Walter White, Tony Soprano, Jimmy McNulty, Al Swearengen, Don Draper—though none of these icons of narrative TV ever swore allegiance to the Southern States, they are Mosby Men insofar as they blur the line between villainy and heroism.
Each is capable of every emotion and compels audiences with both minute idiosyncrasies and a capacity for sweeping gestures. In short, they are human: fully fleshed-out, high-fidelity, total bandwidth vessels of the species. As is the case, they are necessarily complex.
Nothing is so essential in a captivating character than complexity. This, I contend, is why John Mosby continues to cut his way into the firmament of American legends while other, more statuary icons of the War of the Rebellion fade.
Attempts Were Made
In Hollywood, the allure of Mosby has exerted its influence before.
There is a long-standing rumor that Shelby Foote wrote a trilogy of screenplays for Stanley Kubrick surrounding Mosby and his role in the brutal Shenandoah Valley campaigns during the final year of the Civil War.
In 2015, the option for the scripts apparently passed to Marc Forster (Monster’s Ball, World War Z). This project is almost certainly guaranteed to die-on-the-vine in a Hollywood eager to distance itself from both budget-heavy practical effects films and Confederate heroism.
Mosby may have missed the silver screen, but the 1950s found the partisan ranger resurrected and widely distributed in a straight-to-syndication TV series titled The Gray Ghost. A high-B actor, Tod Andrews, plays Mosby in a fundamentally hokey show as formulaic as it is rich in day-for-night shots.
These near misses not withstanding, it should be said: John Singleton Mosby remains a character cut from the cloth of every great prestige television protagonist.
A COMPLEX MAN
He came off as bitter; a snob with the sharpest of tongues. Mosby suffered fools heavily and communicated this distaste openly. “Ipecac,” was his favorite retort to perceived inanities.1 The lawyer-turned-raider behaved as if every wasted word pushed him closer to vomitting.
Despite this, John Mosby showed the greatest fondness for those in his inner circle. He spent an inordinate amount of his post-war life communicating with men who had served under him during the conflict.2 Yet, Mosby eschewed and avoided any and all reunions of the Ranger unit that bore his name. They were trivial and frivolous things, he reasoned. Then one year he showed up and delivered a speech in which he battled emotion as he listed the names of lieutenants who had died under his command.3
The cynic was apparently sentimental at heart. That should have been a surprise to no one.
Mosby was individualistic, contrarian, suspicious of authority, and hostile to hidebound institutions. Yet, save one period before the war when he hung his shingle as a freelance country lawyer in Bristol, Virginia, Mosby’s life was spent in devoted service to governments, causes, and corporations.4 From soldier to appointee to bureaucratic reformer to authentic wonk, the Gray Ghost was first and foremost a company man.
Mosby’s name is most commonly associated with the Confederacy, but he was a staunch, vocal, and venomous Unionist. He, like most of his fellow Virginians, probably cast a ballot for John Bell in the 1860 election. After Fort Sumter, his neighbors were shocked to see him enlist in a Confederate cavalry unit.5
He did not fit in. Especially in the cavalry—a rich man’s branch festooned with dash and swagger. Mosby slouched and was poorly attired. He and Fount Beattie—an original Mosby Ranger—were the only two in their company of the 1st Virginia Cavalry to accept shabby penitentiary uniforms (designed for, made by, and affecting the aesthetic of Virginia state prisoners) in 1861.6
Barring his lukewarm stint in a pre-war militia unit, Mosby had no military background. Still, he was one of six men in the company of renowned frontier fighter and outpost cavalryman Grumble Jones to receive a pistol on the eve of First Manassas.7 His discretion and powers of observation qualified him to be specially equipped and hence ready to perform the most dangerous duties.
Jones—himself a schlub known for his poor attitude, harsh demeanor, and shabby dress—raised Mosby as a fighter, but JEB Stuart made Mosby into the man of legend he became.8
Though Stuart and Mosby were born the same year a few hundred miles apart in the Virginia Piedmont, the two had little in common.
Stuart was gallant and glorious. His gestures were as grand as his presence on the battlefield. Stuart’s entire life was a metonym for a cult of romanticism that shellacked the harsh realities of American Southern frontier life with the gilt of grandeur and honor. He was Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe incarnate, a knight-errant who did battle by day and serenaded ladies at night. He charged his way into the pantheon of southern heroes.
Mosby, on the other hand, lurked, plotted, connived, and struck. Regarded by Federal foes as little more than a bushwhacker, the “gray ghost” built his career and reputation on a willingness to break with the chivalric and overly lethal tactics favored by defenders of southern honor.
Where Stuart was respected and well-regarded, Mosby was feared and envied.
In 1862 while on picket, Mosby wrote his wife and requested she send him his copy of Scott’s collected works.9 He pined for the plumed dash of Stuart’s lifestyle, but his outlook was far less romantic and far more pragmatic. He yearned for the Arthurian archetype, but lived a life of modern practicality, brutal cunning, and fierce wit more in line with modernity.
Though Mosby spent most of his post-war life defending the wayward actions of his fallen chief, the partisan lived by a far different code than most of the superiors he swore fealty to during the war. Unlike Stuart and Jackson and Lee who adhered to, read, and promulgated various doctrines espoused by the faithful, Mosby did not believe in God.
“Our civilization,” as he came to say, “is a thin coat of varnish.”10 One mired in a childish falsehood of petty superstition revered by almost everyone in his society and his life, including his wife, Pauline. She was a devout Catholic.11 Vocal atheist that he was, Mosby somehow reconciled his beliefs with the dogma of a wife he loved dearly.
Their marriage began auspiciously at a wedding in her native Tennessee, at which future President Andrew Johnson (a friend of Pauline’s father) was a guest. So it was that two of the men who came to be most hated in the South by 1867 shared an important prelude.12
The story of Mosby’s fall from grace in the “Solid South”—a term he’s credited with coining, incidentally—is as marbled with contradictory highs and lows as any facet of the Colonel’s life.13
Mosby did not surrender with Lee at Appomattox. He remained in the field where his forces were undefeated, unapologetic, and still lethal. Though he capitulated not long after, Mosby the Gray Ghost bridged an important gap in the cult of southern hero-worship.
In a way, Mosby fit the bill. He was a Virginian and a slave-owner—exactly the type of man who personified the vigor with which free noblemen defended their supposed birthright. Yet, Mosby’s credentials as a slaveowner hardly fit the bill of typical demagoguery which surrounded gray-clad men atop the southern soldier hierarchy.
Mosby’s slave, Aaron, accompanied him through much of the war. After the conflict and his manumission, Aaron moved to New York City, where Mosby sent him funds for the rest of his life.14 This is a curious patronage. One illuminated by still more curious deeds.
Mosby had the stones after the war to contend that any argument positing “states rights” as the cause of the conflict was ignorant to the centrality of chattel slavery which Mosby reasoned was the war’s truest genesis.
His grasp on political economies was true, albeit sacrilegious in the South. Interestingly, shortly after the Emancipation Proclamation, Mosby asked a Unionist woman in Fairfax County to carry word to President Lincoln conveying Mosby’s heartfelt congratulations and thanks for freeing the slaves.15 This apparently contradictory, but visionary, sentiment put Mosby in league with none other than Karl Marx, who wrote a substantially similar letter to Lincoln a year later in 1864.16
Mosby bucked southern orthodoxy as a matter of convention. Still, he did not earn the ire of his fellow Southerners until the Election of 1868 when he loudly endorsed General Grant—a villain in post-confederate Virginia political cosmology—and conspired with his former enemy to win him the Old Dominion.
“Hell,” Mosby said, “was being a Republican in Virginia.”17
His flexibility and effectiveness surprised people. Some mistook him for capricious or weak-minded, but Mosby’s limber maneuverability and eye for good land—literal or otherwise—was a survival skill he learned and mastered early.
As a boy, Mosby never won a fight.18 He was small and sickly, a boy prone to getting his ass kicked. He adapted. In his third year at the University of Virginia, a bully named George Turpin singled Mosby out for physical destruction. The code duello would not benefit young John. A stand-up fight with a much larger boy was an equally unsavory prospect. So Mosby borrowed a pistol and visited Turpin at his boarding house adjacent to the most prestigious University in Virginia. Near hallowed halls of learning laid out by none other than Thomas Jefferson, Mosby ambushed and gut shot George Turpin.19
He, a well-raised demi-patrician from a solid Virginia family, found himself charged, convicted, and imprisoned in the Albermale County Jail for eleven months. This alone would have sunk most men. Yet, Mosby’s keen wit and high-held chin endeared him to his prosector and jailer, William Robertson, who leant him law books and tutored him in the barrister’s path during his imprisonment. So it was that Mosby alchemized his greatest defeat into the trade the sustained him for most of his adult life.20
After his post-war conversion to the Republican political faith, clandestine snipers, guttersnipes, and potential duel opponents incentivized Mosby to quit Warrenton, Virginia. He entered the graft-heavy civil service and became potentially the first of his generation to pass up the riches of corruption for reform.21
Not to become too calcified in either his apparent morality, nor his reputation as a rabid enemy of the Yankee industrialist machine, Mosby used his last favor with Ulysses S. Grant to secure a role as corporate fixer for Collis Huntington, a railroad magnate whose interest with the Southern Pacific “octopus” became synonymous with corruption and regulatory capture in California.22
SCOUTING THE FUTURE
These contradictions overwhelm, especially in Civil War studies where men have been made into statues and the dynamics of the past have been frozen in marble. If the war itself represents an ugly inflection point where long narratives of romantic identity fracture against the reconfiguring influence of industrial capitalism-induced mechanical modern war, Mosby appears less conflicted and more representative of his time.
The glaciers of a calcified past broke apart in America between 1861 and 1865.
New floes and torrents developed and swept people from the solid stasis of their childhood into the chaotic maw of a mobile, lethal, and unsentimental future. If Mosby didn’t consciously embrace these ideas, he surely intuited a path through.
Or maybe “scouted” is the best way to put it.
Mosby’s whole life was one long reconnaissance that struck out from the violence of the honorable plantation south into the fields of an unfamiliar future. As best he could, Mosby picked his way through the landscape and when he came back to base to report what he had found, he discovered that home did not exist anymore and he was alone.
So it was that John Mosby often found himself caught between the lines of an enemy world and an extinct past.
This rugged in-betweenness, this prodigious mind filling a saddle on a fast horse, this eye for place and people, who could kill with words and pistol alike—this is what makes Mosby as a man and ensures his eternal retainer in an American panoply hungry to know people whose primary accomplishment has been survival.