Rebel: The Life And Times Of John Singleton Mosby

John Singleton Mosby (1833–1916) was the Confederacy's best-known practitioner of guerrilla warfare. At heart a Unionist, he nonetheless joined the Southern cause when his homestate of Virginia seceded. He served first in the cavalry and later as commander of a partisan unit in Northern Virginia, where his operations tied up such large numbers of Federal troops that sufficient force could not be gathered to break Robert E. Lee's army till April 1865. Mosby's narrow escapes and impossible exploits (including the capture of a Union general from his bed) earned him a status as a cavalry commander equal to Stuart and Forrest, and a preeminence among the partisan leaders of history. Mosby was only thirty-one when the war ended. Rebel fully explores his long and eventful postwar career: his political battles; his close friendships with former enemies; his association with presidents from Ulysses S. Grant to Theodore Roosevelt; his service as U.S. consul in Hong Kong; and his involvement in the West's range-fencing crisis. In the process this book reveals the fierce independence and eccentric vision of one of America's most controversial, uncompromising figures.