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By Eugene Scheel
Sunday, October 1, 2000; Page V03

My first encounter with John Singleton Mosby, the Confederate guerrilla fighter, was in the Peking Review, a propaganda tabloid of the People's Republic of China. It came in a brown wrapper, laden with beautiful stamps, each one different and hand canceled with a Peking postmark--the reason I subscribed.

This issue featured an article on Mao Zedong's 1927-1949 guerrilla war against the Nationalist Chinese and Japanese, and I remember a sentence to the effect that "the partisan Mosby, in his war against the United States, took Chairman Mao's advice: 'He realized that the dearest thing to an enemy soldier is his sleep; if you take that away, you ultimately will win the war.' "

Although it would have been a neat trick for Mosby to take Mao's advice on any subject, the article then went on to correct the order of things, observing that Mao had been a great admirer of Mosby because they had similar theories of command. Mosby's art of command will be the subject of a conference Oct. 13 through 15 at the Middleburg Community Center. The conference will be sponsored by the John Singleton Mosby Heritage Area Association, a group bent on conserving the rural Virginia Piedmont, through which its namesake foraged and forayed 140 years ago. The speakers will include four authors of authoritative books on Mosby.

The late Middleburg Town Council member Jack Turner once told me--as if I wouldn't believe it--that there were people in town who had actually never been on a horse. In the same spirit, I submit that there are people in Loudoun and Fauquier counties who have never heard of Mosby, despite the 13 streets, five subdivisions and one elementary school in Northern Virginia named for him, and the following resume might be helpful.

Mosby, then approaching 30 and a scout for Jeb Stuart, began his career as a partisan ranger Dec. 30, 1862, at Oakham, Hamilton Rogers's prosperous plantation east of Middleburg. Mosby chose Loudoun and Fauquier for most of his exploits, capturing provisions and enemy prisoners on behalf of the Confederate Army. He raided Union supply wagon trains that had been stocked from the counties' superior yields of corn, wheat and grains and their barns of draught and riding horses, as well as mules and livestock.

With the Confederate dollar worth about 15 cents, the South had trouble securing loans to buy staples for troops. Sometimes Mosby raided the farmers themselves, without troubling too much over which side they were on. He was less than popular among them, because they knew that wherever Mosby was, Union troops weren't far away.

As partisan rangers--we would now call them guerrillas--Mosby's men received some pay but, more important, they could keep the spoils of war. Writing in 1887, Mosby noted: "We captured a great deal more than we could use, the surplus was sent to supply Lee's army. The mules we sent him furnished a large part of his transportation and the captured sabres and carbines were turned over to his cavalry." He added, "We lived on the country where we operated and drew nothing from Richmond except the gray jackets my men wore."

James McPherson's "Battle Cry of Freedom," by consensus the finest one-volume history of the Civil War, cites Mosby as "the foremost of enemies" of the Union Army, and then quotes Mao--"the partisans swam like fish in the sea"--to describe how many of his men seemed to be and how quickly and quietly they moved.

In a book he wrote, compatriot John Esten Cooke described Mosby as "slender, gaunt and active in figure." Marietta Minnigerode Andrews, of Upperville, recalled in her own book "those penetrating blue eyes which ever pierced, eagle-wise." Author Alexander Hunter, who rode in Fauquier's cavalry, the Black Horse Troop, had other choice words for Mosby: "To shake hands with him was like having the first symptoms of a congestive chill. . . . He was utterly self-centered. He would have been a Stoic had he lived in Athens in the days of Pericles."

By all wartime descriptions, Mosby was devoid of human sympathy during the 28 1/2 months his band operated. By October 1864, a little more than seven months before he disbanded his rangers, Mosby's account of his marauding noted 1,600 horses and mules, 230 beef cattle and 85 wagons and ambulances commandeered. He and his rangers also had killed, wounded or captured 1,200, among the latter one general, Edwin Stoughton, surprised naked in bed with a girlfriend.

Numbers were not Mosby's overriding concern, however. When Jeb Stuart remarked: "This is a good haul. Mules! and fat, too," Mosby observed that his "species of warfare" was not to be measured by prisoners or spoils of war but by increased guards on enemy communications lines--"to that extent diminishing the enemy's aggressiveness."

Mosby's exploits were essayed with a band that never exceeded 800 and was usually divided into bands of 20 to 80 men. Unlike the regular army, in which officers were elected by their men, the officers of these groups were appointed by Mosby, who had complete control.

His usual mustering place was Rector's Crossroads, the village that became Atoka in 1893. When it became too obvious--being on the main road from Alexandria to Winchester--later gatherings often were farther south, at or near Rectortown.

Nearly every day, the various small bands set out in different directions. Thus the maraudings against supply trains and scouting parties seemed to take place everywhere. When his men thought they would have a fight on their hands, they picked a location where several roads came together. Then they could "skedaddle," as Mosby's biographers called their retreat, in various directions.

Newspapers and official reports credited nearly every such action to Mosby and his men, even the ones that locals later attributed to the Black Horse Troop or John Mobberly, a lone renegade who operated in the Lovettsville and Between the Hills area. Some early reports spell the perpetrator's name as "Mobly."

Mosby relished the publicity, for it made his force appear larger than it was. And, it kept Union forces in Loudoun and Fauquier--forces that were needed elsewhere in Northern Virginia. In his finest public relations ploy, after two New York Herald correspondents were captured, Mosby gave them full run of his prisoner of war camp near Hopewell Gap in the Bull Run Mountains.

The prisoners were allowed to write home, and their letters soon were reprinted in the Herald. They called Mosby "a perfect gentleman" and his men "intelligent beyond the average" and reverent toward their leader, "who can wear out any four of them by his labors." A Herald editorial called Mosby "A Modern Rob Roy," referring to the early-1700s Scottish freebooter. Northern readers became so interested in hearing more about Mosby that editors told their correspondents to remain in Fauquier, even when the main Confederate and Union armies in Virginia moved south.

For Mosby, winter was a time to fight, because the large armies could not pass along muddy, icy roads, and soldiers languished in camp, huddled about fires. He knew that cold induced torpor, an unsteady trigger finger and a malfunctioning weapon. This is where sleep deprivation played into his hands, because he made sure that Union troops were always in fear of a nighttime raid.

Patience was another of the virtues of Mosby and his men, especially since they usually chose the strategic position and had to wait for the enemy to walk into their trap. Rereading Ernest Hemingway's historical novel of the Spanish Civil War, "For Whom The Bell Tolls," I noted that when Robert Jordan, the protagonist, was alone and waiting for the enemy to come, his thoughts turned to Mosby, who had fought with Jordan's grandfather. He wondered what Mosby would do.

Mosby's unerring sense of seizing the moment is nowhere more evident than in the Mount Zion Church fight, east of Aldie on July 6, 1864. In this classic pitched battle, Mosby's 175 mounted men, supported by a cannon named "Potomac," were aligned on a slight ridge. Four hundred yards away, 150 federals were grazing their horses beside a church.

Maj. William Forbes, the Union commander, ordered his men to mount and formed the cavalry into two parallel ranks. Mosby's cannon fired a shell that landed long. But the noise spooked the horses and men; many had never faced artillery before. As Mosby spotted their uneasiness, he ordered the charge. Authors Hugh Keen and Horace Mewborn--both of whom will speak in Middleburg--note that 106 federals were killed, wounded or captured. Mosby's casualties: 1 killed, 7 wounded.

To the end, Mosby remained his own biggest fan. After the war, he continued to relive his exploits with several northern lecture tours. After one lecture, a man approached him. "I'm Major Douglas Frazer. You captured me in a skirmish near Aldie, Virginia." Mosby looked him over and replied, "I remember the horse."

Eugene Scheel is a Waterford historian and mapmaker.