by Burke Davis
Gilmor rode with Rosser, anticipating easy progress, but they approached the river under a fury of carbine fire. When they could see behind the woods, as Gilmor described it: "There, to our astonishment, we beheld about two brigades of cavalry. We should, therefore, have been obliged to retreat even had there been no dismounted men at the fence; and their fire was very heavy, killing a good many men and horses. Rosser strove hard to keep the regiment in order, but, owing to the nature of the ground and the severe fire from the fence, they went back in some confusion."
As they scrambled back toward safety Rosser shouted, "Major Puller, why in the name of God don't you help me rally the men?"
Puller, white-faced, lifted his head from the horse's mane with an effort. "Colonel, I'm killed," he said.
"My God, old fellow, I hope not," Rosser said. "Bear up, bear
up."
The Colonel left to herd the rest of the regiment to the rear. Gilmor tried to help Puller, but when the injured man reached for his reins he pitched to the ground. Gilmor had men catch riderless horses and carry him to an ambulance. Puller died almost immediately.
Fighting became general, with Jeb and Fitz Lee in the thickest of it. Charges littered the field and sabers rang endlessly. Fitz had two horses shot under him. The Federal Colonel Alfred Duffie led a charge which pushed Fitz Lee into a field on an adjoining farm. Lee formed his line within reach of Breathed's guns. The Federals halted in a woodland, and Fitz launched a charge. Artillery crashed from both sides.
Pelham watched Breathed and his gun crews as they blasted the enemy, nodding his satisfaction, but when Federal fire dwindled and Breathed's men worked more slowly, Pelham was impatient: "Major, do not let your fire cease. Drive them from their position."
Gilmor stood with Pelham near the 2nd Virginia Cavalry; shells burst overhead.
Fitz Lee rode the line. "Keep cool, boys. These little things make a deal of fuss, but don't hurt anyone."
The regiment cheered him, but looked anxiously toward the smoke of the guns as Lee rode away. The troopers filed off to take part in the attack. As the last of the regiment wheeled into line, Captain Bailey shouted, "My God, they've killed poor Pelham!"
Gilmor had heard no bullet strike. He whirled to see Pelham's riderless horse moving off. Pelham lay on the ground "on his back, his eyes open, and looking very natural."
He seemed fatally wounded.
Federal cavalrymen rode near, and Bailey and a lieutenant from Fitz Lee's staff lifted Pelham onto Gilmor's horse. Gilmor saw that the wound was in the back of the head, bleeding profusely. He rode a short distance, put the body over Pelham's borrowed horse, and summoned two dismounted men.
"Take this officer to the nearest ambulance and call a surgeon. Hurry!"
Gilmor galloped to find Stuart. Jeb saw blood on his hands. "You're hurt," he said.
"No, General. It's not my blood. It's Pelham. He's dead. They killed him a few minutes ago. I sent his body off."
Gilmor stared at the general: "I shall never forget his look of distress and horror."
Stuart stopped. "Tell me about it," he said. "Tell me everything that happened." When Gilmor had finished Jeb dropped his head and sobbed. Gilmor heard only a few mumbled words from him: "Our loss is irreparable!"
There was little more fighting. Partial attacks threatened Breathed's guns near the end, but General Averell had not met Lee with all his strength, evidently fearful of an ambush by infantry, and at five thirty P.M. the bluecoats retreated. In the final moments the 4th Virginia, charging in the open, had stopped to tear down a rail fence and galloped on, though about forty men fell at the spot. Gilmor observed: "This must have convinced the enemy of our determination to lose every man before they should enter Culpeper."
Stuart reported to General Lee by telegraph, a small party hung on the Federal rear, and survivors of the command went back toward Culpeper.
Gilmor overtook the two men he had ordered to care for Pelham. They were walking in the dusk just as they had on the battlefield, leading the horse with the body of the gunner draped over it, arms and legs dangling. Pelham's face, hair and hands were caked with mud and blood. Gilmor angrily halted them and stretched the body in a fence corner. He was astonished to find Pelham still breathing.
"Imagine my indignation and vented wrath when I learned that, instead of looking for an ambulance, they had moved on toward Culpeper, a distance of eight miles I firmly believe that, had surgical
aid been called to remove the compression on the brain, his life might have been saved."
Gilmor soon had Pelham in an ambulance, and within a few minutes the young gunner was in bed at the Shackelford home, where three surgeons worked over him. Bessie Shackelford and other women aided with hot water, wrapped his hands and feet in flannel, and brought brandy.
Gilmor recorded the details: "The piece of shell that struck him was not larger than the end of my little finger. It entered just at the curl of the hair on the back of the head, raked through the skull without even piercing the brain, coming out two inches below the point where it entered. The skull was badly shattered between the entrance and exit of the shell. As the surgeons removed the pieces I selected one as a memento of one of the most gallant and highly esteemed officers of the Southern army."
The surgeons announced that the case was hopeless. Gilmor and Bessie remained in the room with him by candlelight.
At one o'clock Pelham opened his eyes. He gave Gilmor "an unconscious look," closed his eyes, and breathed deeply. He was dead.
They put a fresh uniform on the body. Stuart entered, Gilmor wrote, and "great tears rolled down his cheeks as he silently gazed."
H. H. Matthewe, a gunner with Breathed's battery, described the final scene in the Culpeper house:
"General Stuart also came. With measured step, his black plumed hat in hand, he approached the body, looked long and silently upon the smiling face, his eyes full of tears, then stooping down he pressed his bearded hps to the marble brow. As he did so ... a sob issued from his lips, and a tear fell on the pale cheek of Pelham. Severing from his forehead a lock of the light hair, he turned away, and as he did so there was heard in low deep tones, which seemed to force their way through tears, the single word, 'Farewell.' "
When everyone else had gone, Gilmor slept in the room beside the body of the boy Major.5
Stuart telegraphed the Alabama Congressman, Lamar Curry:
The noble, the chivalrous Pelham is no more; he was killed in action; his remains will be sent to you today. How much he was loved, appreciated and admired let the tears of agony we have shed and the gloom of mourning throughout my command bear witness. His loss is irreparable.
He also telegraphed von Borcke to meet the train bearing Pelham's body at Hanover Junction and accompany it to Richmond.
Von Borcke had to quell a mutiny of Pelham's two tearful slaves, Willis and Newton, who begged to be taken. He boarded the train at Hanover and found Pelham's body in a wooden coffin identical to scores of others on the car. He got into Richmond late in the night, found that no hearse met the train, as he had ordered, and carried the coffin into the city in a common dray.
Von Borcke went to Governor Letcher, who offered a room in one of the halls of Congress; the coffin was put there under a guard of honor and covered by a Virginia flag. The Prussian helped undertakers transfer the body to a handsome metal coffin the next day. Von Borcke wrote: "I was overcome with grief as I touched the lifeless hand that had so often pressed mine in the grasp of friendship. ... By special request I had a small glass window let into the coffin-lid just over the face, that his friends and admirers might take a last look at the young hero."
The people came "in troops," most of them girls and young women who covered the casket with flowers. A day later, with the Richmond infantry battalion marching around it, the body went to the railroad station, where a home-bound Alabama soldier became its escort. Reports were that women stopped the train at every station in Alabama, piling the casket w
ith flowers. In Virginia, three young women went into mourning for Pelham.
Stuart paid a final tribute in orders to the cavalry corps:
He fell mortally wounded with the battle cry on his lips and the light of victory beaming in his eyes. His eye had glanced over every battlefield of this army, from the First Manassas to the moment of his death, and he was, with a single exception, a brilliant actor in them all. The memory of the gallant Pelham, his many victories, his noble nature and purity of his character is enshrined as a sacred legacy in the hearts of all who knew him. His record has been bright and spotless, his career brilliant and successful. He fell the noblest of sacrifices on the altar of his country.
To outward appearances, at least, Stuart never mourned another like this.
From the Deep South one of the dead hero's kinsmen, Major Peter Pelham, wrote of the scene in Alabama, when the casket arrived at the family home. People thronged the place from the whole county: "It was a beautiful moonlight night the last of March and as the casket, covered with white flowers... [was] borne by white-haired old men, followed by girls with uncovered heads, to us who stood in the porch at his home, waiting... it seemed a company 'all in white.'.. . And I heard a voice near me say, 'Made white in the blood of the Lamb' and I knew it to be the voice of his Mother. The Father and Sister were crushed in sorrow and kept their rooms, but that Spartan Mother met her beloved dead on the threshold as she would have done had he been living, and led the way into the parlor and directed that he ... be laid where the light would fall on his face when Sunday came."6
Pelham's commission as Lieutenant Colonel, delayed in slow Richmond channels, was hastened by Robert Lee's letter to President Davis:
I mourn the loss of Major Pelham. I had hoped that a long career of usefulness and honor was still before him. He has been stricken down in the midst of both, and before he could receive the promotion he had richly won. I hope there will be no impropriety in presenting his name to the Senate, that his comrades may see that his services have been appreciated, and may be incited to emulate them.
The army quickly forgot the insignificant affair of cavalry at Kelly's Ford, and turned to the looming threat of a spring offensive. Stuart would never forget Pelham.
He wrote Flora:
You know how his death distresses me. He was noble in every sense of the word. I want Jimmie to be just like him.
And this moment moved him as if Pelham's death had somehow made the Southern cause more sacred to him than ever. He admonished his wife:
I wish an assurance on your part in the event of your surviving me—that you will make the land for which 1 have given my life your home and keep my offspring on Southern soil.
Esten Cooke learned of Pelham's death while he was in cavalry headquarters at "Camp No Camp," and was saddened by the contrast of the bleak news with the blaring of an army band nearby. He was moved to poetry:
Oh, band in the pine woods cease, Cease with your splendid call. Oh, the living are noble and just, But the dead are the bravest of all.7
CHAPTER 15
Chancellorsville
ESTEN COOKE'S diary revealed the dull life at the cavalry camp as spring approached:
Wake about 8, find my fire burning and boots, cleaned with real Day & Martin, setting by it. Dress leisurely, gazing into fire with one boot on, or cravat in hand. An old weakness, this. Finish, and read my Bible. Then say my prayers. Then if breakfast isn't ready, read a novel or paper or anything.
Lige then rushes in violently with a coffee pot, breakfast follows, of steak and biscuits nearly invariably. A strong cup of coffee. No molasses now. And I commence the real business of the day, and charm of life, smoking and reading something.
This over I go to writing and write away till three or four—or I don't write. I ride out, to Col. Baldwin's, or elsewhere, and come back, and smoke and lounge in the tents till toward dark when dinner is ready—pretty much the same—a little stewed fruit being the sole addition.
After dinner, smoke, smoke—chat, chat—or read, read! Voila ma vie! The storm rages and I must smoke.
Cooke also reported his conversations with Jeb:
General Lee says he wishes he had a dozen Jacksons for his lieutenants. General Stuart again repeats that Jackson is a man of military genius. And I reply, "That hits it exactly. He certainly has the knack of whipping the Yankees." I believe I am regarded as the Jackson Man of headquarters.
Stuart returned to the gaiety of camp life as if he had forgotten his losses. Cooke recorded one late March day:
The General has got his banjo and is gone out frolicking. He is a jolly cove.
There was a lightness in some of Jeb's correspondence. In a letter to one of his cousins of the Price family he fired a barrage of puns:
I wonder how you all can keep your heads above water when the whole country is crying, "Down with the Prices" It must be consoling to the financiers to observe that the Price sterling is not as much above the Prices current, as before Channing's promotion.
I will spare you any further affliction now, but you see I must have my joke—
"No rose without its thorn, nary Jeb, without his joke"1
Channing Price, the adjutant so recently promoted, had won a reputation as the finest military secretary in the army. His father, a blind Richmond merchant, had for years dictated his correspondence to Channing.
Now, when they rode in the field, Stuart would signal Price and without halting dictate to him three or four orders, each different, often bristling with figures of strength, mileage, routes, and time of departure. Price would listen attentively, and without taking a note or asking a question, rein to the roadside and write orders for Stuart's signature. Jeb rarely made changes in Channing's dispatches.
But Channing's brother Tom, who had been so short a time with the staff, came to grief in a way that afforded gossip for months. Tom was already a distinguished young scholar, a law graduate of the University of Virginia who had studied Latin, Greek and Sanskrit with renowned German scholars in Berlin universities, had studied archeology and languages in Greece, and French literary criticism in Paris. He had run the blockade to join the Confederate army, but life with Stuart soon palled on him. He missed European gaiety and the world of letters.
Tom kept an intimate diary, and unfortunately filled it with secret thoughts on his superiors. He heaped scorn upon Stuart, his officers and their way of life in camp, and showed no appreciation for Jeb's having saved him from service as a private.
Tom lost the diary in a skirmish and bemoaned it at length. Staff officers thought it strange that he attached such value to the book— until Stuart got by mail a Northern newspaper reprinting the diary in full.
The staff saw the cause of Tom's misery, for he had written, "Oh, for Berlin!" and such phrases. And of his generous kinsman: "General Stuart in his usual garrulous style exclaimed," and so on. Jeb was hurt. Tom was soon assigned to the engineers and left the staff. In after years he would become a famed philologist.2
Jeb lost neither his good humor nor his interest in women. In early April an anonymous woman sent him some homemade gauntlets through one of his officers, to whom Stuart wrote:
The best gloves of the kind I ever saw, they speak well for the fertility of resource and readiness of adaptation to the labor of love or necessity, which shine so conspicuously in our Southern heroines. I am proud to see that Virginia is behind none, and that her fair women vie with her brave men in devotion, and cheerful endurance.
He then came to the point:
I must beg of you the further privilege to inform me of the lady's name and residence, for I am anxious to know more of one to whose favor I am so much indebted.8
On April eighth Stuart wrote Flora:
I go forth into the uncertain future. My saber will not leave my hand for months. I am sustained in the hour of peril by the consciousness of right, and upheld by the same Almighty hand, which has thus far covered my head in the day of battle, and in whom I put my trust
.
He was hurried off the next day to Culpeper, where Fitz Lee's little force of 2,000 held the river front. A new campaign was on.
North of the Rappahannock the enemy stirred. General Hooker was fond of proclaiming his force of 130,000 "the finest army on the planet," and he laid a shrewd plan to pry the Army of Northern Virginia from the ridge at Fredericksburg, strike it in the flank and take Richmond.
His cavalry had now grown to 12,000 troopers, by current Southern standards superbly mounted; 13,000 well-fed horses waited in Hooker's camps. Stuart's regiments were pitiful by comparison. Hundreds of men in every regiment had no horses. Wade Hampton's brigade had to be left behind near Fredericksburg for lack of mounts, and many of Hampton's riders were on furloughs to South Carolina and Mississippi, in search of fresh horses at home. Meanwhile, only 2,700 riders picketed the army's front, "from the Chesapeake to the Blue Ridge."
Only the flooding Rappahannock and muddy roads postponed war as April, 1863 advanced.
Headquarters acquired another character in these days, Captain Justus Scheibert, a German whose jollities in broken English made him the leading social attraction in Culpeper. He entertained women at the pianoforte almost nightly. William Blackford and a friend once took him to visit some girls and while they waited in the parlor, Scheibert began playing the piano. In his ardor the fat German bounced hard on the stool, crushed it, and tumbled to the floor. As he scrambled up he heard the girls on the stairway and hurriedly shoved the smashed furniture under the piano. He snatched up a broken stool leg and hid it behind his back as the girls entered. Blackford and his companion laughed so loudly that they could not introduce the stranger, and Scheibert faced the young women staring, red-faced and perspiring. He became a favorite staff amusement.