Confederate guerrilla John Mosby and his forces tied up 50,000 Union troops in Northern Virginia during the last two and a half years of the Civil War. He and his men marauded deep into Federal lines. They suffered relatively few casualties and did immense damage to both the Union psyche and supply chain.

How?

This work is an attempt to piece together fragments of evidence into a coherent story about the ways that people, places, and psychologies self-organized into a shadow war on Washington, D.C.’s doorstep.

Years of research have produced an undeniable conclusion: Mosby and his men harnessed thickets, unlikely avenues, succession forests, friendly farms, and a collection of bridle paths into assets for a microwar that subsumed today’s Dulles Corridor. Slender trails that rarely appeared on maps and left the faintest traces on the muddy soil of Fairfax County became lethal highways.

By comparing and collaging advanced satellite imagery, extant maps, historic chancery records, tax rolls, censuses, first person narratives, genealogies, folklore, geology, geography, sociology, ethnography, and political history through a bifocal lens of spatial analysis and military studies, the shape and dimension of this lost war and the mysterious bridle paths on which it was fought appears from a murky past 160 years distant.