Jeb Stuart, The Last Cavalier Page 4

  When he reached home, he discovered the "long-looked-for document from headquarters"—his commission as second lieutenant in the Mounted Rifles. He was assigned to duty in Texas, October fifteenth.

  He found the Rifles "a corps which my taste, fondness for riding, and desire to serve my country in some acceptable manner led me to select above all the rest."

  There was a delay, however, and he made a leisurely trip west through Washington and New York, buying equipment on his way. It was this week, in Washington, that he had made the first known daguerreotype of his early manhood, a solemn portrait in a fashionable black coat, light waistcoat, white shirt with a gates-ajar collar, its points upturned about his broad mouth. The chin, derided as weak by his friends, is tucked over an enormous black tie. If the chin is weak, the fault is concealed by the camera's angle, for the face is strong, almost belligerent. The hair is swept back from a high brow, curling long over the ears. There is mysterious banter in his letters of this period about the picture, which he sent to several friends. He wrote to one from Washington's Willard Hotel:

  I send you by this mail a likeness of "Beauty". You perceive I was looking my prettiest when it was taken. ... I staid in New York City just three minutes by the watch ... Arlington yesterday, delighted.

  You are at liberty to show this daguerreotype to our mutual

  friends, but beware of 7

  On the eve of departure he had more to say on his career:

  As regards my entering the army, I have but one aim, to do some service to my country in return for what she has done for me.

  I might nominally cancel my sense of duty to my country, by entering that portion of the service entirely unexposed to actual fighting, and thus spend my life in inglorious ease at some delightful station on the Atlantic. But when there are hard knocks to be felt, and hard blows to be dealt, a man really desirous to serve his country will not hesitate a moment to declare for the latter.

  Impatient to join his regiment before the Comanches left the warpath, he was off for the West.

  CHAPTER 3

  On the Frontier

  LIEUTENANT STUART was seasick. He did not leave his cabin as the little steamer crept through the gulf to the West, and when it docked at Galveston, he lay in his berth for twelve hours, still suffering as if he were being tossed on the rough waters.

  A noisy passenger roused him and on unsteady legs Jeb dressed and "crawled" through the streets of the town.

  He had been ill almost since leaving New Orleans, for "a violent northeaster" struck as they entered the Gulf of Mexico and howled over them for hours. Stuart had never before been out of sight of land, and was an easy victim to the pitching of the vessel.

  Otherwise it had been a pleasant journey. He had gone west to Louisville, and here got orders to delay his trip because of a yellow fever epidemic in New Orleans. He used the respite to visit relatives in St. Louis, and it was November twenty-ninth before he took a boat to the south:

  I felt that I had sundered the last ties that bound me to home and friends. ... I glided down the Mississippi, which presented such beauty, novelty and variety of vegetation that the trip really seemed a short one.

  Stuart was not impressed by Galveston:

  I was struck with the rusticity of the inhabitants and the extreme economy and simplicity displayed in their edifices, of which by far the most imposing and finest was the billiard saloon and bar room attached to the Tremont House.

  He went back to the boat and soon landed, "with a voracious appetite" at Indianola, Texas, where he awaited a smaller boat. The final voyage was "tedious" but not perilous. Stuart and his companions slept on deck and cooked their own meals. At night they anchored off the lonely coast and most of the men slept gratefully. But Stuart wrote:

  For my own part I met with something to interest me every day and at night enjoyed an incessant serenade from sea fowls and wolves.

  In Corpus Christi, Stuart found that the Mounted Rifles were some 450 miles west of Laredo in trackless Indian country, and he pushed on. He wrote home of his departure from town under escort, aware that it was the start of his career as a soldier:

  You ought to have seen what an array of wagons were mustered up on the lovely morning of the 29th of December, 1853. May the setting of my military sun be as bright as its rising sun was on that day!

  Jeb saw the country with the eye of a neophyte traveler as he rode west:

  The region is almost entirely uninhabited prairie with little or no vegetation ... and remarkably scarce water. A mud hole is sought with as much avidity as we would repair to the spring under the beech tree on the hottest day in August.

  We found game in the greatest abundance. Deer bounded over the plain in herds with an air of defiance, taking care however to keep at a respectful distance from our rifles, though Major Hall killed two and I wounded another. Rabbits and partridges ran along before us as if inviting us to kill.

  After two days he reached Laredo and headed for Eagle Pass. In this country Stuart had his first glimpse of Indians in the wild.

  He rode with a companion to hunt partridge and was soon out of sight of camp. It was late evening when the wagons had halted for water. From nowhere a band of horsemen appeared, twenty or thirty of them. As Stuart and his friend stared "in utter astonishment" the riders advanced, looking like "Indians in disguise" in their rags, and on scrub ponies.

  Stuart thought his last moment had come:

  Of course we then had to "face the music". In this dilemma we were left for a moment only, for the leader galloping up to us accosted us in plain English and relieved us from our painful suspense.

  The Indians were "mustangers" catching horses for the market, and wanted to buy bread from the soldiers. A relieved Stuart rode with them to the caravan. He wrote home of his courage:

  So you see we were as brave as if they had been Indians sure enough.

  Jeb did not miss occasional beauties of the country, including "a beautiful flower on the roadside" which led him to confess a weakness:

  Fond as I am of flowers (would you believe it?) I didn't pull it, but left it as an ornament to the solitude.

  The caravan reached Laredo, "a little Mexican village of miserable hovels," but the Mounted Rifles seemed to be moving away like a mirage. There was word that they had gone to the west of Fort Clark, to a place called Limpia, more than four hundred miles west of Eagle Pass. The campaign might last six months or longer.

  On one stop Jeb found time to instruct Cousin Bettie on Shakespeare, and revealed the extent of his own reading:

  My favorite piece is the Merchant of Venice. The first time I read Shakespeare to appreciate it was while a Plebe at West Point. I studied my lesson until bedtime and took Shakespeare to bed with me with a lamp by my side and read for hours. I believe Hamlet is his masterpiece. Tempest is first-rate. Love's Labor Lost nothing extra. Midsummer Night's Dream I never could bear. Richard III good. Othello is magnificent.

  I was particularly struck with the author's power of true depiction where Othello is modestly recounting his daring exploits to Desdemona. I hated very much, however, the end. I hope you will read at your leisure Childe Harold and Ivanhoe, and tell me what you think of them. I believe Irving's are the best American works.

  This letter brought a new tone to his correspondence with Cousin Bettie, which had earlier seemed almost like love letters, as if he were trying his hand at the game. From Texas he wrote more like father than lover, and the final letter of the series ended:

  Whatever may be my fate, may you be happy...

  Your Affectionate Cousin.

  It was as if he deliberately snapped whatever tenuous romantic ties bound him to his young kinswoman.1

  The caravan at last joined the Mounted Rifles, but there was little action, though the command scoured West Texas for months. Stuart wrote his cousin Jack Hairston in March, 1855, of his "bitter disappointment":

  Notwithstanding we have threaded every trail, clambered every precipice
and penetrated every ravine for hundreds of miles around, we have not been able to find Mr. Comanche. We are now quietly awaiting General Smith's orders, resting our animals, which are very jaded.

  The men were as worn, he said:

  We had a great deal of walking to do over ground where we could scarcely lead our horses. I wore out a pair of very thick shoes such as cornfield Negroes wear in Virginia and would have been barefooted but for a pair of embroidered slippers which chance threw in my way to bring out. They had been given me while at West Point by Miss Helen Alexander, who was married last summer. I presume she little thought when she gave them that they were destined to tread Comanches trails.

  On the Frontier ^

  He was critical of famed local scouts attached to the Rifles:

  The Texan Rangers would fire all day at deer without killing one. They have left us now, and never was a departure more rejoiced at. They were a rowdy crowd with a few praiseworthy exceptions.

  He wrote Cousin Jack of fine hunting: Blue quail, Rio Grande quail, "the prettiest bird I ever saw," and Chapparal Cocks, antelope and deer. He spent hours observing prairie dogs, which he thought the most remarkable of Texas animals.

  Prairie wolves howled every night, Stuart wrote, but the "most mournful cry" came from a panther. He went out with a companion after "His Panthership," but without success.2

  Stuart was not content with private letters from Texas. He wrote at least two long ones to The Jeffersonian, published in Staunton, Virginia, describing in detail his adventures and the countryside.

  The party pressed over rugged mountains to the camp of the Comanches, now abandoned, where Jeb admired the system of pickets and sentinels developed by the Indians, and concealment of their lodges. Here he met a soldier he would come to know well-Major James Longstreet, who was out from El Paso with a party of the 8th Infantry.

  Stuart's Virginia readers were treated to a sketch of a near tragedy, a swift prairie fire that singed beards, uniforms and horses, and consumed most of the expedition's supplies. The disaster forced the party to give up the chase of Indians and join a nearby camp.

  It was on this expedition that Stuart grew the huge cinnamon-red beard and mustache he wore the rest of his life. He wrote a girl back East:

  My beard (which by the way is in a flourishing condition) has so much altered my physique that you could not recognize me. Davant says that I am the only man he ever saw that Beard improved.

  Stuart triumphed over rough terrain with one piece of artillery on this trip as his horses wound down a snaking cliffside trail. Jeb went to the bottom of the cliff, hoping, he said, to find an order to abandon the gun. There were no such orders from his commander, Major John Simonson:

  I determined to show the Major what a little determination could do.

  Stuart led twenty-five men as they edged the big gun down the sheer bluff with ropes and lariats, lifting it over stones and snaking it along the narrow trail.

  Before night we were sipping our coffee at the Major's bivouac. The Major told me that I deserved great credit for my success, and said that he never expected to see me bring the artillery down that mountain.3

  Stuart was becoming known outside the Rifles. In the spring of 1855, Secretary of War Jefferson Davis organized the 1st and 2nd Cavalry, and ordered Stuart to Jefferson Barracks, St. Louis, as second lieutenant of the ist Cavalry. The commander was Colonel Edwin Sumner, with Joseph E. Johnston as his lieutenant colonel. John Sedgwick was a major, and among the captains and lesser grades were a dozen or more destined to become generals, including George McClellan.

  The cavalry regiments, superbly equipped and led by picked officers from all branches, were the War Department's answer to the Indian menace on the frontier. The Mounted Rifles were outmoded. The need was for a big, swift-striking force able to find the enemy in his own country and endure long campaigns. It was the birth of a modern fighting unit for the army.

  The 2nd Cavalry was led by distinguished men, too: Albert Sidney Johnston was its colonel, R. E. Lee the lieutenant colonel, George Thomas a major. Among the lieutenants was R. E. Lee's nephew, Fitz Lee.

  As he left the Mounted Rifles, Stuart got the highest praise from Major Simonson:

  During your service with Company G, your duties have, at times, been necessarily arduous, and it has afforded me pleasure to notice that under these circumstances you have not omitted to display that cheerfulness and zeal in their performance which, if perservered in, will not fail to be appreciated by those with whom you may serve, and to secure you a favorable reputation as an officer.

  Simonson later wrote:

  Lieutenant Stuart was brave and gallant, always prompt in the execution of orders, and reckless of danger or exposure. I considered him one of the most promising young officers in the United States Army.

  About this time Stuart had a noteworthy letter from his father in Virginia:

  Just embarking in military life (a life which tests, perhaps more than any other, a young man's prudence and steadiness), at an immense distance from your friends, great responsibility rests upon your shoulders.

  It is true that you have, to start with, good morals fortified by religion, a good temper and a good constitution, which if preserved will carry you through the trial safely. But the temptations of a camp to a young man of sanguine temperament, like yourself, are not to be trifled with or despised. I conjure you to be constantly on your guard, repelling and avoiding the slightest approach towards vice or immorality.

  Stuart left Texas in May and was soon busy with the organization of the new force in St. Louis, though probably disappointed when Colonel Sumner made him regimental quartermaster and commissary. He learned vital lessons as chaperon to the mounts, however, and was one of the first men with experience in mounting, feeding and supplying a modern cavalry troop.

  He found companionship in St. Louis among the lieutenants and captains, including W. N. R. Beall, George Steuart, Robert Ransom, George Bayard, Lunsford Lomax, William S. Walker, R. H. Anderson and R. S. Garnett—all of them to become generals. He had at least one close friend outside the regiment, Andrew Reid Venable, Jr., a twenty-three-year-old Virginia businessman drawn to the booming frontier town. Stuart, Venable and other Southerners felt themselves at home, for the "tone of society" was set by families from the plantation South. Stuart's relatives were part of "the Southern element," as he was, without the trouble of searching his conscience.4

  He may have read danger in St. Louis, where the plain people were almost unanimously antislavery, and joined the Free Soilers in noisy demonstrations. The fight to keep slavery from the West seemed to center in the turbulent city. Stuart was snatched away in the summer of 1855, assigned to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas Territory.

  One of his first sights of this frontier must have been the daughter of Colonel Philip St. George Cooke of the 2nd Dragoons. Her name was Flora; born in Missouri of an old Virginia family, graduate of a private school in Detroit, an accomplished horsewoman, and though not pretty, an effective charmer. Stuart succumbed with hardly a struggle. His first note to her on July 25, 1855:

  Lieut. Stuart presents his compliments to Miss Flora with the view of ascertaining whether her plans for the ride this afternoon have fully matured

  Lieut. Stuart begs leave to add that he hopes nothing will occur to prevent the ride, and with best wishes for her hasty recovery from the remotest resemblance of sickness.5

  Little more than two weeks later he wrote a male cousin in Virginia:

  I have something of importance, to myself at least, to tell you and which will perhaps surprise you. . . . Our garrison is notwithstanding the presence of cholera among the troops quite lively. Some seven or eight young ladies can always hoist sail for amusement. I have been riding with one nearly every suitable evening. I hardly expected so much refinement on the frontier... I'm bound to be married before I am 23.6

  A few weeks of riding with Flora brought an engagement. They planned a church wedding, and Stuart wrote hi
s father and got parental blessings. The Cookes were well known in Virginia: The father was a distinguished Army veteran; one of his sons, John R. Cooke, was a promising young Harvard graduate, and a nephew John Esten Cooke, was one of the most celebrated American novelists, "The Sir Walter Scott of The Southern Border," author of successful books, a poet, and contributor to The Southern Literary Messenger.

  The romance was interrupted in September when the ist Cavalry went on an Indian raid. Stuart returned after a hard expedition, on November fourth, to find word of the death of his father. He could not return to Virginia, but the death forced cancellation of plans for an elaborate wedding.

  Stuart wrote Flora that their quarters in Leavenworth's "West End" would be simple by comparison with the spacious accommodations for her father's family, and she was teased at Fort Riley about moving into "one room and a kitchen" from the commander's quarters.

  They were married on November fourteenth at Fort Riley, Flora small and radiant in her white school graduation dress, dazzling her bridegroom with the glow of her blue eyes and the fine complexion which were her only claims to beauty. It was a simple ceremony with only four attendants, two men and two women. Jeb took her to Leavenworth the next day. There were no servants in the party. They began housekeeping in Leavenworth's barracks.