The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (46 page)

This was approximately what Sheridan had been wanting all along, and now that he had it he took care to make the most of it. Richmond lay just ahead, the prize of prizes, but he was in no hurry; Richmond would still be there tonight and tomorrow, whereas Stuart, with his reputation for hairbreadth extractions, might skedaddle. From noon until about 2 o’clock he reconnoitered the Confederate position, probing here and there to test its strength, then settled down in earnest, using one brigade to hold off Gordon in his rear, two more to block the turnpike escape route, and the remaining four against Fitz Lee, whom he outnumbered two-to-one in men and three-to-one in guns. For another two hours the fight was hot, sometimes hand to hand at critical points. By 4 o’clock Sheridan had found what he believed was the key to Lee’s undoing, and orders went for Merritt to press the issue on the right, crumpling Lomax to fling him back on Wickham, after which the whole line would move forward to exploit the resultant confusion. Merritt passed the order on to Custer, who promptly attacked with two regiments mounted and the other two on foot as skirmishers, striking hard for the left of the rebel line just north of Yellow Tavern.

Stuart was there, having sensed the point of greatest danger from his command post near the center. A conspicuous target in his silk-lined cape and nodding plume, he laughed at an aide’s protest that he was exposing himself unnecessarily. “I don’t reckon there is any danger,” he replied. For three years this had apparently been true for him, although his clothes had been slit repeatedly by twittering bullets and he once had half of his mustache clipped off by a stray round. Moreover, he was encouraged by a dispatch from Bragg expressing the opinion that he could hold the Richmond works with his 4000 local defense troops and the help of three brigades of regulars he had ordered to join him from the far side of the James, provided the raiders could be delayed long enough for these reinforcements to make it across the river. Jeb figured there had been time for that already, and once again was proudly conscious of having carried out a difficult assignment, though he was determined to gain still more by way of allowing a margin for error. Arriving on the far left as the two Michigan regiments thundered past in a charge on a section of guns just up the line, he drew his big
nine-shot LeMatt revolver and fired at the blue horsemen going by. They took the guns, scattering the cannoneers, but soon came tumbling back, some mounted and some unhorsed by a counterattack from the 1st Virginia, which Fitz Lee threw at them. Stuart had ridden forward to a fence, putting his horse’s head across it between two of his butternut soldiers in order to get as close as possible to the bluecoats coming back. “Steady, men, steady!” he shouted, still firing his silver-chased pistol at the enemy beyond the fence. “Give it to them!” Instead, it was they who gave it to him: one of them anyhow. A dismounted private, trotting past with his revolver drawn — John A. Huff of the 5th Michigan, who had served a two-year hitch in a sharpshooter outfit, winning a prize as the best marksman in his regiment, then returned home and reënlisted under Custer, apparently out of boredom, though at forty-five he was old for that branch of the service — took time to fire, almost casually in passing, at the red-bearded officer thirty feet away. Jeb’s head dropped suddenly forward, so that his plumed hat fell off, and he clapped one hand to his right side. “General, are you hit?” one of the men alongside him cried as the blue trooper ran off down the fence line, pistol smoking from the fire of that one unlucky shot. “I’m afraid I am,” Stuart replied calmly when the question was asked again. “But don’t worry, boys,” he told the distressed soldiers gathering rapidly around him; “Fitz will do as well for you as I have done.”

They got him off his horse and did what they could to make him comfortable while waiting for an ambulance. Fitz Lee came riding fast when he heard of the wound, but Jeb sent him back at once to take charge of the field. “Go ahead, Fitz, old fellow,” he said. “I know you’ll do what is right.” Then the ambulance came and they lifted him into it, obviously in pain. Just as it started rearward a portion of the line gave way and a number of flustered gray troopers made off across the field. “Go back!” Stuart called after them, sitting up in his indignation despite the wrench to his hurt side. “Go back and do your duty, as I have done mine, and our country will be safe. Go back, go back!” Then he added, though in different words, what he had told the staff major yesterday about not wanting to survive the South’s defeat: “I’d rather die than be whipped!” Presently a surgeon and other members of his staff overtook the mule-drawn ambulance and stopped it, out of range of the Federals, for an examination of the wound. While his blood-stained sash was being removed and his bullet-torn jacket opened, Stuart turned to Lieutenant Walter Hullihen, a staff favorite, and addressed him by his nickname: “Honeybun, how do I look in the face?” Hullihen lied — for his chief was clearly in shock and getting weaker by the minute. “You are looking all right, General,” he replied. “You will be all right.” Jeb mused on the words, as if in doubt, knowing only too well what lay in store for a gut-shot man. “Well, I don’t know how this will turn out,” he said at last, “but if it is God’s will that I shall die I am ready.”

By now the doctor had completed his examination and ordered the ambulance to move on. He believed there was little chance for the general’s survival, but he wanted to get him to Richmond, and expert medical attention, as soon as possible. An eighteen-year-old private followed the vehicle for a time on horseback, looking in under the hood at the anguished Stuart until it picked up speed and pulled away. “The last thing I saw of him,” the boy trooper later wrote, “he was lying flat on his back in the ambulance, the mules running at a terrific pace, and he was being jolted most unmercifully. He opened his eyes and looked at me, and shook his head from side to side as much as to say, It’s all over with me.’ He had folded arms and a look of resignation.”

Fitz Lee by then had restored his line, and Sheridan, after prodding it here and there for another hour, decided the time had come to move on after all. Shadows were lengthening fast; moreover he had intercepted a rebel dispatch urging Bragg to send substantial reinforcements. So he broke off what he called “this obstinate contest” north of Yellow Tavern, and pushed on down Brook Turnpike, through the outer works of Richmond, to within earshot of the alarm bells tolling frantically in the gathering darkness. This was the route Kilpatrick had taken ten weeks ago, only to call a halt when he came under fire from the fortifications, and Little Phil had a similar reaction when he drew near the intermediate line of defense, three miles from Capitol Square. “It is possible that I might have captured the city of Richmond by assault,” he would report to Meade, “but the want of knowledge of your operations and those of General Butler, and the facility with which the enemy could throw in troops, made me abandon the attempt.” His personal inclination was to plunge on down the pike, over the earthworks and into the streets of the town, though he knew he lacked the strength to stay there long; “the greatest temptation of my life,” he later called the prospect, looking back. “I should have been the hero of the hour. I could have gone in and burned and killed right and left. But I had learned this thing: that our men knew what they were about.… They would have followed me, but they would have known as well as I that the sacrifice was for no permanent advantage.”

Forbearance came hard, but he soon had other matters on his mind. Withdrawal, under present circumstances, called for perhaps more daring, and certainly more skill, then did staying where he was or going in. Gordon was still clawing at his rear on Brook Turnpike, and Fitz Lee was somewhere off in the darkness, hovering on his flank; Bragg, for all he knew, had summoned any number of reinforcements from beyond the James, and presently the confusion was compounded by a howling wind- and rainstorm (the one that was giving Hancock so much trouble, out on its fringes, on the night march into position for his dawn assault on the toe of Ewell’s Mule Shoe) so severe that the steeple
of old St John’s Church, on the opposite side of Richmond, was blown away. Sheridan turned eastward, headed for Meadow Bridge on the Chickahominy, which he intended to cross at that point, putting the river between him and his pursuers, and then recross, well downstream, to find sanctuary within Butler’s lines, as had been prearranged, at Haxall’s Landing on the James. In addition to the rain-lashed darkness, which made any sense of direction hard to maintain, the march was complicated by the presence of land mines in his path; “torpedoes,” they were called, buried artillery projectiles equipped with trip wires, and the first one encountered killed a number of horses and wounded several men. Sheridan had an answer to that, however. Bringing a couple of dozen prisoners forward to the head of the column, he made them “get down on their knees, feel for the wires in the darkness, follow them up and unearth the shells.” Despite the delay he reached Meadow Bridge at daylight: only to find that the rebels had set it afire the night before to prevent his getaway. At the same time he discovered this, Bragg’s infantry came up in his rear and Fitz Lee’s vengeance-minded troopers descended whooping on his flank.

He faced Wilson and Gregg about to meet the double challenge, and gave Merritt the task of repairing the bridge for a crossing. Fortunately, last night’s rain had put the fire out before the stringers and ties burned through; a new floor could be improvised from fence rails. While these were being collected and put in place, the two divisions fighting rearward gave a good account of themselves, having acquired by now some of the foxhunt jauntiness formerly limited to their gray-clad adversaries. For example, when instructed by Sheridan to “hold your position at all hazards while I arrange to withdraw the corps to the north side of the river,” James Wilson made a jocular reply. “Our hair is badly entangled in [the enemy’s] fingers and our nose firmly inserted in his mouth. We shall, therefore, hold on here till something breaks.” Nothing broke; not in the blue ranks anyhow, though James Gordon was mortally wounded on the other side, shot from his horse while leading a charge by his brigade. Merritt finished his repair work in short order and the three divisions withdrew, without heavy losses, to camp for the night down the left bank of the Chickahominy, near the old Gaines Mill battlefield. Proceeding by easy marches they rode past other scenes from the Seven Days, including Malvern Hill, to Haxall’s Landing, which they reached on May 14. The raid was over, all but the return, and Sheridan was greatly pleased with the results, not only because of the specific damage accomplished at Beaver Dam and Ashland, but also because of other damage, no less grave for being more difficult to assess. At a cost of 625 killed and wounded and missing, he had freed nearly 400 Union prisoners and brought them with him into Butler’s lines, along with some 300 captive rebels. How many of the enemy he had killed or wounded in the course of the raid he could not say, but
he knew at least of one whose loss to Lee and the Confederacy was well-nigh immeasurable. The killing of Jeb Stuart at Yellow Tavern, he declared, “inflicted a blow from which entire recovery was impossible.”

After three days’ rest with Butler he was off to rejoin Grant. The northward march was uneventful except for a rather spectacular demonstration, staged while crossing the high railroad bridge over Pamunkey River, of the indestructibility of the army pack mule. Falling from a height of thirty feet, one of these creatures — watched in amazement by a regiment of troopers whose colonel recorded the incident in his memoirs — “turned a somersault, struck an abutment, disappeared under water, came up, and swam ashore without disturbing his pack.” On May 24 the three divisions rejoined the army they had left, two weeks and one day ago, near Spotsylvania.

Stuart by then had been eleven days in his grave, not far from the church that lost its steeple in the windstorm on the night he arrived from Yellow Tavern. After six mortal hours of being jounced on rutted country roads because the ambulance had to take a roundabout route to avoid the raiders on the turnpike, he reached his wife’s sister’s house on Grace Street at 11 o’clock that evening, and there, attended by four of Richmond’s leading physicians through another twenty hours of suffering, he made what was called “a good death” — a matter of considerable importance in those days, from the historical as well as the religious point of view. After sending word of his condition to his wife at Beaver Dam, in hope that she and the children would reach him before the end, he gave instructions for the disposition of his few belongings, including his spurs and various horses. “My sword I leave to my son,” the impromptu will concluded. The night was a hard one, with stretches of delirium, but toward morning he seemed to improve; an aide reported him “calm and composed, in the full possession of his mind.” Shortly after sunrise on May 12, when the rumble of guns was heard from the north, he asked what it meant, and on being told that part of the capital garrison had gone out to work with the cavalry in an attempt to trap the raiders at Meadow Bridge: “God grant that they may be successful,” he said fervently, then turned his head aside and returned with a sigh to the matter at hand: “But I must be prepared for another world.” Later that morning the President arrived to sit briefly at his bedside. “General, how do you feel?” he asked, taking the cavalryman’s hand. “Easy; but willing to die,” Jeb said, “if God and my country think I have fulfilled my destiny and done my duty.”

Davis could scarcely believe the thirty-one-year-old Virginian was near death; he seemed, he said afterward, “so calm, and physically so strong.” But one of the doctors, seeing the Chief Executive out, told him there was no chance for Stuart’s recovery. The bullet had pierced his abdomen, causing heavy internal bleeding, and probably his liver and stomach as well; “mortification” — peritonitis — had set in, and he was
not likely to see another dawn. That afternoon Jeb himself was told as much. “Can I last the night?” he asked, realizing that his wife might not arrive before tomorrow because of the damage to the railroad north of Richmond, and received the doctor’s answer: “I’m afraid the end is near.” Stuart nodded. “I am resigned, if it be God’s will,” he said. “I would like to see my wife. But God’s will be done.” Near sunset he asked a clergyman to lead in the singing of “Rock of Ages,” and it was painful to see the effort he made to join the slow chorus of the hymn. “I am going fast now, I am resigned; God’s will be done,” he murmured. That was shortly after 7 o’clock, and within another half hour he was dead.