It was on this date in 1864* that an infamous Union war crime took place in Front Royal, Virginia.
Union forces in the Old Dominion were bedeviled by John Singleton Mosby, whose bold and legendary guerrilla tactics are commemorated in Herman Melville’s “The Scout Toward Aldie”:
All spake of him, but few had seen
Except the maimed ones or the low;
Yet rumor made him every thing–
A farmer–woodman–refugee–
The man who crossed the field but now;
A spell about his life did cling —
Who to the ground shall Mosby bring?
In 1864, the “Gray Ghost” haunted the Shenandoah Valley, and his spooky brand of warfare eventually goaded the Union into crossing the streams.
Allegedly raging from the murder by Mosby’s troops of a surrendering northern cavalryman, the blues rounded up six captured Mosby men — actually only five, plus one 17-year-old civilian who had opportunistically joined the fray — and summarily executed them.
David Jones, Lucien Love and Thomas Anderson were shot. So was the aforementioned civilian, Henry Rhodes, under the eyes of his shrieking mother.
Then, two last unfortunates were hanged. William Thomas Overton spurned an offer of clemency in exchange for information on Mosby’s hideouts with the memorable parting, “Mosby will hang 10 of you for every one of us.”
Not quite so … but not an empty threat, either. Weeks later, Mosby would order the retaliatory executions of a like number** of randomly-selected Union prisoners of war, and communicate this intelligence to his foes along with his (successful) suit to resume more gentlemanly methods of killing one another.
* Some sources (including some cited in this post) claim September 22nd. The consensus of authoritative sources appears to be clearly September 23rd. The Gray Ghost himself may be one source of the confusion; according to Custer and the Front Royal Executions, “In his memoirs, which were published over 50 years after the event, Mosby got the date wrong, apparently based upon one of the newspaper accounts … [which] stated that the Front Royal incident occurred on September 22, not September 23, the date upon which it actually did occur.”
** Seven were condemned in retaliation, for these six plus a separate execution that occurred Oct. 13.
On this day..
- 1959: John Day Jr., Korean War casualty
- 1948: Shafiq Ades
- 1730: Cathrine M'Canna, mother's daughter
- 1831: Slaves of Sussex County, for Nat Turner's rebellion
- 1675: Katharina Paldauff, the Flower Witch
- 1923: Jesus Saleta and Pascal Aguirre, Terrassa anarchists
- 1603: Marco Tulio Catizone, the false Dom Sebastian
- 1884: Two Pennsylvania murderers
- 782: 4,500 Saxons by order of Charlemagne
- 1921: Jake Martin and Putnam Ponsell
- 1947: Nikola Petkov, "a dog's death"
- 1994: Johannes van Damme, heroin smuggler
https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/13/a-tiger-execution/
The second man hanged was named Carter. No first name seems to be available. Mosby’s rosters often contained men who “went along for the raid” even if they were not assigned to the particular company involved and so it is difficult at time to discern just who was and who was not present, injured or killed and whether or not they were actual members of the battalion or someone who wished to join and had not yet been enlisted.
The article never named the sixth man – who was he?
The names discussed are:
Jones
Love
Anderson
Overton
?
Rhodes (young volunteer)
Always extremely frustrating to us non-professionals who do not have access to a multitude of records to find out personal information. The same is true on the many Civil War photos – never tells who those people are!!!
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