John Singleton Mosby: The Spirit of the Confederacy

John Singleton Mosby: The Spirit of the Confederacy

Many leaders and heroic figures emerged from the Civil War, on both the Confederate and Union sides. Ordinary people were given the chance to show their valor and conceive brilliant military strategies. One such “regular Joe” exercised the idea of attacking many spots of an army to weaken them instead of the traditional charging, and worked his way up through the ranks and become the legend known as the “Gray Ghost”. John Singleton Mosby helped the Southern effort in the war by weakening the strength of the Union armies through his style of guerilla warfare, and by disrupting the supply of goods and communications within the Union through his attacks and raids.

John Mosby’s life began in Edgemont Virginia on December 6th, 1833. He was baptized John Singleton Mosby by his Methodist parents Virginia Mclaurine and Alfred Mosby. John’s first seven years of schooling took place in a school called Murrell’s Shop. However, around 1840 his family moved to a town in the Blue Ridge Mountains four miles from Charlottesville, Virginia. For the next three years he would attend the local school in Fry’s Woods. Starting at age ten, he attended Charlottesville School that taught up through high school .

Mosby had a reputation for a heated temper and one of the first occurrences of it was on March 29, 1853 after he had entered and graduated the University of Virginia .

The incident began with a disagreement between himself and another student, George R. Turpin, a medical student who was also attending the University. The tiff then escalated to the point that John shot the young man and then was sentenced to twelve months in prison and fined five hundred dollars. Surprisingly, this event seemed to help rather than hurt the reckless Mosby, for while he was in prison he studied law. After being pardoned by the governor at the time as a Christmas present, he studied in the law office of William J. Robertson. Admitted to the bar in 1855, Mosby first set up his own practice in Howardsville, Virginia. However, Mosby soon after moved his practice to Bristol but not before he met and married Pauline Clark . They were married in a Nashville hotel on December 30th, 1857 and had their first child May, on May 10th, 1859 . Unfortunately, their time together was cut short by the outbreak of the civil war in 1861.