By Tom Perry
The year 1854 saw the nation moving closer to Civil War with the U.S. Congress passing the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which established “Popular Sovereignty,” allowing the people of a new territory to decide whether it would enter the Union as “Free” or “Slave.” Along with the creation of the Republican Party, Henry David Thoreau published Walden.
Brevet Second Lieutenant James Ewell Brown “Jeb” Stuart woke up in Galveston, Texas, in early December. A recent writer described Galveston this way. “The Gulf breeze cooled the city at nightfall; one of the most beautiful beaches in the world offered delightful surf bathing; and you saw everybody in the afternoons bathing, promenading, or driving in carriages on the smooth, crisp sands…”
Stuart probably never saw it that way, as he stayed on the ship for 12 hours due to seasickness. He probably agreed with the Spanish, who called it the “Isle of Misfortune.” Half a century later, a hurricane destroyed the city. John Thomason, the future biographer of Stuart, left with his family the day before the natural disaster on September 8, 1900.
Across the “Lone Star State,” recent West Point graduate Stuart went from Galveston to Corpus Christi to Laredo, chasing his command all over West Texas. During the trip from Galveston to Corpus Christi, he had to throw a drunken captain overboard to sober him up in the “briny embrace of Neptune.” Stuart arrived at Fort Davis near Limpia, Texas, on January 29, 1855.
The Regiment of Mounted Rifles was under the command of Colonel Percifer Smith, Lieutenant Colonel William Loring, Major George Crittenden, and Stuart’s immediate commander, Major John Simonson. Among those in the regiment was First Lieutenant William E. Jones. Years later, as an older subordinate of Stuart, Jones would face a court-martial from his younger commanding officer. The two men from Southwest Virginia had a long, tumultuous relationship that may have begun in Texas in 1854. In December, Jones and Stuart were present for several months before Jones left in March 1855. Jones was on leave when Stuart arrived, per records in the National Archives. One can almost imagine Jones’s reaction to finding young Stuart holding his position. A man with a nickname like “Grumble” did not need much to take a dislike to the gregarious young officer nicknamed “Beauty,” whom Jones later called “that young whipper snapper.”
For most of his first few months in the army, Stuart patrolled the Texas panhandle and trans-Pecos country, trying to control the Apaches and Comanche. The mission allowed him enough leisure to hunt quail and observe prairie dogs. His first commanding officer in Texas, Major Simonson, said of him, “Stuart was brave and gallant, always prompt in the execution of orders and reckless of danger or exposure. I considered him at that time one of the most promising young officers in the United States Army.”
In January 1855, from Fort McIntosh, Stuart was in Company G. The post returns in the National Archives, a most overlooked resource for studying a man like Stuart, reported that the Regiment Mounted Riflemen: including four companies (A, B, D, G) had 185 men along with the Company F of the 1st Artillery with 78, five companies of the 5th Infantry (A D F H I) with 311 and Field and Staff of 21 men giving Fort McIntosh a total aggregate of 595 men present for duty.
At the beginning of a new life, Stuart wrote his last letter to his cousin Bette Hairston back in Virginia, with words such as, “Whatever may be my fate, may you be happy.” She saved his letters and married her cousin J. T. W. “Watt” Hairston, and kept the money, literally, within the family.
Meanwhile, in Texas in February 1855, Stuart joined Simonson’s command at Camp Eagle Pass. He recorded his experiences for the Staunton Jeffersonian, a Virginia newspaper. On his 22nd birthday, February 6, 1855, a patrol went out with Stuart in charge of the artillery.
One of the more famous of these exploits took place when Stuart, in charge of transporting artillery through rugged mountains, came to a fifteen-hundred-foot cliff with no roads down to the valley below. Ever resourceful, he devised a way for his men to lower a cannon gun down the face of the cliff by hand using ropes.
Stuart commented that the weather was such that “we can have May and December in one day in February.” He wore out his shoes and resorted to wearing embroidered slippers he had had since his time at West Point. The patrol ran into an infantry column commanded by Major James Longstreet, and Stuart met Richard S. Ewell, both future Confederate Generals in Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, while in Texas.
Stuart saw prairie fires and prairie dogs, Native American art, and mirages, but never saw an Indian. Stuart grew a beard in Texas. Laughingly described as “the only man he ever saw that a beard improved,” he wrote that the whiskers had “so much altered my physique that you could not recognize me.” He always thought of home, commenting, “Love still retains some deathless chains to bind the heart to home.”
