 CHAPTER 18 In December 1899 Colonel Mosby wrote the following letter to John S. Russell, his chief scout in the war, which throws valuable sidelights on many of the episodes connected with his command, and sums up his deliberate opinion of many of the controversial points connected with his partisan life. In this survey of the past Colonel Mosby stated many of his final conclusions. December 16, 1899 Mr. John S. Russell, Berryville, Virginia Dear John, I have mailed you a set of photographs of the Berryville raid that made Sheridan retreat fifty miles down the valley to the place where he started from. In 1867 Captain McAleer of Baltimore visited the scene, made sketches, and procured photographs of many of our men. He then went to Paris and had the pictures painted by two distinguished artists—footnote, Bosse and Philippe Atoe. Photographic reproductions of these paintings were widely circulated in France, England, and America shortly after the war, and a footnote. Number 1, entitled Mosby Planning an Attack on the Federal Cavalry, represents the battalion just as we reached the east bank of the Shenandoah, the daughter of the stars. You are near me, listening intently to an order I am giving you to cross the river and find out what was in front. You returned after dark when I was asleep enjoying a soldier's dream, and the sentinel stars had set their watch in the sky, and told me that a long train, heavily guarded, was passing on the pike. In a few minutes all were mounted and moving to the attack. Number 2 represents the Berryville fight and the stampede of the train guard. I am with Sam Chapman's company that was kept in reserve with the howitzer that is firing, while Richard's squadron charge at one point on the line, and William Chapman and Glasscock with their companies charge at another. Stockton Terry of Lynchburg is near me with the battalion colors. A body of the enemy formed behind a stone fence and made some resistance. Here Louis Addy of Glasscock's company was killed. I remember very well when Guy Broadwater rode up and reported it to me in the midst of the fight. All I said was, I can't help it. He was a fine boy. Do you remember how the yellow jackets routed us and were near spoiling all my plans of that day? The howitzer came up at a gallop and was unlimbered on a knoll that commanded the pike. The gun was put in a position right over a nest of yellow jackets. They were home rulers, like the boars, and instantly a swarm flew out to repel the invasion of their territory. My men had stood a volley from a body of infantry on the pike, but the sting of the yellow jackets was too much for their courage. The horses reared and plunged. The men ran away from the gun. Whether the scene was sublime or ridiculous depends upon one's point of view at the time. My horse was frantic, and I felt a good deal like Hercules did when he put on the shirt of the centaur and couldn't pull it off. We were on the verge of a panic. A few minutes delay would give the enemy time to recover from their surprise. A shot from the howitzer was to be the signal for the squadrons to charge. They were waiting. But just then one of the men, Babcock, I think it was, rushed forward, recaptured the howitzer and dragged it off. The yellow jackets returned in triumph to their hole in the ground. In a minute a shell burst among the wagons. It knocked off the head of a mule, the guard stand peated, while the braying of the mules could be heard above the roar of the gun. The mules we captured supplied General Lee's army with transportation and the drove of fine beefs was sent as a present and furnished beef steaks for his soldiers. You will observe in the picture representing a return a figure on horseback playing a fiddle. It is Bob Ridley, Eastam. He got it from a headquarters wagon. Bob is playing a tune to which he had danced. Malbrook has gone to the wars. Our object was to impede Sheridan's march. I was sorry I could not be with you at the unveiling of the monument to our men at Front Royal, and I dissent from some historical statements in Major Richards's address. I do not agree with him that our men were hung in compliance with General Grant's orders to Sheridan. They were not hung in obedience to the orders of a superior, but from revenge. A man who acts from revenge simply obeys his own impulses. Major Richards says the orders were a dead letter, after I retaliated, which implies that they had not been before. I see no evidence to support such a conclusion. In his letter in the Times Major Richards says that Sheridan's dispatches about hanging our men were visionary, i.e. he never hung any. If so, the order had always been a dead letter. No one ever heard of his hangings until his dispatches were published a few years ago. Sheridan was then dead, but his posthumous memoirs say nothing about hanging. Although two pages are devoted to an account of the killing of Megs and Custer's burning dwelling-houses in Rockingham County in revenge. Megs was not killed by my men. We never went that far up the valley. Sheridan's dispatches in the war records about the men he hung were not even a revelation to me. They revealed nothing. They were simply specters of imagination, like the dagger in the air that Macbeth saw. If Sheridan had communicated Grant's dispatch of August 16th to any one to be executed, it would have been to Blazer, who commanded a picket corps that was specially detailed to look after us. In his report Blazer speaks of capturing some of my men. He never mentions hanging any. Those he captured were certainly not hung, for I saw them when they came home after the close of the war. The following dispatches record the rise and fall of Blazer. Sheridan to Auger. August 20, 1864. I have one hundred men who will take the contract to clean out Mosby's gang. I want one hundred Spencer rifles for them. Send them to me if they can be found in Washington. Signed, P. H. Sheridan, Major General, commanding. Endorsement. Approved by order of the Secretary of War. Signed, C. A. Dana, Assistant Secretary. Stevenson to Sheridan. Harper's Ferry, November 19, 1864. Two of Captain Blazer's men came in this morning, Privates Harris and Johnson. They report that Mosby with three hundred men attacked Blazer near Cabaltown yesterday about eleven o'clock. They say the entire command, with the exception of themselves, was captured or killed. I have ordered Major Congdon with three hundred twelve Pennsylvania cavalry to Cabaltown to bury dead and take care of wounded, if any, and report all facts he can learn. I shall immediately furnish report as soon as received. Exit Blazer. Richards commanded in the Blazer fight. I was not there. As an affair of arms it passed anything that had been done in the Shenandoah campaign and recalled the days when knighthood was in flower. When we sent Blazer and his band of prisoners to Richmond, they would not have admitted that they had ever hung anybody. Major Richards refers to Grant's orders to destroy subsistence for an army so as to make the country untenable by the Confederates, and pathetically describes the conflagration. He ought to know that there had been burning of mills and wheat stacks and louden two years before Grant came to Virginia. Grant's orders were no more directed against my command than Earley's. Augusta and Rockingham were desolated, where we never had been, but I can't see the slightest connection between burning forage and provisions and hanging prisoners. One is permitted by the code of war, the other is not. After General Lee's surrender I received a communication from General Hancock asking for mine. I declined to do so until I could hear whether Joe Johnston would surrender or continue the war. We agreed on a five-day's armistice. When it expired nothing had been heard from Johnston. I met a flag of truce at Millwood and had proposed an extension of ten days, but received through Major Russell a message from Hancock refusing it and informing me that unless I surrendered immediately he would proceed to devastate the country. The reply I sent by Russell was, Tell General Hancock he is able to do it. Hancock then had forty thousand men at Winchester. The next day I disbanded my battalion to save the country from being made a desert. If anyone doubts this let him read Hancock's report. If it was legitimate for Hancock to lay waste the country after I had suspended hostilities surely it was equally so for Grant to do it when I was doing all the damage in my power to his army. Stanton warned Hancock not to meet me in person under a flag of truce for fear that I would treacherously kill him. Hancock replied that he would send an officer to meet me. He sent General Chapman. The attention Grant paid to us shows that we did him a great deal of harm. Keeping my men in prison weakened us as much as to hang them. Major Richards complains of the debasing epithets Sheridan applied to us. I have read his reports, correspondence and memoirs, but have never seen the epithets. In common with all Northern and many Southern people he called us guerrillas. The word guerrilla is a diminutive of the Spanish word garra, war, and simply means one engaged in the minor operations of war. Although I have never adopted it I have never resented as an insult the term guerrilla when applied to me. Sheridan says that my battalion was the most redoubtable partisan body that he met. I certainly take no exception to that. He makes no charge of any active inhumanity against us. The highest compliment ever paid to the efficiency of our command is the statement in Sheridan's memoirs that while his army largely outnumbered Earleys, yet their line of battle-strength was about equal on account of the detachments he was compelled to make to guard the border and his line of communication from partisan attacks. Ours was the only force behind him. At that time the records show that in round numbers Earleys had seventeen thousand present for duty and Sheridan had ninety-four thousand. I had only five companies of cavalry when Sheridan came in August 1864 to the Shenandoah Valley. A sixth was organized in September. Two more companies joined me in April 1865 after the evacuation of Richmond. They came just in time to surrender. I don't care a straw whether Custer was solely responsible for the hanging of our men or jointly with others. If we believe the reports of the generals none of them ever heard of the hanging of our men they must have committed suicide. Contemporary evidence is against Custer. I wonder if he also denied burning dwelling-houses around Berryville. I once called at the White House in 1876 to see General Grant, sent him my card, and was promptly admitted. When I came out of his room one of the secretaries told me that General Custer had called the day before, but that General Grant had refused to see him. The incident is related in the Life of Custer. A few weeks afterward Custer was killed in the Sitting Bull Massacre. Major Richards further says that there was scarcely a family in all that section that did not have some member in Mosby's command. If that is true I must have commanded a larger army than Sheridan. I didn't know it. He describes the pathos of the scenes that might have been if the severe and cruel order had been executed to transfer the families from that region to Fort McHenry, and says it would have paralyzed my command. Yes, so that would have been a more humane way of getting rid of it than killing the men. Now I have never considered women and children necessary appendages to an army. On the contrary, I would rather class them with what Caesar, in his commentaries, call impedimenta. Homer's heroes were not paralyzed when Helen was carried off to Troy. He had only aroused their martial ambition. Sheridan knew that if he did anything of the kind it would stimulate the activity of my men, so he didn't try it. As for our Lieutenant Colonel, who, as Major Richards says, married in that section, I think that if Sheridan had captured his wife and mother-in-law and sent them to prison instead of going into mourning he would have felt all the wrath and imitated the example of the fierce Achilles when he heard that Patroclus, his friend, had been killed and his armor had been captured. Now perished Troy, he said, and rushed to fight. Very truly yours, John S. Mosby. CHAPTER XIX My recollections of General Lee My first meeting with General Robert E. Lee was in August 1862 when I brought the news of Burnside's reinforcement of Pope, a story I have told in the preceding pages. The next time we met was at his headquarters in Orange, about two months after Gettysburg. He did not seem in the least depressed, and was as buoyant and aggressive as ever. He took a deep interest in my operations, for there was nothing of the Fabius in his character. Lee was the most aggressive man I met in the war and was always ready for an enterprise. I believe that his interest in me was largely due to the fact that his father, Light Horse Harry, was a partisan officer in the Revolutionary War. After General Stewart was killed in May 1864 I reported directly to General Lee. During the siege of Petersburg I visited him three times, twice when I was wounded. Once when I got out of the ambulance, he was standing near, talking to General Longstreet. When he saw me hobbling up to him on crutches, he came to meet me, introduced me to General Longstreet, and said, Colonel, the only fault I have ever had to find with you is that you are always getting wounded. Such a speech from General Lee more than repaid me for my wound. The last time I saw him during the war was about two months before the surrender. I had been wounded again. He was not only kind but affectionate and asked me to take dinner with him, though he said he hadn't much to eat. There was a leg of mutton on the table. He remarked that some of his staff officers must have stolen it. After dinner when we were alone he talked very freely. He said that in the spring of 1862 Joe Johnston ought not to have fallen back from the Rappadan to Richmond and that he had written urging him to turn against Washington. He also said that when Joe Johnston evacuated his lines at Yorktown in May of that year he should have given battle with his whole force on the Isthmus at Williamsburg instead of making a rear-guard fight. When I bade Lee goodbye after our last interview I had no idea that it was my final parting with him as my commander. I can never forget the sympathetic words with which he cautioned me against unnecessary exposure to danger. The following is the last order he ever gave me. It was dated March 27, 1865, and put me in command of all northern Virginia. Collect your command and watch the country from the front of Gordonsville to Blue Ridge and also the valley. Your command is all now in that section, and the general, Lee, will rely on you to watch and protect the country. If any of your command is in northern Neck, call it to you, signed W. H. Taylor, assistant adjutant general. Lee was raised in the political school of Washington and Hamilton. In the Virginia Convention of 1788 his father had voted against the imbecile confederation and for the Constitution which made the laws of the Union supreme law of the land, and in 1798 spoke and voted against the famous state's rights resolutions. In the year 1794 he commanded the Virginia troops that were ordered to Pennsylvania to suppress the whiskey insurrection. It is difficult to distinguish in law between Washington's proclamation in 1794, calling out the military force to execute the laws of the United States, and Lincoln's in 1861. As Lieutenant Colonel of the Second Cavalry, Lee was stationed in Texas in February 1861, but was ordered to Washington, arriving there about the time of the presidential inauguration. The commander-in-chief, General Scott, of Virginia, was too old for active service. There was then no retirement law, and he wanted Lee near him as an advisor and second in command. On March 16 Colonel Edwin V. Sumner was promoted to be a Brigadier General in place of twigs who had been dismissed for treachery in surrendering the Union troops in Texas. A Virginia lady who met Lee about that time told me, many years ago, that he spoke to her with great indignation about General Twigs's conduct. Lee now became Colonel of the First Cavalry. His biographers do not seem to have heard of this promotion, and have ignored the fact that he accepted a commission from President Lincoln. Lee was with his family at Arlington, and on confidential relations with the War Department, up to the day of his resignation, April 20, 1861. As the command of the U.S. Army was offered to him, Scott must have thought that he would stand by the Union, and Lee's purpose to resign in the event of Virginia passing an ordinance of secession had not been disclosed. Lee was forced by circumstances to take the side for which he fought in the war. On the subject of slavery and the right of secession he agreed with Abraham Lincoln. Five years before in writing about slavery he had said, it is a moral, social, and political evil. During at Fort Mason, Texas, on January 23, 1861, after seven states had passed ordinances of secession, Lee said, The framers of our Constitution would never have exhausted so much labor, wisdom, and forbearance in its formation, and surrounded it with so many safeguards and securities, if it was intended to be broken by every member of the Confederacy at will. It was intended for perpetual union, so expressed in the preamble, and for the establishment of a government not a compact, which can only be dissolved by revolution, or by the consent of all the people in convention assembled. It is idle to talk of secession. Anarchy would have been established, and not a government by Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, and all the other patriots of the revolution. When Lee resigned his commission to join the forces of his native state, he acted, as nearly every soldier acts, from personal sympathy with the combatants, and not on any legal theory of right and wrong. On the day when he resigned, he wrote his sister that he could not draw his sword against his family, his neighbors, and his friends. On the previous day he happened to go into a store in Alexandria to pay a bill. His heart was burdened with the great sorrow, and he uttered these words which the merchant wrote down in his journal. They still stand there to-day. I must say that I am one of those dull creatures that cannot see the good of secession. Below this entry the merchant wrote, Spoken by Colonel R. E. Lee when he paid this bill, April 19, 1861. A few days later Lee was made commander-in-chief of the forces of the state of Virginia. There was no competition for their position. The late Judge John Critcher represented West Moreland, Lee's native county, in the secession convention, and was one of the committee sent to notify him of the appointment. The Judge told me that when Lee returned with the committee to the convention hall, in the capital at Richmond, they had to wait for a few minutes in the rotunda. Looking at Howden's statue of Washington, Lee said very gravely, I hope we have seen the last of secession. He evidently feared that the seceding states would soon separate from one another. The life of Alexander Stevens shows that the apprehension was not unfounded, and that the members of the Confederacy were held together only by the pressure of war and by the despotic power of the central government at Richmond. I once heard General John C. Breckenridge say, at a dinner in Baltimore, soon after he returned from his exile in Canada, that if the Southern Confederacy had been established, there would have been such a spirit of local self-assertion that every county would have claimed the right to set up for itself. I met General Lee a few times after the war, but the days of strife were never mentioned. I remember the last words he spoke to me, about two months before his death, at a reception that was given to him in Alexandria. When I bade him good-bye he said, Colonel, I hope we shall have no more wars. In March 1870 I was walking across the bridge connecting the Ballard and Exchange hotels in Richmond, and to my surprise I met General Lee and his daughter. The General was pale and haggard and did not look like the Apollo I had known in the Army. After a while I went to his room, our conversation was on current topics. I felt oppressed by the great memories that his presence revived, and while both of us were thinking about the war, neither of us referred to it. After leaving the room I met General Pickett and told him that I had just been with Lee. He remarked that, if I would go with him, he would call and pay his respects to the General, but he did not want to be alone with him. So I went back with Pickett. The interview was cold and formal, and evidently embarrassing to both. It was their only meeting after the war. In a few minutes I rose and left the room, together with General Pickett. He then spoke very bitterly of General Lee, calling him that old man. He had my division massacred at Gettysburg, Pickett said. Well, it made you immortal, I replied. I rather suspect that Pickett gave a wrong reason for his unfriendly feelings. In May 1892, at the University of Virginia, I took breakfast with Professor Venable, who had been on Lee's staff. He told me that some days before the surrender at Appomattox, General Lee ordered Pickett under arrest, I suppose, for the Five Forks Affair—footnote, Battle of April 1, 1865—and a footnote. I think the Professor said that he carried the order. I remember very well his adding that, on the retreat, Pickett passed them, and that General Lee said, with deep feeling, is that man still with this army? I once went to see the tomb at Mulcombe in the chapel of the Ursuline convent at Quebec. When I read the inscription, Fate denied him victory, but blessed him with a glorious immortality. It recalled General Robert E. Lee. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. This recording is by Mark Smith of Simpsonville, South Carolina. Mosby's Memoirs 20. My Recollections of General Grant I first met General Grant in May 1872, after Mr. Greeley had been nominated for the Presidency by a convention whose members called themselves Liberal Republicans, although, as a matter of fact, many of them had been the most radical element of the party, but had seceded on account of personal grievances. My home was then at Warrington, Virginia, where I was practicing law. As it was only fifty miles from Washington, I was frequently there, but I had only once seen General Grant, one evening at the National Theater, when he was in a box with General Sherman. Both men seemed to enjoy the play as much as the gods in the gallery. In common with most southern soldiers I had a very kindly feeling towards General Grant, not only on account of his magnanimous conduct at Appomattox, but also for his treatment of me at the close of hostilities. I had never called on him, however. If I had done so, and if he had received me even politely, we should both have been subjected to severe criticism. So bitter was the feeling between the sections at the time. No doubt in those days most northerners believed the imaginative stories of the war correspondence and supposed that my battalion fought under the black flag. General Grant was as much misunderstood in the south as I was in the north. But time has healed wounds which were once thought to be irremediable. And there is today no memory of our war so bitter, probably, as the Scottish recollection of Culloden. Like most southern men I had disapproved the reconstruction measures and was sore and very restive under military government. But since my prejudices have faded I can now see that many things which we regarded as being prompted by hostile and vindictive motives were actually necessary in order to prevent anarchy and to secure the freedom of the newly emancipated slave. I had given little attention to politics and had devoted my time to my profession, although I was under no political disability. As we had all been opposed to the Republican Party before the war it was a point of honour to keep on voting that way. When Horace Greeley was nominated I saw, or thought I saw, that it was idle to divide longer upon issues which we acknowledged to have been legally, if not properly, settled. And that if the southern people wanted reconciliation as they said they did the logical thing to do was to vote for Grant. I have not changed my opinion nor yet have I any criticism to make of those who differed with me. We were all working for the same end. Some said they couldn't sacrifice their principles for Grant's friendship. I didn't sacrifice mine. Not long before the death of the late General M. C. Butler, United States Senator from South Carolina, I met him on the street in Washington. We ought to have gone with you for Grant, he said. My views and opinions of that period are set forth in the following interview published in the Richmond Inquirer in January 1873. Reporter I see it stated generally that you have some influence with General Grant. Is this true? Colonel Mosby I don't know what amount of influence I may have with the President, but General Grant knows the fiery ordeal I have been through here in supporting him, and I suppose he has some appreciation of it. Reporter What is the policy that you have advocated for the Virginia people? Colonel Mosby The issues that formally divided the Virginia people from the Republican Party were those growing out of the Reconstruction measures. Last year the Virginia people agreed to make no further opposition to those measures and to accept all questions growing out of them as settled. They're being no longer any questions than on principles separating Virginia people from General Grant, it became a mere matter of policy and expediency whether they would support him or Horace Greeley. I thought it was the first opportunity the Southern people had had to be restored to their proper relation and influence with the Federal Administration. In other words, I said the Southern statesmen ought to avail themselves of this opportunity and support General Grant for re-election, and thereby acquire influence and control over his Administration. That was the only way I saw of displacing the carpet-bag crew that represented the government in the Southern states. I think that events have demonstrated that I was right. General Grant has certainly accorded to me as much consideration or influence as any one man could have a right to expect. I know it is the disposition of General Grant to do everything in his power for the relief of the Southern people, if Southern politicians will allow him to do it. The men who control the policy of the Conservative Party combine with the extreme radicals to keep the Southern people arrayed against General Grant. As long as this course is pursued, the carpet-bag crew who profess to support the Administration get all of the Federal patronage. This is the sustenance, the support of the carpet-bag party in the South. Deprived of that it would die tomorrow. I admit, as every Southern man must admit, the gross wrongs that have been perpetuated upon the Southern people. I am no apologist for them, but neither party proposes any atonement or indemnity for the past. I propose at least to give security for the future by an alliance between the Southern people and General Grant's Administration. Reporter Has the President ever tendered you any position under his Administration? Colonel Mosby Shortly after the presidential election, the President said something to me on the subject of giving me an office. I told him while I would asleaf hold an office under him as under any other man who had ever been President. Yet there was no office within his gift that I desired or would accept. I told him that my motives in supporting him had been assailed, and my accepting of position under his Administration would be regarded as a confirmation of the truth of the charge that I was governed by selfish motives. But my principal reason for not accepting anything from him was that I would have far more influence for good by taking nothing for myself. Reporter Colonel, I have heard that you are now promoting claims against the government. Is that a fact? Colonel Mosby It is not. I have filed one claim for a citizen before the Southern Claims Commission. I shall turn this over, however, to a claim agent. I have had hundreds of claims of all sorts for prosecution against the government offered me, but have declined them all, as I have no idea of bartering my political influence. I do not think that any man nominated at Lynchburg will stand the most remote chance of success, because he will only be supported by the Negroes of the State, led by a few white men. No matter what my relations to the Administration may be, I wouldn't assist in putting this set in power. I had strong personal reasons for being friendly with General Grant. If he had not thrown his shield over me, I should have been outlawed and driven into exile. When Lee's surrendered my battalion was in Northern Virginia, on the Potomac, a hundred miles from Appomattox. Secretary of War Stanton invited all soldiers in Virginia to surrender on the same conditions which were offered to Lee's army, but I was accepted. General Grant, who was then all-powerful, interposed, and sent me an offer of the same parole that he had given General Lee. Such a service I could never forget. When the opportunity came, I remembered what he had done for me, and I did all I could for him. Early one morning, a few days after the election of 1872, I had to go to the Treasury Department on business. The Secretary, Mr. Boutwell, had not come, and I was waiting in an anti-room. To my surprise, General Grant walked in. He shook hands with me and said, I heard you were here and came to thank you for my getting the vote of Virginia. That is the only time I ever saw a President in any of the departments. Of course I appreciated General Grant's compliment, although he gave me credit for a great deal more than I deserved. General Grant had also done another thing which showed the generosity of his nature. A few weeks before the surrender, a small party of my men crossed the Potomac one night and got into a fight, in which a detective was killed. One of the men was captured and sent to Fort McHenry. After the war he was tried by a military commission and sentenced to be imprisoned. The boy's mother went to see President Johnson, to beg a pardon for her son, but Johnson repelled her roughly. In her distress she went over to the War Department to see General Grant. He listened patiently to her sorrowful story, then rose and asked her to go with him. He took her to the White House, walked into the reception room, and told the President that there had been suffering enough and that he would not leave the room without a pardon for the young Southerner. Johnson signed the necessary paper. In spite of the parole that I had taken, after I had settled down to the practice of law, I was several times arrested by Provost Marshall's, stationed at the courthouses where I went on the circuit. This was both annoying and unfair. My parole was a contract with the government that was binding on both parties. To arrest me before I had violated it was a breach of it. As my wife passed through Washington on her way to Baltimore, she determined to go to the White House not to ask for a pardon but to make a complaint. She had not intimated her purpose to me. Her father and President Johnson had served in Congress together, and had been friends, so she told Johnson whose daughter and whose wife she was. Instead of responding kindly, he was rude to her. She left him and went to see General Grant at the War Department. He treated her as courteously as if she had been the wife of a union soldier, and then wrote the following letter which he gave to her. He did not dictate the letter to a clerk. The whole is in his small, neat handwriting. It gave me liberty to travel anywhere. I'm molested as long as I observe my parole. THE ARMYS OF THE UNITED STATES Washington, D.C. February 2, 1866 John S. Mosby, lately of the Southern Army, will hereafter be exempt from arrest by military authorities except for violation of his parole, unless directed by the President of the United States, Secretary of War, or from these headquarters. His parole will authorize him to travel freely within the State of Virginia, and as no obstacle has been thrown in the way of paroled officers and men from pursuing their civil pursuits or traveling out of their States, the same privilege will be extended to J. S. Mosby, unless otherwise directed by competent authority. Signed U.S. Grant, Lieutenant General. When General Ewell was captured by the Federal Forces on the retreat from Richmond, he was sent to Fort Warren. Mrs. Ewell, who had married the General during the war, was from Nashville and had known Johnson when he was Governor of Tennessee. She, too, called on the President, presuming on their old acquaintance, to ask that her husband be released on parole. Ewell was in a feeble condition. He had lost a leg in the war. Johnson treated her just as he had treated my wife and asked her why she had married a one-legged man. Mrs. Ewell then went to see General Grant, who expressed great pleasure at being able to do something for my old friend Ewell, and ordered that the poor fellow should be released from prison. He did hundreds of similar things. As I have said, my first interview with General Grant was in May, 1872, when I was introduced to him by Senator Lewis of Virginia. He immediately began telling me how near I came to capturing the train on which he went to take command of the Army of the Potomac in 1864. I remarked, if I had done it, things might have changed. I might have been in the White House, and you might be calling on me. Yes, he said. In our talk I became convinced that he was not only willing, but anxious, to lift the southern people out of the rut they were in, but he couldn't help them without their cooperation. If they insisted on keeping up their fire on him, he had to return the fire. I knew that he was in favor of relieving southerners of the disabilities imposed by the Fourteenth Amendment, as he had recommended in his message. Such a bill had passed the House, but in the Senate Sumner had insisted on tacking to it his Civil Rights Bill, which made it odious, and the measure was defeated. I suggested that if he could get such a bill passed, it would be construed as an olive branch, and would create such a reaction in his favor in Virginia that we could carry the State for him. We will see what can be done, he replied. As I was under no disability myself, it would have been hard to discover a selfish motive in what I urged Grant to do. A few days afterwards a bill removing political disabilities was reported in the House. The rules were suspended and the bill passed. It was sent to the Senate. There was a night session. Sumner went to his committee room to take a nap, and while he was asleep the bill was called up and became a law. He was furious when he awoke and found out what had been done. Many Confederates who had been excluded from public position were then sent to Congress or received appointments from Washington. Among them was the Vice President of the Southern Confederacy. I crossed the Rubicon when I paved my first visit to the White House, and I never recrossed it. My son Beverly, who was about twelve years old, was with me. He had been with his mother six years before when she called on Andrew Johnson. That night, when he knelt by her to say his prayers, after getting through the usual form he turned to her and said, Now, Mama, may I pray to God to send old Johnson to the devil? I told the story to Grant. A great many would have joined in Beverly's prayer, he said, laughing. As many people in the South regarded me as a connecting link between the administration and themselves, I had to pay frequent visits to the White House, either to ask favors or to carry complaints. Such a duty as a shirt of nesses to anyone who wears it. Although I declined to take office from General Grant and exerted all the influence I had with him for the benefit of the Virginia people, this did not save me from the imputation of assorted motives. It is generally believed that Grant appointed me consul at Hong Kong. He did not. I was appointed by Mr. Hayes. Often, as I went to the White House during Grant's second term, I never failed to see him, except once, when he was in the hands of a dentist. In those days, hundreds went to him for appointments, who would now be sent to the Civil Service Commission. In spite of all this pressure, he never seemed to be in a hurry. He was the best listener I ever saw, and one of the quickest to see the core of a question. I once called at the White House about seven o'clock in the evening, with a telegram I had received from General Hampton. The doorkeeper said that the President was at dinner. I gave the man my card and told him I would wait in the hall. He returned with a message from General Grant, asking me to come in and take dinner with a family. I replied that I had already dined. Then Ulysses S. Grant, Jr., came out and said, Father says that you must come in and get some dinner. Of course I went in. At the table the General spoke of having called that evening on Alexander Stevens, who was lying sick at his hotel. It looked as if our war was a long way in the past when the President of the United States could call to pay his respects to the Vice President of the Confederate States. A few weeks before the close of Grant's second term I introduced one of my men to him. I hope you will not think less of Captain Glasscock because he was with me in the war, I said. I think all the more of him the President promptly replied. I once said to General Grant, General, if you had been a southern man would you have been in the southern army? Certainly, he replied. He always spoke in the friendliest manner of his old army comrades who went with the south. Once, speaking of Stonewall Jackson, who was with him at West Point, he said to me, Jackson was the most conscientious being I ever knew. I saw Grant on the day when he signed the Electoral Commission Bill to decide the Hays-Tilden dispute. He was in an unusually good humor and said that the man in whose favor the Commission decided should be inaugurated. He talked a good deal about his early life in the army and gave a description of his first two battles, Palo Alto and Rosaca de la Palma. A few days after he left the White House I called on General Grant at the home of Mr. Hamilton Fish where he was staying. I did not ask him to recommend me to the new administration as some members of the Cabinet were not friendly to him. President Hays, however, appointed me United States Consul at Hong Kong and it was there in 1879 during Grant's tour of the world that I last saw him. I went in a boat to meet him and as I was the official representative of the United States, the other craft that surrounded the steamship as soon as it anchored gave me the right of way. As I went up the gangway I recognized him, with his wife and eldest son, standing on the deck. It did look strange that I should be there representing the government while General Grant was a private citizen. There was with me an old Virginian who had gone to Hong Kong before the war. When I introduced him I told General Grant that when I arrived I had found this fellow countryman of mine in about the same temper that I was in when the General was fighting in the wilderness, but that he was willing to surrender to the man to whom General Lee had surrendered. Mrs. Grant spoke up and asked liberal terms for him and Grant said that he paroled him and hoped he would be a loyal citizen. The governor of Hong Kong met General Grant's party at the wharf and they went to the government house. Next morning the general paid his respects to me at the American consulate. He was the guest of the governor for about ten days. On several days I breakfasted with him and we had many free and informal talks. Once he was giving a description of his ride on donkey-back from Jaffa to Jerusalem. That, he said, was the roughest road I ever travelled. General, I replied, I think you've travelled one rougher road than that. Where? he inquired. From the rapid end to Richmond, I answered. I reckon there were more obstructions on that road, he admitted. I went with the general, Mrs. Grant, Colonel Fred Grant, and the governor in a launch to the United States man of war which carried his party up the China coast, and bade him my last farewell. When we started ashore, the ship began firing a royal salute of twenty-one guns in honour of the governor, and the launch stopped. When the firing was over General Grant lifted his hat and we responded. I never saw the great soldier again. Some time afterwards I sent the general a Malacca cane which I had had lacquered for him. It bore the inscription to General U.S. Grant from John S. Mosby, Hong Kong. He was in very poor health when he received it, but Colonel Fred Grant wrote me that his father was pleased at my remembrance of him. When I heard that President Cleveland had removed me as consul in 1885, I wrote to General Grant and asked him to secure me employment from some corporation by which I could make a living. I did not then know how near he was to his end. My letter was forwarded to him at Mt. McGregor, and on the day before I sailed from Hong Kong a dispatch announced his death. I felt that I had lost my best friend. I did not suppose that my letter would have any result, but on arriving in San Francisco I learned that he had dictated a note to Governor Stanford of the Southern Pacific asking him as a personal favor to take care of me. I was made an attorney in the company and held that position for sixteen years. I have given as faithful an account as Aeneas did to Dido of events, all of which I saw and part of which I was. No one clung longer to the Confederacy than I did, and I can say with the champion of another lost cause, that if Troy could have been saved by this right hand, even by the same it would have been saved.