Virginian John Beall began his Civil War career at 26 as a private in the 2d Virginia Infantry Regiment and fought in the 1st Battle of Bull run as a part of the Stonewall Brigade. he then led a company of Gen. Turner Ashby's cavalry in the Shenandoah Valley until he was severely wounded in the chest while leading a charge on October 16, 1861. Beall was given a medical discharge from the army during his long convalescence, but he was not ready to stop fighting. In spring 1863, Beall won the War Department's approval of a daring plan for raiding union shipping vessels in the Chesapeake Bay. He was appointed an acting master in the Confederate navy and was authorized to raise a band of partisan raiders. The group would have to provide its own ship, and the raiders' only payment would be a share of the booty they captured from Northern vessels. On the evening of September 17, 1863, Beall and 18 men set out into the bay in two ships and quickly captured a Union sloop and two fishing scows. The next night, Beall's men captured a Yankee sloop carrying $200,000 worth of sutler's stores that was bound for Port Royal, SC Three more ships were captured by September 21, and then the raiders returned safely to their Mathews County base. Union response to the first raid was slow and ineffectual. But when Beall's crew set out again in November, they were quickly captured, strapped in irons in old Fort McHenry, MD, and held as pirates. southern authorities ordered the same number of Union prisoners to be held in similar conditions, eventually forcing the federals to treat the raiders as prisoners of war. After being exchanged on May 5, 1864, Beall found approval to continue his partisan activities slow to come and went to Canada to look for other opportunities to strike the enemy. The commander of confederate secret operations in Canada, Jacob Thompson, recruited Beall to form a force of refugees and escaped confederate prisoners who were in Canada to disrupt Northern trade on Lake Erie. Stephen T. Foster Atlas Editions, USA