Can anyone tell me with confidence that Mosby was not a bushwacker? I thought he was but now I am not so sure.....Grey Ghost - He must have been in uniform.
I've been trying to do a little research on your question tonight. He is listed, in general, as one, but I would say, "it depends." The CSA passed a partisan rangers act and he fits into that. He was
most definitely not the scalping, collecting ears, decapitation type that went on in the Missouri/Kansas area.
But I came across this very interesting tidbit about Benjamin Butler and Mosby on Wikipedia. First, I had no idea that Butler and Mosby ever met, never mind talked or listened to each other. Mosby was very educated and certainly understood differences of ideas and opinions on a wide range of topics. I would say one of his greatest gifts was he was teachable and flexible for whatever situation life held for him.
Virginia politics
On May 8, 1872, as covered by the
Washington Star, Mosby personally thanked then-
U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant for that document. Mosby also told Grant he believed vehemently that election of
Horace Greeley (a long-time editor of the
New York Tribune detested in the South) would be worse for the South because the men surrounding him were worse than those surrounding his old benefactor Grant. A few days later, Massachusetts Congressman
Benjamin Butler presented an amnesty bill for former Confederates, as Mosby had suggested in that meeting, and soon President Grant signed it into law. After Greeley became the Democratic party's nominee in July, Mosby became Grant's campaign manager in Virginia, and an active
Republican, although he also made sure the Republicans would not run a candidate against his friend and fellow Warrenton attorney
Eppa Hunton, who campaigned and won as a Democrat.
[51] In his autobiography Grant stated, "Since the close of the war, I have come to know Colonel Mosby personally and somewhat intimately. He is a different man entirely from what I supposed. ... He is able and thoroughly honest and truthful."
[52]