Since the close of the war I have come to know Colonel Mosby personally, and somewhat intimately. He is a different man entirely from what I had supposed. He is slender, not tall, wiry, and looks as if he could endure any amount of physical exercise. He is able, and thoroughly honest and truthful. There were probably but few men in the South who could have commanded successfully a separate detachment in the rear of an opposing army, and so near the border of hostilities, as long as he did without losing his entire command.
- Ulysses S. Grant, as quoted in Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Volume II (1886), Charles L. Webster & Company, p. 142.
Mosby stood five foot, eight inches and weighed 130 pounds soaking weight. The greatest partisan commander of the War, he and his men so dominated parts of Union occupied Northern Virginia that it was referred to as Mosby’s Confederacy. After the War he joined the Republican party and had an illustrious career as a lawyer and in government. He left behind a large body of writings on the War that are well worth reading. A unique man in peace and in war.
I live in Mosby’s adopted home town of Warrenton, where he’s buried. His Catholic wife was a pillar of the local parish. She died decades before he did, but he continued to support their children’s Catholic upbringing and had them educated at Catholic schools. Mosby himself apparently became a deathbed convert to Catholicism and had a funeral Mass here, the procession to the cemetery leaving from the old church building that still stands today, though it’s no longer in use. (A newer building was erected in another part of town in the mid-1900s.)
This was an honorable man though fighting for a cause not so honorable. He recognized the necessity of the nation coming together after the war and did his part well. Quite a contrast today where the desire to divide even extends to renaming military bases that honor the participants on the other side of that war.