Of all the images associated with the Civil War era, there is none more captivating than that of the swashbuckling Confederate cavalry officer. Daring, fearless, and often reckless to a fault, cavalry commanders were icons in the South both during the conflict and afterwards. A master horse soldier, Mosby was the scourge of Union forces in Northern Virginia or, as the region came to be know, "Mosby's Confederacy." First published posthumously in 1917,
The Memoirs of Colonel John S. Mosby
provides an extraordinary record of the war in Virginia as well as the studied, first-hand insights of one of the Confederacy's most formidable soldiers.
John Singleton Mosby
was born in 1833 at the home of his grandfather, a Revolutionary War veteran, in Powhatan County, Virginia. He was dismissed from the University of Virginia after he shot and wounded another student. Ordered to serve a short jail sentence, Mosby read law with his defense counsel and eventually established his own practice. In 1915, as Mosby was nearing the end of his life, the University of Virginia presented him with a heavy bronze medal on which was inscribed a flowery tribute from his "alma mater."