What Was The Role of David Herold

[Laurie Verge]

I am not a Mosby expert, but most of Mosby's activities (I believe) were not involved with battles and hand-to-hand combat like we associate with soldiers. They were partisan rangers who swooped in, grabbed what they needed, and skedaddled.

Even when Powell was in regular Confederate units, do we have any indication as to how much hand-to-hand combat he experienced?

It is my opinion that what he had to do at the Seward household, actually facing his "enemy" on a very personal level, was somewhat foreign to him. To me, there is a difference between being a trained soldier and a trained killer -- and I should add a political fanatic, which is what I view Booth as being. Booth hated Lincoln and Lincoln's politics. I doubt that Powell had rabid feelings that way about Seward.