Strange and Obscure Stories of the Civil War

by Tim Rowland

  Noble as they might be, in an acid test, most of history’s heroes could never quite live up to their press clippings. But in Jeb Stuart’s case, the press clippings could never quite live up to the man. To be certain, the Richmond papers could be over the top at times, but in general the Jeb Stuart as history remembers him was largely spot-on. The enduring image of Stuart from the ground up begins with a pair of glistening, knee-length boots of such enormity that they could conceivably have been worn by a man twice his size. Stuart’s sash was yellow, his cape lined with red. A flower might smile from his lapel. Then there was that cinnamon beard, an organism unto itself that spilled down his chest like a furry waterfall and seemed all out of proportion to the exposed portion of Stuart’s face. His men would watch the fibers of his beard for the telltale ripples that told them that, somewhere in there, Stuart was smiling. Topping off this human work of abstract art was the traditional caviler’s hat, the brim rolled up on one side and an ostrich plume rippling in the breeze.

  Swashbuckling, fun-loving, feared—the mere rumor of Stuart in the vicinity could cause the Federals to call off an attack. At West Point, he had been a good student and a bad boy, graduating thirteenth in his class, but with, count ’em, 129 behavior-related demerits. Stuart family lore mildly protests the class rank; the story goes that he sloughed off his academics down the home stretch for fear that his good grades would land him a stale job building bridges with the other brainy and boring engineers. (The demerits for conduct, by contrast, appear not to be an issue.)

  An outsized personality to be sure, Stuart’s clear voice and ringing laugh punctuated an air of dash and gallantry, where fighting and flirting were the order of the day, and were on occasion barely separable. When the Confederates chased the Federals out of Northern Virginia in the late summer of 1862 and crossed the Potomac into Maryland, Stuart decided his men deserved a party. On a walk the evening of September 8 near Urbana, he discovered the Landon House, a conveniently unoccupied mansion with an ample ballroom. His officers were tasked with decorating the property with a forest-fire’s worth of candles and sprays of roses. All the residents of Urbana were invited (except for the men) and music and laughter echoed through the night of September 9, until a Union cavalry unit showed up uninvited. Stuart’s men excused themselves, hopped on their horses, whipped the Yankees, and returned to the ball, barely missing a dance. Stuart’s “Sabers and Roses” ball is celebrated in Frederick to this day.

  J.E.B. Stuart rode hard and played hard. Once he excused himself from a ball and went out to shoot some Yankees before returning to the dance. (Courtesy National Archives)

  Stuart’s exploits on the battlefield are just as memorable, but perhaps the action that most typifies the man was a simple reconnaissance assignment that Stuart—simple not being his forte—turned into an epic ride around the Union army and an epic embarrassment to Gen. George McClellan.

  In the spring of 1862, McClellan had shipped his army down the Chesapeake Bay and was driving up the James River toward Richmond. Robert E. Lee, newly installed as commander of the Confederate eastern army had his back solidly against Richmond’s outskirts. Lee had a plan, but for it to work he needed to know the status of McClellan’s right flank. Was it solidly anchored in a defensible position, or was it ripe for the picking? Lee called on the man who served as his “eyes and ears” but who was also could be something of a worry left to his own devices. Lee solemnly outlined to Stuart his need for intelligence behind enemy lines. Then, perhaps seeing those auburn whiskers giving away a grin, Lee turned the rest of his orders into a general “what not to do” list that much resembled a father’s instructions upon giving his son the keys to the family car. The “greatest caution” must be exercised; he was to “return as soon” as the job was done; he was “not to hazard unnecessarily”; he was “not to attempt” any craziness.

  Stuart’s grin grew wider. Lee’s sigh grew deeper. He tried again:

  Remember that one of the chief objectives of your expedition is to gain intelligence for the guidance of future movements … Should you find the enemy moving to his right, or is so strongly posted as to make your expedition inopportune, you will …

  If Stuart were even still listening at this point, he was way past “inopportune” and was well on his way to “just plain nuts.” He chose 1,200 good riders and selected officers whom he awakened at two in the morning with the charge that “in ten minutes every man must be in his saddle.” In seven hours his troop had ridden north to the Union’s right flank near the town of Hanover Court House, where Patrick Henry had once been a rabble-rouser by day and a bartender by night. Here the first Union troops were spotted in a numbers and positions indicating that they were indeed vulnerable to Lee’s attack.

  Stuart’s mission was accomplished. And it was just beginning.

  Stuart routed a small band of 150 Federal cavalry, and his presence was no longer a secret, or it shouldn’t have been. But for the Union, wrote Burke Davis, “a three-day nightmare of confusion and fumbling had just begun.” Stuart turned his men to the east and began running into, and scattering, Union horsemen who failed to set off a greater alarm because they appeared not to be believing what they were seeing. “Nothing to worry about,” read one dispatch.

  In fact, there was. Federal attempts to shoo away what they believed were a few stray Confederates were overwhelmed by Stuart’s sizable column, which swallowed up Federal prisoners, horses, and mules by the dozen. Supply wagons were raided of their contents and burned. One of these wagons had a load of Champagne and cigars destined for a Union general, and—it was poetic justice for Stuart, perhaps—officers soon had more trouble from their own men as they did the Federals, as they rode through the ranks trying too keep too many corks from being prematurely popped.

  If anything, riding around an army is trickier than it sounds, because at some point it becomes necessary to ride through the army, or at least the umbilical cord of supply trains and communication lines that connect the army to friendly confines back home. Stuart shattered these lines, cutting telegraph wires and burning freight cars filled with hay and moored barges shipping supplies to McClellan. In the middle of administering mayhem, Stuart’s men were startled by a train whistle, and watched as a locomotive pulling flatcars loaded with Federal troops rambled into sight. Seeing the Rebels, the engineer applied full throttle (and got shot for his trouble) and away sped the train, as one of the war’s more surreal battles ensued— Stuart’s men on horseback exchanging fire with Union troops on rail cars. Stuart called to the rear for one of the few artillery pieces he’d brought along, but the gun was hopelessly sunken up to its axle in mud. All the whipping and profanity that the teamsters could muster had no effect. Finally, desperate men employed desperate measures. A pilfered keg of whiskey was balanced on the gun, with notice that anyone who could pull it free got the booze. A company of German didn’t have to be told twice before wading into mud to their waists and lifting the weapon to solid ground.

  Virginians had gotten wind of the raid even if the Union hadn’t and lined the country road to hug and hold men from their families whom they hadn’t seen since the beginning of the war. For many, it was a poignant march, since they had now passed the point of no return. Federal troops were finally starting to give chase; it was not hard, for all they had to do was follow the trail of flames and billowing smoke. For the Federal Keystone Cops, it was still a challenge. At one point, the solitary figure of John Mosby was approached by Federal cavalry. Knowing his horse was exhausted, Mosby, wrote Emory Thomas, “resorted to a desperate bluff. He drew his saber, turned in his saddle and waved imaginary followers forward.” The Federal horsemen pulled up short.

  Rumor and horror stories spread through the Union ranks. Something was out there. They didn’t know what. They heard it might be Stuart. They hoped it wasn’t. Through a long night, union pickets with nerves strung tight as piano wires strained their ears for any sound and shot at the slightest rustle in the hedges. It was
, recalled one Union sentry, “a bad night for cows.”

  Still, Confederate cavalry riders thought their chances were no better than one in ten—but they followed on with glee, having, one wrote, “implicit confidence and unquestioning trust” in their leader. It was, said Mosby, a “carnival of fun” as they burned and pillaged, and overran the portable grocery stores that followed the armies around. It was the ultimate boys’ night out. By the following evening, the raiders were swilling stolen wine and gorging on figs, beef tongue, pickles, cakes, sausages, jam, ketchup, and whatever else the sutlers (suppliers of victuals to the military) might have been peddling.

  It was the high point of the ride. The rest was worry and work. With obviously no time to sleep, the men napped in their saddles, including Stuart himself, who had to be steadied by an officer to keep him from falling off his horse. The critical point arrived at what was supposed to be a manageable ford across the Chickahominy, but turned out to be an impassable torrent of floodwater. Figuring the jig was up, many men simply slid off their mounts and collapsed in the grass, too tired to care. The Union cavalry were indeed in pursuit, but with seemingly little urgency. An enduring intrigue is the behavior of the man giving chase, Gen. George Cooke, who had the added title of father-in-law of Jeb Stuart.

  The engineers, whose career path Stuart had once shunned, were now of considerable use. Pressed into action, they were able to cobble a makeshift bridge balanced on the abutments of a burned bridge, allowing Stuart’s men to cross into relative safety just as the first Union trooper appeared on the river’s north side. He fired a single shot. Like everything else thrown at Stuart over the past thirty-six hours, it was ineffective.

  In Richmond, the newspapers could not be contained. Magnificent. Brilliant. Unparalleled, they gushed. Columns were filled with explosive accounts of the ride, all of them marvelous, none of them true, a soldier recounted. Confederates reckoned that, while losing only one man, they had captured a couple of hundred Yankees, burned as many wagons, and cost the Union upwards of $2 million in property damage. McClellan, no surprise, downplayed the raid. Just some routine troublemakers who “fired into a train” and “destroyed some wagons.” McClellan said he sent in some infantry, which “ran them off.”

  All of this was inaccurate. But the truth would have been too embarrassing.

  1After the subsequent Battle of Antietam, McClellan excused his lack of a follow-up attack by griping that his horses were “sore-tongued and fatigued,” leading Lincoln to ask what the horses might be doing on their own time that had them so fatigued. Lincoln later apologized for the wisecrack.

  CHAPTER 12

  An Original, American Piece of Work

  To some, Union Maj. Gen. Daniel Sickles almost lost the Battle of Gettysburg single-handedly, and as such all but cost the North the Civil War. Any true fan of Dan Sickles, however, is liable to shrug apathetically at this event, it being, all told, only about the fifth or sixth most interesting thing to happen to the man during the course of his eventful life.

  Number one on the list? Hard to say. Maybe it was when he murdered the son of Francis Scott Key. Might have been the time he introduced a whore to English royalty. Could have been his tryst with the beefy but insatiable ex-queen Isabella II, or the fact that he allowed himself to be bilked out of so much of the money he had stolen. He spent some time at Tammany Hall, but the inmates of that particular asylum appeared to be too honest for him. So he moved on to Congress and immediately drank it under the table.

  Dan Sickles didn’t know the first blessed thing about the military, which explains why by the summer of 1863 he was a general in charge of his own 10,000-man corps in the army of the Potomac. He is, perhaps, best understood in the parlance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s ditty about a street urchin who got his start wiping the grime off of the doorknob at a law office: I polished up the handle so carefully/That now I am the ruler of the Queen’s Navy.

  After its army spent a wretched winter on the Rappahannock in 1862–63, the North placed its chips on “Fighting Joe” Hooker, a general of some ability who didn’t always pick his officers and drinking buddies—who invariably were one and the same—well. The bacteria that was Dan Sickles blossomed in Hooker’s inner petrie dish of wine, women, and song, and Sickles also carefully wormed his way into President Abraham Lincoln’s circles, where his uncouth antics occasionally amused the president, and had mixed, but generally favorable, results with the president’s wife.

  Hooker probably deserved better than he got in Chancellorsville, the first major battle under his command. Unlike McClellan, Hooker had no qualms about taking action. He led his army on an ambitious flanking maneuver, only to get outflanked himself at least partly because Sickles misread the movement of Stonewall Jackson’s men as a retreat instead of an attack. As evening approached, Jackson was treated to the sound of gunfire interspersed with momentous cheers that signaled another field taken by the South. Capt. Richard Eggleston Wilbourn, Jackson’s signal officer, estimated the Yanks were being driven back at the rather amazing rate of two miles an hour.

  At Chancellorsville, Sickles is generally credited with fighting well, but stupidly. Notably, he launched a “midnight attack” that failed because—in the one circumstance Sickles could hardly have been expected to foresee—it was dark. No matter. Sickles established what would become a pattern by blaming others for messes of his own making, or taking credit for quelling crises that he himself caused, even though they usually had to be quelled by someone else.

  One tragedy of Dan Sickles—there are many—is that he possessed the one quality no other Union commander seemed to have at the time: aggressiveness. At Chancellorsville, Sickles wanted to advance, but was pulled back by Hooker, a sore point that would come into play later in the summer.

  If Hooker had been undermined by his old drinking buddy’s analysis, the commander seemed more perturbed by his bosses. In a snit that Washington had failed to recognize his genius following the defeat, he haughtily tendered his resignation, and seemed stunned when Lincoln accepted it. Lincoln’s choice to replace Hooker was a turtle-eyed general named George Meade, who was pretty much the opposite of Sickles in every possible way—sober, a professional soldier, level-headed, apolitical—the two were bound to clash.

  Dan Sickles had arrived at this point by allegedly living a life that made war seem almost serene by comparison, as summarized in a gripping biography, Sickles at Gettysburg, by James Hessler. The son of wealthy parents, Sickles was sent to grow up in a home that included an infant girl named Teresa who would one day become his wife, but not before Sickles had carried on an affair with her mother. By his late teens he had been charged with theft, which began a lifelong career of filching money and property in ways that were sometimes interesting, sometimes not. Nor did his endeavors in Democratic politics at Tammany Hall—vote-fixing, ballot-tampering, financial funny business and the occasional brawl—stand out in the grand scheme of his life. Sickles spent time as a state assemblyman and as a kept man, the keeper being a prostitute and/or madam named Fanny, who saw to it that Sickles always had plenty of cash on hand.

  Sickles, in turn, exchanged Fanny’s talents for political favors in Albany. The arrangement worked well enough until Sickles got the aforementioned female infant, now a teen, pregnant, at which point Fanny showed up with a riding crop and beat the living daylights out of Dan in public. If there was a coolness between them after that it wasn’t lasting, as Dan got a job in the Buchanan administration and took Fanny to England—never mind that he had subsequently married Teresa—where she made quite the splash with the royals, but not in a good way. Dan and Teresa went on to have a daughter who died an alcoholic after Dan turned his back on her as an adult. Meanwhile, Sickles rode Tammany to Congress and moved with Teresa to Washington where his lifestyle continued to exceed his salary and his bedrooms continued to exceed his wife’s. Fed up, perhaps, she took a lover of her own, Philip Barton Key, son of the Star Spangled Banner’s writer. Key and Sickle
s were friends until the affair became public, and which point Sickles shot Key to death in the street and extracted a lengthy mea culpa, in writing, from Teresa. Ever the slippery scoundrel, Sickles was acquitted after filing the nation’s first defense of temporary insanity and seeing to it (probably) that poor Teresa’s “confession” was printed in newspapers nationwide.

  The public blamed Teresa, who was sent back to the Northeast in exile, and it only later blamed Dan when he apparently forgave her and moved back in. It was this disgrace that finally caught up with Sickles and drove him out of Congress and into infamy at Gettysburg.

  Despite an early drubbing on the first day of that history-changing battle, Gen. George Meade maneuvered the army into a respectable, defensive position going into day two. The line has famously been described as a fishhook, curled around a hilltop to the north, then extending straight to the south along a slight ridge. But this line had a wart on it, and that wart was Dan Sickles, who against orders moved his corps a half-mile or more forward of the main defense to form a bump that in military terms is called a salient. Not having attended military school, Sickles may not have been up on his definitions, nor may he have known that salients are often undesirable because the men are exposed on three sides instead of just one.