The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2004

because he did not wish to fight against the French, Mosby also turned down this opportunity, according to a subsequent article in the Brooklyn Eagle. In 1885, Democrat Grover Cleve- land entered the White House, and Republican Mosby was soon advised of his pending replacement. He dashed off a letter to Grant, request- ing assistance in getting started back home. But in late July, just as he was about to embark for San Francisco, a cable arrived announcing Grant’s death. The 51-year-old Mosby sailed for the United States with a heavy heart and without a prospect in the world. Mosby didn’t know it, but his request for assistance had reached Grant literally on his deathbed. And the dying man had, in his last days, dic- tated a telegram to be sent at once to Grant’s friend Leland Stanford, California’s new senator and president of the Southern Pacific Railroad. Grant’s plea for the ex-Confederate partisan fighter was not refused, and Mosby, when he stepped onto the pier at San Francisco, found a job awaiting him in the legal department of the Southern Pacific. He would spend the next 16 years as a railroad lawyer — not the sort of salvation he’d envi- sioned, but, as he later put it, his poverty dictated his circumstances, not his will. Disappointed, Mosby had at least landed on his feet, and would spring into action again. At the age of 64 he was drilling a light cavalry unit in Oakland, Calif., for service against Spain. (As it turned out, “Mosby’s Hussars” never saw action.) A little later he again burst into print as a Land Office special agent and person- al emissary of President Theodore Roosevelt, wading into the volatile range-fencing crisis in Colorado and Nebraska. And, in perhaps the great- est irony of his life, the one-time rav- ager of Union supply trains and rustler of Union mules capped his career with six years as an attorney in the Department of Justice. In his retirement years Mosby received a medal from the University of Virginia (from which he had been expelled years before for shooting a fellow student in self-defense) and, subsequently, an invitation to speak on campus. He was deeply moved, feel- ing that the greatest injustice of his life had been righted. “I now feel that I am a rich man,” he told a friend, Mrs. Charles W. Kent, years later, with “something more valuable than gold.” John Mosby died in Washington, D.C., at the age of 82, on Memorial Day 1916. He is buried in Warrenton, Va. J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 65 Interim Accommodations for Corporate and Government Markets Apartments, Townhouses & Single Family Homes “FOR THE EXECUTIVE ON THE MOVE” finder5@IX.netcom.com Locations throughout Northern Virginia and D.C. Units fully furnished, equipped and accessorized Many “Walk to Metro” locations Pet Friendly 5105-L Backlick Road, Annandale, Virginia Tel: (703) 354-4070 Fax: (703) 642-3619 Executive Lodging Alternatives