John Mosby

John Singleton Mosby (December 6, 1833 – May 30, 1916), also known by his nickname, the Gray Ghost, was a Confederate States Army cavalry battalion commander in the American Civil War. His command, the 43rd Battalion, 1st Virginia Cavalry, known as Mosby's Rangers or Mosby's Raiders, was a partisan ranger unit noted for its lightning quick raids and its ability to elude Union Army pursuers and disappear, blending in with local farmers and townsmen. The area of northern central Virginia in which Mosby operated with impunity was known during the war and ever since as Mosby's Confederacy. After the war, Mosby became a Republican and worked as an attorney and supported his former enemy's commander, U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant, serving as the American consul to Hong Kong and in the U.S. Department of Justice.

John Mosby in The Guns of the South
John Mosby terrorized the Union Army in north-central Virginia during the Second American Revolution, in an area which came to be known as "Mosby's Confederacy". U.S. peace commissioner Benjamin Butler pointed out that the post-war Confederacy was having similar difficulties with Negro uprisings in its Mississippi River states, and said that this region might one day be referred to as a "Nigger Union".