Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation (9 page)

In the details of his actions Stuart showed his usual vigor and initiative. He seems never to have considered that his success in details was totally unrelated to his major assignment: to screen Lee’s infantry and to provide the general with information about the enemy.

Somewhere between June 9, when he had been hard pressed at Brandy Station, and June 24, when communications with the northward-advancing infantry were severed, Stuart the man superseded Major General Stuart the cavalry leader.

During the two years before the invasion Stuart’s vanity had served him and the army as well as had his devotion and skill. Flamboyant and doting on praise, he possessed the ability to achieve the spectacular, and the dedication to a cause to make his ability useful. People reacted strongly to his vivid personality, and he inspired both the deepest loyalty and the most abiding dislike. This had been true his whole life.

He had been born thirty years before in southern Virginia tobacco-growing country, the son of a lawyer and congressman who served both in Richmond and in Washington. The elder Stuart was too convivial to establish a solid success, although socially he was greatly sought after for his accomplishments as a singer, raconteur, and drinking companion. James Ewell Brown Stuart took after his father in his love of gay gatherings, though he shunned liquor; from his mother he inherited a tougher inner core. She trained him to the iron will that characterized all his undertakings. Stuart’s fixity of purpose was always awesome—and in June 1863 it was disastrous.

His youth was typical of the young Southern gentry who lived in style and privilege, with a rigid code of personal honor and not much cash. At West Point, where he was a college mate of the same Pleasonton whom he fought at Brandy Station, he did well in everything military, finishing as second captain in the corps. He even then displayed that attention to dress which was to make him the beau of Lee’s army.

Beginning as a regular-army lieutenant in Western garrison life and Indian-fighting, the twenty-one-year-old Stuart made an impression by his vast physical strength and endurance and by his fearlessness. There was no question of his courage: he simply did not react with fear. During his tour in the West he made a love marriage with Flora Cooke, a Virginia girl whose father, Colonel Philip St. George Cooke, was a regular-army man commanding the 2nd U.S. Dragoons. Then, in 1859, while he was a first lieutenant in the U.S. 1st Cavalry, Stuart, by a curious circumstance, became personally involved in an incident that served as a prelude to the Civil War.

He and Flora had children by then, and the lieutenant applied for a leave of absence so that his parents in Virginia might meet their grandchildren. Leaving Flora and the children with the grandparents, Stuart went to Richmond as a lay delegate for the General Convention of the Episcopal Church, of which he was a devout communicant. Army business took him on to Washington, where he happened to be when John Brown led his band of insurrectionists into Harper’s Ferry. Lieutenant Colonel R. E. Lee also was in Washington on a leave of absence to settle his father-in-law’s estate at the near-by plantation of Arlington. Thus it was that the former West Point superintendent and one of his former cadets collaborated to suppress John Brown’s insurrection and arrest Brown himself.

This was the first joint action of Lee and Stuart. They remembered it three years later when, in July 1862, Lee was appointed general of the heterogeneous army defending Richmond and Stuart was commanding its small cavalry force. Lee immediately dispatched the young cavalry leader on a reconnaissance mission to discover what the Federal General McClellan was doing in the marshy, heavily brushed country around Richmond. The inept performance of the Union cavalry presented Stuart with his first opportunity of the war to satisfy his penchant for the spectacular.

Instead of returning with his information, he decided to ride around McClellan’s entire army. It was a reckless venture and militarily profitless, but luck held—he lost only one man and one gun-limber—and his literally hairbreadth escapes made exciting reading for a Confederate people famished for good news.

The timing of the exploit was perfect. Everything was going wrong everywhere in the newly formed nation, and Richmonders lived in hourly dread of seeing McClellan’s army enter their city. Suddenly the people had a hero, young and golden, who fitted their romantic concepts:

From plume to spear a cavalier,
Whose soul ne’er parleyed with a fear,
Nor cheek bore tinge of shame.

Then twenty-nine years old, Stuart, with his stocky legs and massive torso, was not a graceful man on foot, but on horse he was an eye-filling figure. In a day of beards his thick red-brown whiskers and luxuriant mustaches were things of splendor, and his light eyes, sometimes as cold as morning light on a saber, could also appear merry and flashing. His gray uniform was magnificently tailored, given dash by a red-lined cape; his boots glistened like dark silver, and on his campaign hat fluttered an ostrich-feather plume. There was an air of audacity about him which won the hearts of a discouraged people.

Ladies garlanded his horse with roses, and music followed wherever he went. He sang in a rich baritone when he was riding, and when he wasn’t riding he was dancing. He was a gallant with the girls—too much so, some said. Even loyal troopers complained of him as a ladies’ man. At the Dundee plantation, where he headquartered for a spell when his fame was running in, an elderly lady today remembers her father protesting “Stuart kissing all the girls.”

He savored every moment of it, but no dance or song or pretty pair of lips ever kept him away from duty. Not even Stonewall Jackson, his dear friend, was a more dedicated Confederate. In action he was all business and sometimes was inclined to be hard on his men, of whom he thoughtlessly demanded his own illimitable energy. In the Second Manassas campaign his screening of the infantry and harassment of the enemy were a classic illustration of the proper use of cavalry. Stuart was a Confederate all the way, on a primal conviction, and winning independence came before everything to him—until June 1863.

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Men, to be successful, must emerge at the right time. Stuart’s star had risen during the early period when the Union cavalry was inferior to the Confederate in skill and performance. Similarly, Sheridan came to Virginia in 1864 and distinguished himself at a time when the Confederate cavalry had passed its physical peak and was in a state of decline.

Stuart’s original troopers were trained riders from childhood, and they brought with them their fine—in many cases, blooded—horses. They knew the country they were fighting over as well as they knew their own rooms. Representing the cavalier stock of the South—the young Ruperts who carried ladies’ handkerchiefs on sabers—they held in their hearts a contempt for “Northern clerks and mechanics.” Stuart’s men rode as they fox-hunted, straight across country, taking all obstacles at a full gallop. They went into action shouting as if they could never die.

The Federals began the war with a lot to learn about handling horses in the field, but the U.S. Navy and Treasury departments, and manpower and industry prosecuted the war until in due time the Union cavalry had learned their lessons in the hardest of all schools—survival. After two years they were good riders, physically tough, and they knew the Vir?ginia countryside pretty well themselves. They were smoldering over the indignities suffered at Stuart’s hands, and they had produced some first-rate officers who were determined to even the score with the Rebels’ beau sabreur. They came close to it at Brandy Station.

On that day Stuart’s invaluable volunteer aide, South Carolina’s Farley, a gentle Shakespearean scholar and savage fighter, was killed by a shellburst. Rooney Lee was wounded in the leg, and Wade Hampton’s son, serving on his father’s staff, was severely hurt. Alabama’s Major John Pelham, the boy cannoneer whom Lee called “the gallant Pelham” and who was the darling of the cavalry, had been killed in the spring. And the giant Prussian volunteer aide, Heros von Borcke, had been invalided out with a serious throat wound. They were all going, with none to replace them, when newspapers began to attack Jeb Stuart.

References were made to dancing and singing, with guarded hints about his role as a ladies’ man. These frivolities were suggested as a reason for his less than spectacular showing against Pleasonton. Actually, Stuart had handled his men superbly once he settled down to the fight. The surprise, caused by the ineptitude of a brigadier who had been forced upon him, and his own overconfidence had got Stuart into the trouble. The improved fighting quality of the Union cavalry kept him in it.

Then while Stuart’s own papers were criticizing his personal habits, the Northern papers were provided with a means for holding him up to ridicule.

Stuart had on his staff a cousin, Channing Price, a faithful and efficient officer, and Price had a brother, Thomas, who until a few months before had been a student in Germany. Late in 1862 the plight of his state brought Thomas Price home, and Stuart, to save this second cousin from the rigors of the infantry, gave him a staff commission with his engineers. Coming fresh from European student life into the rough hardships of cavalry life, Thomas Price proved to be an unhappy volunteer, and as a devotee of Old World culture he was impervious to the male charm that emanated from the aggressive Stuart.

To relieve his misery, Lieutenant Price confided his impressions to a diary. Great was his agitation when one afternoon his engineering unit was run down by hostile cavalry and his diary was captured along with his luggage. His excitement was explained when the diary, having made its way to a Northern newspaper office, was published in a newspaper that promptly appeared in the Confederate camp. There, for all to see, were Lieutenant Price’s unflattering comments on Cousin Jeb, including such items as “General Stuart, in his usually garrulous style. . . .”

All in all, Stuart must have felt his fame slipping from him at the time when Lee started the cautious movement of his three corps northward into Pennsylvania, and Pleasonton did nothing to help him regain his glory. Pleasonton sent his by now hard-bitten and confident cavalry daily, even hourly, against the gray troopers guarding the mountain passes. He never broke through, but Stuart’s riders were hard put to contain the pressing Federals. They were really fought out during those two weeks from June 9 until the misty morning of June 22, when the Confederate vedettes peered warily ahead and found the blue horsemen gone.

Not only had Stuart’s cavalry been pressed on the defensive as never before, but also they had not been able to gain a spot of information about the enemy. Stuart, smarting over the cuts to his ego, refused to read the portents. Always the Federals had had more foot soldiers, more and better cannon, fantastically more and better supplies, but always Stuart had had better cavalry. Suddenly he did not, and he refused to accept the fact.

When Lee completed the movement of his infantry, guns, and wagons away from Hooker and started northward along the Shenandoah Valley, his trusted cavalry leader was preoccupied with re-establishing the supremacy of Jeb Stuart. He was young and very vain, and his pride was hurt—but not his confidence. He would show them. He would show them all, by another “ride around McClellan.”

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Stuart decided that in moving north to screen the infantry he would not take the safe way up the Valley west of the Blue Ridge. Instead, he would ride around Hooker and cross the Potomac to the east, closer to Washington, then join the infantry on its way north. He submitted this plan to Lee, who, with reservations, agreed to it “if practical.”

Apparently General Lee was concerned about adding this risk to the whole gamble of the invasion, for on June 23 he had Colonel Marshall, his A.A.G, write Jeb Stuart a worried follow-up letter of instructions.

Without question, those instructions offered Stuart the discretion that Lee customarily granted to his subordinates. His innate consideration restrained him from giving a direct order to those he trusted, and he was always influenced by the individualistic nature of the patriot army. Because this army lacked the machinery of a regular establishment, Lee felt that more could be accomplished by appeals to the officers’ initiative and sense of personal responsibility. He preferred suggestion to command when an officer had proved trustworthy, as had Stuart, and Lee was especially fond of young Jeb.

Lee’s letter was delivered to cavalry headquarters before daybreak of the 24th. Stuart, refusing the comforts of a house while his men slept in the rain, was sleeping under a rubber blanket on the ground. As always, Stuart came fully awake at the touch of his aide. This is, in part, what the letter said:

If General Hooker’s army remains inactive, you can leave two brigades to watch him, and withdraw with the three others; but should he not appear to be moving northward, I think you had better withdraw this [west] side of the mountains tomorrow night [24th], cross at Shepherdstown the next day [25th], and move over to Frederick.

You will, however, be able to judge whether you can pass around their army
without hinderance,
doing them all the damage you can, and cross the river east of the mountains. In either case [that is, whether Stuart crossed the Potomac west of the mountains at Shepherdstown or at some ford east of the Blue Ridge],
after crossing the river, you must move on and feel the right of Ewell’s troops,
collecting information, provisions, etc.

There was no underscoring in the letter clumsily written by Colonel Marshall and endorsed by Lee, but even in Marshall’s unclear instructions the words here italicized would leave a trained cavalryman in no doubt about his assignment.