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262 Gray Ghost 18 “All that the proud can feel of pain” Mosby’s men had seen him cry only once, standing by the deathbed of Tom Turner at Loudoun Heights. But when he read about Lee’s surrender in the Baltimore American and realized that the war was over, he broke down again, in“the very image of despair.”Sitting on a log outside the house where he had spent the night, he laid aside the paper and said, “I thought I had sounded the profoundest depth of human feeling, but this is the bitterest hour of my life.”He had never been physically healthy in peacetime, and he loved fighting so much that he spoke of coming under fire as a “marvelous experience.” He could not bring himself to surrender as long as General Johnston’s army remained active in North Carolina and as long as there was a shred of hope of continuing the fight. He disbanded the regiment but delayed his own surrender until after Johnston, and by then the Union army was offering a five-thousanddollar reward for his capture.1 When Lee surrendered on April 9 and Stanton and Halleck instructed Hancock to offer the same terms in his department that Grant had given Lee’s men,they ordered that Mosby was to be excluded.Therefore , on the morning of April 10, Hancock issued a circular to the public announcing that Confederates could surrender except:“The Guerrilla Chief Mosby is not included in the parole.” That afternoon Stanton asked Grant for his opinion. Should the terms offered Lee’s army be extended to Mosby’s men and others? Stanton was surprised when Grant replied that all should be given the same terms, including Mosby. Now backtracking, on the following day Hancock’s chief of staff Charles H. Morgan wrote Mosby a letter informing him and proposing a meeting 263 “All that the proud can feel of pain” between Mosby and an officer of equal rank to discuss Mosby’s surrender .2 At Winchester Hancock waited for two days for an answer. When none came, he issued a second circular on April 13, mentioning that Mosby had not replied and threatening that, if he did not come in, Hancock’s forces would desolate Mosby’s civilian supporters.Meanwhile, he began organizing a second circular hunt to capture Mosby. He issued orders for the mobilization, on the morning of April 15, of about eight thousand infantry and cavalry in an operation designed to seal off the Potomac River and the Blue Ridge Mountains, sweep into Mosby’s Confederacy to arrest all able-bodied adult males, confiscate all livestock, and destroy Mosby’s “haunts” with the torch, leaving the people in poverty . He still had no reply from Mosby when at 1:00 A.M. on April 15,only a few hours before the raid was to begin, he received notification of Lincoln’s assassination and had to cancel the operation.3 Mosby was stalling—he had decided to continue the fight as long as Johnston had an army in the field in North Carolina—and he had sent Channing Smith and four men to Richmond to find out and to ask Lee’s advice. Smith had not returned, but on the fifteenth, the same day that Hancock canceled the raid, Mosby wrote a letter proposing a conference to discuss a brief suspension of hostilities to allow time for him to communicate with Confederate authorities. He sent the letter to Hancock with a delegation of four officers that included William Chapman, returned from the Northern Neck, and Aristides Monteiro, Mosby’s surgeon during the last few months of the war. As the four entered Union lines in the Valley and identified themselves, a Union picket shouted, “Thank God! The war is over. I know the end has come when Mosby’s men surrender.”Chapman and Monteiro presented the letter to Hancock, and he seemed amazed that they did not have the appearance or demeanor of outlaws but were both educated and cultured gentlemen.4 They left, and Hancock thought this was going to be easy. He had his chief of staff reply on April 16 that armistice talks were not required, that a forty-eight-hour cease-fire was now in effect, until noon,April 18, to give Mosby time to communicate with his government.At that hour,a Union officer of equal rank would meet Mosby in the hotel in Millwood in the Valley, a site...

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