Description
A Thousand Points of Truth: The History and Humanity of Col. John Singleton Mosby in Newsprint
By V.P. Hughes. The author paints a realistic, intimate and human portrait of Col. John Singleton Mosby based upon thousands of newspaper articles from over seven hundred publications dating from 1862 through 1916. These articles contain countless firsthand testimonies about Mosby by friends, enemies, scholars and Mosby himself.
From the author:
My interest in Colonel John Singleton Mosby began in 1950. However, it wasn’t until 2002 that it led to extensive research on the subject, centered upon newspaper reports on the man published during the Civil War and throughout—and even after—his life. And while I rejected Virgil Carrington Jones’s observation on Mosby, contained in the preface of my new book on Mosby, I did not contemplate writing it until an even more disparaging observation came to my attention during my research.
The comment was contained in an article in the Ponchatoula Times of May 26, 1963, as part of a six-article series written by Bernard Vincent McMahon, entitled “The Gray Ghost of the Confederacy.” Mr. McMahon, in turn, based his comment upon Gen. Omar Bradley’s judgment of what might have been the postwar life of Gen. George Patton: “Now substitute Mosby for Gen. Patton in the book A General’s Life, by Omar Bradley: ‘I believe it was better for Gen. Patton [Mosby] and his professional reputation that he died when he did. . . . He would have gone into retirement hungering for the old limelight, beyond doubt indiscreetly sounding off on any subject anytime, any place. In time he would have become a boring parody of himself—a decrepit, bitter, pitiful figure, unwittingly debasing the legend’” (emphasis mine).
McMahon, however, only proffered in his writings the widely accepted view of John Mosby held by many, if not most. However, like Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, I have come to know Col. Mosby rather more intimately through the testimony of countless witnesses over a span of 150 years, and I believe that it is time for those who deeply respect John Mosby the soldier to now also respect John Mosby the man.
A century ago, the book of John Singleton Mosby’s life closed. It is my hope that this book will validate the claim he made during that life that he would be vindicated by time.
Softcover, 790 pages, illustrated
