Jeb Stuart, The Last Cavalier

by Burke Davis

  This action came at a bridge over Totopotomoy Creek, near their objective at Beaver Dam. Jackson seemed slow. His Maryland gunners answered Federal batteries in a thick woodland, but though the advance crossed the bridge after extinguishing flames set by the enemy, Jackson halted.

  There was cannon fire and musketry from the south. There, unknown to Stonewall, A. P. Hill had grown impatient, and despite orders to await word from Jackson, had attacked at Mechanicsville; on that field casualties were mounting.

  For some reason, Jackson, though behind schedule, seemed to think he had done enough for the day. He sat withdrawn and aloof, taking little interest in affairs. Stuart's amazement did not get into the official records, but he watched Jackson, stroking his beard in his familiar gesture of perplexity as he saw the smoke of roaring battle to the south.2

  Jackson's men, in any event, were cooking supper while A. P. Hill's men were dying before the Federal rifle pits to the south—with the vulnerable end of McClellan's line almost within Stonewall's grasp.

  The pickets in Jackson's front found no enemy in the night, and daylight revealed that McClellan had retreated. The line was abandoned from Beaver Dam to Mechanicsville and beyond. General Lee ordered a pursuit, and again gave Jackson a vital role: He would command D. H. Hill's force in addition to his own. Below him Longstreet and A. P. Hill drove eastward on the heels of the retreating Federals. Stuart remained with Jackson.

  Thousands of troops choked the roads and waded the shallow brown streams. Firing was sparse, but as noon approached and Lee moved the men of Longstreet and A. P. Hill into position, Federal resistance became stronger. The enemy had made a stand somewhere ahead. A battle flared around a swampy place called Gaines' Mill. More than 50,000 bluecoats were digging in, their front especially forbidding along a series of ravines crowned by earthworks and sharpened logs.

  Lee's headquarters became impatient as the day lengthened. Nothing had been heard from Jackson. Lee sent an aide to find him, and at last went out in search of Stonewall himself. Jackson found his way through this landscape with difficulty, and was once led out of his path by a native guide because of a misunderstanding about place names: Cold Harbor and Old Cold Harbor, both near Gaines' Mill.

  Jackson and Lee met at one P.M., but this did not speed the attack, for the left flank still dragged as the rest of the army went into action. D. H. Hill's men lay strung along a roadway, pinned down by cannon fire. For several hours no one seemed to know where Jackson was.

  Stuart's command was not idle. Esten Cooke was with Jeb much of the day, amid "shelling hotter than I ever knew it.... I followed Stuart here, there, everywhere. Shells very quick and hot, evidently directed by a signal man up a tree."

  As they rode under fire, Cooke plunged forward on the neck of his horse and tumbled to the ground. Stuart and the staff stared in dismay, fearing that he had been killed.

  "Hallo, Cooke, are you hit?" Stuart yelled.

  Cooke leaped up, caught his horse and rejoined them. "I dodged too far, General," he said sheepishly.

  Jeb and the young men roared with laughter.

  "You dodged too far, Cooke!" Stuart said. It was only the first of his interminable jokes about the incident at Cooke's expense.

  The troopers made quick work of the first Federal cavalry sighted. Captain Blackford felt "a creeping of the flesh" as he saw

  .

  CONFEDERATE FORCES JUNE 2S FEDERAL FORCES JUNE 25

  CONFEDERATE FORCES JUNE 30 FEDERAL FORCES JUNE

  THE SEVEN DAYS: STUART IN THE ENEMY REAR

  some Union Lancers drawn up in a field with steel-tipped spears glistening.

  Stuart threw a regiment into line three hundred yards from the enemy and charged. Von Borcke said: "But before our Virginia horsemen got within fifty yards of their line, this magnificent regiment ... turned tail and fled in disorder, strewing the whole line of their retreat with their picturesque but inconvenient arms. The entire skirmish was over in less time than is required to record it; and I do not believe that out of the whole body of 700 men more than twenty retained their lances."

  As fighting concentrated, the cavalry was drawn up in fields in the rear of Old Cold Harbor. Cooke was sent to investigate the front and to find Jackson. He discovered Stonewall "sitting on a log near an old tumbledown log house, in his old sun-yellowed tilt-forward cap and dingy coat."

  "General, I am on General Stuart's staff. He wishes to know your dispositions."

  "Wait a moment," Jackson said.

  "General Stuart is just across there—he could ride over."

  "Ask him to gallop over," Jackson said.

  Stuart soon came up and Jackson began changing the front of his fourteen brigades to bring them to the aid of Longstreet and A. P. Hill. Cavalry joined the move,

  Jeb sent Pelham with two batteries to shell the enemy. The young Alabamian took guns into a field near Cold Harbor and opened fire. Federal shelling grew fiercer. Stuart, Jackson, Cooke, von Borcke and other officers rode forward. Cooke sketched it in his diary:

  "Musketry terrible. Artillery duel in full roar. . .. Enemy trying it last time. . . . Stuart and Jackson in [the] thickest of it. . . .

  "Not flurried one particle. Never cooler in my life. Laughing and voice steady, a sure sign with me. . . . Night coming on. Separated from Stuart. . . . Shelling awful. Whiz! Whiz-is-is-bang! whizzz! bang! whirrr!

  "Went forward. . . . Our guns belching flame, and throwing shovelsful of fiery cinders from muzzles. Enemy's batteries silenced.

  Found Stuart, rode forward with him to where the enemy had fired

  the fence and bushes on left of the road to draw our fire

  "At the burning fence... D. H. Hill's men were heard cheering as they ran the enemy down the big hill where their twelve guns were."

  The Federals had at last fallen back. Near the end of the day, when it seemed too late, Jackson's division had struck and pushed McClellan's line into the dark swamps.

  Stuart and Cooke rode to the rear and halted under "a lofty, rugged and solitary oak, riven by cannon balls," where they made headquarters for the night.

  During the day Cooke had halted for a moment in the yard of a Mrs. Johnson, where, he was told, General Philip St. George Cooke had made headquarters until the early morning. Stuart's father-in-law had lived in a small tent there, Mrs. Johnson said. Cooke recorded: "He is wretched, they say, and hopes the first ball will kill him."

  The army had suffered horribly in the day: Some 8,000 casualties, almost half of them in Jackson's division. Many brigades were wrecked.

  Stuart and Cooke had a visitor as they drowsed under their tree. At two A.M. of June twenty-eighth, as Cooke wrote, "a third personage rode up, dismounted, and lying down between us, began to converse."

  "Yesterday was the most terrific fire of musketry I ever heard," the newcomer said. Cooke knew him at once in the darkness: "Anyone who had listened to the brief, low, abrupt voice would have recognized it. The speaker was Stonewall Jackson."

  Jackson and Stuart talked for a few minutes, planning the continued chase of the enemy the next day. Cooke fell asleep.

  Another diarist who had seen Stuart during the day and kept a vivid memory of it was Kyd Douglas of Jackson's staff. When Stonewall had called up batteries to support Pelham he said to an aide, "Ride to General Ewell and direct him, if the enemy do not retire before dusk, he must sweep them from that hill with the bayonet!"

  Stuart sat nearby and cheered. "That's the order!" he said, waving the plumed hat in the air. "Let one of my staff go with him. That order must not miscarry! "8

  Daylight revealed a landscape of broken trees, burned thickets, and fields littered with dead. Jackson rode among the thousands of bodies, many of them John Hood's Texans, and paid tribute: "The men who carried this position were soldiers indeed."

  Most of the Confederate army lay still in the morning, for General Lee had not yet puzzled out the intentions of McClellan. There were signs that the enemy was abandoning the base on th
e York and shifting southward to the James. Lee could not bring himself to believe that the aggressive McClellan had so soon abandoned his plan to attack Richmond. He called Stuart and Ewell to headquarters. Stuart would drive eastward to the nearest point of the York River Railroad and try to cut the enemy from their base. Ewell's infantry would move down the Chickahominy in the same direction, with Fitz Lee's cavalry as an advance guard.

  Cooke had a lame horse and rode back into Richmond for a fresh one, and both he and von Borcke missed the day's action. The German watched enviously as Stuart left with the command, but found some excitement in camp, where the rumor spread that the Yankees had poisoned wells and springs in the region, and that hundreds of Confederates were dying in agony. But the sensible von Borcke concluded: "Although I do not love the Yankees, I am quite sure they were entirely innocent of this. The sufferers had been made ill by the too abundant use of bad apple brandy, which will kill anybody."

  Stuart led his men toward the familiar territory through which they had galloped on the raid around the enemy. To the south, below the Chickahominy, dust clouds marked the path of McClellan's army.

  The cavalry met no resistance until it was about six miles east of Old Cold Harbor, where it passed Ewell's infantry. At Dispatch Station, the first rail depot north of the Chickahominy, Jeb sent up a squadron of Cobb's Georgians and the enemy picket fled.

  The cavalry turned northeast after troopers had cut telegraph wires and torn up tracks of the York River Railroad. Jeb notified Ewell that he had struck the railroad, and sent General Lee word that the line seemed to be undefended. Jeb then gave another display of his creative interpretation of Lee's orders, taking matters into his own hands. As he explained in an official report:

  "I determined to push boldly down the White House road, resolved to find what force was in that direction, and, if possible, rout it.'4

  He seized a train of wagons and its escort and galloped on. Cavalry pickets melted away before him. Prisoners told him that Generals Stoneman and Emory were near the White House with a strong force. Stuart wrote:

  "The fleeing pickets had heralded the approach of what no doubt appeared to their affrighted mind to be the whole Army of The Valley, and from the valley of the Pamunkey a dense cloud of smoke revealed ... the flight and destruction in the path of a stampeded foe."

  The gray column hammered on. At Tunstall’s Station, the last stop before White House, Stuart met the first serious opposition. He was called by skirmishers to inspect a Yankee position at Black Creek.

  A Federal cavalry squadron sat on the opposite bank, and beyond was what seemed to be an artillery battery. The bridge over the stream had been burned, and the steep-banked creek, with miry approaches, could not be swum in the face of Federal fire. Stuart called for Pelham. A few shots from the guns dispersed the enemy cavalry and brought a surprise from the undergrowth along the stream. A neatly laid Federal ambush was flushed—scores of riflemen who had lain in hiding ready to halt a Confederate crossing. There was no reply from the guns on the hill beyond the enemy horsemen, and Stuart concluded that they were dummies.

  Jeb sent over dismounted skirmishers under Captain Farley and they scoured the area for further signs of ambush; they found none.

  The night was lit by the burning of White House, the estate of Rooney Lee, in whose historic home George Washington was said to have married the widow Custis. Stuart wrote: "The conflagration raged fearfully during the entire night, while explosions of shells rent the air." He was told that 5,000 Federals guarded the burning depot, a force much larger than his own.

  Stuart paraded dismounted men to convince the enemy that he had infantry with him, and had Pelham fire guns at long range into the White House area, changing gun positions often to create the impression that an army was at hand. This ruse, Blackford recalled, forced the enemy to burn the vast city of sheds which had grown up about the plantation house. Somehow, in any event, the place burned, and the Federal infantry was taken away in the night by boats.

  At daylight on June twenty-ninth, Stuart's column moved within sight of the White House, picking up a few Federal fugitives on the way. When they were a quarter of a mile from the smoking ruins, Stuart and Rooney Lee found a Federal gunboat at the docks.

  Young Lee, as blandly as if the valuable estate were enemy property instead of his own, indicated all the strong points of the landscape. Jeb sent 75 men to duel with the vessel, the U.S.S. Marblehead.

  Stuart's troopers went over an open meadow about forty paces apart, ready with rifles. Whistling shells from the gunboat flew overhead. Bluecoat skirmishers came ashore and from the river bank blazed away at the Confederates until one of Pelham's howitzers fired, exploding a shell just over the Marblehead. The boat began to gather steam, called in her skirmishers and fell downstream under Pelham's fire.

  There was a strange race between the gunboat and Pelham's piece, which rumbled along the bank as far as the horses could go. Stuart and his staff trotted to the White House.

  They pawed among luxuries left by the enemy: Heaps of lemons and other fruits and vegetables, canned meats and oysters and lobster, cases of beer, wine and liquor, barrels of sugar, tons of ice. There were eggs packed in salt barrels, roasted by the fire, and now plucked out as delicacies by the hungry cavalrymen.

  Stuart's concern was with the historic house. He angrily protested "the deceitfulness of the enemy's pretended reverence for everything associated with the name of Washington, for the dwelling-house was burned to the ground, and not a vestige left except what told of desolation and vandalism."3

  Perhaps this diverted him, for he reported that his soldiers ate

  "fruits of the tropics as well as substantials of the land." In truth, Blackford noted, the troopers dashed for the whisky, and before Rooney Lee was aware of it, scores were drunk, and had bottles hidden in their clothing. Lee spread a shrewd rumor that the enemy had poisoned the liquor and left it as a trap, and that one man had just died in extreme pain. Bottles sailed out of the column in every direction and sobriety slowly returned.

  Nine barges burned at the water front, sending up millions of dollars' worth of supplies in smoke. Troopers ransacked wagons, taking their pick of valuables. Stuart put a pontoon train aboard wagons and started it southward. He debated with Blackford as to what should be done with captured locomotives. The engineer had them put out of action by blasting their boilers with Pelham's guns at a range of fifty yards.

  There was a dispatch from R. E. Lee in the morning ordering Stuart to watch for any sign of enemy retreat in his direction. Stuart replied with his news that the Federals were now definitely running for the James River, since he had destroyed their base on the York. He was not the first with this information, however. Lee had got it early in the morning from two of Longstreet's engineers, who had found empty Federal entrenchments south of the Chickahominy.

  Stuart remained at the White House the rest of this hot Sunday, salvaging his loot, but sent Fitz Lee and the ist Virginia south to observe the enemy along the Chickahominy.

  Far behind Stuart's party, in the swamps to the southeast, Lee's main army had spent an unprofitable day. The commander's efforts to trap McClellan had again gone awry. Jackson's wing was delayed by a burned bridge, and Magruder met the enemy alone in a costly battle at Savage's Station. Army co-ordination seemed elusive indeed. A rainstorm ended the day, with Lee making further plans to press the Federals: Jackson would cross White Oak Swamp and drive the enemy into the waiting divisions of Longstreet and A. P. Hill.

  Esten Cooke galloped back from Richmond in Stuart's tracks and at last came to the White House, where he found "the General— and the flies." He found the wreckage of the depot, "wild, tragic, loathsome chaos ... an awful stench." Cooke put his weapons in a wagon, since his new horse was already worn out, and went into the country in search of another mount. The cavalry left him behind.

  Von Borcke had caught up by now, finding Stuart "in excellent spirits" and full of tales of the expediti
on. There was little time for a reunion, for Jeb moved them back to the Chickahominy on Monday morning, and spent the day along the river while the enemy engaged Pelham in an artillery duel. Stuart could not discover the flank of the main body of enemy infantry, and went into camp near the river. He had heard rolling sounds of battle from upstream most of the day.

  Lee's army had failed once more. Jackson had been strangely delayed in crossing; White Oak Swamp. No one could explain his lethargy, for though two cavalrymen, Wade Hampton and T. T. Munford, had pointed out to Stonewall means of crossing the swamp, the usually aggressive Valley conqueror had sat on a log almost all day, as if overcome by exhaustion or fever. While he waited at the northern edge of his swamp the escaping Federal army had brushed with the outnumbered forces of Longstreet and A. P. Hill and stung them badly in the battle of Glendale, or Frayser's Farm. Even yet General Lee was pressing the pursuit,

  Stuart had seen none of the major action of this hectic campaign since Cold Harbor, because of his orders from General Lee to skirt the enemy flank. And not until three thirty A.M., July first, was he called to aid the main army.

  At that hour a dispatch bearer roused Jeb from sleep near Forge Bridge of the Chickahominy. The note was signed by Lee's aide, Colonel Chilton, but bore no hour. The order said that the enemy had been headed off at a road intersection, and told Stuart to cross the Chickahominy and co-operate with infantry on the south side. It suggested that Grapevine Bridge was a suitable spot.

  Stuart questioned the courier:

  "When was this written?"