7. VII.
The foregoing presents as accurate an outline of Stuart as the
present writer, after a close association with him for two or three
years, could draw. No trait is feigned or fanciful, and the picture
is not exaggerated, though it may seem so to some. The
organization of this man was exceptional and very remarkable.
The picture seems a fancy piece, perhaps, but it is the actual
portrait. The gaiety, nerve, courage, dash, and stubborn resolution
of that man were as great as here described. These were
the actual traits which made him fill so great a space in the public
eye; and as what he effected was not “done in a corner,” so
what he was became plain to all.
He was hated bitterly by some who had felt the weight of his
hot displeasure at their shortcomings, and some of these people
tried to traduce and slander him. They said he was idle and
negligent of his duties—he, the hardest worker and most wary
commander I ever saw. They said, in whispers behind his
back—in that tone which has been described as “giggle-gabble”
—that he thought more of dancing, laughing, and trifling with
young ladies than of his military work, when those things were
only the relaxations of the man after toil. They said that ladies
could wheedle and cajole him—when he arrested hundreds,
remained inexorable to their petitions, and meted out to the
“fairest eyes that ever have shone” the strictest military justice.
They said that he had wreaths of flowers around his horse, and
was “frolicking” with his staff at Culpeper Court-House, so
that his headquarters on Fleetwood Hill were surprised and captured
in June, 1863, when he had not been at the Court-House
for days; sent off every trace of his headquarters at dawn, six
hours before the enemy advanced; and was ready for them at
every point, and drove them back with heavy loss beyond the
river. In like manner the Sleeks sneered at his banjo, sneered
at his gay laughter, sneered at his plume, his bright colours, and
his merry songs. The same good friends invented stories of
rebukes he had incurred from General Lee, when he uniformly
received from that great friend and commander the highest evidences
of regard and confidence. These winged arrows, shot in
secret by the hand of calumny, which in plain Saxon are called
lies, accompanied Stuart everywhere at one period of his career;
but the Southern people could not be brought to believe them.
They flushed the face of the proud and honest cavalier, sometimes,
and made the blue eyes flash; but what could he do?
The calumnies were nameless; their authors slunk into shadow,
and shrank from him. So he ended by laughing at them, as the
country did, and going on his way unmindful of them. He
answered slander by brave action—calumny by harder work,
more reckless exposure of himself, and by grander achievements.
Those secret enemies might originate the falsehoods aimed at
him from their safe refuge in some newspaper office, or behind
some other “bomb-proof” shelter—
he would
fight. That was
his reply to them, and the scorn extinguished them. The honest
gentleman and great soldier was slandered, and he lived down
the slander—fighting it with his sword and his irreproachable
life, not with his tongue.
When death came to him in the bloom of manhood, and the
flush of a fame which will remain one of the supremest glories of
Virginia, Stuart ranked with the preux chevalier Bayard, the
knight “without reproach or fear.”
The brief and splendid career in which he won his great
renown, and that name of the “Flower of Cavaliers,” has
scarcely been touched on in this rapid sketch. The arduous
work which made him so illustrious has not been described—I
have been able to give only an outline of the man. That picture
may be rude and hasty, but it is a likeness. This was
Stuart. The reader must have formed some idea of him, hasty
and brief as the delineation has necessarily been. I have tried
to draw him as the determined leader, full of fire and force; the
stubborn fighter; the impetuous cavalier in the charge; the, at
times, hasty and arrogant, but warm-hearted friend; the devoted
Christian, husband, and father; the gayest of companions; full
of fun, frolic, laughter, courage, hope, buoyancy, and a certain
youthful joyousness which made his presence like the sunshine.
Upon this last trait I have dwelt much—the youth, and joy,
and hope, which shone in his brilliant eyes and rang in his
sonorous laughter. He passed before you like an incarnate
spring, all mirth and sunshine; but behind was the lightning.
In those eyes as fresh and blue as the May morning, lurked the
storm and the thunderbolt. Beneath the flowers was the hard
steel battle-axe. With that weapon he struck like Cœur de Lion,
and few adversaries stood before it. The joy, romance, and
splendour of the early years of chivalry flamed in his regard, and
his brave blood drove him on to combat. In the lists, at Camelot,
he would have charged “before the eyes of ladies and of
kings,” like Arthur; on the arena of the war in Virginia he followed
his instincts. Bright eyes were ever upon the daring
cavalier there, and his floating plume was like Henry of Navarre's
to many stout horsemen who looked to him as their chosen
leader; but, better still, the eyes of Lee and Jackson were fixed
on him with fullest confidence. Jackson said, when his wound
disabled him at Chancellorsville, and Stuart succeeded him:
“Go back to General Stuart and tell him to act upon his own
judgment, and do what he thinks best—I have implicit confidence
in him.” In Spotsylvania, as we have seen, General Lee
“could scarcely think of him without weeping.” The implicit
confidence of Jackson, and the tears of Lee, are enough to fill
the measure of one man's life and fame.
Such was Stuart—such the figure which moved before the
eyes of the Southern people for those three years of glorious
encounters, and then fell like some “monarch of the woods,”
which makes the whole forest resound as it crashes down.
Other noble forms there were; but that “heart of oak” of the
stern, hard fibre, the stubborn grain, even where it lies is mightiest.
Even dead and crumbled into dust, the form of Stuart
still fills the eye, and the tallest dwindle by his side—he seems
so great.
