THE CHEVALIER OF THE LOST CAUSE.
The queer people who devote their energies to the collection of
autographs have a habit, as everybody whose name has been three times
in print must have discovered, of soliciting from their victim "an
autograph _with_ a sentiment," and the unfortunate one is expected,
in such cases, to say something worthy of himself, something
especially which shall be eminently characteristic, revealing, in
a single sentence, the whole man, or woman, as the case may be.
How large a proportion of the efforts to do this are measurably
successful, nobody but a collector of the sort referred to can
say; but it seems probable that the most characteristic autograph
"sentiments" are those which are written of the writer's own
motion and not of malice aforethought. I remember seeing a curious
collection of these once, many of which were certainly not unworthy
the men who wrote them. One read, "I. O. U. fifty pounds lost at
play,--CHARLES JAMES FOX;" and another was a memorandum of sundry
wagers laid, signed by the Right Honorable Richard Brinsley Sheridan.
These, I thought, bore the impress of their authors' character, and
it is at the least doubtful whether either of the distinguished
gentlemen would have done half so well in answer to a modest request
for a sentiment and a signature.
In the great dining-hall of the Briars, an old-time mansion in the
Shenandoah Valley, the residence of Mr. John Esten Cooke, there hangs
a portrait of a broad-shouldered cavalier, and beneath is written, in
the hand of the cavalier himself,
"_Yours to count on_,
J. E. B. STUART,"
an autograph sentiment which seems to me a very perfect one in its
way. There was no point in Stuart's character more strongly marked
than the one here hinted at. He was "yours to count on" always: your
friend if possible, your enemy if you would have it so, but your
friend or your enemy "to count on," in any case. A franker, more
transparent nature, it is impossible to conceive. What he was he
professed to be. That which he thought, he said, and his habit of
thinking as much good as he could of those about him served to make
his frankness of speech a great friend-winner.
I saw him for the first time when he was a colonel, in command of
the little squadron of horsemen known as the first regiment of
Virginia cavalry. The company to which I belonged was assigned to
this regiment immediately after the evacuation of Harper's Ferry by
the Confederates. General Johnston's army was at Winchester, and
the Federal force under General Patterson lay around Martinsburg.
Stuart, with his three or four hundred men, was encamped at Bunker
Hill, about midway between the two, and thirteen miles from support
of any kind. He had chosen this position as a convenient one from
which to observe the movements of the enemy, and the tireless
activity which marked his subsequent career so strongly had already
begun. As he afterwards explained, it was his purpose to train and
school his men, quite as much as anything else, that prompted the
greater part of his madcap expeditions at this time, and if there
be virtue in practice as a means of perfection, he was certainly an
excellent school-master.
My company arrived at the camp about noon, after a march of three
or four days, having traveled twenty miles that morning. Stuart,
whom we encountered as we entered the camp, assigned us our
position, and ordered our tents pitched. Our captain, who was even
worse disciplined than we were, seeing a much more comfortable
camping-place than the muddy one assigned to us, and being a
comfort-loving gentleman, proceeded to lay out a model camp at a
distance of fifty yards from the spot indicated. It was not long
before the colonel particularly wished to consult with that captain,
and after the consultation the volunteer officer was firmly convinced
that all West Point graduates were martinets, with no knowledge
whatever of the courtesies due from one gentleman to another.
We were weary after our long journey, and disposed to welcome the
prospect of rest which our arrival in the camp held out. But resting,
as we soon learned, had small place in our colonel's tactics. We
had been in camp perhaps an hour, when an order came directing that
the company be divided into three parts, each under command of a
lieutenant, and that these report immediately for duty. Reporting, we
were directed to scout through the country around Martinsburg, going
as near the town as possible, and to give battle to any cavalry force
we might meet. Here was a pretty lookout, certainly! Our officers
knew not one inch of the country, and might fall into all sorts of
traps and ambuscades; and what if we should meet a cavalry force
greatly superior to our own? This West Point colonel was rapidly
forfeiting our good opinion. Our lieutenants were brave fellows,
however, and they led us boldly if ignorantly, almost up to the very
gates of the town occupied by the enemy. We saw some cavalry but met
none, their orders not being so peremptorily belligerent, perhaps, as
ours were; wherefore they gave us no chance to fight them. The next
morning our unreasonable colonel again ordered us to mount, in spite
of the fact that there were companies in the camp which had done
nothing at all the day before. This time he led us himself, taking
pains to get us as nearly as possible surrounded by infantry, and
then laughingly telling us that our chance for getting out of the
difficulty, except by cutting our way through, was an exceedingly
small one. I think we began about this time to suspect that we were
learning something, and that this reckless colonel was trying to
teach us. But that he was a hare-brained fellow, lacking the caution
belonging to a commander, we were unanimously agreed. He led us out
of the place at a rapid gait, before the one gap in the enemy's lines
could be closed, and then jauntily led us into one or two other
traps, before taking us back to camp.
But it was not until General Patterson began his feint against
Winchester that our colonel had full opportunity to give us his field
lectures. When the advance began, and our pickets were driven in,
the most natural thing to do, in our view of the situation, was to
fall back upon our infantry supports at Winchester, and I remember
hearing various expressions of doubt as to the colonel's sanity
when, instead of falling back, he marched his handful of men right
up to the advancing lines, and ordered us to dismount. The Federal
skirmish line was coming toward us at a double-quick, and we were
set going toward it at a like rate of speed, leaving our horses
hundreds of yards to the rear. We could see that the skirmishers
alone outnumbered us three or four times, and it really seemed that
our colonel meant to sacrifice his command deliberately. He waited
until the infantry was within about two hundred yards of us, we being
in the edge of a little grove, and they on the other side of an open
field. Then Stuart cried out, "Backwards--march! steady, men,--keep
your faces to the enemy!" and we marched in that way through the
timber, delivering our shot-gun fire slowly as we fell back toward
our horses. Then mounting, with the skirmishers almost upon us, we
retreated, not hurriedly, but at a slow trot, which the colonel
would on no account permit us to change into a gallop. Taking us out
into the main road he halted us in column, with our backs to the
enemy.
"Attention!" he cried. "Now I want to talk to you, men. You are brave
fellows, and patriotic ones too, but you are ignorant of this kind of
work, and I am teaching you. I want you to observe that a good man on
a good horse can never be caught. Another thing: cavalry can _trot_
away from anything, and a gallop is a gait unbecoming a soldier,
unless he is going toward the enemy. Remember that. We gallop toward
the enemy, and trot away, always. Steady now! don't break ranks!"
And as the words left his lips a shell from a battery half a mile to
the rear hissed over our heads.
"There," he resumed. "I've been waiting for that, and watching those
fellows. I knew they'd shoot too high, and I wanted you to learn how
shells sound."
We spent the next day or two literally within the Federal lines. We
were shelled, skirmished with, charged, and surrounded scores of
times, until we learned to hold in high regard our colonel's masterly
skill in getting into and out of perilous positions. He seemed to
blunder into them in sheer recklessness, but in getting out he
showed us the quality of his genius; and before we reached Manassas,
we had learned, among other things, to entertain a feeling closely
akin to worship for our brilliant and daring leader. We had begun
to understand, too, how much force he meant to give to his favorite
dictum that the cavalry is the eye of the army.
His restless activity was one, at least, of the qualities which
enabled him to win the reputation he achieved so rapidly. He could
never be still. He was rarely ever in camp at all, and he never
showed a sign of fatigue. He led almost everything. Even after he
became a general officer, with well-nigh an army of horsemen under
his command, I frequently followed him as my leader in a little party
of half a dozen troopers, who might as well have gone with a sergeant
on the duty assigned them; and once I was his only follower on a
scouting expedition, of which he, a brigadier-general at the time,
was the commander. I had been detailed to do some clerical work at
his head-quarters, and, having finished the task assigned me, was
waiting in the piazza of the house he occupied, for somebody to give
me further orders, when Stuart came out.
"Is that your horse?" he asked, going up to the animal and examining
him minutely.
I replied that he was, and upon being questioned further informed
him that I did not wish to sell my steed. Turning to me suddenly, he
said,--
"Let's slip off on a scout, then; I'll ride your horse and you can
ride mine. I want to try your beast's paces;" and mounting, we
galloped away. Where or how far he intended to go I did not know.
He was enamored of my horse, and rode, I suppose, for the pleasure
of riding an animal which pleased him. We passed outside our picket
line, and then, keeping in the woods, rode within that of the Union
army. Wandering about in a purposeless way, we got a near view of
some of the Federal camps, and finally finding ourselves objects of
attention on the part of some well-mounted cavalry in blue uniforms,
we rode rapidly down a road toward our own lines, our pursuers riding
quite as rapidly immediately behind us.
"General," I cried presently, "there is a Federal picket post on the
road just ahead of us. Had we not better oblique into the woods?"
"Oh no. They won't expect us from this direction, and we can ride
over them before they make up their minds who we are."
Three minutes later we rode at full speed through the corporal's
guard on picket, and were a hundred yards or more away before they
could level a gun at us. Then half a dozen bullets whistled about our
ears, but the cavalier paid no attention to them.
"Did you ever time this horse for a half-mile?" was all he had to say.
Expeditions of this singular sort were by no means uncommon
occurrences with him. I am told by a friend who served on his staff,
that he would frequently take one of his aids and ride away otherwise
unattended into the enemy's lines; and oddly enough this was one of
his ways of making friends with any officer to whom his rough, boyish
ways had given offense. He would take the officer with him, and when
they were alone would throw his arms around his companion, and say,--
"My dear fellow, you mustn't be angry with me,--you know I love you."
His boyishness was always apparent, and the affectionate nature of
the man was hardly less so, even in public. He was especially fond
of children, and I remember seeing him in the crowded waiting-room
of the railroad station at Gordonsville with a babe on each arm; a
great, bearded warrior, with his plumed hat, and with golden spurs
clanking at his heels, engaged in a mad frolic with all the little
people in the room, charging them right and left with the pair of
babies which he had captured from their unknown mothers.
It was on the day of my ride with him that I heard him express his
views of the war and his singular aspiration for himself. It was
almost immediately after General McClellan assumed command of the
army of the Potomac, and while we were rather eagerly expecting him
to attack our strongly fortified position at Centreville. Stuart
was talking with some members of his staff, with whom he had been
wrestling a minute before. He said something about what they could
do by way of amusement when they should go into winter-quarters.
"That is to say," he continued, "if George B. McClellan ever allows
us to go into winter-quarters at all."
"Why, general? Do you think he will advance before spring?" asked one
of the officers.
"Not against Centreville," replied the general. "He has too much
sense for that, and I think he knows the shortest road to Richmond,
too. If I am not greatly mistaken, we shall hear of him presently on
his way up the James River."
In this prediction, as the reader knows, he was right. The
conversation then passed to the question of results.
"I regard it as a foregone conclusion," said Stuart, "that we shall
ultimately whip the Yankees. We are bound to believe that, anyhow;
but the war is going to be a long and terrible one, first. We've only
just begun it, and very few of us will see the end. _All I ask of
fate is that I may be killed leading a cavalry charge._"
The remark was not a boastful or seemingly insincere one. It was
made quietly, cheerfully, almost eagerly, and it impressed me at the
time with the feeling that the man's idea of happiness was what the
French call glory, and that in his eyes there was no glory like that
of dying in one of the tremendous onsets which he knew so well how to
make. His wish was granted, as we know. He received his death-wound
at the head of his troopers.
With those about him he was as affectionate as a woman, and his
little boyish ways are remembered lovingly by those of his military
household whom I have met since the war came to an end. On one
occasion, just after a battle, he handed his coat to a member of his
staff, saying,--
"Try that on, captain, and see how it fits you."
The garment fitted reasonably well, and the general continued,--
"Pull off two of the stars, and wear the coat to the war department,
and tell the people there to make you a major."
The officer did as his chief bade him. Removing two of the three
stars he made the coat a major's uniform, and the captain was
promptly promoted in compliance with Stuart's request.
General Stuart was, without doubt, capable of handling an infantry
command successfully, as he demonstrated at Chancellorsville,
where he took Stonewall Jackson's place and led an army corps in
a very severe engagement; but his special fitness was for cavalry
service. His tastes were those of a horseman. Perpetual activity
was a necessity of his existence, and he enjoyed nothing so much as
danger. Audacity, his greatest virtue as a cavalry commander, would
have been his besetting sin in any other position. Inasmuch as it
is the business of the cavalry to live as constantly as possible
within gunshot of the enemy, his recklessness stood him in excellent
stead as a general of horse, but it is at least questionable whether
his want of caution would not have led to disaster if his command
had been of a less mobile sort. His critics say he was vain, and he
was so, as a boy is. He liked to win the applause of his friends,
and he liked still better to astonish the enemy, glorying in the
thought that his foemen must admire his "impudence," as he called
it, while they dreaded its manifestation. He was continually doing
things of an extravagantly audacious sort, with no other purpose,
seemingly, than that of making people stretch their eyes in wonder.
He enjoyed the admiration of the enemy far more, I think, than he
did that of his friends. This fact was evident in the care he took
to make himself a conspicuous personage in every time of danger.
He would ride at some distance from his men in a skirmish, and in
every possible way attract a dangerous attention to himself. His
slouch hat and long plume marked him in every battle, and made him
a target for the riflemen to shoot at. In all this there was some
vanity, if we choose to call it so, but it was an excellent sort of
vanity for a cavalry chief to cultivate. I cannot learn that he ever
boasted of any achievement, or that his vanity was ever satisfied
with the things already done. His audacity was due, I think, to his
sense of humor, not less than to his love of applause. He would laugh
uproariously over the astonishment he imagined the Federal officers
must feel after one of his peculiarly daring or sublimely impudent
performances. When, after capturing a large number of horses and
mules on one of his raids, he seized a telegraph station and sent a
dispatch to General Meigs, then Quartermaster-General of the United
States army, complaining that he could not afford to come after
animals of so poor a quality, and urging that officer to provide
better ones for capture in future, he enjoyed the joke quite as
heartily as he did the success which made it possible.
The boyishness to which I have referred ran through every part
of his character and every act of his life. His impetuosity in
action, his love of military glory and of the military life, his
occasional waywardness with his friends and his generous affection
for them,--all these were the traits of a great boy, full, to running
over, of impulsive animal life. His audacity, too, which impressed
strangers as the most marked feature of his character, was closely
akin to that disposition which Dickens assures us is common to all
boy-kind, to feel an insane delight in anything which specially
imperils their necks. But the peculiarity showed itself most strongly
in his love of uproarious fun. Almost at the beginning of the war
he managed to surround himself with a number of persons whose
principal qualification for membership of his military household
was their ability to make fun. One of these was a noted banjo-player
and ex-negro minstrel. He played the banjo and sang comic songs to
perfection, and _therefore_ Stuart wanted him. I have known him to
ride with his banjo, playing and singing, even on a march which
might be changed at any moment into a battle; and Stuart's laughter
on such occasions was sure to be heard as an accompaniment as far
as the minstrel's voice could reach. He had another queer character
about him, whose chief recommendation was his grotesque fierceness
of appearance. This was Corporal Hagan, a very giant in frame, with
an abnormal tendency to develop hair. His face was heavily bearded
almost to his eyes, and his voice was as hoarse as distant thunder,
which indeed it closely resembled. Stuart, seeing him in the ranks,
fell in love with his peculiarities of person at once, and had him
detailed for duty at head-quarters, where he made him a corporal,
and gave him charge of the stables. Hagan, whose greatness was
bodily only, was much elated by the attention shown him, and his
person seemed to swell and his voice to grow deeper than ever under
the influence of the newly acquired dignity of chevrons. All this
was amusing, of course, and Stuart's delight was unbounded. The man
remained with him till the time of his death, though not always as a
corporal. In a mad freak of fun one day, the chief recommended his
corporal for promotion, to see, he said, if the giant was capable of
further swelling, and so the corporal became a lieutenant upon the
staff.
With all his other boyish traits, Stuart had an almost child-like
simplicity of character, and the combination of sturdy manhood
with juvenile frankness and womanly tenderness of feeling made him
a study to those who knew him best. His religious feeling was of
that unquestioning, serene sort which rarely exists apart from the
inexperience and the purity of women or children.
While I was serving in South Carolina, I met one evening the general
commanding the military district, and he, upon learning that I had
served with Stuart, spent the entire evening talking of his friend,
for they two had been together in the old army before the war. He
told me many anecdotes of the cavalier, nearly all of which turned
in some way upon the generous boyishness of his character in some
one or other of its phases. He said, among other things, that at
one time, in winter-quarters on the plains of the West I think, he,
Stuart, and another officer (one of those still living who commanded
the army of the Potomac during the war) slept together in one bed,
for several months. Stuart and his brother lieutenant, the general
said, had a quarrel every night about some trifling thing or other,
just as boys will, but when he had made all the petulant speeches
he could, Stuart would lie still a while, and then, passing his arm
around the neck of his comrade, would draw his head to his own breast
and say some affectionate thing which healed all soreness of feeling
and effectually restored the peace. During the evening's conversation
this general formulated his opinion of Stuart's military character in
very striking phrase.
"He is," he said, "the greatest cavalry officer that ever lived. He
has all the dash, daring, and audacity of Murat, and a great deal
more sense." It was his opinion, however, that there were men in
both armies who would come to be known as greater cavalry men than
Stuart, for the reason that Stuart used his men strictly as cavalry,
while others would make dragoons of them. He believed that the nature
of our country was much better adapted to dragoon than to cavalry
service, and hence, while he thought Stuart the best of cavalry
officers, he doubted his ability to stand against such men as
General Sheridan, whose conception of the proper place of the horse
in our war was a more correct one, he thought, than Stuart's. "To the
popular mind," he went on to say, "every soldier who rides a horse
is a cavalry man, and so Stuart will be measured by an incorrect
standard. He will be classed with General Sheridan and measured by
his success or the want of it. General Sheridan is without doubt
the greatest of dragoon commanders, as Stuart is the greatest of
cavalry men; but in this country dragoons are worth a good deal more
than cavalry, and so General Sheridan will probably win the greater
reputation. He will deserve it, too, because behind it is the sound
judgment which tells him what use to make of his horsemen."
It is worthy of remark that all this was said before General Sheridan
had made his reputation as an officer, and I remember that at the
time his name was almost new to me.
From my personal experience and observation of General Stuart, as
well as from the testimony of others, I am disposed to think that
he attributed to every other man qualities and tastes like his own.
Insensible to fatigue himself, he seemed never to understand how a
well man could want rest; and as for hardship, there was nothing,
in his view, which a man ought to enjoy quite so heartily, except
danger. For a period of ten days, beginning before and ending after
the first battle of Bull Run, we were not allowed once to take our
saddles off. Night and day we were in the immediate presence of the
enemy, catching naps when there happened for the moment to be nothing
else to do, standing by our horses while they ate from our hands,
so that we might slip their bridles on again in an instant in the
event of a surprise, and eating such things as chance threw in our
way, there being no rations anywhere within reach. After the battle,
we were kept scouting almost continually for two days. We then
marched to Fairfax Court House, and my company was again sent out in
detachments on scouting expeditions in the neighborhood of Vienna
and Falls Church. We returned to camp at sunset and were immediately
ordered on picket. In the regular course of events we should have
been relieved the next morning, but no relief came, and we were
wholly without food. Another twenty-four hours passed, and still
nobody came to take our place on the picket line. Stuart passed some
of our men, however, and one of them asked him if he knew we had been
on duty ten days, and on picket thirty-six hours without food.
"Oh nonsense!" he replied. "You don't look starved. There's a
cornfield over there; jump the fence and get a good breakfast. You
don't want to go back to camp, I know; it's stupid there, and all the
fun is out here. I never go to camp if I can help it. Besides, I've
kept your company on duty all this time as a compliment. You boys
have acquitted yourselves too well to be neglected now, and I mean to
give you a chance."
We thought this a jest at the time, but we learned afterwards that
Stuart's idea of a supreme compliment to a company was its assignment
to extra hazardous or extra fatiguing duty. If he observed specially
good conduct on the part of a company, squad, or individual, he was
sure to reward it by an immediate order to accompany him upon some
unnecessarily perilous expedition.
His men believed in him heartily, and it was a common saying among
them that "Jeb never says 'Go, boys,' but always 'Come, boys.'" We
felt sure, too, that there was little prospect of excitement on any
expedition of which he was not leader. If the scouting was to be
merely a matter of form, promising nothing in the way of adventure,
he would let us go by ourselves; but if there were prospect of "a
fight or a race," as he expressed it, we were sure to see his long
plume at the head of the column before we had passed outside our own
line of pickets. While we lay in advance of Fairfax Court House,
after Bull Run, Stuart spent more than a month around the extreme
outposts on Mason's and Munson's hills without once coming to the
camp of his command. When he wanted a greater force than he could
safely detail from the companies on picket for the day, he would send
after it, and with details of this kind he lived nearly all the time
between the picket lines of the two armies. The outposts were very
far in advance of the place at which we should have met and fought
the enemy if an advance had been made, and so there was literally
no use whatever in his perpetual scouting, which was kept up merely
because the man could not rest. But aside from the fact that the
cavalry was made up almost exclusively of the young men whose tastes
and habits specially fitted them to enjoy this sort of service,
Stuart's was one of those magnetic natures which always impress their
own likeness upon others, and so it came to be thought a piece of
good luck to be detailed for duty under his personal leadership. The
men liked him and his ways, one of which was the pleasant habit he
had of remembering our names and faces. I heard him say once that he
knew by name not only every man in his old regiment, but every one
also in the first brigade, and as I never knew him to hesitate for a
name, I am disposed to believe that he did not exaggerate his ability
to remember men. This and other like things served to make the men
love him personally, and there can be no doubt that his skill in
winning the affection of his troopers was one of the elements of his
success. Certainly no other man could have got so much hard service
out of men of their sort, without breeding discontent among them.