Jeb Stuart, The Last Cavalier

by Burke Davis

  Stuart wrote one of his girl friends, sending a bit of the wedding cake and announcing his conquest by "Miss Flora, eldest daughter of Colonel P. St. George Cooke, U.S. 2nd Dragoons, to whom I was married on the 14th." He addressed the girl correspondent as "My dear, dear friend," adding:

  Our correspondence shall never stop with my consent. What say you? . . . Tell Miss Emily I fear she will take no interest in "Beauty" now that he is an old married man.

  Jeb and Flora began life together on the raw post while the regiment was being trained for new duties. There was soon good news—promotion for Stuart. Flora's father, a bit dazed, wrote his novelist nephew:

  Flora was married, rather suddenly—to Mr. Stuart of Virginia. ... He is a remarkably fine, promising, pure young man, and has had so far an extraordinary promotion. He is a First Lieutenant, 1st Cavalry.7

  The Kansas in which the Stuarts began marriage was in chaos. Open war raged as bands of Border Ruffians fought Free Soilers. Murder became commonplace, and old Osawatomie Brown was charged with massacres; there were lynchings and retaliations. In the spring of 1856 a proslavery band from Missouri invaded Kansas to avenge murders at Pottawatomie. Their leader was a soldier Stuart would meet again.

  This was Henry Clay Pate, a captain of Missouri militia, deputy U.S. Marshal, and correspondent of the Missouri Republican of St. Louis. Pate was a fiery young Virginian of twenty-four, who had studied at the University in Charlottesville.

  The Missourians had captured some of Brown's gang, including John Brown, Jr., and on June second, at Black Jack on the Santa Fe Trail, John Brown's band of nine men forced the surrender of Pate's men after a gun battle.

  Colonel Edwin Sumner and a party of the ist Cavalry arrived to free Pate and his Missourians, and in the rescue column of fifty troopers rode Lieutenant Stuart.

  The soldiers halted near the camp and old Brown came out to treat with Colonel Sumner as if he were the ruler of a sovereign state. Sumner ordered the band dispersed and announced that he was there by command of President Pierce to enforce law and order in an impartial manner. Brown began moving his camp and freed the prisoners.

  Stuart thus had his first glimpse of Brown and his ragged soldiers who had taken the law into their own hands in an attack on slavery. He also began an acquaintance with Pate, who was so soon to be riding at his side in the bloody sequel to the trials of Kansas.

  Stuart might have learned from the wisdom of his colonel in this matter, for Sumner reported:

  Things are getting worse every day, and it is hard to foresee the result. One of these things must happen: Either it will terminate in civil war or the vicious will band themselves together to plunder and murder all whom they meet.

  Affairs in Kansas did not improve. Stuart's father-in-law, General Cooke, reported in mid-June:

  The disorders in the Territory have, in fact, changed their character, and consist now of robberies and assassinations, by a set of bandits whom the excitement of the times has attracted hither.

  The climax came on July 4, 1856, when Colonel Sumner, under what he construed to be his orders, entered the antislavery Free State Legislature at Topeka and ordered it to disperse. Governor Woodson had declared the assembly to be in defiance of his authority, which had been clearly stated by President Pierce. Sumner felt that he could take no other course than to close the legislature as directed by the governor, but he made a bold and manly speech:

  This is the most disagreeable duty of my whole life. My orders are to disperse the Legislature, and I am here to tell you it must not meet, and to see it dispersed. God knows I have no partisan feelings in the matter, and I will have none so long as I hold my present position in Kansas. I have just returned from the border, where I have been driving out bands of Missourians, and now I am ordered here to disperse you. You must disperse. Let me again assure you that this is the most disagreeable duty of my life.

  When a storm of protest broke in the North, Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, in an apparent search for a scapegoat, said sternly that Colonel Sumner had exceeded his authority, and Sumner was given leave. But barracks gossip in Kansas was that the courageous old soldier had been relieved only because he expressed his distaste for the disbanding of the legislature and had exposed the plans of the proslavery faction.

  Young James Stuart, entranced with Flora and very much in love, watched the growing agonies of the frontier in crisis.8

  Flora became pregnant in December, 1856. In the summer, when Indian troubles grew worse on the frontier the regiment was gone for weeks, and Flora must have despaired of seeing Jeb again. Before he returned he had a serious wound to report.

  Far out on the border the regiment (again under Colonel Sumner) came upon three hundred Cheyenne warriors in line of battle. Stuart wrote:

  We fronted into line as soon as possible.... It was my intention to give a carbine volley and then charge with drawn pistols, and use the saber as a last resort; but much to my surprise the Colonel ordered, "Draw sabers! Charge!" when the Indians were within gunshot.

  We set up a terrific yell, which scattered the Cheyennes in disorderly flight, and we kept up the charge in pursuit.

  It was the first cavalry charge of Stuart's life with flesh-and-blood enemy facing him. He dashed joyously among the fleeing Indians and lost his company in the melee. He found himself riding with other young officers at his side, including his friends Stanley and Lomax. When he rode among the enemy, Stuart wounded an Indian who was on the point of shooting Lunsford Lomax. The Indian shot at Stuart, but missed.

  Lieutenant Stanley yelled, "Wait! I'll fetch him!" and knelt to fire at the Indian. His gun went off accidentally, using the last of his ammunition. The Indian advanced on Stanley with a pointed pistol.

  "I could not stand that," Stuart wrote, "but drawing my saber rushed upon the monster and inflicted a severe wound on his head."

  The Indian was no more than a foot or two from Stuart when he fired his pistol, striking Jeb in the breast. The bullet glanced off bone, "lodging near my left nipple, but so far inside that it cannot be felt."

  He reassured Flora:

  I rejoice to inform you that the wound is not regarded as dangerous, thought I may be confined to my bed for weeks. I am now enjoying excellent health in every other respect.

  Stuart began his recovery near the forks of the Solomon River under the treatment of Dr. Charles Brewer, the regimental surgeon. He was carried eight miles to the rear, where he was left with other wounded in a tiny field fort for about ten days while the command chased the Cheyenne. His wound improved so rapidly that two days after being shot he was not in pain when lying still. He wrote Flora:

  We have a pretty view up the creek for about two miles. ... I can sit up a little with props, and seize a moment now and then to jot a daily token to my wife. The day drags heavily.

  My Prayer Book—which I must say has not been neglected —and my Army Regulations are my only books. A few sheets of Harpers Weekly are treasures indeed.

  About thirty Cheyennes attacked the fort on August fourth, but the wounded and their guards drove them off. Stuart walked a bit the next day, and at the end of that week began the long trip to Fort Kearny on horseback. The party went slowly, for some of the wounded rode on travois, Indian fashion. The command had no compass and traveled by the stars and the skill of Pawnee guides.

  Stuart woke up on the second morning in a thick fog to find the Pawnees had deserted. The party was lost. With a glimpse of the starry sky at night as fog cleared briefly, Jeb set a course and took a small band to find the fort, but it was a struggle with a new guide, a Mexican, who insisted Kearny lay south of the line of march Stuart had chosen. For a day or two, alternately lashed by storms and blinded by fog, Jeb held his men to the work. To keep the proper line one man would halt in rear as others rode ahead, to be signaled into proper position. The rearmost man then rode to the front in turn. Jeb wrote Flora of a night in a violent storm:

  There we sat, every man squatted on his saddle
, revealed in gloomy outlines only by the lightning's flash.

  We were all sleepy, and were dozing through the night in this way when a flash of lightning revealed, instead of the pretty grass plat, a large mass of water before us halfway up the bodies of our horses, and had barely time to make good our retreat.

  After a hard day's march the party ate the last of its food, but Jeb did not despair.

  "From the first I prayed to God to be my guide," he wrote, but he was willing to aid Providence. He forced the party across a swollen stream in its path, though other officers advised against it, and the Mexican guide made the plea, "Me no swim." Stuart swam first, alone, and the others followed on horseback.

  They met the mail coming from Fort Kearny, carried by a government rider who had a little food in his knapsack. Stuart got a piece of hard bread, "the most delicious morsel I ever tasted." They soon reached the fort, where they found Colonel Sumner anxious for their safety. A relief expedition was sent for the sick and wounded, and the adventure was over.9

  Jeb returned to Flora on August seventeenth. She bore a child the first week in September, a girl. Stuart insisted that she be named Flora. He was a doting father at twenty-four, and life in the skin-hung cavalry quarters of the frontier was gay and pleasant for the little family. His wound healed quickly. It was to be the last of his career until death.

  In these days a nostalgia for Virginia and Laurel Hill touched Stuart. He wrote his mother:

  I wish to devote one hundred dollars to the purchase of a comfortable log church near your place, because in all my observation I believe that one is more needed in that neighborhood than any other that I know of; and besides, "charity begins at home". Seventy-five of this one hundred dollars I have in trust for that purpose, and the remainder is my own contribution. If you will join me with a like amount from two or three others interested will build a very respectable free church. ... What will you take for the South half of your plantation? I want to buy it.

  Indian troubles in Kansas became less. Flora's father, Colonel Cooke, went into the Northwest with his dragoons. Stuart remained with his family at Fort Riley, where six companies of the ist Cavalry were commanded by Major John Sedgwick. A year and a half passed quickly for the Stuarts with their infant daughter.

  Jeb was not idle. For one thing, he turned to the problem of his saber, awkwardly fixed to his belt, hard to remove and replace. In spare moments he devised a simple attachment, quick and easy to use, That led him to another invention, "Stuart's Lightning Horse Hitcher," a halter with a snap enabling him to hitch and free a horse almost instantly.10

  Stuart renewed his interest in religion, and early in 1859 was confirmed in the church of his wife and mother by the Episcopal Bishop Hawkes in St. Louis. Soon afterward the Stuarts went on a long leave to Virginia, where they visited relatives. Jeb went to Richmond for a church convention, and to Washington, hoping to sell his inventions to the War Department. He was there when chance led him to Harpers Ferry, to meet John Brown once more. The quelling of this uprising stirred his Southern passions anew and he wrote Virginia's Governor Wise, urging an enlarged militia:

  I have during my summer's stay ... done all in my power to encourage and help organize military companies; I have found an insuperable obstacle in the cost of the uniform. Some of the best soldiers are unable to afford $25 for such a purpose. I therefore respectfully and earnestly urge you in view of the exposed situation of Virginia to attack from the North ... to take into serious consideration the issue by the State to every organized military company in the State the same number of uniform suits as arms.11

  Before old Brown was tried and hanged Jeb and Flora were back in Kansas. There was soon a second child, Philip St. George Cooke Stuart, named in honor of his grandfather—who was now stationed in Oregon Territory.

  Fort Riley was far removed from the rising antagonisms of the East, but the post was divided, North and South, and the loyalties of officers were so well known that an accurate roster of potential Southern soldiers could be—and was—drawn up in faraway Virginia. Newspapers coming into the fort shrieked increasingly ominous news.

  Stuart and Flora left no record of their talks about Secession; she seemed to seek the background instinctively, and to leave such decisions to her voluble husband. The Stuarts were certainly among the most avid readers of the New York Herald in April of 1860. They perhaps read aloud its stories which seemed to prophesy war.

  The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, the Herald reported, drew a great audience, half of it women, to the seventh of his lecture series at the Brooklyn Tabernacle—where he spoke on "How To Save the Union." He was often interrupted by applause.

  There was a report of a singular debate in the Senate in Washington one April day: ... "The Slavery Question" and "Suppression of Polygamy in Utah" were quaintly wedded. And in the Herald’s column Mr. Etheridge of Tennessee raised a defiant Southern protest: "If the Government has the right to interfere in the private affairs of a white man, it can do the same with niggers—unless a nigger is better than a white man."

  Flora Stuart must have read danger in the headlines of the Herald in May:

  Great doings at the Cooper Institute. Anti-Slavery froth and bubble. Abolition Lions and Lambs lying down together. Mob law recommended to People.

  And this paper's hostility to abolitionism surely drew appreciative laughter from Stuart with its advice to the Republican Party, ready to convene:

  "Our Friends the Black Republicans in Chicago are urged to come clean before the people." In short, to forget Seward and "give us a candidate of merit."

  The ferment was also in the pages of Jeb's "treasure," Harpers Weekly, among the advertisements for a new Thackeray novel, The Virginians, Winslow Homer's drawings for a new serial, and patent remedies for common ills. Army couples in the frontier barracks saw perhaps more clearly than Easterners the implication in the triumphant advertisements of a controversial book that was splitting the country.

  Helper's Impending Crisis A Live Book 55,000 Copies Have Been Sold

  Now Is The Time This is the work that is creating So Much Excitement in Congress Price $ 1 Paper Covers

  50 Active Agents Wanted

  There was a story of violent passions from Washington: Senator Clark of Missouri was denouncing the Helper book when Senator Haskin "let fall a pistol from his pocket. This caused some confusion and alarm. At the close of the affray Mr. Clark apologized and all ended quietly."

  Perhaps most prophetic of all was the Weekly ‘s report of a brief speech in Congress when William Pennington, of New Jersey, was elected Speaker of The House. John Sherman of Ohio was the orator:

  A Republican Speaker is elected and no calamity comes;

  A Republican Speaker is elected and the people rejoice;

  A Republican Speaker is elected and stocks advance;

  A Republican Speaker is elected and cotton is worth 11 cents a pound and upwards—and may it advance higher (cheers);

  A Republican Speaker is elected and slave property remains the same in value;

  A Republican Speaker is elected and the Union is safe;

  So will it be when a Republican President is elected (prolonged cheers and cries of 'Good!').

  And in the New York Tribune was an item of special interest to Lieutenant Stuart, who was an inveterate reader and clipper:

  The Tribune is requested to state that Mrs. Brown, the widow of the martyr of Harpers Ferry, is much embarrassed and annoyed by the multitude of letters addressed to her by entire strangers.

  She asked them to desist.

  If Lieutenant Stuart growled his rage at these gusts of news, his young wife probably heard him out in silence, going about the chores of tending her children and the small household in her rather humorless calm, determined to leave the family's politics in the hands of Jeb.

  The cavalry left for the west in early summer, and Jeb rode far from Fort Riley to the headwaters of the Arkansas River where the command was ordered to build a fort. T
he 1st Cavalry wintered there at new Fort Wise and, in January, Stuart applied for leave to bring his family to the station.

  But things in the East were happening swiftly. While Stuart was directing logging crews in the wilderness, South Carolina seceded, and Alabama, Florida and Mississippi fell out behind her. Jefferson Davis was sworn in as provisional President of the Confederate States in Montgomery, Alabama in January, 1861.

  Stuart knew nothing of this when he wrote Davis in his Senate office at Washington:

  Sir: In view of the impending condition of affairs in our country, no sane man can fail to calculate on a rupture of our national bonds as a thing strongly probable. In view, therefore, of the probable dismemberment of the Army, and of your prominence as one likely to exercise a large control in the organization of the Army of the South, I beg leave respectfully to ask you to secure for me a position in that army. I have the honor to refer you to Gen. J. E. Johnston, Cols. Cooke, Lee and Emory and the Captains of my regiment, for whatever of merit I may possess. Please file this application.

  On January eighteenth Stuart wrote his brother, William Alexander Stuart:

  Events are transpiring rapidly that furnish so little hope of perpetuating the Union, that I feel it incumbent upon me to tell you my course of conduct in such an emergency. Of course I go with Virginia, whether she be alone or otherwise, but I am sure that a large military force will be required for a time by the State, and I am anxious to secure from Wythe [County] a legion of cavalry—200 men—myself as commander, or a battery of light artillery, 100 men or less. With Gov. Letcher as Governor, and you on the spot, I ought to be able to get such a command.