- Joined
- Jul 19, 2016
- Location
- Spotsylvania Virginia
Introduction: Although we traditionally associate horse soldiers with the cavalry, there were several other categories of soldiers who fought on horseback that were not classified as cavalry. Partisan Rangers were one of those groups. This will be the first of three series I intend to post this coming year on non-cavalry soldiers who fought on horseback. The next two will be on the Mounted Artillery followed by The Dragoons (aka Mounted Infantry).Partisan Rangers
“…with the exception of John Mosby, these rangers are "a nuisance and an evil to the service and ought to be disbanded”
Possibly the formation of the Partisan Rangers came about on March 27, 1861 when the Virginia Legislature passed the Virginia Ranger Act, twenty days before it voted to succeed from the Union. The legislation called for the formation of ten Companies of Rangers. Following suite, on April 8th, a bill was introduced in the 1stConfederate States Congress to permit forming a force of partisan rangers with a five-dollar bounty for each Union soldier killed. The Confederate Senate Congressional Military Committee replaced the bounty with providing rangers the same pay as regular soldiers and included the stipulation that they become subjects to nearly all Confederate States Army regulation. The Confederate Congress passed the Partisan Ranger Act on April 21, 1861 with the intent to increase recruitment of irregulars for service. The bill also allowed Partisan Rangers to sell captured goods and arms to the Confederate Quartermaster General Department in one instance. But the overriding purposes were to take control over guerilla warfare for the betterment of the Government and yet promote guerilla warfare in places out of reach of the Confederate army.
Initially, President Davis did not approve of irregular warfare since the guerillas were too difficult to control and because it reduced the number of able men eligible to serve in the regular army. However, in the fall of 1861, when southern regulars were driven out of western Virginia, irregulars remined to fight. That led Virginia Governor John Letcher to issue a proclamation calling to “raise such a force as would enable General John Floyd to recover western Virginia from the dominion of the invader.”
From that legislation and proclamation came a variety of irregular soldiers composed mostly into two groups - guerrillas and the more conservative units known as Partisan Rangers or Raiders. Their activities ranged from out-right criminal acts to support of the regular army through reconnaissance, intelligence, and disruption of Union supplies.
The more independent and loosely organized of the two groups were the guerrillas, such as William Quantrill’s Raiders out of Missouri. This group adhered to their own laws and reported to no one outside of their own command. For the most part those men were of questionable background. One had murdered his father, another his brother. Many were outright thieves. William (aka Bloody Bill) Anderson was a member of Quantrill’s Raiders, but later started his own, and perhaps more feared, band of guerrillas in Missouri.
The raiders who joined John Hunt Morgan (Morgan’s Thunderbolt Raiders) in Kentucky at the beginning of the war belonged to the aristocracy. They were mostly from wealthy families who originally settled in Virginia and North Carolina and had migrated west to Kentucky. Four years before the war they formed the Lexington Rifles. At the start of the civil war, they were sworn into the Confederate army as the First Kentucky Cavalry. Morgan worked in perhaps the widest range of operation, to include parts of Tennessee, Kentucky and his famous ride into Ohio and Indiana.
Further east in Virginia a more organized group, Mosby’s Rangers, emerged to become the ultimate example of partisan rangers. John Singleton Mosby (aka The Grey Ghost) first appeared as a subordinate to General William “Grumble” Jones’ cavalry in the Shenandoah Valley in 1861. Jones’ fierce-disciplinarian traits may have molded the young Mosby. By January 1863, Mosby had gained permission to organize a group of Partisan Rangers, reporting to Cavalry Commander J.E.B. Stuart. Stuart recommended that Mosby call his group Mosby’s Regulars, since the term Ranger had gained a bad reputation. The men of Mosby’s Regulars were anything but “regulars” however, consisting of a hodgepodge of deserters, men home on furlough, wounded, too old or too young for regular service, and a few with questionable character.
Although the Partisan Rangers were able to distract the enemy, play important roles with independent raids and collect intelligence. It proved an overall failure compared to its original intent of moving unrestricted and unconventional warfare outside of government control, to advance the Confederacy’s war goals.
By late 1863, The Partisan Ranger Act of 1861 had begun to fall apart due to unlawful and violent guerilla activity. General Thomas Rosser, cavalry commander in the Shenandoah Valley, wrote to Robert E. Lee that, with the exception of John Mosby, these rangers were "a nuisance and an evil to the service and ought to be disbanded, and the men placed in the regular ranks.” Similar characterizations by other Confederate generals caused Lee to lobby the Confederate government to repeal the Partisan Ranger Act. On February 17th, 1864 all except Mosby’s Rangers and (John) McNeill’s Rangers both operating in northern and western counties of Virginia, were repealed. Those two groups had consistently demonstrated military discipline and operated until the end of the war.