green and Curt McIntosh of Company I, 23rd Ohio; Bill Tatman and Tom Wilson of the 2nd West Virginia Cavalry; and George Johnson.
Brown was no longer the only Scout. The Rangers also brought in George McCauley, formerly from the 9th West Virginia.7
As the throng of prisoners filed in, Mosby made a grand appearance. Standing apart from his men and the Federals, Mosby grasped the bridle rein of his “splendid gray horse.” Badger vividly described Mosby: “His forearm resting on the saddle’s pommel, his left arm akimbo, and his foot thrown across the ankle and resting on its toe. He is a slight, medium-sized man, sharp of feature, quick of sight, lithe of limb, with a bronzed face, the color and tension of whipcord; his hair a yellow-brown, with full but light beard, and mustache of the same. A straight Grecian nose, firm-set expressive mouth, large ears, deep-gray eyes, high forehead, large well-shaped head, and his whole expression denoting hard services, energy.”8
Mosby wore “top-boots and a civilian’s overcoat—black, lined with red—and beneath it the complete gray uniform of a Confederate lieutenant-colonel, with its two stars on the sides of the standing collar, and the whole surmounted by the inevitable slouched hat of the whole Southern race.” Badger also noted how Mosby’s men often gained the element of surprise: “His men were about half in blue and half in butternut.”9
As Mosby passed Badger, “he scarcely noticed [him]” but noticed the Federal officer’s prized horse, Belle. After Badger dismounted, Mosby said to his manservant, “Take that horse.”10
Enslaved body servant, friend, and Ranger Aaron Burton went to war with John Mosby. A slave of Mosby’s father, Burton raised Mosby and was by Mosby’s side through the entire war. As Burton noted, “I loved him and was with him in all his battles.… He was a good man and was a great fighter.” Mosby had the “greatest confidence in his body servant, and he was frequently left in charge of all the booty that was captured from the Union soldiers.” One individual described Burton as “the perfection of politeness … with a sweet musical voice”11 and fond of singing to himself.
Badger, heartbroken from the loss of his beloved Belle, a horse he had ridden for three years “through many a bloody and hair’s breadth escape, who loved me with almost human love,” recollected, “I could not refrain from throwing my arms around Belle’s neck and tenderly caressing her for the last time before she was led away.”12
As Burton led the horse away, an unfortunate Ranger lieutenant protested, wanting to keep the animal for himself, mumbling something about the rules of dividing the booty. He “was promptly silenced” and put in his place, ordered to choose from among the other captured horses. Meanwhile, Mosby, perhaps with a cup of coffee in hand, busied himself reading the paperwork of the captured men. The Gray Ghost had a nose for fine coffee and would always find the best, according to John Munson. Real coffee was scarce after the second year of the war, and most people drank “decoctions of roasted peanuts, or beans, or sweet potatoes, or almost anything that would look black, and taste burnt. Mosby would not drink a drop of any such sham coffee, and he could distinguish the slightest adulterated article from the real bean.”13
He approached Badger with “a peculiar gleam of satisfaction on his face and said, ‘Oh! Captain Badger, inspector-general of the cavalry! Good-morning, Captain. Glad to see you, sir. Indeed, there is but one man I would prefer to see this morning to yourself, and that is your commander [Brigadier General Armstrong Custer].’ ”
Mosby acidly added, “Were you present, sir, the other day, at the hanging of eight of my men as guerrillas at Front Royal?”14
It was the one question Badger dreaded. “[It] pierced me like a sword,” recalled the Federal officer, as he had been present during the hanging. Believing it might make matters worse if he timidly claimed he tried to “save the lives of the wretched men,” Badger boldly and firmly proclaimed, “I was present, sir, and, like you, have only to regret that it was not the commander instead of his unfortunate men.”15
Expecting a denial, the answer Badger relayed “seemed to please Mosby.… With a grim smile,” the guerrilla leader then directed another officer to search Badger and the prisoners. The Rangers purloined the Federals’ belongings. “A board of officers was assembled to appraise their value … the rules of the gang requiring that all captures shall be thus disposed of, or sold, and their value distributed, or sold, and their value distributed proportionally among the captors.”16 Boots, a gold watch, $300 in greenback, rings, a Bible, and a Masonic pin all went to the board for accounting.
The Rangers considered Wash contraband and “raffled” him for $2,000, a free man enslaved and trafficked like livestock. He was “very indignant that he should be thought worth only two thousand dollars Confederate.” Wash then extolled the men with his accomplishments. He could make the best milk punch of any man in the Confederacy. “This hit at the poverty of their resources,” remembered Badger. Perhaps in an act of kindness or a show of plenty, Aaron Burton offered Wash a drink. Despite being parched, Wash “stubbornly refused,” his pride intact. Badger privately asked Wash why he turned down the drink; “You know, too much freer breeds despise!”17
Mosby then returned Badger’s Bible, letters, and Masonic pin, telling him, “You may as well keep this; it may be of use to you somewhere. Some of my men pay some attention to that sort of thing. Your people greatly err in thinking us merely guerrillas. Every man of mine is a duly enlisted soldier and detailed to my command from various Confederate regiments. They are picked men, selected from the whole army for their intelligence and courage. We plunder the enemy, as the rules clearly allow. To the victors belong the spoils, has been the maxim of war in all the ages.”18
After the Confederates finished searching the other prisoners, a Ranger the Scouts nicknamed Jim Crow searched Private Joseph A. Brown for valuables, but the Scout concealed his money in a hidden slit in his waistband. As Crow frisked him, Brown handed over his personal letters. “A dead giveaway,” the letters were each addressed, “In care of Captain Blazer, commanding scouts.” Unflinching, Brown “coolly remarked, those are from my girl.” Remarkably, Crow returned them. The Scout realized Crow could not read.
After the shakedown, the men set out in an easterly direction. Rangers led and flanked the group. As Brown rode, he chewed on the letters’ envelopes to destroy the evidence. After crossing the Shenandoah, the band traveled through Ashby’s Gap and spent the night in an abandoned schoolhouse, the “sole relic left of a former civilization.”19 Badger surmised that Mosby used the dilapidated and unpainted structure as a way station. To guard the prisoners, Mosby’s men ringed the schoolhouse’s interior. Brown built a small fire to warm the room using a Bible he found and, conveniently, the incriminating letters as kindling. Mosby’s men, meanwhile, opened a mailbag captured from the courier and entertained themselves reading love letters. The men slept in the schoolhouse until dawn, when they mounted up and continued their journey to Richmond.
As the band ambled along, Brown whispered to fellow Scout George McCauley, also known as Mack, that he had cartridges that the Confederates had failed to find for their unloaded Spencer rifles in saddlebags on their horses. They conspired to load their guns covertly and make their escape when they entered the Luray Valley. Riding up a steep, winding trail in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the men beheld a spectacular autumn vista: brilliant yellow-, orange-, and red-infused forest, rivers, and mountains. Mosby turned to Badger and said, “This is a favorite promenade of mine. I love to see your people sending out their almost daily raids after me. Here comes one of them now, almost towards us. If you please, we will step behind this point and see them pass. It may be the last sight you will have of your old friends for some time.”20
“The coolness of his speech enraged me,” thought Badger, yet the Union officer also “admired” Mosby’s “quiet and unostentatious audacity.”21 Badger claimed briefly to have considered rushing the guerrilla leader but checked his anger as the Yankee patrol passed within half a mile of them at the bottom of the mountain.
“Mosby stood with folded arms on a rock above them, the very picture of stoical pride and defiance, or, as Mack whispered: ‘Like patience on a monument smiling at grief.’ ”22
As the men moved into the Luray Valley, Mosby told them they were inside Confederate lines and “the first effort of escape would be death,”23 then he bid the party farewell. Several heavily armed men guarded the prisoners’ caravan as they headed south to Richmond. Brown rode up toward Badger and whispered to him of his plans and asked him to take command once they attacked the guards.
Brown rode next to McCauley and handed him several precious brass Spencer cartridges as rain fell. After the exchange, the private reached back to grab his rifle, his bulky rain poncho obscuring his movement; next, he attempted to load the weapon but found “one cartridge in the cylinder [magazine] that failed to drop out.” Each Spencer had a seven-round tube magazine with a spring that led the cartridges into the rifle’s chamber. “Expecting every minute to be detected,” Brown found a small piece of a lead pencil that he used to extract the jammed round. The spring now operated properly. With his heart pounding in his breast, “and not in the mouth as a few minutes before,”24 the Scout rode up to McCauley and whispered that he would touch his left foot as a signal to start shooting.
With the foothills of a mountain 200 yards in front of the group and woods to their left, the caravan approached ever closer to their first stop: Confederate general Rosser’s camp, where Brown suspected he would be unmasked as a Scout. A ranger rode in front of Brown. Jim Crow rode in front of McCauley and another Ranger. A final Ranger held the column’s rear. Brown asked how far Rosser’s camp was. One of the Rangers responded that it was about two and a half miles. He then turned to Crow and casually commented, “I would just as soon have a good navy revolver as a hundred-dollar greenback.” Just then, Brown touched McCauley’s foot, and both men fired their Spencers. Brown killed one Confederate, and McCauley’s shot struck Crow, dropping him from his horse. The Ranger fell and landed in a sitting position, catatonically holding the bridle of his horse. Badger “vamoosed” after the first shot. Brown spun around and jumped off his horse to shoot another one of the Ranger guards, who had been grabbed by one of the prisoners and was being held “securely,” as Brown approached within fifteen feet. The Ranger blasted him with his revolver. The bullet grazed the Scout’s shoulder. Brown raised his gun “and fired, the ball taking him above the left eye, killing him instantly, the blood and brain-matter spattering [prisoner] Green in the face.”25 Green held on to the corpse as both men dropped to the ground together. The dead Ranger’s revolver was at half-cock, a split second away from firing a second potentially deadly shot at Brown. The single surviving Ranger guard escaped, galloping half a mile away at full speed, “firing his pistols to alarm the country.”26
Brown scrambled over to Jim Crow, whose rain overcoat had covered his head after he fell off the horse. “I shot him through the cape. I took four revolvers from him, and jumping on his horse, commenced to fasten the revolvers around me, but one of them fell out of the scabbard when I jumped down to get it, the horse becoming frightened ran away.”27
The prisoners scattered behind Confederate lines and in a countryside soon to be crawling with angry Southerners hunting for them. Brown ran on foot toward the mountain and caught up with Green and Tatman. They fled about three miles until, remarkably, they encountered Wash. When two Rebels fired on the band, Brown and the other men separated from Wash as they moved from one wood to another.
Brown’s group hid in bushes till about 8 or 9 p.m., and “all the while we could hear their horses walking on the stony road, patrolling and watching for us.” With revolvers in hand, the men cautiously made their way through the countryside. Listening carefully, Brown and the group approached a road and crawled through a hole in a fence. After running all night, they briefly rested to catch their breath. In the morning, they finally heard the water of the Shenandoah River, accompanied by the terrifying barking of bloodhounds.
As Brown and the men knew it would be difficult to outrun the hounds, they “backed up against a large oak tree side by side,” with the intent “to sell our lives as dearly as possible.”28 As they saw the dogs pass them in the distance, Brown and the others crossed their trail and took to the river to throw off the dogs. The Scout led the band down the river for about half a mile until they came to a small log cabin. By now, the men had not eaten for two days.
“With one revolver in my bosom,” Brown approached the house and told a woman he was a Confederate soldier who escaped Federal troops from Front Royal. He asked how far it was to Front Royal, asked if she had anything to eat, and offered to pay her.
“You are no Rebel,” she insisted, then turned to a ten-year-old boy and told him to run and inform the authorities. Brown pulled out his revolver and threatened to kill the child if he moved. The Scout then demanded food, and she went into the house and returned with bacon fat and cornbread. “Fearing it might be poisoned, I made her eat some of both to satisfy myself.” Brown snatched the food and made his way back to Green and Tatman, telling the woman that he “belonged to General Rosser’s command on the way out of the cabin, and if she thought I was a Yankee and wanted me recaptured, she could tell.”29
They wolfed down the food and continued moving toward Front Royal, about thirteen miles away. Avoiding patrols, the men stumbled upon two boys working a sugar cane patch. “We played Rebels and asked if any Yankees were around?” “None nearer than Front Royal but seven of your boys went along the road a few minutes ago.”30
The men followed the river, looking for a ford, when they came across a cabbage patch. “We thought we struck oil,” recalled Brown. Each man devoured a head the size of a “wooden pail.”31 Not long after the cabbage patch, the men’s luck continued, and they found a ford. Wading through the cold water of the river up to their arms, they made it to the other side and kept to the woods, avoiding all roads. Brilliant orange and crimson hues from the trees, combined with an abundance of black haws and persimmons, assaulted the men’s eyes as they advanced. As darkness fell, the men stumbled across Union pickets, finally safe. Badger’s party was not.
Badger, McCauley, and Wash would spend seven more days behind Confederate lines. One man not joining them, the old mail carrier, “was never seen again” and likely was recaptured by the Rebels. After separating from Brown, somehow Wash miraculously linked back up with Badger’s party. Badger remembers going through one of the Ranger’s saddlebag and finding his gold watch and $1,100—“doubles of their robberies of our men.” The cash evoked a snarky response: “Not quite nuff,” said Wash, “showing his ivories from ear to ear” as he demanded full value of the enslaved person of $2,000.32
An expert woodsman, the Scout led the group in the direction the enemy would least expect—South—directly into their lines. After first heading to the mountain, where they linked up with Wash, the group rode for hours “directly into the enemy’s country as fast as we could ride, and before complete darkness intervened, we made thirty miles from the place of our escape.” Pushing the horses as far as they could endure up the summit of the Blue Ridge, the men would “see the Rebel campfires … and view their entire lines”33 by morning.
Led by McCauley, the men avoided Confederates sent to recapture them. Pangs of hunger and thirst gnawed at the Federals as they maneuvered away from Confederate pickets. The men had not eaten for three days, and desperation set in. “We even ate a poor little dog which had followed our fortunes to his untimely end.” Barbarically, even cannibalism was considered. Badger considered sacrificing poor Wash: “[We] were thinking seriously of eating negro Wash, when he, to save himself from so unsavory a fate, ventured down the darkness to a cornfield and brought us three ears of corn apiece which we ate voraciously.”34
Starving and on a mountain near Rebel lines, the men decided to head farther south and struck the Shenandoah twenty miles behind Early’s army. Using the cover of night to cloak their movements, they built a raft “and floated by night forty miles down that memorable stream through his crafty pickets.” Using all their knowledge and skills from nearly a year of service as Scouts, they used their Union uniforms “and after that passed for Rebel scouts earnestly ‘looking for Yanks’ until we found them.”35
Against all odds, McCauley led Badger and Wash home. Union forces, fearing Brown and his party were Confederate spies, initially detained them after their escape. The wily Scout was able to avoid his Union captors and first reported to his old officer Colonel Rutherford B. Hayes, who verified Brown’s identity. He reported directly to Sheridan.
Badger also made a report and told his story to the press, to whom he embellished and exaggerated his role in the escape. McCauley returned to the Scouts and the other men to their respective units. Despite so many close brushes with death, Wash survived and remained a free man.
* Blazer referred to Powell by the alias he assumed: Payne.