Mosby's Fighting Parson: The Life and Times of Sam Chapman (review)

The staggering number of Civil War books that emerge each year is proof that no historical story is every completely told. Nowhere is this truer than in the field of Civil War biography. In Mosby's Fighting Parson, Peter A. Brown offers the life story of Samuel Forrer Chapman. "Sam" Chapman was born in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia in 1833, and was a seminary student preparing to enter the ministry when the Civil War began. Enlisting immediately after Fort Sumter, Chapman experienced virtually the entire war in the eastern theater. He served the Confederacy variously as an infantry private, artillery officer, and conscription officer. Most notably, in early 1863 he joined John Singleton Mosby's famous Virginia partisan outfit, the 43d Battalion Virginia Cavalry, or "Mosby's Rangers." During his service with Mosby, Lieutenant Chapman rose from Battalion Adjutant to captain and commander of Company E, earning the lifelong affection of Mosby along the way. After the war, he moved to the mountainous counties of western Virginia, where he fathered eleven children, helped to establish several Baptist churches, served as a school superintendent and minister, and even participated in the Spanish-American War as a volunteer chaplain. Chapman died at his home in Covington, Virginia, in May 1919.

This book is much more than simply a chronicle of one man's life, however. At times, it becomes a collective biography of Sam Chapman's family, friends, and acquaintances. Chief among these were Mosby and Sam's brother, William, who had a similar career to his brother's, eventually rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel in Mosby's command. The reader also meets a young Jedediah Hotchkiss, who as an itinerant schoolteacher instructed the young Sam and several of his relatives before moving on to Confederate fame as Stonewall Jackson's mapmaker.

The first third of the book is simply a chronological retelling of Mosby's early career and military campaigns. This story has been told elsewhere on numerous occasions, and here it serves only to detract from the book's true object. A short introduction with contextual information on Mosby would have been a better choice. Otherwise, Brown adroitly combines the general course of the war with the campaigns and exploits of Chapman and the rest of Mosby's Rangers. If anything, the narrative occasionally spends too much time on the rest of the war; the book's actual subject is sometimes lost in the shuffle as a consequence. These shortcomings are errors of enthusiasm for the subject, however, and do not detract measurably from the quality of the narrative. The Civil War specialist will appreciate some of the less glamorous aspects of Chapman's military career, such as his service as an enrolling officer in Warrenton, Virginia, enforcing the Confederate Conscription Act. Brown has also mined a wide variety of primary and secondary sources to paint a detailed picture of the daily operations of Mosby's troopers.

The book's final chapters, which detail Chapman's postwar life, are as interesting and valuable as any on the subject's war years. They offer a fascinating glimpse into life in postwar western Virginia, the importance of churches and religion on the local level, and the activities of Confederate officers in Reconstruction and beyond. Chapman's experience offers an excellent example of postwar civic leadership by a former Confederate officer. The author is to be commended for telling this story in the detail it deserves.

Mosby's Fighting Parson was clearly a labor of love for its author, a Lexington, Virginia resident. Brown has combined exhaustive research with an engaging narrative style. Two well-done maps and an interesting selection of photographs complement the text. This book will appeal to those readers interested in the military history of "Mosby's Confederacy," and also to those with...