Days before Lee’s surrender, clouds of black smoke billowed, stoked by a tempest of cinders that swept the streets of Richmond from burning Confederate warehouses. Shells stored inside the buildings exploded, causing the walls to collapse as Brigadier General Edward Ripley and his Union troops rode through the conflagration consuming the city. “Forward!” Ripley urged his men onward “into a sea of fire, or, rather, the crater of an active volcano.”1
Ripley was one of the Union officers responsible for securing Richmond as the Confederates retreated and torched military supplies in their capital. Within days, President Lincoln personally visited and incredulously walked and rode through the streets of Richmond. Confederate private William H. Snyder had seen “with the greatest anxiety President Lincoln expose himself to a fearful risk of walking so carelessly unattended and unprotected through the streets filled with people whose hearts in their defeat were bitter, and it would be but human nature for someone to take the opportunity to revenge the lost cause on the person of the man who represented the triumphant cause of the Union.”2 Convinced the war was lost, Snyder felt that any additional lives taken were wanton murder, and he begged to see Ripley at his headquarters in the burned-out city. Years later, the Union brigadier general described Private Snyder’s frantic pleas and warning that Lincoln was in grave danger: “A party had just been dispatched from Raines’s [sic] torpedo bureau on a secret mission, which vaguely he understood was aimed at the head of the Yankee government, and he wished to put Mr. Lincoln on his guard and have impressed upon him that just at this moment he believed him to be in great danger of violence and he should take greater care of himself. He should give no names or facts, as the work of his department was secret [using proper tradecraft, the Torpedo Bureau compartmentalized its missions], and no man knew what his comrade was sent to do, that the President of the United States was in great danger.”3
Snyder worked for General Gabriel J. Rains’ Confederate Secret Service Torpedo Bureau. Knowing he was one of Rains’ operatives, Ripley understood the gravity of the Confederate’s story and had the operative swear under oath and recorded his deposition. Next, he asked for an audience with President Lincoln himself, who had traveled by gunboat from Washington to Richmond to witness the fall of the Southern capital. Ripley entered Admiral Porter’s boat; the president sat on a long-cushioned sofa as young Tad Lincoln ran up and down the length of the couch and climbed behind his father. As Ripley later recounted, the president was “so worn, emaciated, and pallid, that he looked more like a disembodied spirit than the successful leader of a great nation in its hour of supreme triumph.”4
“As I progressed in the explanation of my errand, Mr. Lincoln let his hands supporting his chin and clasping either cheek in an expression of the most heart-breaking weariness, his great melancholy eyes filling the cabin with the mournful light they emitted.”5
Ripley read aloud to Lincoln Snyder’s deposition and “urged upon him the reasonableness of the warning, the good faith and apparent integrity of the man.” The Confederate had been waiting in a nearby room, and the Union officer begged the president to bring him in and talk to him. Lincoln slowly lifted his head and “cast upon me that face above all human faces that of a man of sorrow and acquainted with grief”6 and said,
“No, General Ripley, it is impossible for me to adopt and follow your suggestions. I deeply appreciate the feeling which has led you to urge them on me, but I must go on as I have begun in the course marked out for me, for I cannot bring myself to believe that any human being lives who would do me any harm.”7
Lincoln’s nobility, gentle naïveté, and sense of fatefulness were on display. Ripley portentously recalled, “Snyder so honestly and prophetically warned him. I have so often thought of the web of fate I held in my important hands that morning … if I had been able to persuade the great President to let his friends protect him.”8
On April 2, three days before that meeting with the president, as Richmond’s defenses crumbled, one of Rains’ finest operatives and an explosives expert, Frank Harney, took a train to Gordonsville. Earlier, Judah Benjamin, Confederate secretary of state, had withdrawn $1,500 in gold using the Secret Service citation for covert action. Jefferson Davis approved the draft. Since Harney was the Confederacy’s agent in Richmond at the time, the money likely went to fund his operation. While it is impossible to prove Jefferson Davis’ direct involvement in the assassination, “this is probably as close to the ‘smoking gun’ as one will ever get,” according to historian and intelligence officer Brigadier General William Tidwell, who spent years tediously unearthing and analyzing the Secret Services’ finances.9 Harney carried deadly explosives, detonators, and fuses stowed in his saddlebags and rode north to Mosby’s Rangers and, according to Snyder, toward Lincoln and the White House.
As word of Richmond’s fall reached Mosby’s Confederacy, a pall of “gloom and despondency” hovered over the men. On April 5, Mosby called a meeting at North Fork Church that drew a full attendance of Rangers. In a conversation with Ranger J. Marshall Crawford and another man, Mosby declared, “There is nothing else for me to do but to fight on.” Hardcore till the end, the men responded they “would stand by him.”10
In those final days of the war, Mosby formed a new unit, Company H, “and organized it especially for” a new officer, renowned as a scout, who had recently joined the command: George Baylor. “The foe in the Valley dreaded him as much as they did our own Chieftain, Mosby,”11 remarked one of the men. Rangers lined up and faced Mosby. Baylor thought to himself, why “strangers select me their captain was an enigma my juvenile brain could not solve.”12 But this is how Mosby always ran “elections,” and his command; he was in charge, down to the smallest details.
“Men, I nominate George Baylor, of Jefferson County, captain of this company.… All in favor of Baylor as captain, say aye.”13
“[A] feeble response along the line, and much apprehension,” Baylor recalled.
“George Baylor is unanimously chosen captain,” Mosby announced. With the official birth of the new company, Mosby “ordered me to take it on a scout to Jefferson and baptize it” and “go out, see what I can do,”14 recalled Baylor.
Company H had some experienced men, veteran Rangers, but mostly15 new faces from those recently recruited into the command filled its ranks. “Fall out!” Acting according to Mosby tradition, Baylor dismissed the men for the night and ordered them to re-form in the morning at Snickersville. After they assembled on the morning of April 6, Baylor learned the Union’s Loudoun Rangers camped only miles away—an opportunity to vanquish a local rival that had been a thorn in the side of Mosby’s Rangers for months. Crossing the Shenandoah, Company H bore down on their prey. The fifty men first had to pass through pickets of an infantry regiment. Wearing blue overcoats and likely a sprinkling of Union blue uniforms (even though Baylor later claimed that his men in the front ranks, including himself, wore butternut or gray), they approached the Union lines.
A picket politely but nervously saluted—“Present arms.”16
In perfect order, Baylor’s fifty men passed the pickets and quietly approached the Loudoun Ranger camp’s neat line of tents and horses tied up. The Unionists were engaged in various diversions and did not notice Company H until the Rangers were on top of them. Baylor reached fifty yards from the camp, outnumbered at least two to one, and ordered a charge: “We were playing a bold game, and the bold game generally wins in war as well as in cards.”17 Baylor and his men routed more than one hundred Unionists, taking sixty-five Loudoun Rangers prisoner, killing two and wounding four, taking their horses, equipment, and weapons. The raid was the final nail in the coffin for one of Mosby’s nemeses. When Union general Winfield Scott Hancock received word of their demise, he heartily laughed, “Well, that is the last of Loudoun Rangers.”18
Baylor rode to Upperville with the prisoners and was greeted by some of Mosby’s men who had returned from the Northern Neck. Mosby assigned a new mission, and Frank Harney from the Torpedo Bureau was attached to the force. The one hundred men of Companies D and H “were ordered on a scout to Fairfax County,”19 ostensibly on a mission: “to capture a train hauling wood,” according to Ranger James Williamson.”20 Clearly, sending two companies of Rangers to capture a train carrying wood had zero strategic or tactical value on its face, so it is reasonable to assume the train was a cover story. The likely real mission: to create a distraction and infiltrate Harney through Union lines and deliver him into the hands of members of the Confederate Secret Service in Washington, DC. At the time, gunpowder was easy to obtain and security so lax at the White House that just about anyone could get into or out of the residence. Operatives could drive a wagon loaded with explosives up to the White House, or Harney could detonate the hidden explosives with a horological torpedo, or timebomb. Orders were compartmentalized and on a need-to-know basis, and Baylor may have had no idea of the true nature of the mission. Men under Mosby’s command obeyed orders and did not question them or faced removal from command.
From Upperville, on April 8 the men rode to Salem, where the column of Rangers stopped and spent the night at Waveland, a plantation and safe house that welcomed Mosby and his men throughout the war. “Rest and refreshment were found by me at the hospitable mansion where pleasure and enjoyment could always be found with the hosts of young company usually found there,” recalled Baylor. Mosby had placed his seasoned commander Captain Alfred Glasscock in command of the two companies. Still, when the Rangers assembled the next morning, to Baylor’s surprise he received a note “that he [Glasscock] would be unable to accompany us on account of his wedding.” Under Baylor’s command, the two companies set out to Burke Station. The young officer recalled, “Having acquainted myself with the destination of our expedition and our guides, I moved off across Bull Run Mountains, not without some misgivings.”21
The skies turned ominous, and rain came down in torrents. In the middle of the night, “one of our officers, familiar with the country and the people, informed me that a house full of young ladies was close by, and proposed that I should go with him, find shelter, and a pleasant visit.” Dry shelter and women—“such a tempting solicitation could not be resisted,”22 recalled Baylor.
Unbeknownst to Baylor, many of the Rangers had the same idea: “On reaching the house, I found quite a lot of our men had preceded me, and were in possession of the premises and the ladies, having a hilarious time.” Baylor became suspicious of the party’s hosts and ordered his men back to where they camped not far from Arundel’s Tavern (also known as Brimstone Hill).23 Sometime that night, Charley Dear, one of Mosby’s most hardened and seasoned warriors, made out his will24—a seemingly odd thing to do with the possibility of the end of the war in sight. Baylor spent the “night in suspense and trepidation.”25
At daybreak on April 10, the Rangers mounted up and started toward Burke Station. The commander of the 8th Illinois Cavalry, acting on information from “a source [he] considered reliable”26 (likely the women in the house), took his troopers and “came upon the trail of the enemy and followed [Baylor’s men] towards Burke’s Station, in the neighborhood of which some shots were exchanged … the rebels upon being discovered beat back into the woods.” At this point,27 Baylor rode back toward Arundel’s Tavern. After the head of his column passed the tavern, the 8th ambushed the two Ranger companies. To stave off defeat, two Rangers organized thirty of their fellow Rangers and charged into the Illinois men with their Colts blazing. The clash of horses and pistols initially checked the Union attack.
Baylor continued to try to rally his men—“a bold dash would save us”—as the Rangers had done in a myriad of clashes, but the “line began to waver and break, retreat was inevitable,”28 he later recalled.
The Rangers fled toward the ford crossing the Occoquan River at Wolf Run Shoals. One Ranger dug the spurs deeply into his horse. He tried to outrun the Yankee cavalry, blindly firing over his shoulder, “recklessly but harmlessly at close intervals, till both were empty and [he] was almost dead with exhaustion.”29
Veteran Ranger Charley Dear vainly threw himself in the melee to save his comrade, but his mount threw him into a ravine, and the horse soon followed its rider. Baylor did not fare much better as gunfire hit his horse in the nostril and foreleg, nearly unhorsing the commander of Company H.
Another Ranger tried to escape on foot as his horse was shot out from under him. Two Rangers rode up on each side of him and, “taking hold of wrists, galloped along with him until he overtook a riderless horse which he mounted, but was captured shortly afterward.”30
The 8th Illinois also captured Frank Harney from the Torpedo Bureau on April 10. The group was headed toward Washington, DC, and according to Private Snyder, the White House. The 8th Illinois Cavalry’s after-action report records among the captives “Thomas H. Harvey [Harney], Engineer Bureau, Lieutenant, Company F, 6th Missouri—brought ordnance to Colonel Mosby.”31 Harney remained silent during interrogation about the operation and the mission and was not captured with detonators or ordnance. He planned to obtain powder in Washington, where it was plentiful. The Confederate explosives expert would be released from Federal captivity at Elmira Prison months later, and after his release, he was never heard from or seen again. Years would pass before the true nature of Harney’s mission would surface.
Harney’s capture lent credence to his mission. Lincoln assassination coconspirator George Atzerodt later stated that John Wilkes Booth had met “a party in N. York who would get the prest [Lincoln] certain. They were going to mine the end of the pres. House near the War Depart. They knew an entrance to accomplish it through.”32 Years after the event, Ranger J. Marshall Crawford made an indirect reference to the operation, writing in his book, “Baylor lost two men killed and five or six captured, including Lieutenant Harney, whose loss was irretrievable.”33 Mosby denied any involvement in a Lincoln conspiracy. Any acknowledgment, if he were involved, would have been a death sentence to his postwar career. The Rangers most likely would have never known the full details of the mission due to the compartmentalization of the information. But the 8th Illinois Cavalry may have unwittingly stopped an attempt on the president’s life. Unaware of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Mosby and his Rangers had their last action with the 8th Illinois. Ranger John Munson later wrote, “I sometimes feel sure that, if we had known it was to be the last fight of our career, every man of us would have died rather than suffer the defeat that followed.”34 Decades would pass before the story of the mission surfaced.
However, in April 1865, Private Snyder’s warning remained unheeded: “President of the United States was in great danger.” Through their network, Booth may have learned of Harney’s capture, which may have triggered Booth and the other conspirators to put the assassination in action and decapitate the Federal government.35
On April 11, the day after Harney’s capture, Booth and Lewis Powell were in attendance when Lincoln spoke from the balcony of the Executive Mansion, outlining reconstruction plans. Booth implored Powell to shoot Lincoln dead with his revolver. Powell refused, and Booth replied, “That is the last speech he will ever make.”36