Jeb Stuart, The Last Cavalier Read online

  Jeb Stuart, The Last Cavalier

  Burke Davis

  Burford Books (2000)

  Tags: Military, Non Fiction

  Militaryttt Non Fictionttt

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  SUMMARY:

  A full and definitive biography of the dashing and enigmatic Confederate hero of the Civil War: General J.E.B. Stuart.

  JEB STUART

  THE LAST CAVALIER

  BURKE DAVIS

  WITH MAPS BY RAFAEL D. PALACIOS

  THE FAIRFAX PRESS

  NEW YORK

  To Robert D. Loomis

  Copyright © MCMLVII by Burke Davis All rights reserved.

  This 1988 edition is published by The Fairfax Press, distributed by Crown Publishers, Inc., 225 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003, by arrangement with Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Inc.

  Printed and Bound in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Davis, Burke, 1913-

  Jeb Stuart, the last cavalier / Burke Davis; with maps by Rafael D. Palacios. p. cm.

  Reprint. Originally published: New York : Rinehart, 1957. Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN 0-517-18597-0

  1. Stuart, Jeb, 1833-1864. 2. Generals—United States—Biography. 3. United States. Army—Biography. 4. Confederate States of America. Army—Biography

  Acknowledgments

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following individuals, organizations and publishers for permission to reprint material controlled by them in this biography:

  A. LEOPOLD ALEXANDER, Savannah, Georgia, for permission to reprint an excerpt from THE ALEXANDER LETTERS, I 787-1900, compiled and published by G. J. Baldwin.

  STUART B. CAMPBELL, Wytheville, Virginia, for permission to reprint an excerpt from a letter written by J. E. B. Stuart to his mother in January, 1860.

  REV. DAVID H. COBLENTZ, Clover, South Carolina, for permission to reprint two military dispatches of General Stuart.

  CONFEDERATE MEMORIAL LITERARY SOCIETY, Richmond, Virginia, for permission to reprint excerpts from letters written by J. E. B. Stuart on September 4, 1849, June 3, 1850, August 10, 1855, May 19, 1861 and July 19, 1862.

  MRS. ANDREW J. DAVIS, Alexandria, Virginia, for permission to reprint the first letter J. E. B. Stuart wrote to Flora Cooke (July 25, 1855).

  DUKE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY, Durham, North Carolina, for permission to reprint excerpts from letters of May 10,1861, June 13,1861, December 5,1862, December 18,1862, April 6,1863 and May 4,1863 which are included in the /. E. B. Stuart Papers; from entries in the John Esten Cooke War Journals of 1862 and 1863; and from a letter in the Robert W. Hooke Papers.

  EMORY UNIVERSITY LIBRARY, Emory University, Georgia, for permission to reprint excerpts from letters which appear in LETTERS OF GENERAL J, E. B. STUART TO HIS WIFE, 1861, edited by Bingham Duncan, copyright 1943 by Emory University Library (Sources and Reprints, Series 1, No. 1).

  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY, Boston, Massachusetts, for permission to reprint excerpts from THE LIFE AND CAMPAIGNS OF J. E. B. STUART, by H. B. McClellan.

  VAN DYK MACBRIDE, Newark, New Jersey, for permission to reprint a brief note written by J. E. B. Stuart to Miss Belle Hart.

  RALPH G. NEWMAN, Chicago, Illinois, for permission to reprint an excerpt from a paper sent by J. E. B. Stuart to General G. B. McClellan.

  LOUISE FITZHUGH PRICE, Richmond, Virginia, for permission to reprint brief excerpts from letters of Charming Price.

  CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, New York, N.Y., for permission to reprint brief excerpts from LETTERS FROM LEE'S ARMY, edited by Charles Minor Blackford, III, copyright 1947 by Charles Scribner's Sons; WAR YEARS WITH JEB STUART, by W. W. Blackford, copyright 1945 by Charles Scribner's Sons; RECOLLECTIONS GRAVE AND GAY, by Constance C. Harrison, copyright 1911 by Charles Scribner's Sons, 1939 by Fairfax Harrison; and JEB STUART, by John W. Thomason, copyright 1930 by Charles Scribner's Sons.

  UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS, University, Alabama, for permission to reprint excerpts from THE CIVIL WAR DIARY OF GENERAL JOSIAH GORGAS, edited by F. E. Vandiver, copyright, 1947.

  UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA LIBRARY, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and MRS. JAMES E. COVINGTON, Richmond, Virgina, for permission to reprint excerpts from letters of J. E. B. Stuart to his cousins Betty and Jack Hairston, which are included in the Hairston-Wilson Papers of The Southern Historical Collection of the University of North Carolina Library.

  VIRGINIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY, Richmond, Virginia, for permission to reprint excerpts from Volume 8 of the SOUTHERN HISTORICAL SOCIETY PAPERS; and for permission to reprint brief excerpts from the Philip St. George Cooke Papers.

  VIRGINIA STATE LIBRARY, Richmond, Virginia, for permission to reprint a letter written by Elizabeth L. Stuart to General Robert E. Lee on April 23, 1861, the original of which is in the Virginia State Library.

  McDONALD WELLFORD, Richmond, Virginia, for permission to reprint a letter written by J. E. B. Stuart to his cousin, the mother of Channing Price, and a letter of Evalina Wellford written on May 16, 1863.

  Contents

  Old John Brown 3

  The Young Warrior 17

  On the Frontier 29

  First Blood.. 50

  Gathering the Clan 67

  The Peninsula 90

  Fame at a Gallop 107

  A Week of Miracles 131

  Easy Victories 154

  Exit John Pope 173

  Bloody Maryland 191

  Enemy Country 211

  War in Winter 238

  Pelham's Last Fight 260

  Chancellorsville 278

  Prelude to Invasion 302

  Gettysburg 322

  The Receding Tide 350

  In The Wilderness 377

  Yellow Tavern 385

  "God's Will Be Done" 410

  Notes 422

  Author's Acknowledgments 440

  Bibliography 443

  Index 449

  List of Maps

  First Fame: Stuart Circles McClellan—June 12-15 113

  The Seven Days: Stuart in the Enemy Rear 135

  Stuarts 1800 Raid Chambersburg—October 10-

  12, 1862 217

  Fateful Lines of March to Gettysburg—June 25-

  July 2, 1863 327

  Stuart Shields Lee After Gettysburg 341

  Stuart Blocks Sheridan's Richmond Raid—May

  9-11, 1864 387

  The Kill: Sheridan Vs. Stuart, Yellow Tavern-

  May 11, 1864 407

  JEB STUART The Last Cavalier

  CHAPTER 1

  Old John Brown

  (OCTOBER 18, 1859)

  THE soldiers were drunk, and after dark the streets were full of them, popping their guns and shouting. Mist from the rivers writhed through the town in a slow gray current, and the troops plunged about in it like comic specters. There was a drizzle of cold rain.

  The saloon was open late, roaring, and men crowded the barrooms of the hotels, The Wager House and The Gait House, adding to their excitement with tales of the day's fighting.

  The troops were militiamen who had swarmed into the town in the fork of the Shenandoah and the Potomac to keep the peace. They had fired raggedly all day in an indecisive battle, and the little band of raiders which had defied them was still unsubdued, hiding in the fire-engine house. Harpers Ferry waited. No one seemed to know what was to be done.

  A crowd of two thousand stared at the brick fire house and its enormous doors. Behind the doors lay the raiders and their prisoners. The enginehouse was almost surrounded by the militia, but their picketing was loose and unsoldierly.

  One militiaman growled that his troop had been given no orders since dark, except a f
ew unintelligible commands "from a set of drunken fellows whooping and bellowing like a pack of maddened bulls, evidently too drunk to hold their guns."1

  The enginehouse loomed in the darkness like a symbol of the unspoken fear of the South—a mutiny of the Negroes. The white leader in the place called himself Isaac Smith, and he had come over the Potomac from his mysterious rented farm in Maryland with a tiny band of whites and Negroes to seize the Armory and call the slaves of Virginia to rebellion. It had been a long day.

  At least a dozen men were dead. Among them was the gentle old Mayor of Harpers Ferry, Fontaine Beckham, who had for twenty-five years been the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad agent. One of the raiders had shot the unarmed Beckham as he peered around a water tank. Another of the dead was George Turner, a rich farmer, shot as he rode in a street, gun in hand.

  Beckham's death sent a lynch mob storming into The Wager House, where it seized William Thompson, twenty-six, one of the raiders who had been snatched as he emerged from the enginehouse under a flag of truce.

  The victim was defiant. "You may take my life," Thompson yelled, "but eighty million will rise up to avenge me, and bring liberty to the slaves."

  He was dragged to the Potomac bridge, where two pistols were fired against his head. The body dropped into shallow water below, and all day men and boys shot the corpse and laughed at the expression of agony on its white face.

  There was more of it. One of Smith's followers was William Leeman, eighteen, caught in an outpost of the raiders, also killed with a pistol. His body was left in plain sight on heights above the town. Men fired at it hour after hour, filling it with shot.2

  Daingerfield Newby, a Negro who was shot in the engine-house yard, fell into the hands of the Virginians and his ears were sliced off and other atrocities committed on his body. A townsman reported that a drove of hogs tore the corpse.

  Two men sent out from Smith's lair under a white flag were shot down in the street. One lay in the sun for a while, bleeding; the other, mortally wounded, crawled back to the raiders. Two more raiders were shot late that afternoon as they attempted to escape over the river.

  The first militia company had come at noon, from Charles-town. Others came from Martinsburg, Shepherdstown, Winchester County, and from Frederick, Maryland. Five companies from Baltimore arrived after dark.

  Smith and his men had attacked yesterday, Sunday morning.

  They had made no secret of their plan. One of the first captives was a guard of the Federal Armory, from whom Smith took the key, saying, "I came here from Kansas. I want to free all the Negroes in this state. If the citizens interfere with me, I must only burn the town and have blood."

  He had about thirty captives, most of them snatched on their way home from a Methodist revival, but when he moved his band from the Armory into the fire-engine house, he took only nine of the most prominent as hostages. The militia freed those he had abandoned.

  One of Smith's first prisoners was the dignified Colonel Lewis Washington, a great-grandnephew of George Washington. He had been taken in a midnight call; his nonplussed slaves were taken with him, given pikes and told to guard their master.

  Smith now had weapons which he seemed to feel had magical significance: A pistol given George Washington by Lafayette, and a handsome sword presented to the first President by Frederick the Great. The sword did not leave Smith's hand.

  Among the prisoners was a farmer, John H. Allstadt, brought in with his eighteen-year-old son in a wagon with Washington and his slaves.

  "As we drove inside the Armory yard," young Allstadt wrote, "there stood an old man."

  "This is John Brown," a voice said.

  The old man stepped toward Colonel Washington. "Osawatomie Brown of Kansas," he said, as if he wanted no mistake about his identity, despite his assumed name.

  Colonel Robert Baylor of the militia found courage, after a council, to send a man into the enginehouse yard, demanding surrender. He chose Samuel Strider. The young man approached the building under a flag of truce, a white handkerchief tied atop an umbrella.

  A voice called from the enginehouse.

  "I heard nothing about terms, sir." Strider said. "What terms do you want?"

  "I want to be allowed to take my men and prisoners across the bridge into Maryland." There was more of this, in an old man's voice.

  "Captain, you will have to put that in writing," Strider said. "It's too dark to write."

  "Nonsense. You needn't tell me an old soldier like you hasn't got all the modern conveniences. If you don't write down your terms in black and white, I won't take them back."

  A light appeared in the enginehouse and a piece of paper was soon thrust out. Strider returned to Colonel Baylor with a note:

  Capt. John Brown answers:

  In consideration of all my men, whether living or dead, or wounded, being soon safely in and delivered up to me at this point with all their arms and ammunition, we will then take our prisoners and cross the Potomac bridge, a little beyond which we will set them at liberty; after which we can negotiate about the Government property as may be best. Also we require the delivery of our horses and harness at the hotel.

  John Brown

  Several men read the note with Baylor. It was passed to Lawson Botts, a leading lawyer of the region and a kinsman of the Washington family. Botts threw down the note and ground it under his foot.

  "Gentlemen," he said, "this is adding insult to injury. I think we should storm those fellows without delay."3

  Colonel Baylor shook his head. He would sit until daylight to avoid wounding the prisoners. He rejected the plea for terms, but did not tell the mob the identity of "Smith."

  Baylor sent another man to talk with Brown, a Captain Sinn of the Frederick militia. Brown complained that his men had been shot under a flag of truce.

  "Men who take up arms as you have, in insurrection, must expect that," Sinn said.

  "I have weighed the responsibility and shall not shrink from it," Brown said. "I had full possession of the town, and could have murdered everyone in it. We have killed no unarmed men. I think we are entitled to some terms."

  "Mayor Beckham was unarmed, and you shot him."

  Brown expressed "deep regret." Sinn left the enginehouse. A doctor followed him there, examined the wounded son of old Brown, Watson, saw that he was near death, and departed. The light was snuffed out, and the enginehouse was quiet.

  First news of the raid had gone out at seven five A.M., a message from a railroad telegrapher reporting a plot to free the slaves. The master of transportation in the Baltimore office of the railroad replied at nine A.M.:

  Your dispatch is evidently exaggerated and written under excitement. Why should our trains be stopped by Abolitionists, and how do you know they are such and that they numbered one hundred or more? What is their object?

  Before the frantic Harpers Ferry operator could reply to his critic, the railroad's president, John W. Garrett, read the message of alarm and sent telegrams to President Buchanan in Washington, to Virginia's Governor Wise, and the commander of Maryland's volunteer troops. Thus the news reached the country at large before the first of the militia entered Harpers Ferry.

  The enginehouse was a solid brick structure, about thirty-five feet by thirty, with doors stoutly battened. Two "heavy, old-fashioned fire engines" were inside, with a hose cart and reel standing between them on the brick floor. The prisoners huddled at the rear with the dead and wounded raiders. It was cold in the place as night wore on.

  Young Allstadt wrote: "In the quiet of the night young Oliver Brown died. He begged again and again to be shot, in the agony of his wound, but his father replied to him, 'Oh, you will get over it,' and, If you must die, die like a man.' "

  Oliver Brown lay quiet in his corner.

  "I guess he's dead," Brown said.

  There were now only five raiders left alive and unwounded. Old Brown spoke occasionally, and managed a normal voice, though he had been forty hours without sleep.

&nb
sp; "Men, are you awake?" he called at intervals.

  Jeremiah Anderson and Dauphin Thompson were two of the younger raiders. They listened as Brown talked with the captive Federal paymaster, John Daingerfield. The paymaster insisted that Brown's raid was treason against the United States as well as Virginia.

  One of the young men called to Brown, "Are we committing treason against the country by being here?" "Certainly," Brown said.

  "Then we don't want to fight any more, if that's true. We thought we came to liberate the slaves. We didn't know it was treason."

  There were now few sounds to be heard from outside the enginehouse. The raiders had been warned that civilians no longer surrounded the place. United States Marines had come.

  It had been quite a day for Lieutenant James Ewell Brown Stuart, 1 st U.S. Cavalry, a fiercely bearded officer of twenty-six on furlough from his Kansas frontier regiment. He was caught up in the opening scene of a national struggle by sheer accident.