1. I.
Sometimes, in dreams as it were, the present writer—like many
others, doubtless—goes back in memory across the gulf of years
to 1861, recalling its great scenes and personages, and living
once more in that epoch full of such varied and passionate emotions.
Manassas! Centreville! Fairfax! Vienna!—what memories
do those names excite in the hearts of the old soldiers of
Beauregard! That country, now so desolate, was then a virgin
land, untouched by the foot of war. The hosts who were to
trample it still lingered upon the banks of the Potomac; and the
wildest fancy could not have prefigured its fate. It was a smiling
country, full of joy and beauty—the domain of “ancient
peace;” and of special attraction were the little villages, sleeping
like Centreville in the hollow of green hills, or perched like
Fairfax on the summit of picturesque uplands. These were old
Virginia hamlets, full of recollections; here the feet of Mason
and Washington had trod, and here had grown up generation
after generation ignorant of war. Peace reigned supreme; the
whole landscape was the picture of repose; the villages, amid
the foliage of their elms or oaks, slept like birds that have nestled
down to rest amid the grass and blossoms of the green spring
fields.
Look first upon that picture, then on this!—the picture of a
region blasted by the hot breath of war. Where now was the
joy of the past? where the lovely land once smiling in fresh
beauty, and the charm of peaceful years? All the flowers and
sunshine had disappeared. The springing grasses, the budding
forests, the happy dwellings—all had vanished. Over the smiling
fields the hoofs of cavalry had trampled; the woods had
been cut down to furnish fuel for the camp fires; the fences had
preceded them; the crops and forage had been gleaned for the
horses of the troopers. The wheels of artillery and army trains
had worn the roads into ruts and quagmires; opposing columns
had advanced or retreated over every foot of ground, leaving
their traces everywhere; those furrows over which the broom-straw
waved in the winter wind, or the spring flowers nodded in
the airs of May, were ploughed by cannon-balls.
The war-dogs had bayed here, and torn to pieces house and
field and forest. The villages were the forlorn ghosts of themselves,
and seemed to look at you out of those vacant eyes, their
open windows, with a sort of dumb despair. They were the
eloquent monuments of the horrors of war—the veritable
“abodes of owls.” Had a raven croaked from the dead trees
riven by cannon-balls, or a wolf growled at you from the
deserted houses, you would have felt not the least astonishment.
As you passed through those villages, once so smiling, the tramp
of the cavalry horses, or the rumbling wheels of the artillery,
made the echoes resound; and a few heads were thrust from the
paneless windows. Then they disappeared; silence settled down
again, and the melancholy hamlet gave place to the more
melancholy fields. Here all was waste and desolate; no woods,
no fences, no human face; only torn-down and dismantled
houses, riddled with bullets, or charred by the torch of war.
The land seemed doomed, and to rest under a curse. That
Federal vedette younder, as we advance, is the only living object
we behold, and even he disappears like a phantom. Can this,
you murmur, be the laughing land of yesterday, the abode of
peace, and happiness, and joy? Can this be Fairfax, where the
fields of wheat once rolled their golden waves in the summer
wind, and the smiling houses held out arms of welcome? Look!
it has become a veritable Golgotha—the “place of skulls”—a
sombre Jehoshaphat full of dead men's bones!
I remember all that, and shall ever remember it; but in contrast
with these scenes of ruin and desolation, come back a
thousand memories, gay, joyous, and instinct with mirth. The
hard trade of war is not all tragedy; let us laugh, friends, when
we can; there are smiles as well as tears, comedy as well as
tragedy, in the great and exciting drama. You don't weep
much when the sword is in the hand. You fight hard; and if
you do not fall, you laugh, and even dance, perhaps—if you can
get some music—by the camp fire. It is a scene of this description
which I wish to describe to-day. This morning it came
back to my memory in such vivid colours that I thought, if I
could paint it, some of my readers would be interested. It
took place in autumn of the gay year 1861, when Johnston
and Beauregard were holding the lines of Centreville against
McClellan; and when Stuart, that pearl of cavaliers, was in
command of the front, which he guarded with his cavalry. In
their camps at Centreville, the infantry and artillery of the
army quietly enjoyed the bad weather which forbade all military
movements; but the cavalry, that “eye and ear” of an army,
were still in face of the enemy, and had constant skirmishes
below Fairfax, out toward Vienna, and along the front near the
little hamlet of Annandale.
How well I remember all those scenes! and I think if I had
space I could tell some interesting stories of that obstinate petite
guerre of picket fighting—how the gray and blue coats fought for
the ripe fruit in an orchard just between them, all a winter's
afternoon; how Farley waylaid, with three men, the whole column
of General Bayard, and attacked it; and how a brave boy fell one
day in a fight of pickets, and was brought back dead, wrapped
in the brilliant oil-cloth which his sister took from her piano
and had sent to him to sleep upon.
But these recollections would not interest you as they interest
me. They fade, and I come back to my immediate subject—
a visit to General “Jeb Stuart” at his headquarters, near Fairfax
Court-House, where, in this December of 1861, I saw the gay
cavalier and his queer surroundings.
Stuart was already famous from his raids against General Patterson
in the Valley. He had harassed that commander so persistently—driving
in his pickets, getting in rear of his camps,
and cutting off his foraging parties—that Johnston said of him:
“He is worse than a yellow-jacket—they no sooner brush him off
than he lights back again.” Indefatigable in reconnoissance,
sleepless in vigilance, possessed of a physical strength which
defied fatigue and enabled him to pass whole days and nights in
the saddle, Stuart became the evil genius of the invading column;
and long afterwards, when transferred to the West, General
Johnston wrote to him: “How can I eat, sleep, or rest in peace,
without you upon the outpost!” From the Valley he came to
Manassas, charged the Zouaves there, and then was made a Brigadier-General
and put in command of the cavalry of the army
which held the front toward Alexandria. It is at this time,
December, 1861, that I present him to the reader.
Go back with me to that remote period, and you shall have
no fancy sketch, or “dignified” picture of a General commanding,
but the actual portrait of the famous General “Jeb Stuart”
in the midst of his military household.
