Mosby's Sneak Attack - NYTimes.com "On the bed we saw the general sleeping," recalled the memoirist. There was no time for ceremony, so I drew up the bedclothes, pulled up the general's shirt, and gave him a spank on his bare back, and told him to get up. This brief description captured the apex of one military career, and the nadir of another. In the early morning hours of March 9, 1863, Lt. John Singleton Mosby led 29 Confederate partisans east along the Little River Turnpike in northern Virginia, quietly passing through a gap in the Union lines and soon arriving at Fairfax Courthouse. Mosby already had a fierce reputation for leading his "rangers" on stunning strikes behind enemy lines; most notably, he had helped plan J.E.B. Stuart's famous 1862 ride around Gen. George B. McClellan's army parked near Richmond, Va. Mosby's Rangers would become so effective that the area of northern Virginia stretching east from the Shenandoah Valley along the Potomac River to Alexandria and south to the Rappahannock River would become known as "Mosby's Confederacy." But this time, guided by James Ames, known as "Big Yankee," a recent Union deserter who opposed Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, Mosby had a very particular mission. He was in search of a single person, a man named Percy Wyndham. This son of an English lord was a military adventurer who, after service with the French Navy, England's Royal Artillery, the Austrian Lancers and Giuseppe Garibaldi during the Italian Risorgimento, came to America to fight slavery. Now a colonel in the 1st New Jersey Cavalry, Wyndham had incurred Mosby's wrath by referring to his rangers as a "pack of horse thieves" and threatening to burn Middleburg, alleged to be Mosby's center of operations. Whatever frustration Mosby might have felt upon discovering that Wyndham was spending the night in Washington must soon have evaporated when he learned that the night presented other opportunities. A second Union officer was apparently headquartered at the nearby home of Dr. William P. Gunnell, and Mosby soon found himself rousing the sleeping Brig. Gen. Edwin Stoughton. Various accounts have the Confederate partisan shaking the somnolent officer, while others have him slapping his back, as Mosby himself recalled, or even smacking him on his bare bottom. The 24-year-old West Point graduate from Vermont had fought well during the Peninsula Campaign, but had earned a reputation for enjoying both women and hard drink. He was rumored to keep a Miss Annie Jones, a 20-year-old woman from Cambridge, Mass., near at hand, and the evening of his capture Mosby's troops found a number of Champagne bottles in his room. Whatever his wake-up call of choice, and whatever Stoughton's condition at the time, Mosby soon had the brigadier general's full attention: General, did you ever hear of Mosby? "Yes," replied Stoughton, "have you caught him?" I am Mosby. Stuart's cavalry has possession of the courthouse; be quick and dress. Anxious to get underway before he and his rangers were discovered, Mosby later recalled that "Stoughton has the reputation of being a brave soldier, but a fop. He dressed before a looking-glass" but "forgot his watch and left it on the bureau, but one of my men . . . took it and gave it to him." The rebels also made off with two captains, 30 enlisted men and 58 horses, slipping away as quietly as they had arrived. The night's raid was an unvarnished success. By sunrise, Mosby and his captives were back behind Confederate lines. The next day he took Stoughton to Stuart's headquarters at Culpepper Court House, where he turned his prisoner over to Gen. Fitzhugh Lee. Nephew to Robert E. Lee and an accomplished cavalry leader in his own right, Lee disapproved of Mosby's irregular tactics. He greeted Stoughton, a West Point classmate, warmly and at the same moment snubbed Mosby. "It was plain that he was sorry for what I had done," Mosby recalled years later, and "I was very mad at such treatment." Stuart, however, soon made amends for Lee's snub, issuing an order lauding Mosby's "boldness, skill, and success" and his "daring enterprise and dashing heroism." Stoughton soon found himself in Richmond's Libby Prison, from where he was freed in a prisoner exchange two months later. The fiasco at Fairfax Courthouse brought an end to his once promising career. It wasn't just his capture that did him in. Like many other Union officers, Stoughton had succumbed to "headquarterism," whereby general officers stayed in comfortable civilian quarters while their troops were billeted in far less comfortable conditions, often several miles away. The practice rankled many enlisted men: as one of Stoughton's own troops wrote in a letter home, "If he is so fancy that he can't put up with them, the Government should put him out." It also left the officers far more exposed to the sort of raid that Mosby so effectively executed. Northern newspapers had a field day at Stoughton's expense. "A Union Brigadier General and Several Officers Gobbled Up," blared one Washington paper's headline. His capture was "utterly disgraceful," claimed The New York Times, while The Baltimore American labeled him the "luckless sleeper at Fairfax" who was "Caught Napping." Even President Lincoln weighed in, allowing that he "didn't mind the loss of the Brigadier as much as the horses, for I can make a much better General in five minutes, but the horses cost one hundred and twenty-five dollars apiece." Once freed, Stoughton chose to resign from the Army when his appointment as a brigadier general was not renewed. He moved to New York and practiced law until his death, at age 30, on Christmas Day, 1868. If Fairfax Courthouse destroyed one man's career, it elevated another's. It was "one of those things a man can do only once in a lifetime," Mosby noted. If he'd been caught, "everybody would say that I had tried to do what I ought to have known to be impossible. The safety of the enterprise lay in its novelty," he continued. Nothing of the kind had been done before. Mosby's military success proved so troublesome that in the fall of 1864, Lt. Gen. Ulysses Grant suggested to Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan a new tactic. "The families of most of Mosby's men are known and can be collected," he wrote. I think they should be taken and kept ... as hostages for good conduct. ... When any of them are caught with nothing to designate what they are, hang them without trial. So harsh a measure proved counterproductive. After Sheridan's forces executed six of Mosby's partisans, he retaliated by hanging three Union captives. In November Mosby wrote to Sheridan suggesting a cease-fire of sorts: both agreed that they would resume treating captured soldiers as prisoners of war. A few members of the Confederate officer corps appear to have shared Grant's disdain for Mosby's tactics. Gen. Thomas Rosser, writing with support from the generals Jubal Early and Fitzhugh Lee, urged Robert E. Lee to disband Mosby's Rangers. They "are a nuisance and an evil to the service," he wrote. Without discipline, order, or organization, they roam ... over the country, a band of thieves, stealing, pillaging, plundering, and doing every manner of mischief and crime. They are a terror to the citizens and an injury to the cause. While Lee did forward their recommendation to the Confederate War Department, he later put the brakes on any action against Mosby, remarking that he was "zealous, bold, and skillful" and that he "has accomplished a great deal." In an ironic twist to his "zealous, bold, and skillful" military exploits against the federal government, Mosby became an active Republican in the postwar years. He campaigned vigorously on behalf of Grant's election to the presidency in 1868 and served as the American consul to Hong Kong as well as an official in the Department of the Interior. He died in 1916. Sources: James A. Ramage, "Gray Ghost: The Life of Col. John Singleton Mosby"; Charles Wells Russell, ed., "The Memoirs of Colonel John S. Mosby"; Jeffrey D. Wert, "Mosby's Rangers: The True Adventures of the Most Famous Command in the Civil War." Rick Beard, an independent historian, is senior adviser for the Pennsylvania Civil War 150 and volunteer coordinator of the Civil War Sesquicentennial for the American Association for State and Local History.