Take Sides with the Truth: The Postwar Letters of John Singleton Mosby to Samuel F. Chapman

Preface

1 Preface John Singleton Mosby had practiced law in Bristol, Virginia, for nearly five years when, in the summer of 1860, the twenty-seven-year-old attorney was persuaded to join a newly formed cavalry company.1 The following April the country found itself rendered asunder by civil war, and the new recruits were soon incorporated into the First Virginia Cavalry, commanded by Col. J. E. B. Stuart. Within a year Mosby became a scout for Stuart, who by that time had been promoted to brigadier general. In the late winter of 1862–1863, Stuart gave his determined scout the opportunity to gather and lead an independent partisan command.2 Samuel Forrer Chapman, a twenty-two-year-old ministerial student at Richmond College, left school and in May 1861 enlisted as a private in the Warren Rifles at Front Royal, Virginia. A month later the Warren Rifles became Company B of the Seventeenth Regiment, Virginia Infantry. That October Sam transferred to the Dixie Artillery, a Page County company, which his younger brother, William, a former student at the University of Virginia, helped to organize. Sam served as first lieutenant in the battery when William became commander. A year later, with the reorganization of General Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, the Dixie Artillery was disbanded, and the two brothers became enrollment and conscription officers in Warrenton, the county seat of Fauquier County, Virginia.3 In March 1863, Sam and William Chapman joined John Mosby and his fledgling partisan command. In July 1864, Sam, who had been serving as adjutant, was promoted to captain, in command of the newly formed Company E of the Forty-third Battalion. His brother William commanded Company C before becoming lieutenant colonel, second-in-command of the battalion, under Colonel Mosby.4 2 Preface Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865; on April 21, Colonel Mosby disbanded the Forty-third in lieu of surrender, and the following day Sam and William Chapman were paroled at Winchester, Virginia . John Mosby suffered nearly a year of harassment and arrests at the hands of Federal authorities before finally being paroled in February 1866, upon orders of Gen. U. S. Grant.5 After the war, Sam Chapman returned to his ministry in northern Virginia. He also worked, along with William, as a mail agent on the Railroad Mail Service, a position obtained with the assistance of John Mosby, who had become friends with President Grant.6 Sam later served as superintendent of schools in Fauquier and Alleghany Counties, as well as postmaster in Covington, Virginia, and deputy U.S. marshal in Staunton, Virginia. In 1898–1899, he donned the blue uniform of the U.S. Army and served in Cuba as chaplain of the Fourth Regiment, U.S. Volunteer Infantry.7 William Chapman eventually received an appointment as agent with the Internal Revenue Service . John Mosby practiced law in Warrenton and Washington, D.C.,8 before becoming U.S. consul to Hong Kong. He worked as an attorney for the Southern Pacific Railroad in San Francisco, as a land agent for the U.S. Department of the Interior, and finally as an attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. Sam Chapman remained a close confidant of Colonel Mosby, and the two exchanged correspondence and visited often in the ensuing years. In 1914 John Mosby wrote to Sam Chapman concerning the practice of patronage in government positions: “I did have you appointed under Grant although you had not voted for him; nor did I consider it an act of generosity on my part as I was only paying a small part of the debt owed you” (emphasis added).9 Mosby was referring to Sam’s appointment as mail agent, in the patronage-heavy Railroad Mail Service , by President Grant. Mosby’s consideration of a “debt” owed by him to Chapman revealed , in a single word, the extent of the relationship between these two old veterans. Surely Sam Chapman had not performed any service for John Mosby since the war that would have Mosby think he had incurred a debt. He could only have been referring to what had taken place during the conflict when Sam served as one of Mosby’s Rangers. Preface 3 Midway through the war Mosby acquired a small howitzer, for use in raiding the railroads, and Sam was placed...