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 Towards the last, as I have already said, resort was had frequently
to first principles, and bartering, or "payment in kind," as it was
called, became common, especially in those cases in which it was
necessary to announce prices in advance. To fix a price for the
future in Confederate money when it was daily becoming more and
more exaggeratedly worthless, would have been sheer folly; and so
educational institutions, country boarding-houses, etc., advertised
for patronage at certain prices, payment to be made in provisions at
the rates prevailing in September, 1860. In the advertisement of
Hampden Sidney College, in the Examiner for October 4, 1864, I find
it stated that students may get board in private families at about
eight dollars a month, payable in this way. The strong contrast
between the prices of 1860 and those of 1864 is shown by a
statement, in the same advertisement, that the students who may
get board at eight dollars a month in provisions, can buy wood at
twenty-five dollars a cord and get their washing done for seven
dollars and fifty cents a dozen pieces.
This matter of prices was frequently made a subject for jesting in
private, but for the most part it was carefully avoided in the
newspapers. It was too ominous of evil to be a fit topic of editorial
discussion on ordinary occasions. As with the accounts of battles in
which our arms were not successful, necessary references to the
condition of the finances were crowded into a corner, as far out of
sight as possible. The Examiner, being a sort of newspaper Ishmael,
did now and then bring the subject up, however, and on one
occasion it denounced with some fierceness the charges prevailing in
the schools; and I quote a passage from Prof. Sidney H. Owens's
reply, which is interesting as a summary of the condition of things in
the South at that time:—
"The charges made for tuition are about five or six times as high
as in 1860. Now, sir, your shoemaker, carpenter, butcher, market
man, etc., demand from twenty, to thirty, to forty times as much as
in 1860. Will you show me a civilian who is charging only six times
the prices charged in 1860, except the teacher only? As to the
amassing of fortunes by teachers, spoken of in your article, make
your calculations, sir, and you will find that to be almost an
absurdity, since they pay from twenty to forty prices for everything
used, and are denounced exorbitant and unreasonable in demanding
five or six prices for their own labor and skill."
There were compensations, however. When gold was at twelve
thousand per cent. premium with us, we had the consolation of
knowing that it was in the neighborhood of one hundred above par
in New York, and a Richmond paper of September 22, 1864, now
before me, fairly chuckles over the high prices prevailing at the
North, in a two-line paragraph which says, "Tar is selling in New York
at two dollars a pound. It used to cost eighty cents a barrel." That
paragraph doubtless made many a five-dollar beefsteak palatable.
 CHAPTER V.

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.
 CHAPTER VI.

LEE, JACKSON, AND SOME LESSER WORTHIES.

The story goes that when Napoleon thanked a private one day for
some small service, giving him the complimentary title of "captain,"
the soldier replied with the question, "In what regiment, sire?"
confident that this kind of recognition from the Little Corporal meant
nothing less than a promotion, in any case; and while commanders
are not ordinarily invested with Napoleon's plenary powers in such
matters, military men are accustomed to value few things more than
the favorable comments of their superiors upon their achievements
or their capacity. And yet a compliment of the very highest sort,
which General Scott paid Robert E. Lee, very nearly prevented the
great Confederate from achieving a reputation at all. Up to the time
of Virginia's secession, Lee was serving at Scott's head-quarters, and
when he resigned and accepted a commission from the governor of
his native State, General Scott, who had already called him "the
flower of the American army," pronounced him the best organizer in
the country, and congratulated himself upon the fact that the Federal
organization was already well under way before Lee began that of
the Southern forces. This opinion, coming from the man who was
recognized as best able to form a judgment on such a subject,
greatly strengthened Lee's hand in the work he was then doing, and
saved him the annoyance of dictation from people less skilled than
he. But it nearly worked his ruin, for all that. The administration at
Richmond was of too narrow a mold to understand that a man could
be a master of more than one thing, and so, recognizing Lee's
supreme ability as an organizer, the government seems to have
assumed that he was good for very little else, and until the summer
of 1862 he was carefully kept out of the way of all great military
operations. When the two centres of strategic interest were at
Winchester and Manassas, General Lee was kept in Western Virginia
with a handful of raw troops, where he could not possibly
accomplish anything for the cause, or even exercise the small share
of fighting and strategic ability which the government was willing to
believe he possessed. When there was no longer any excuse for
keeping him there, he was disinterred, as it were, and reburied in
the swamps of the South Carolina coast.
I saw him for the first time, in Richmond, at the very beginning of
the war, dining with him at the house of a friend. He was then in the
midst of his first popularity. He had begun the work of organization,
and was everywhere recognized as the leader who was to create an
army for us out of the volunteer material. I do not remember, with
any degree of certainty, whether or not we expected him also to
distinguish himself in the field, but as Mr. Davis and his personal
followers were still in Montgomery, it is probable that the narrowness
of their estimate of the chieftain was not yet shared by anybody in
Richmond. Lee was at this time a young-looking, middle-aged man,
with dark hair, dark moustache, and an otherwise smooth face, and
a portrait taken then would hardly be recognized at all by those who
knew him only after the cares and toils of war had furrowed his face
and bleached his hair and beard. He was a model of manly beauty;
large, well made, and graceful. His head was a noble one, and his
countenance told, at a glance, of his high character and of that
perfect balance of faculties, mental, moral, and physical, which
constituted the chief element of his greatness. There was nothing
about him which impressed one more than his eminent robustness,
a quality no less marked in his intellect and his character than in his
physical constitution. If his shapely person suggested a remarkable
capacity for endurance, his manner, his countenance, and his voice
quite as strongly hinted at the great soul which prompted him to
take upon himself the responsibility for the Gettysburg campaign,
when the people were loudest in their denunciations of the
government as the author of that ill-timed undertaking.
I saw him next in South Carolina during the winter of 1861-62. He
was living quietly at a little place called Coosawhatchie, on the
Charleston and Savannah Railroad. He had hardly any staff with him,
and was surrounded with none of the pomp and circumstance of
war. His dress bore no marks of his rank, and hardly indicated even
that he was a military man. He was much given to solitary afternoon
rambles, and came almost every day to the camp of our battery,
where he wandered alone and in total silence around the stables and
through the gun park, much as a farmer curious as to cannon might
have done. Hardly any of the men knew who he was, and one
evening a sergeant, riding in company with a partially deaf teamster,
met him in the road and saluted. The teamster called out to his
companion, in a loud voice, after the manner of deaf people:
"I say, sergeant, who is that durned old fool? He's always a-pokin'
round my hosses just as if he meant to steal one of 'em."
Certainly the honest fellow was not to blame for his failure to
recognize, in the farmer-looking pedestrian, the chieftain who was
shortly to win the greenest laurels the South had to give. During the
following summer General Johnston's "bad habit of getting himself
wounded" served to bring Lee to the front, and from that time till
the end of the war he was the idol of army and people. The faith he
inspired was simply marvelous. We knew very well that he was only
a man, and very few of us would have disputed the abstract
proposition that he was liable to err; but practically we believed
nothing of the kind. Our confidence in his skill and his invincibility
was absolutely unbounded. Our faith in his wisdom and his
patriotism was equally perfect, and from the day on which he
escorted McClellan to his gun-boats till the hour of his surrender at
Appomattox, there was never a time when he might not have
usurped all the powers of government without exciting a murmur.
Whatever rank as a commander history may assign him, it is certain
that no military chieftain was ever more perfect master than he of
the hearts of his followers. When he appeared in the presence of
troops he was sometimes cheered vociferously, but far more
frequently his coming was greeted with a profound silence, which
expressed much more truly than cheers could have done the well-
nigh religious reverence with which the men regarded his person.
 General Lee had a sententious way of saying things which made
all his utterances peculiarly forceful. His language was always
happily chosen, and a single sentence from his lips often left nothing
more to be said. As good an example of this as any, perhaps, was
his comment upon the military genius of General Meade. Not very
long after that officer took command of the army of the Potomac, a
skirmish occurred, and none of General Lee's staff officers being
present, an acquaintance of mine was detailed as his personal aid
for the day, and I am indebted to him for the anecdote. Some one
asked our chief what he thought of the new leader on the other
side, and in reply Lee said, "General Meade will commit no blunder
in my front, and if I commit one he will make haste to take
advantage of it." It is difficult to see what more he could have said
on the subject.
I saw him for the last time during the war, at Amelia Court House,
in the midst of the final retreat, and I shall never forget the heart-
broken expression his face wore, or the still sadder tones of his voice
as he gave me the instructions I had come to ask. The army was in
utter confusion. It was already evident that we were being beaten
back upon James River and could never hope to reach the Roanoke,
on which stream alone there might be a possibility of making a
stand. General Sheridan was harassing our broken columns at every
step, and destroying us piecemeal. Worse than all, General Lee had
been deserted by the terrified government in the very moment of his
supreme need, and the food had been snatched from the mouths of
the famished troops (as is more fully explained in another chapter)
that the flight of the president and his followers might be hastened.
The load put thus upon Lee's shoulders was a very heavy one for so
conscientious a man as he to bear; and knowing, as every
Southerner does, his habit of taking upon himself all blame for
whatever went awry, we cannot wonder that he was sinking under
the burden. His face was still calm, as it always was, but his carriage
was no longer erect, as his soldiers had been used to see it. The
troubles of those last days had already plowed great furrows in his
forehead. His eyes were red as if with weeping; his cheeks sunken
and haggard; his face colorless. No one who looked upon him then,
as he stood there in full view of the disastrous end, can ever forget
the intense agony written upon his features. And yet he was calm,
self-possessed, and deliberate. Failure and the sufferings of his men
grieved him sorely, but they could not daunt him, and his moral
greatness was never more manifest than during those last terrible
days. Even in the final correspondence with General Grant, Lee's
manliness and courage and ability to endure lie on the surface, and
it is not the least honorable thing in General Grant's history that he
showed himself capable of appreciating the character of this manly
foeman, as he did when he returned Lee's surrendered sword with
the remark that he knew of no one so worthy as its owner to wear
it.
After the war the man who had commanded the Southern armies
remained master of all Southern hearts, and there can be no doubt
that the wise advice he gave in reply to the hundreds of letters sent
him prevented many mistakes and much suffering. The young men
of the South were naturally disheartened, and a general exodus to
Mexico, Brazil, and the Argentine Republic was seriously
contemplated. General Lee's advice, "Stay at home, go to work, and
hold your land," effectually prevented this saddest of all blunders;
and his example was no less efficacious than his words, in
recommending a diligent attention to business as the best possible
cure for the evils wrought by the war.
From the chieftain who commanded our armies to his son and
successor in the presidency of Washington-Lee University, the
transition is a natural one; and, while it is my purpose, in these
reminiscences, to say as little as possible of men still living, I may at
least refer to General G. W. Custis Lee as the only man I ever heard
of who tried to decline a promotion from brigadier to major general,
for the reason that he thought there were others better entitled than
he to the honor. I have it from good authority that President Davis
went in person to young Lee's head-quarters to entreat a
reconsideration of that officer's determination to refuse the honor,
and that he succeeded with difficulty in pressing the promotion upon
the singularly modest gentleman. Whether or not this younger Lee
has inherited his father's military genius we have no means of
knowing, but we are left in no uncertainty as to his possession of his
father's manliness and modesty, and personal worth.
Jackson was always a surprise. Nobody ever understood him, and
nobody has ever been quite able to account for him. The members
of his own staff, of whom I happen to have known one or two
intimately, seem to have failed, quite as completely as the rest of the
world, to penetrate his singular and contradictory character. His
biographer, Mr. John Esten Cooke, read him more perfectly perhaps
than any one else, but even he, in writing of the hero, evidently
views him from the outside. Dr. Dabney, another of Jackson's
historians, gives us a glimpse of the man, in one single aspect of his
character, which may be a clew to the whole. He says there are
three kinds of courage, of which two only are bravery. These three
varieties of courage are, first, that of the man who is simply
insensible of danger; second, that of men who, understanding,
appreciating, and fearing danger, meet it boldly nevertheless, from
motives of pride; and third, the courage of men keenly alive to
danger, who face it simply from a high sense of duty.[2] Of this latter
kind, the biographer tells us, was Jackson's courage, and certainly
there can be no better clew to his character than this. Whatever
other mysteries there may have been about the man, it is clear that
his well-nigh morbid devotion to duty was his ruling characteristic.
But nobody ever understood him fully, and he was a perpetual
surprise to friend and foe alike. The cadets and the graduates of the
Virginia Military Institute, who had known him as a professor there,
held him in small esteem at the outset. I talked with many of them,
and found no dissent whatever from the opinion that General Gilham
and General Smith were the great men of the institute, and that
Jackson, whom they irreverently nicknamed Tom Fool Jackson, could
never be anything more than a martinet colonel, half soldier and half
preacher. They were unanimous in prophesying his greatness after
the fact, but of the two or three score with whom I talked on the
subject at the beginning of the war, not one even suspected its
possibility until after he had won his sobriquet "Stonewall" at
Manassas.
It is natural enough that such a man should be credited in the end
with qualities which he did not possess, and that much of the praise
awarded him should be improperly placed; and in his case this
seems to have been the fact. He is much more frequently spoken of
as the great marcher than as the great fighter of the Confederate
armies, and it is commonly said that he had an especial genius for
being always on time. And yet General Lee himself said in the
presence of a distinguished officer from whose lips I heard it, that
Jackson was by no means so rapid a marcher as Longstreet, and
that he had an unfortunate habit of never being on time. Without
doubt he was, next to Lee, the greatest military genius we had, and
his system of grand tactics was more Napoleonic than was that of
any other officer on either side; but it would appear from this that
while he has not been praised beyond his deserving, he has at least
been commended mistakenly.
The affection his soldiers bore him has always been an enigma. He
was stern and hard as a disciplinarian, cold in his manner,
unprepossessing in appearance, and utterly lacking in the apparent
enthusiasm which excites enthusiasm in others. He had never been
able to win the affection of the cadets at Lexington, and had hardly
won even their respect. And yet his soldiers almost worshiped him.
Perhaps it was because he was so terribly in earnest, or it may have
been because he was so generally successful,—for there are few
things men admire more than success,—but whatever the cause
was, no fact could be more evident than that Stonewall Jackson was
the most enthusiastically loved man, except Lee, in the Confederate
service, and that he shared with Lee the generous admiration even
of his foes. His strong religious bent, his devotion to a form of
religion the most gloomy,—for his Calvinism amounted to very little
less than fatalism, and his men called him "old blue-light,"—his
strictness of life, and his utter lack of vivacity and humor, would have
been an impassable barrier between any other man and such troops
as he commanded. He was Cromwell at the head of an army
composed of men of the world, and there would seem to have been
nothing in common between him and them; and yet Cromwell's
psalm-singing followers never held their chief in higher regard or
heartier affection than that with which these rollicking young
planters cherished their sad-eyed and sober-faced leader. They even
rejoiced in his extreme religiosity, and held it in some sort a work of
supererogation, sufficient to atone for their own worldly-mindedness.
They were never more devoted to him than when transgressing the
very principles upon which his life was ordered; and when any of his
men indulged in dram-drinking, a practice from which he always
rigidly abstained, his health was sure to be the first toast given. On
one occasion, a soldier who had imbibed enthusiasm with his whisky,
feeling the inadequacy of the devotion shown by drinking to an
absent chief, marched, canteen in hand, to Jackson's tent, and
gaining admission proposed as a sentiment, "Here's to you, general!
May I live to see you stand on the highest pinnacle of Mount Ararat,
and hear you give the command, 'By the right of nations front into
empires,—worlds, right face!'"
I should not venture to relate this anecdote at all, did I not get it
at first hands from an officer who was present at the time. It will
serve, at least, to show the sentiments of extravagant admiration
with which Jackson's men regarded him, whether it shall be
sufficient to bring a smile to the reader's lips or not.
The first time I ever saw General Ewell, I narrowly missed making
it impossible that there should ever be a General Ewell at all. He was
a colonel then, and was in command of the camp of instruction at
Ashland. I was posted as a sentinel, and my orders were peremptory
to permit nobody to ride through the gate at which I was stationed.
Colonel Ewell, dressed in a rough citizen's suit, without side-arms or
other insignia of military rank, undertook to pass the forbidden
portal. I commanded him to halt, but he cursed me instead, and
attempted to ride over me. Drawing my pistol, cocking it, and
placing its muzzle against his breast, I replied with more of vigor
than courtesy in my speech, and forced him back, threatening and
firmly intending to pull my trigger if he should resist in the least. He
yielded himself to arrest, and I called the officer of the guard. Ewell
was livid with rage, and ordered the officer to place me in irons at
once, uttering maledictions upon me which it would not do to repeat
here. The officer of the guard was a manly fellow, however, and
refused even to remove me from the post.
"The sentinel has done only his duty," he replied, "and if he had
shot you, Colonel Ewell, you would have had only yourself to blame.
I have here your written order that the sentinels at this gate shall
allow nobody to pass through it on horseback, on any pretense
whatever; and yet you come in citizen's clothes, a stranger to the
guard, and try to ride him down when he insists upon obeying the
orders you have given him."
The sequel to the occurrence proved that, in spite of his infirm
temper, Ewell was capable of being a just man, as he certainly was a
brave one. He sent for me a little later, when he received his
commission as a brigadier, and apologizing for the indignity with
which he had treated me, offered me a desirable place upon his
staff, which, with a still rankling sense of the injustice he had done
me, I declined to accept.
General Ewell was at this time the most violently and elaborately
profane man I ever knew. Elaborately, I say, because his profanity
did not consist of single or even double oaths, but was ingeniously
wrought into whole sentences. It was profanity which might be
parsed, and seemed the result of careful study and long practice.
Later in the war he became a religious man, but before that time his
genius for swearing was phenomenal. An anecdote is told of him, for
the truth of which I cannot vouch, but which certainly is sufficiently
characteristic to be true. It is said that on one occasion, the firing
having become unusually heavy, a chaplain who had labored to
convert the general, or at least to correct the aggressive character of
his wickedness, remarked that as he could be of no service where he
was, he would seek a less exposed place, whereupon Ewell
remarked:
 "Why, chaplain, you're the most inconsistent man I ever saw. You
say you're anxious to get to heaven above all things, and now that
you've got the best chance you ever had to go, you run away from it
just as if you'd rather not make the trip, after all."
I saw nothing of General Ewell after he left Ashland, early in the
summer of 1861, until I met him in the winter of 1864-65. Some
enormous rifled guns had been mounted at Chaffin's Bluff, below
Richmond, and I went from my camp near by to see them tested.
General Ewell was present, and while the firing was in progress he
received a dispatch saying that the Confederates had been victorious
in an engagement between Mackey's Point and Pocotaligo. As no
State was mentioned in the dispatch, and the places named were
obscure ones, General Ewell was unable to guess in what part of the
country the action had been fought. He read the dispatch aloud, and
asked if any one present could tell him where Mackey's Point and
Pocotaligo were. Having served for a considerable time on the coast
of South Carolina, I was able to give him the information he sought.
When I had finished he looked at me intently for a moment, and
then asked, "Aren't you the man who came so near shooting me at
Ashland?"
I replied that I was.
"I'm very glad you didn't do it," he said.
"So am I," I replied; and that was all that was said on either side.
The queerest of all the military men I met or saw during the war
was General W. H. H. Walker, of Georgia. I saw very little of him, but
that little impressed me strongly. He was a peculiarly belligerent
man, and if he could have been kept always in battle he would have
been able doubtless to keep the peace as regarded his fellows and
his superiors. As certain periods of inaction are necessary in all wars,
however, General Walker was forced to maintain a state of hostility
toward those around and above him. During the first campaign he
got into a newspaper war with the president and Mr. Benjamin, in
which he handled both of those gentlemen rather roughly, but failing
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