By Tom Perry
Many years ago, on a tour of the 1862 Peninsula Campaign, where George B. McClellan was moving up the land between the James and York Rivers against Joseph Johnston. We stopped the two buses on the Quarterpath Road. Most of the tourists did not know that J. E. B. Stuart had gotten lost and had to come up the beach along the James River, but our tour leader did.
Ed Bearss (1923-2020), the retired Head Historian of the National Park Service, was familiar with Stuart. As we waited for the people to get off the buses, he looked at me and said, “Tom, are you lost?” I laughed, and another National Park Service Historian, who was standing there waiting, laughed, which caused Ed to look at him with the glare. When everyone arrived at the Civil War Trails sign, we were standing by it, which told of Stuart’s lapse. Bearss pointed out that the other historian had laughed at me and said, as he pointed his big stick at the somewhat rotund historian’s belly, that he was “losing the battle of the bulge.” A reference to the famous World War II European battle that occurred in the winter of 1944-45.
Bearss would know all about it as he was “he served in the 3rd Marine Raider Battalion; he fought in the Guadalcanal and New Britain campaigns with the 1st Marine Division. In 1943, Bearss caught malaria in the South Pacific and was sent to New Zealand to recover. On 2 January 1944, with the 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines at the Battle of Cape Gloucester, Bearss was hit by Imperial Japanese Army machine-gun fire that broke both of his arms and injured his heel. After spending the next 26 months in the hospital, he left the Marines in March 1946[3] with the rank of corporal.”
Ed began his career with the National Park Service in 1955 at Vicksburg, Mississippi, and retired in 1995. He was a commentator on Ken Burns’ Civil War, but what started this career in Civil War history was J. E. B. Stuart. Growing up near Billings, Montana, Bearss first became interested in the War Between the States while reading about the exploits of Patrick County’s own James Ewell Brown “Jeb” Stuart. “I became interested in the Civil War in the seventh grade,” he explained in a 2007 interview with the magazine, America’s Civil War. “My father liked to read to my brother and me books that he was interested in… Someone had given him a book by John Thomason on Jeb Stuart. My father read this book to me, and that captured me.”
Over the years, I have encountered many people and historians who first became interested in this history when they encountered J. E. B. Stuart. I spent many weekends on the battlefields in the eastern theater of the Civil War with Robert K. Krick and Gary Gallagher. Growing up in Colorado, Gallagher first encountered J. E. B. Stuart. He told the story this way.
“I was especially fascinated by one photograph in the book. I’m writing an essay about that image right now for a book that Matt Gallman and I are co-editing. Twenty-five historians are writing about one image that was especially important to them, and the image that I’m writing about is the photograph of J.E.B. Stuart in full cavalier mode–where he has his high boots and the plumed hat and all that. That picture fascinated me as a ten or eleven-year-old. So I started reading about Jeb Stuart and buying books about Jeb Stuart. I acquired probably seven or eight over the next year and a half. Henry B. McClellan’s book, W. W. Blackford’s book, and John W. Thomason’s book, those were still in print then. And then I branched out from there. I had read maybe three hundred books on the Civil War by the time I was in high school. My high school teacher had me teach about the Civil War when we got to it. Just for one day.”
Gary “received his B.A. from Adams State College of Colorado (1972) and his M.A. (1977) and Ph.D. (1982) from the University of Texas at Austin. He began his academic career in 1986 at Penn State University, where he taught for twelve years. In 1998, he joined the faculty of the University of Virginia and held the John L. Nau III Professorship in the History of the American Civil War and served as the founding Director of the John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History.”
All of us stand on the shoulders of those who came before us, and here are two historians who became interested in the Civil War because of J. E. B. Stuart. I was fortunate to know many great historians who encouraged me to try to preserve some of that history, including the Laurel Hill Farm and its many histories.
