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ly direction, crossing the Hazel River and entering Rappahannock County.
“The sun was just above the hill tops when we reached Woodville, a collection of a dozen houses, weather-beaten and depopulated except at one or two houses where several women and Negroes were gathered to see us come up,” Private Sneden wrote. “Mosby had been here for a week or more only a short distance in our rear where he had made the place his headquarters.”
The captured Yankee mules were all fine and fat, some 117 in all, and “the Rebels were in high glee at the capture of so fine a lot.”
It was about 5 a.m., a rousing morning in Woodville. “The Rebel cavalrymen yelled and threw up their slouch hats, while the mules kicked, brayed and plunged in all sorts of ways,” the diary continues. “Mosby went into the best looking house and brought out a lot of women and Negro servants or slaves to look at us. We were a hard looking crowd, some without shoes or hats, jaded and hungry”
One of the Union captives had no hat and tied a blanket over his head, which made him look like “a mounted Arab,” Private Sneden wrote. “He scared the Negroes, who got away in the rear, especially when one of the Rebels yelled out, ‘Say, Yank, where’s your horns?’ I must have made a sorry appearance, with eye all swollen up and the dried blood all over my face and neck.”
In vivid detail, Private Sneden records his passage through Rappahannock County with the captives and Mosby’s men, telling of an arduous climb to the summit of the Blue Ridge and a descent into a deep valley (apparently the F.T. Valley) en route to Madison Court House. “We had passed only three or four tumble down half-ruined houses since leaving Woodville, and had not met a single human being or animal thus far, he writes.
Later, moving south toward Madison, the caravan “passed several large plantation houses which were a long distance from the road.” After a while, the party “approached near to Madison Court House, whose white houses and steeple came into view.”
The Union private was taken to Gordonsville where he and the other captives were put on a train to Richmond, where he was imprisoned. Later, he was transferred to the notorious Confederate
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