The Foreign Service Journal, November 2011

meritorious service, etc., etc., had re- signed his post in Peking. Mosby again set his sights on the Bangkok con- sulate, where, in the words of a U.S. Navy ship captain quoted in a dispatch from Mosby to John Hay, things were going on “that would disgrace a Modoc Indian.” Mosby was by now being depicted as a man who outreformed the re- formers. “Col. Mosby,” remarked the San Francisco Chronicle in April 1880, “seems just now to be a particularly sharp thorn in the side of our mild and virtuous ‘Civil Service reform’ admin- istration. ... [He] seems to be one of those restless, inquisitive spirits who feel that they have a mission to look into things, and get at their true in- wardness. Instead of being content to draw his pay, take things easily, and shut his eyes and ears, … he keeps a bright lookout, and is always wanting to understand the working of the ma- chinery.” By that spring, Bailey and Sickels had resigned. President Hayes had, as Mosby told Garfield in May, “at last swept the China coast.” A crop of re- spectable men now took up station in the East. “The president’s new ap- pointments in China,” Mosby wrote to Garfield in October, “are all first-rate men.” His immediate objectives accom- plished, Mosby began to press Presi- dent-elect Garfield for more wide- spread reform. “The State Depart- ment needs overhauling and renovat- ing,” he wrote to Garfield in November 1880. “It above all needs an able law officer — some of its decisions on law questions would ‘make the angels weep.’” He hoped to resign shortly, he added, and enlisted the president- elect’s aid in regaining a “foothold at the bar.” In particular, he wrote to Garfield, “I shall ask you to give me the position of assistant attorney-general for which many friends urged my ap- pointment.” Irony and Fulfillment The following summer (1881), Mosby’s long-term hopes were dashed by an assassin’s bullet in Washington. After Garfield’s death, he stayed on in the Orient, immersing himself over the next four years in the boiling issues of Chinese immigration to America and the opium trade. He sallied forth from time to time on other Far East issues that he felt merited attention, from the perceived arrogance of Spanish authorities at Manila to perceived weaknesses in the distribution of U.S. naval forces in the Pacific. And he pushed for an in- creased American involvement in China, arguing (not unlike George Seward before him) for a ground-floor American role in Chinese railroad- building and other internal projects. In late 1881, Ulysses S. Grant ap- pears to have prodded President Chester A. Arthur to name Mosby consul general at Shanghai. But Mosby, according to papers in the Na- tional Archives, got wind of the plan and balked, replying through a state- side spokesman that he would prefer something at home, or a first-class post in Europe. In 1884, he received what he con- sidered an even greater honor: the powerful Chinese viceroy Li Hung- chang offered him command of an army in the field. But because he did not wish to fight against the French, Mosby also turned down this opportu- nity, according to a subsequent article in the Brooklyn Eagle. In 1885, Democrat Grover Cleve- land entered the White House, and RepublicanMosby was soon advised of his pending replacement. He dashed off a letter to Grant, requesting assis- tance in getting started back home. But in late July, just as he was about to embark for San Francisco, a cable ar- rived 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 re- quest 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, Cali- fornia’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 envisioned, 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 Oak- land, 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 personal emissary of President Theodore Roosevelt, wading into the volatile range-fencing crisis in Colorado and Nebraska. And, in perhaps the greatest irony of his life, the one-time ravager of Union supply trains and rustler of Union mules capped his career with six years as an attorney in the Depart- ment of Justice. In his retirement years Mosby re- ceived a medal from the University of Virginia (from which he had been ex- pelled years before for shooting a fel- low 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 inWarrenton, Va. 52 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 1