February 6, 1833–May 12, 1864
HIGHEST RANK:
Confederate General
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN:
Aquarius
NICKNAMES:
Beauty, Flower of Cavaliers, Jeb, Knight of the Golden Spurs
WORDS TO REMEMBER:
“As to being laughed at about your husband’s fondness for society and the ladies. All I can say is that you are better off in that than you would be if I were fonder of some other things, that excite no remark in others. The society of ladies will never injure your husband and ought to receive your encouragement” (in a letter to his wife).
Urbana, Maryland, was an unlikely spot for revelers the night of September 8, 1862. Especially those of a Confederate bent. But here, in the midst of Unionist territory, young warriors in their finest gray made merry by candlelight with a bevy of local ladies, breathing life into a great cold hall that, before the intervention of war, had housed an academy of learning. Then the rumble of distant guns upset the rhythm of the quadrille, and a delicious tension fell upon the place. As riders brought news of enemy action at an outpost, the men dashed away to their waiting saddles with more than the usual pluck. Courage, after all, loves an audience. By midnight, the horsemen had dispatched their adversaries, chased them as far as their galloping mounts would allow, and returned in triumph. The music struck up once again and women dizzy with battle musk pressed their young suitors for tales of derring-do.
The wounding truth, unfortunately, intruded. As injured soldiers from the clash began to be helped through the academy’s entrance, ladies started swooning for a very different reason, throwing a decidedly pallid patina over the festivities. Musicians put away their instruments, dancers tended to the dying, and the familiar rhythm of blood-red reality returned.
Known as the “Flower of Cavaliers,” the handsome Jeb Stuart was often swarmed by admiring Southern belles and would happily surrender to their requests for kisses. Mrs. Stuart was not pleased.
All in a night’s work for Jeb Stuart and his merry band. The ball had been his idea—jump-starting the social season was his standard modus operandi when settling into new headquarters. Simply put, war was a pageant to Stuart. Though unprecedented in scope, mechanization, and slaughter, the American Civil War was also a reflection of the Victorian age through which it sliced, producing no small number of hotspurs for whom national disintegration was an opening to chivalric distinction. And none of them could hold a candle to the cavalry general from Virginia who called himself “Knight of the Golden Spurs.”
Stuart had another nickname, as well: “Beauty,” an ironic sobriquet he picked up at West Point because he wasn’t much to look at. Unfortunately, he was also easily offended, a combination of traits that got him into one scrape after another. Proud and envious of power, he wore his bruises proudly and resolved to make himself into somebody that people admired—especially women. By the time he graduated from the academy in 1854, he had already fallen for one: A probable proposal to his cousin Bettie Hairston, whom Stuart got to know during his furlough in 1852, was turned down.
The next time he proposed to a woman, in the summer of 1855, he got an answer in the affirmative. Her name was Flora Cooke, the smart, hard-riding daughter of a colonel of dragoons. The couple had met and fallen in love at the romantic lovers’ getaway ofFort Leavenworth, Kansas, where Stuart was trying to make a name for himself after a stint on the west Texas frontier. Fort Leavenworth had more than its fair share of trouble, as the army attempted to keep pro- and antislavery militants from cutting each other to pieces (mostly in vain). With the issue over slavery in Kansas left to settlers, the territory, predictably, fell prey to an increasingly volcanic guerrilla conflict. Fights with the Cheyenne were no picnic either—in 1857 Stuart was shot in the chest at close range during a battle with hostiles, nearly ending his life.
But Stuart wasn’t just another faceless officer doing time on the prairie (there were no shortage of those). He had stuck with the army because, unlike so many of his fellow West Point graduates, he genuinely liked the rough life, the hard beds, and the moldering food. Enduring it all was a distinction of sorts. But more important, the army was a means of affirmation, a catalyst for his burning need to turn heads in his direction. Outwardly disdainful of the power elite whose ranks he inwardly craved to join, his background nevertheless offered connections to it. Elizabeth, his termagant of a mother, had exacted from him an oath never to touch liquor. But his father had bestowed something of genuine worth: political connections. Archibald Stuart had been an officer during the War of 1812 and a popular figure in state and national politics. The Stuart name was familiar and liked in Virginia. Beauty’s greatest asset, however, had been secured at West Point: the Lee family. Custis Lee, a fellow graduate, was one of his best friends, and Custis’s father, Robert E., the academy’s superintendent between 1852 and 1855, had welcomed the young Stuart into his home as a close acquaintance. All these factors came together in 1859 to decide Beauty’s fate.
It began with a stroke of creative genius. Stuart, a consummate horseman (he had often jibed Yankees at the Point for their clumsy equestrian skills), invented a “saber hook” to be attached to a cavalryman’s saber belt; it allowed a rider to quickly hang his sword on the saddle, freeing him to dismount with ease. Duly impressed, the government gave Stuart six months’ leave to go to Washington and secure a patent for his inspired creation. He was in the offices of the War Department on October 17 when word arrived of the raid on Harpers Ferry. Having appointed Colonel Robert E. Lee to do something about it, the secretary of war awarded an eager Stuart the task of fetching Lee, who was on leave across the river at his Arlington estate. When Lee traveled to Harpers Ferry that evening, his young protégé was with him—and the following day, Stuart found himself standing before the heavy doors of a fire engine house in which a partisan called “Smith” was holed up with his associates and some hostages, his plan to start a slave rebellion having foundered. Stuart held Lee’s ultimatum in his hand, and after getting the raiders to open the door under a flag of truce, he beheld the face of the abolitionist who called himself Smith. Immediately, the lieutenant recognized the fellow as none other than John Brown—an unsparing militant he had once met back in “Bloody Kansas.” After negotiations went nowhere, Stuart stepped away from the door and waved his hat in the air, giving the signal to Lee and the marines under his command that the time for talk had ended. Later, when the dust had settled and the insurgents were in custody, Stuart, the only person present who had ever met John Brown, was able to positively identify him. All in all, the young officer had performed well, prominently lending his nerve and knowledge to the resolution of an incident that had the whole country talking. Things were looking pretty good for Stuart—he’d even earned $5,000 for the patent of his hook.
Though he was back in Kansas when Abraham Lincoln’s election was causing much gnashing of teeth, his name was already on the lips of those in the South who were anticipating a war. Pledging to “go with Virginia,” Stuart packed up and took his family back east upon hearing of his native state’s secession, resigning his commission in the United States Army. The Confederates already thought better of him than his erstwhile employers: En route to his new lieutenant colonelcy in the Provisional Army of Virginia, he received word that the U.S. Army had planned to give him a promotion of their own—to captain. Pshaw.
It’s a wonderful irony that the Civil War’s preeminent cavalier began the conflict with a commission in the infantry. (No cavalry openings were available at the time.) But Thomas Jackson, soon to be known to the world as “Stonewall,” wasn’t going to let that stop him. He gave Stuart a cavalry command, a decision for which virtually everyone in the South would soon be grateful. In skirmishing with Union forces in the northern Shenandoah Valley, Stuart proved uncannily gifted not only at confusing his foes, but also at passing his tactical expertise on to the un-blooded civilians under his leadership. After Joseph Johnston assumed command over the forces around Winchester, Stuart screened the army’s withdrawal from the Valley, then caught up with it on the road to Bull Run. There, in the war’s first major engagement, he led his men in a charge that broke up a unit of Zouaves. But more important, the knowledge of the field gained by his swift horsemen allowed him to guide Jubal Early’s infantry to where it was needed most, where it routed the Union right.
Such speed and agility—the ability to be at so many places at once and, when necessary, to seem to be—defined the cavalry; and nobody understood or made use of this as well as Stuart did in the first two years of the war. Tireless, aggressive (“when in doubt, attack”), and to the saddle born, Stuart drew on the South’s equestrian culture to forge mounted units that, with his charismatic leadership, made fools of their Union adversaries. His secret weapon, simply enough, was concentration: While Federal troopers were being spread thin across every theater, the Confederacy was pooling its cavalry assets so as to overwhelm the enemy at every encounter. It all meant that Stuart could do things his enemies couldn’t. And some of those things were spectacular.
In September 1861, Stuart was given six regiments of horsemen and the rank of brigadier general. By June of the following year, Richmond was being threatened by McClellan’s inexorable advance during the Peninsula campaign, Stuart’s cavalry was busy screening the Rebel army’s retreat toward the capital, and Joseph Johnston was wounded badly enough to be replaced by a new commander. That replacement, of course, was Robert E. Lee. Stuart himself could not have made a more congenial choice.
Jeb Stuart had a case of “the Lees.” The new chief of the Army of Northern Virginia was like a father to him, but that was just the beginning. Two of Stuart’s regimental commanders were Lees: Robert’s son William “Rooney” Lee led the Ninth Virginia Cavalry, while Fitzhugh Lee, a nephew of the elder Lee, rode at the head of the First Virginia. Jeb was still close to his old chum Custis, considered Mrs. Robert E. Lee a sort of second mother, and carried on a correspondence with Lee’s daughter, Mary, a friend since his time at West Point. At any rate, Stuart needed no introduction to his new superior. And the two quickly developed a working relationship that any military officer, in any age, would envy.
Lee had to stop McClellan’s advance and throw the huge Northern army, already uncomfortably close to Richmond, back down the Peninsula from whence it came. But Lee (being Lee) wanted to do more than that—he wanted to destroy the larger foe, piecemeal. And his dashing young cavalry czar would help him do it. Beauty was charged with making a reconnaissance north of the Chickahominy River, where torrential rains had separated parts of McClellan’s army from the rest, inviting their extermination. Stuart did that and went one better. In a move of singular hubris, he drove his 1,200 carefully chosen horsemen on a one-hundred-mile circuit of McClellan’s entire army, burning, looting, and confusing as he went. Sure, Lee’s intelligence requirements were met: Stuart discovered just how vulnerable those stranded Federal elements were north of the river, paving the way for Lee’s advance of the Seven Days’ Battles. But Stuart’s most significant accomplishment, though less tangible, was incalculably greater. He had turned the Confederacy’s dark hour into a bloody good lark, playing “Marco Polo” with the biggest army yet seen in American history. On the eve of an attack like the one Lee was about to unleash, such shenanigans had an unnerving effect—an abusive bit of effrontery that shattered Union delusions of control.
It was merely the first of Stuart’s headline-making raids. In late August 1862, he led a descent on Catlett’s Station, Virginia, catching the camp of Union general John Pope off guard and grabbing tons of loot, thousands of Yankee greenbacks, and invaluable correspondence that alerted Lee to his enemy’s intentions. In October, Stuart went in search of horses at Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, and found more than a thousand of them—in the course of which he once again rode right around McClellan’s army and destroyed all manner of matériel. The raid on Dumfries, in December 1862, caught hundreds of prisoners and horses and gave Stuart an opportunity to snipe at Federal quartermaster general Montgomery Meigs, to whom Stuart wired a complaint about the low quality of Northern mules with which he was forced to haul his booty back home. (To add insult to injury, he sent the message from Burke’s Station, which Washington believed at the time was still under Union control.)
Stuart had become a legend in his own time. The papers sang his praises. Poets scribbled verses about him. To his countrymen, he was the bold and dashing knight with the devil-may-care style and a real pair of golden spurs to match—sent to him by an admiring Baltimore woman. And to the Union he was a bona fide bogeyman who appeared whenever and wherever he wished, offering battle only when he wanted to and then disappearing after trouncing his opponents.
Who the hell would take this lying down? Nobody—not even the Federals. When Northern cavalry under William Averell came in force across the Rappahannock at Kelly’s Ford in March 1863, they were gunning for Stuart himself. It was an unpleasant reminder that the blue-coated students of Jeb Stuart’s school of cavalry hard knocks had been paying attention in class. Stuart’s men fought them to a draw, but were hard-pressed and discomfited by the attack, which was unprecedented in scale, ferocity, and intent. Worst of all, Stuart’s beloved artillery chief, John Pelham, was killed in the action. During the Chancellorsville campaign that followed, Joe Hooker offered more of the same—throngs of cavalry, rather than the old dribs and drabs, in numbers only the North could produce. Stuart did well against them under the circumstances and even got an opportunity to command Stonewall’s corps after the great Jackson was mortally wounded. Though he lobbied to make the position permanent, Lee gave him an even better prize: an expanded cavalry command, bringing Stuart’s force to around ten thousand riders.
He would need them. On June 9, Union general Alfred Pleasanton crossed the Rappahannock with a force that made Averell’s effort at Kelly’s Ford look like a wine tasting. In the battle near Brandy Station that followed—the largest cavalry clash in North American history—Pleasanton managed to catch Stuart with his pants down, though his men were compelled in the end to withdraw. Nevertheless, Stuart’s days as mounted master of Virginia were over.
Stuart himself, however, didn’t seem to notice. In the Gettysburg campaign that followed, it was like the old days—ranging across a supine Pennsylvania countryside that bowed before his quickening wrath, yielding up its riches. Lots of riches. But while he was lugging around well over a hundred wagons full of captured supplies and provisions, the Army of Northern Virginia was groping forward like a great blinded beast. Stuart’s cavalry, effectively the army’s eyes, was off gallivanting. And when Lee bumped into the enemy, beginning the three-day Battle of Gettysburg, it was in a place not of his choosing, against an enemy whose strength had to be guessed. Stuart showed up the second day, too late to do more than take up the far left wing of the army and, on the third day, launch a futile assault around the Rummel farm that would reap a pile of bodies and little else.
Nobody’s perfect. But Stuart had failed to perform what was essentially Cavalry 101: screen the infantry in enemy territory and scout for details about the enemy’s strength and whereabouts. The spectators back home reacted accordingly, angrily stripping him of the laurels he’d won in sunnier days. Newspaper editorials began popping up throughout the Confederacy—had been, in fact, since Brandy Station—in which the Knight of the Golden Spurs was dismissed as “indolent” and even “weak-minded.” And it wasn’t just the folks back home who were pissed off. Wade Hampton, one of Stuart’s most able subordinates, had been seething for quite some time over what he believed was Stuart’s preferential treatment of Virginians at the expense of South Carolinians like himself. Thomas Rosser, a colonel in Stuart’s command, pretty much hated his superior for his conceit and duplicity—a fact of which Stuart remained completely ignorant. Then there’s the notorious “Grumble” Jones, who’d been griping about Stuart virtually since the moment he was assigned to his command. Officers like these bore witness to the other Jeb Stuart, the guy who knew he looked great in the saddle with his high boots, French sword, and black plume; who could hold up the progress of a raid just to get smothered in kisses by admiring damsels; who loved the reviewing stand at least as much as he loved victory; and whose conspicuous need for affirmation made it uncomfortably obvious that the adoration of the ladies was the cause he fought for.
After months of increasing Federal strength, it is hardly surprising how Beauty met his end. He had always said, “All I ask of fate is that I may be killed leading a cavalry charge.” But by May 1864, circumstances were such that he was more likely to be on the receiving end of a cavalry charge. And that, more or less, is what happened. When Phil Sheridan came trotting south while infantry of both sides were mauling each other at Spotsylvania, it was with the intention of doing what none of his predecessors could: finish the Stuart legend. Sheridan came at the head of hard, ruthless officers who led huge numbers of troopers with a surfeit of repeating rifles, well-fed mounts, and confidence. When Stuart deployed at Yellow Tavern to stop them, it was with the understanding that he was confronting a foe whose goal was Richmond. Sheridan, however, wanted Stuart. And he got him. Or, more precisely, a private from the Fifth Michigan named John Huff got him while running past Stuart, who sat on his horse squeezing off shots from his LeMat at a swarm of onrushing Federals as if it were the most natural thing in the world. He died from the wound the following day.
A HOUSE DIVIDED
“He will regret it but once,” said Stuart about his father-in-law’s decision to fight for the Union, “and that will be continuously.” Stuart’s in-laws, the Cookes, hailed from Virginia and went with the Confederacy—with two exceptions. Philip St. George Cooke, Flora’s father, never doubted that his primary allegiance was to his country, rather than his state. (The other was Flora’s sister.) To Cooke, the fact that he wore blue during the War Between the States while his son and son-in-law wore gray was more a reflection of their treason than his lack of clan loyalty. Jeb, for his part, believed that Cooke’s decision was evil and unforgivable—a stain on the family honor that no amount of time could remove. But this furious attitude posed a difficult problem for Stuart: his son had been named after the elder Cooke. Stuart solved the problem by convincing Flora to rename the little tyke. His new identity? James Ewell Brown Stuart Jr., a.k.a. “Jimmy.”
Facing and killing his father-in-law on the field of battle remained Stuart’s principal fantasy through much of the war, but it never came to pass. Philip Cooke died in 1895.
War-drobe
Very early in the morning of August 18, 1862, Stuart and his staff barely escaped capture by Union cavalry at Verdiersville, Virginia. It was such a close-run attack that Stuart had no time to grab his hat, gauntlets, or cloak before vaulting into his saddle and getting the hell out of town. (He had been sleeping on a porch when word arrived that enemy horsemen were nearby.) For a fellow like Stuart, who prided himself on getting the drop on the enemy rather than the reverse, the capture of his personal clothing was no small slight. “Where’s your hat?” was the all-too-common greeting he received throughout the Army of Northern Virginia. And though he was the “jolly cavalier,” celebrated for his sense of humor and good fun, enough was enough.
Which is why the raid at Catlett’s Station just four days later was so important to him. In addition to sensitive documents and lots of booty, the raid produced the uniform of Union general John Pope himself—the guy whose horsemen had stolen Stuart’s hat. Beauty made the most of his revenge by sending Pope a request for an exchange: his hat for Pope’s uniform. But Pope’s duds were destined for greater things. Stuart ultimately sent the clothes to Virginia governor John Letcher, who had the cloak displayed in the state library in Richmond like the war trophy that it was.
THE “PRICE” OF CELEBRITY
Stuart spared no effort to make the mood at his headquarters, wherever it might be, as lighthearted as possible. Feuds of any sort amongst his principal subordinates made him very uneasy, and he hastened to smooth them over. He openly favored those of a jolly disposition, and his sense of humor was legendary—indeed, he was probably the only man in the entire Confederacy who could get a laugh out of both Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, two notoriously stern fellows. A fan of extraordinary, even exotic people, he attracted some unusual types to his HQ, including a hulking, ferocious, unusually hairy corporal named Hagan and a 250-pound Prussian soldier of fortune named Heros von Borcke (who, despite—or perhaps partly because of—his clumsy English, would become one of Stuart’s closest associates).
Not everyone in Stuart’s circle bought into the convivial atmosphere, of course. Tom Price, an engineer on Stuart’s staff, wrote in his diary of Stuart’s boastful, “garrulous” behavior in camp, where he often “prattled on” and indulged in “over-acting.” A portrait emerges of a commanding officer who’s trying too hard and who loves to hear himself recount his own heroics. Unfortunately for both Stuart and Price, the diary was captured by Federals during the Chancellorsville campaign and was ultimately excerpted in the. Price transferred out of Stuart’s command soon after.
BAND OF BROTHERS
Stuart, who dabbled in poetry and loved to sing (he had an excellent voice), made music a fundamental element of camp life. His retinue nearly always featured musicians, including a servant of his named Bob, who played the bones and the violin. But by far the most celebrated minstrel in Jeb’s coterie was Sam Sweeney. The younger brother of Joel Sweeney, who is credited with popularizing the banjo, Sam could hold an audience spellbound or set them to dancing up a storm. And the song he was most often asked by Stuart to play was “Jine the Cavalry,” which recounted Stuart’s exploits and whose opening chorus boomed, “If you want to catch the Devil, if you want to have fun/If you want to smell Hell, jine the cavalry!” Needless to say, it was Stuart’s favorite song.
Sweeney died from smallpox in January 1864, taking much of the brio out of Stuart’s celebrated soirees.
REMEMBER THE LADIES
It seems nearly certain that Jeb Stuart never committed an act of adultery. But in all fairness, it couldn’t have been easy to be the wife of the “Flower of Cavaliers.” Late in the war, Flora began to tire of the pernicious rumors of her husband’s fondness for female admirers. Stuart got defensive about it, confirming the chasm that existed between their respective notions of proper behavior. His flirtations—though innocent enough—were so numerous as to beg the question: What was their purpose? He was once swarmed by admiring belles in Middleburg, Virginia, happily surrendering to their requests for “kisses.” And his association with Richmond socialites Constance and Hetty Cary spawned plenty of gossip—Stuart once asked Hetty at a charades party to spend some time with him alone in a closet. It’s as if Stuart was reaping the ultimate affirmation for a Victorian practitioner of courtly love—a reminder, through the attentions of women, that he was everything the newspapers said he was.
A final, touching tragedy was perhaps emblematic of Stuart’s relationship with his wife. After receiving word of his wounding at Yellow Tavern, Flora rushed with all available speed to be at his side. But she arrived too late to say farewell. On his deathbed, Stuart asked for her on several occasions. He also conferred with his aide, Major Henry McClellan (a first cousin of the renowned Union general George McClellan), about the disposition of his personal effects: his sword, to be given to his son; his spurs, to Mrs. Lilly Lee, a friend and war widow; and, folded within his hat, a small Confederate flag that McClellan did.