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Letters of John Singleton Mosby, 1858 and 1897, Accession # 10804, Special Collections Dept., University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.
These letters were purchased from the Book Press Ltd., Williamsburg, Virginia, on 21 November 1988.
This collection contains two letters, 1858 and 1897, of John Singleton Mosby (1833-1916), Confederate partisan ranger. The first letter, 17 March 1858, was written during Mosby's antebellum legal career; in it he discusses the sale of five slaves with a Mr. Martin.
The second letter, 3 October 1897, was addressed to Civil War author John C[odman] Ropes (1836-1899). Mosby, writing from San Francisco, denies that he and members of his command committed atrocities during the war; rather, they "conducted honorable war." He claims that if he had served under Napoleon his tactics would have disrupted communications between [Gebhard von] Blucher (1742-1819) and the Duke of Wellington (1769-1852) [at Waterloo?] thereby thwarted their cooperation with each other. He also mentions his accident at the University of Virginia which resulted in the loss of his left eye [23 April 1897]. Additional information concerning this accident is available under accession number 7872-a, John Singleton Mosby Scrapbooks (Scrapbook II), in the Manuscripts Division of the Special Collections Department, Alderman Library.