A Confederate takes a stand against Confederates hiding what they really fought for

He was known as the "Gray Ghost," a capable Confederate officer whose 43rd Virginia Cavalry's lightning-quick raids behind Union lines in northern Virginia and Maryland during the Civil War frustrated Union forces. John Singleton Mosby was one of the Confederacy's most celebrated generals; however, this Southern war hero lost his luster when he decided to cast his lot with the Republican Party and forge a friendship with President and former Union general Ulysses S. Grant in the years after Appomattox. As Mosby entered the twilight years of his life, he was frustrated that many of his former brothers in gray were twisting history for their own purposes, hiding the true reason for what they had fought to preserve and the cause of secession.




Confederate General John S. Mosby

As the years passed and many of the former Confederates chose to record their war experiences, most chose to frame the war that they fought to sever the South's relationship with the federal government as a tragic family quarrel, a war of "brother against brother" in which both the Union and Confederacy had fought gallantly for noble causes--states' rights on the part of the South, preservation of the Union for the North. They chose to hide the real cause of the war--slavery. This tragic, yet romantic Lost Cause version of the Civil War was reinforced in the writings of Confederate soldiers and officers alike, in reunion speeches, and dedication of monuments in public spaces throughout the South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.




John S. Mosby to Sam Chapman, June 4, 1907 (Page 1)

As a United States Assistant Attorney in 1907, Mosby wrote Sam Chapman a letter on Department of Justice stationary in which he complained that George Christian, one of many former Confederates who were rewriting the cause of the Civil War, minimizing the primary role of slavery, to make it appear as a noble war. Mosby gives a brief account of the Southern defense of slavery prior to the war, criticizing John C. Calhoun's bitter attack on Thomas Jefferson, who had prohibited slavery's expansion into the Old Northwest (Northwest Ordinance of 1787). The "Gray Ghost" confessed that he did not approve of slavery; rather, it was inherited in his family as an institution: "Now while I think as badly of slavery as Horace Greeley did, I am not ashamed that my family were slaveholders. It was our inheritance. Neither am I ashamed that my ancestors were pirates & cattle thieves. People must be judged by the standard of their own age. If it was right to own slaves as property, it was right to fight for it. The South went to war on account of slavery. South Carolina went to war--as she said in her Secession proclamation--because slavery would not be secure under Lincoln. South Carolina ought to know what was the cause for her seceding.... Ask Sam Yost to give Christian a skinning. I am not ashamed of having fought on the side of slavery--a soldier fights for his country--right or wrong--he is not responsible for the political merits of the course he fights in. The South was my country.”


*Note: In the above excerpt, I have made slight edits (punctuations & removed strikeouts) to make Mosby's letter easier to read. If you would like to view the original letter and transcript, please visit Gilder Lehrman.

This post was inspired by Adam H. Domby's article "Defenders of Confederate Monuments Keep Trying to Erase History" which referenced Mosby's letter.