Captain Richard Blazer could see his breath in the frigid air as he lay side by side on the cold ground in the vast, low-ceilinged room with scores of other Union prisoners of war. Given no coverings except their clothing and only practically inedible bricks of ground cornbread for rations, the men counted the days, hoping they would survive until their release. Many didn’t. A contemporary newspaper account reported that 158 of the 1,500 men imprisoned at Danville in 1865 died in January alone.1
After his capture on November 18, 1864, Blazer was initially confined in Libby Prison in Richmond, where he confirmed “the old story of the horrors” regarding the three-story brick warehouse–turned–Confederation prisoner-of-war camp on the banks of a canal beside the James River. But Libby Prison was “a palace compared with the prison at Danville,” where he was transferred on December 11 and remained confined until February 17. “When he came back to us, he was very much emaciated, having lost a considerable amount of flesh,” testified one soldier, in addition to developing rheumatism and kidney disease, which would plague him “until he died.”2 One saving grace for Blazer would be the $12 he smuggled in and used to purchase extra food. The ability of Union prisoners to purchase supplemental food caused the Gallipolis Journal to proclaim that “fiendish malignity” and “settled determination to destroy the lives of as many Yankees as possible by starvation”3 rather than scarcity fueled the Union prisoners’ treatment.
Around the same time Blazer languished in Libby Prison, his Confederate nemesis suffered brief capture and one of his closest brushes with death. It seemed the gates of hell opened on Mosby’s Confederacy. For much of December, Mosby found Loudoun County in smoking ruins and subject to Sheridan’s scorched-earth policy. “I will soon commence on Loudoun County and let them know there is a God in Israel. Mosby has annoyed me considerably, but the people are beginning to see he does not injure me a great deal but causes a loss to them of all they have spent their lives accumulating.… But when they have to bear their burden by loss of property and comforts, they will cry for peace,”4 Sheridan wrote to Halleck on November 26. In what would become known as the Burning Raid, he ordered his cavalry regiments who had battled Mosby for months to burn all mills and barns, destroy all forage and subsistence, and drive off and kill livestock. Homes were to be spared. With the division’s massive numbers, Mosby could only attack rear elements of the unit but could not stop the swath of destruction they cut across the county.
Mosby, coming from a wedding near Glen Welby farm on a cold early December night, arrayed in his finest—with heavy black, scarlet-lined cape, ostrich-plumed hat, gold cords, tall boots, and two stars gleaming on his collar indicating his rank—stopped with fellow Ranger Tom Love at a friendly home for a late supper. Believing themselves safe, they left their horses and pistols secured outside. However, amid their dinner, scores of Union troops descended on them and their hosts.
When Union officers entered the dining room of Lakeland,* Mosby quickly covered the stars on his collar with his hands. “I knew that if they discovered my rank, to say nothing of my name, they would guard me more carefully.” As he stood by a Union officer, a stray bullet from outside struck the Confederate guerrilla leader in the stomach. He gasped, “I am shot!”5
Chaos ensued. “In the confusion to get out of the way, there was a sort of hurdle race, in which the supper table was knocked over, and the tallow lights put out,” wrote Mosby in his memoir. “In a few seconds, I was left in the room with no one but Love, Lake [their host], and his daughter.” Still bleeding profusely, Mosby walked into the adjoining bedroom and hid his coat with its telltale stars, then he lay on the floor, “determined to play the part of a dying man.” When the Union soldiers returned, they questioned a guest at the dinner who knew Mosby well, and whose brother was in his command, about the fallen man’s identity. Mosby “listened with fear and trembling for her answer” until he heard her declare she had never seen him before. “I am sure that in the eternal records, there is nothing registered against that good woman who denied my name and saved my life.”6
Mosby himself gave the soldiers a false name and false command when they interrogated him and examined his wound. A doctor declared his wound to be mortal, shot through the heart. “He located the heart rather low down, and even in that supreme moment, I felt tempted to laugh at his ignorance of human anatomy. I only gasped a few words and affected to be dying.”7 The soldiers left after stripping him of his fine boots and trousers, thinking a dead man would have no further need of them.
“Although I was a prisoner at the time, I have never complained of [the bullet], for it proved to be a lucky shot for me. It was the means of my escape.” After waiting to be sure his enemies had left, Mosby rose from the pool of blood and walked into the other room, greatly astonishing his hosts. “They were as much astonished to see me as if I had risen from the tomb.” Even Mosby still thought he might have one foot in the grave: “My own belief was that the wound was mortal; that the bullet was in me.” Wrapped in quilts and placed in the back of an oxcart, Mosby was transported to a safe house in the middle of a fierce storm, where doctors removed the bullet before he was further transported to his father’s house in Lynchburg to convalesce. In the meantime, Northern and Southern press falsely reported his death, but eventually a Northern paper retracted with the commentary that “the devil takes care of his own.”8
When Mosby recovered from his wounds and grew strong enough to travel, he rode by rail from Lynchburg to Richmond, where he made an appearance at the Confederate Congress in late December, which gave him an overwhelming reception. Before returning to his Rangers, he visited General Lee in Petersburg, where the two men had dinner. No record of their conversation exists, but later events strongly indicate that the two men discussed a special mission that involved kidnapping Abraham Lincoln. Fittingly, a month later, Confederate Secret Service ciphers changed to the keywords, Come Retribution.
Earlier in December, Lee ordered Mosby, at the suggestion of Confederate secretary of war James A. Seddon, to send four of his seven Ranger companies to an area known as the Northern Neck. This northernmost of three Virginia peninsulas consists of portions of Westmoreland, Richmond, Northumberland, and Lancaster Counties. The eastern part of the neck faces the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay, with southern Maryland located directly across the waterways. On the surface, the move appeared bizarre. These four companies, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel William Henry Chapman, were being placed far outside their normal area of operations and safe houses. Ostensibly, the Rangers who had been deployed to the Northern Neck after Sheridan’s Burning Raid on Mosby’s Confederacy lacked food and forage to counter roving Union marauders. This was most likely a cover story for why they were operating so far away from Mosby’s Confederacy. Spurred on by the Dahlgren Raid and the failed mission to capture and kill Jefferson Davis and his cabinet, the Confederate Secret Service planned to kidnap President Lincoln and use him as a bargaining chip in future peace negotiations. After capturing the president, a team of operatives could move Lincoln south through Washington along their secret line of Confederate agents in southern Maryland, across the Potomac to the Northern Neck, and into a secure location. Mosby’s men in the Northern Neck would be in an ideal position to screen the operation from pursuing Union cavalry and bring Lincoln to Richmond.
To what extent Mosby knew about the operation remains a mystery; his knowledge could have been compartmentalized. An ideal spy, Mosby never put anything of operational value in writing in the event it could fall into enemy hands. The Gray Ghost kept his men in the dark; as he quipped to John Munson, “Only three men in the Confederate Army knew what I was doing or intended to do; they were Lee and Stuart and myself; so don’t feel lonesome about it.”9 With Stuart dead, that left two men who knew Mosby’s plans. Coincidentally, or by design, when Mosby visited Richmond, another shadowy figure emerged in the capital: John Surratt.
Combat artist James E. Taylor enjoyed the warmth of a fire and the banter of friendly conversation on one of his final nights in the Shenandoah Valley. Operations there were winding down for the winter. A division of Sheridan’s VI Corps had already moved out of the valley to join Grant at Petersburg, and the rest of Sheridan’s infantry support would soon do so while the plucky general retained the cavalry. Moving his correspondent with the pace of the war, Frank Leslie recalled Taylor back to Baltimore for reassignment. The otherwise uneventful evening at the tavern where Taylor lodged shifted when “two mysterious visitors equipped for the warpath” sidled up to bathe in the heat generated from the flames of the fireplace. In whispered tones, the tavern keeper revealed to Taylor that the strangers were Jessie Scouts and explained their role in Sheridan’s army. Minding their own business, the “reticent men” bided their time till midnight, when they would “steal away to their perilous mission.” Besides his times riding with Blazer’s men, this was Taylor’s first contact with Sheridan’s Jessie Scouts, and he reflected on their duty. “They carried their lives in their hands, and as they sat there in the play of the firelight, with lips sealed, for instinctively none questioned them, they riveted my gaze and started my fancy, and they arose in my minds as heroes of the highest magnitude for the spy must of necessity be a noble and courageous character. He must be patriotic, quick-witted, intelligent, and terribly in earnest, or he will never undertake the Secret Service of the Army.”10
Taylor wondered whether this would “be their last mission in their country’s cause; whether a rope or a volley from a file of men.”11
* The beautiful two-story stone mansion still stands.