A review of A Thousand Points of Truth: The History and Humanity of Col. John Singleton Mosby in Newsprint (ExLibris, 2016) by V.P. Hughes
Valerie Protopapas (who writes under her maiden name V.P. Hughes) has given us a massive work on Confederate guerilla fighter, Colonel John Singleton Mosby (1833-1916). Her tome, which reaches over eight-hundred pages, is made up of annotated newspaper reports about her subject spanning a lifetime that ended with his death more than fifty five years after the War Between the States. Mrs. Protopapas leaves no doubt about why she undertook her task and states it unabashedly in the introduction: “I hope to show that John Singleton Mosby was a true hero who struggled not just against the armed might of a powerful enemy, but against the forces of political, moral and ethical chaos that raged around him in his well-considered life.”
The author’s involvement with Mosby often seems to border on adoration; and the fact that she has spent most of her life on Long Island makes this attraction all the more interesting. Whenever she quotes Yankee newspaper editors raging against Mosby’s alleged “atrocities” as a guerilla leader in North Central Virginia, she rushes almost indignantly to his defense. And she appears genuinely relieved that after the defeat of the Confederacy, demands by vengeful Union supporters for Mosby’s imprisonment and execution never lead to any action, other than a few short-term detainments that ended in his release.
A Thousand Points of T...
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From newspaper comments, it seems that the guerilla tactics of the man known as “the Gray Ghost”, which entailed capturing Union commanders with small bands of irregulars, aroused admiration on the victorious side as well in the South. Moreover, right after the War, Mosby became an admired tactician across the ocean, and Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck encouraged German officers to study his remarkable form of warfare. Perhaps more than any other connection, his contacts with Union General Ulysses S. Grant helped extricate Mosby from difficult situations for several years after the War. Grant conferred on Mosby a safe conduct pass when the two met in January 1866 that served the “Gray Ghost” in good stead, until his enemies lost their passion for revenge.
Mosby’s relation to Grant yielded other benefits. He joined the Republican Party while Grant was preparing to run for a second term in 1872, and the general who gave him a handwritten letter of safe passage later became his lifelong friend. In 1876, Mosby, by then widowed, relocated to Washington, and tried to gain access to Grant’s successor, Rutherford B. Hayes. What other Southerners, including Mosby’s neighbors in Warrenton, Virginia, viewed as opportunistic moves caused his popularity to plummet among zealous defenders of the Confederate cause. Here Mrs. Protopapas comes to Mosby’s defense. His support for Grant and his decision to join the national Republicans was intended to bridge the gap between Republicans and Southern Democrats. In Virginia Mosby withheld support from pro-Reconstruction Radical Republicans and backed the state Conservative Party and their gubernatorial candidate in 1873 General James Kemper. Mosby’s strategy was to establish cooperation between the Conservatives in Virginia (who were formed out of and then returned to the Southern Democrats) and Grant and the national Republican leadership.
