Book published in 1990
A concise account of one of the most renowned units of the US Civil War, and certainly the most successful partisan unit of the South. Wert argues, with amble justification in his text, that the romantic image of the Rangers, "knights, dressed in plumed hats and red-lined capes," who "rode away barely scathed" (p. 292) was "very much different" from reality. Wert concludes that while Mosby and his men "earned a place among some of the finest guerilla warriors in history," they "neither prolonged the war in (Virginia), nor had they kept thousands of Union troops away from the front." (p. 293).
In reaching this conclusion, Wert covers the actions of the Rangers in detail: who they were, individual actions, their hosts and opponents. The Rangers' targets were isolated outposts and under-guarded wagon trains - their early capture of a Union general in his bedclothes on a late winter's night was an anomaly - glorious, but not their typical fare. Like many insurgents, the Rangers struck at weak targets, using superior knowledge of the countryside to approach their target and then disperse, relying on the hospitality of locals to feed and house themselves and their mounts; the actions of the occupying army only served to encourage their hosts, until in late 1864, the Union army began to burn out the "seccesh", civilian and armed alike, by root and branch. For Mosby and his men, success or defeat would not come at their hands, but depending on whether the North tired of the conflict before gathering the strength to crush it.
Wert's comprehensive account of Mosby and the Rangers is exhaustive, almost exhausting, in its detail. A worthy addition to a Civil War bookshelf, Wert's volume neither glorifies nor detracts from Mosby's record, but sets it out cleanly and plainly.
