Archibald Stuart 

The Stuart family tells a story that during the raid of Union troops on Saltville, Virginia, in December 1864, a soldier of the United States was staring at a portrait of a distinguished fellow admiringly until told that the subject of the painting was the father of Confederate Major General James Ewell Brown Stuart. Upon hearing this, the Yankee slashed the portrait with his saber. The painting hangs today in the home of a Stuart in Abingdon, with the repaired slash still visible.

George Washington was the first President of the United States when Archibald Stuart was born on December 2, 1795, in Lynchburg, Virginia. He was educated in private schools in the area. As the son of Judge Alexander Stuart, it was natural that Archibald would take up law as a vocation, and with that, politics came naturally. One recent biographer of J. E. B. Stuart pointed out that Abraham Lincoln had no better political experience than Archibald Stuart before the Civil War. 

After joining the legal bar in Campbell County and serving in an artillery unit during the War of 1812, he married Elizabeth Letcher Pannill in 1817. Eleven children would be born to the union: Ann in 1818, Bethenia in 1819, Mary in 1821, David in 1823, William in 1826, John in 1828, Columbia in 1830, Jeb in 1833, an unnamed son who died in 1834, Virginia in 1836 and Victoria in 1838. 

After a short sojourn living in Missouri near his father, young Stuart returned to the Old Dominion by 1823, and Patrick County appointed him delegate to the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1829-30. Famous Virginians abounded at the meetings, including Presidents James Madison, James Monroe, and the United States Supreme Court Chief Justice. Archibald Stuart lived in Patrick County and represented it in the Virginia House of Delegates starting in 1830 for two years. Stuart served as Commonwealth Attorney in Patrick and Floyd counties over the years and was on the committee establishing a courthouse in Carroll County. 

Archibald Stuart was a member of the twenty-fifth Congress of the United States from March 4, 1837, until March 3, 1839, representing the Whig Party. Another Virginia Constitutional Convention would come from 1850 through 1851. Both conventions would take power away from the slave holding classes of the eastern part to the western parts of the Commonwealth. Arch Stuart was with the reformers in both conventions. This movement would lead to West Virginia seceding from Virginia during the Civil War.

Archibald Stuart served in the Virginia Senate from 1852 to 1854 before his death on September 20, 1855, at Laurel Hill during the administration of the fourteenth President of the United States, Franklin Pierce. Stuart was buried at his Patrick County home until 1952, when his remains were moved to Saltville to be buried beside his wife, Elizabeth.

The fire that destroyed Laurel Hill in the late 1840s consumed most of Archibald Stuart’s papers. From a historian’s point of view, this was tragic because we would know much more about the man whose farm the J. E. B. Stuart Birthplace preserved. There are clues in letters to and from the man. One recent addition to the collection of the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond is from Archibald Stuart trying to be appointed to the Board of Visitors at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, in 1854 so he could observe the final examinations of his son, J. E. B. Stuart, who graduated that year. Another collection of letters from 1855 from Archibald Stuart in the Library of Virginia in Richmond, Virginia, to his oldest granddaughter describes the loneliness of the man at Laurel Hill just before his death.

Tradition describes Archibald Stuart as a vibrant fellow, full of life, who enjoyed a good time. Evidence shows that he liked to gamble and that his exuberance may have led to troubles in his long marriage to the serious Elizabeth Letcher Pannill. He was a concerned father writing long letters to J. E. B. Stuart during the latter’s days at West Point, and his son would write, “Alas! What a shadow is life!” upon his father’s death. If a man is judged by what he leaves behind, Archibald Stuart deserves high marks for his famous children, not to mention his grandson, who would be the Governor of Virginia. He was born as a child of the American Revolution, would mingle with the likes of Madison, Monroe, and Marshall, and died only six years before the outbreak of the Civil War. Imagine the stories he could tell.

The painting of Archibald Stuart shows the slash of one of Stoneman’s Union Cavalry during the raid on Saltville in December 1864.