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By Root 6616 0

They occurred without warning, and though little was taken except for a few wagons or an unlucky soldier on picket duty, the effect on Federal morale was severe. Hooker had been in command for less than a week when, on January 29, 1863, a small force led by one of the most effective Confederate outfits—John Singleton Mosby and his Partisan Rangers—pounced on the Federal pickets guarding Percy Wyndham’s base around Fairfax Court House. Nine horses and their riders were captured. Wyndham ran to his horse and marshaled two hundred cavalrymen to chase after Mosby, but the raiders had vanished into the darkness. The raids against the Federals had made Mosby a hero among Virginians, which surprised everyone who had known him before the war. A lawyer by profession, he was small and thin, slightly hunched, and very plain with strawlike hair and a narrow hatchet face. He looked more like nineteen than his real age of thirty, but his unprepossessing exterior belied a superior ability to infiltrate enemy lines and cause mayhem. His surprise attacks were forcing Federal authorities to divert large numbers of troops into wasteful defensive operations.

On the evening of March 8, Mosby and twenty-nine volunteers set off toward Fairfax Court House. He had devised a plan to sneak into Wyndham’s headquarters and kidnap him from his bed. Mosby had not told the men what he aimed to do, since he reasoned that they would undoubtedly have refused so suicidal a mission. It was a frosty, pitch-black night, which helped the marauders slip past Federal pickets. Mosby knew exactly where to find the gaps in the line. “We passed along close by the camp-fires, but the sentinels took us for a scouting party of their cavalry,” he wrote. “I had felt very cold in the early part of the night, but my blood grew warmer as I got farther in the lines, and the chill passed away. I had no reputation to lose by failure but much to gain by success.” It was midnight when they reached the village of Fairfax. Mosby’s men were shocked when they realized where they were, but not more so than the Federal guards, who at first refused to believe what was happening.17

Mosby quickly organized his men into raiding parties; one to gather the prisoners, the other to collect the horses. The telegraph lines were cut and the operator subdued. The Confederates moved stealthily from house to house, rousing officers from their beds with the warning that they would be shot if they made a noise. Mosby waited impatiently for Wyndham to appear. “But for once fortune had been propitious to him,” recalled Mosby. Wyndham had taken the train to Washington that afternoon. The raid on his house produced only two sleepy staff officers and Wyndham’s uniform, which Mosby decided to keep as a trophy. As he prepared to leave with his dumbfounded prisoners, who outnumbered the Confederates four to one, Mosby was told that Brigadier General Edwin Stoughton was billeted in the town.18

The twenty-five-year-old Stoughton was as famous for his unlikely promotion as he was for his high living. He should not have been in Fairfax at all, since his brigade was five miles away, but the general liked his independence. The two-story brick house that served as his headquarters was never empty or silent. Unable to resist the challenge, Mosby tricked his way inside by claiming to have a dispatch from the 5th New York Cavalry. He then grabbed the surprised Union officer, “whispered my name in his ear, and told him to take me to General Stoughton’s room. Resistance was useless and he obeyed.” Stoughton was sleeping off a rowdy night. Mosby woke him by spanking his bottom. “He asked in an indignant tone what all this meant. I told him that he was a prisoner, and that he must get up quickly and dress. I then asked him if he had ever heard of ‘Mosby,’ and he said he had. ‘I am Mosby,’ I said.” Stoughton intrigued his captor by taking such inordinate care in getting dressed that one of the Confederates standing guard politely handed him his watch after he left it on the bureau.19

Sir Percy Wyndham was humiliated. It