The Savannah morning news. (Savannah, Ga.) 1900-current, 1901-08-17
EMPLOYED By UNCLE SAM.
John s. Mosby, Confederate Leader,
a Government Omcer.
From the Philadelphia Times.

From the Philadelphia Times.
Col John S. Mosby. who was recent
~ appointed special agent of the gen
eral land office-at the request Of Pres
ident Mckinley himself, 1t is said--will
be assigned to a Western district which
will include Minnesota and Nebraska
Perhaps there was never better IL
lustration of the typical young Amer
lean than John S. Mosby was in 1851,
when, in his twenty eighth year, he
enlisted as a private under Gen. Jos
eph f. Johnson. 1t is impossible for
any one who knows the type and
knows Mosby from his record and his
writings to mistake him. He was full
of Byron and Scott. Campbell, Shake
speare and the writer's whose genius
perpetuates the romance of the middle
ages to our own times-to our lasting
detriment, as Mark Twain insists,
though he has no great following in
his view that If all SCOTS novels had
been burned in ten years after they
were written we might have got over
the nineteenth century in America
with little or no expediture of gun
powder.
Mosby had not been so very long
away from the University of Virginia
when the war began. He was a young
lawyer who had just begun to attempt
practice, but though he had studied
law under. the favorable conditions of
retirement which followed a personal
difficulty" with fellow student at the
university, law influences his descrip-
tions of his campaigning much less
than his reading of the English class
les. He can quote Jomini and Julius
Caesar offhand on the art of war.
When he was leading his handful Of
partisans in Virginia he had Napol-
cons maXinls in mind, and he cannot
attempt to make a point of his own
without having IT suggest an illustra-
ton from Moliere, Horace or some 9TH
er poet in or out of the way of the
common reader. But it is easy to see
that the substratum for all this is the
boys reading of the English romantic
poets and novelists-chiefly of Byron
and Scott.
For most of them were men of the
type he himself represented-a type
which Maj. John N. Edwards best IL
Illustrated in the West. Some of them
were farmers, more or less illiterate,
il is true, but the better part of them
stepped INTO the war out of Walter
SCOTS novels. One of them whom Mos
by admired more. perhaps, than the
rest, was tneolOSlcal student VINO
was about to graduate into a Presby-
terrain minister when he reacted into a
medieval knight, and girded on a flash
ing sword with Mosby-a sword which
Mosby would not allow him to use on
the ground that IL was a mere medie-
val playtning This theory of the use
of the saber illustrates the blending of
the practical and the romantic which
made the young partisan famous at a
time most men have hardly made up
their minds what to attempt.
He saw that while the blades of a
column of cavalry looked sublime as
they flashed in the sun they would not
reach the ten feet beyond the horses
ears which, for a revolver bullet fired
by a man who knows how to use the
pistol. means certainty. And certain
~ was what he looked for and almost
invariably found. He did not assume
that his own men were superior to