By Tom Perry
On first arriving in New York at the tender age of seventeen in 1850 with the temptation of New York City not far off, James Ewell Brown “Jeb” Stuart wrote to a cousin, “I expect that you as well as all my old friends about Emory have concluded that I have renounced the cross since I came to this place usually considered as so great variance with religion. But I rejoice to say that I still have evidence of a savior’s pardoning love. When I came here, I had reason to expect that many and strong temptations would beset my path, but I relied on him whom to know is life everlasting to deliver me from temptation and prayed God to guide me in the right way and teach me to walk as a Christian should.”
At West Point, Stuart befriended Oliver Otis Howard, a self-righteous and opinionated abolitionist from Maine, whom most Southern cadets hated. Howard and Stuart faced each other across several battlefields during the years 1861 to 1864. Nothing shows Stuart’s Christian faith more than his friendship with Howard. One reason that Stuart got along with Howard was that they attended bible study together. Howard managed the Freedmen’s Bureau after the Civil War and later became the President of the African American school that bears his name today, Howard University. The latter wrote in his autobiography, “I can never forget the manliness of J. E. B. Stuart…He spoke to me, he visited me, and we became warm friends.” Stuart and Howard did Bible study together.
Stuart wrote to Howard about their faith after graduating, “I was gratified to learn that you were accomplishing so much good in a Christian sphere at West Point. I wish you from my heart God’s Speed. I devotedly trust that we both may in our day, and generation be instruments of good.”
Howard, known as The Christian General and Old Prayer Book, wrote nearly fifty years later of his friend Stuart, “J. E. B. Stuart was cut out for a cavalry leader. In perfect health, but thirty-two years of age, full of vigor and enterprise, with the usual ideas imbibed in Virginia concerning State Supremacy, Christian in thought and temperate by habit, no man could ride faster, endure more hardships, make a livelier charge, or be more hearty and cheerful while so engaged. A touch of vanity, which invited the smiles and applause of the fair maidens of Virginia, but added to the zest and ardor of Stuart’s parades and achievements. He commanded Lee’s cavalry corps – a well-organized body, of which he was justly proud.”
After graduating from the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, Stuart eventually joined the First U.S. Cavalry in the Kansas Territory, where he founded a church in what is now Junction City, Kansas. The church is still there, and a plaque at the entrance honors the work of Lieutenant Stuart in its formation.
Stuart joined the Temperance Movement and gave speeches about the temptation of alcohol. During his time on the prairie, Lieutenant Stuart said, “From the first I prayed God to be my guide and I felt an abiding hope that all would be well with us.”
While stationed on the prairie, Stuart never forgot where he came from. He sent his mother $100 and asked her, in a letter, to match it to start a church near Laurel Hill. “I wish to devote one hundred dollars to the purchase of a comfortable log church near your place because, in all my observation, I believe one is more needed in that neighborhood than any other that I know of; and besides, ‘charity begins at home.’ Seventy-five of this one hundred dollars I have in trust for that purpose, and the remainder is my own contribution. If you will join me with twenty-five dollars, a contribution of a like amount from two or three others interested will build a very respectable free church.” In 1859, when Mrs. Stuart sold the property, she set aside one acre for the church, but it was never built.
Stuart joined the Methodist Church while at Emory and Henry College. His father, Archibald Stuart, came from a long line of Presbyterians. His mother, Elizabeth Letcher Pannill Stuart, was a strict, religious, and disciplined woman with a love of nature. You can see many of these traits in her most famous offspring. Elizabeth was Episcopalian, a “High Church Episcopalian,” meaning she was almost Catholic in her outlook. Local tradition holds that she attended services on Lebanon Hill in Mount Airy, North Carolina, where the Episcopalians met in the old Methodist meeting house. This congregation would form Trinity Episcopal, located on Main Street today.
The year 1859 was decisive for Stuart’s life, both professionally and spiritually. In April, Stuart and family left on the seventh for an extended trip east on a six-month leave of absence, with permission to apply for two extensions. Flora Cooke Stuart wrote in the margins of David French Boyd’s The Boyhood of J. E. B. Stuart that Bishop Hawkes confirmed J. E. B. Stuart in his mother’s Episcopal Church in 1859 in Saint Louis. Stuart wished to attend the Episcopal Convention in Richmond in 1859.
During the War Between the States, Stuart bought his men copies of the scriptures from his pocket. He attended revivals and continued his faith in a very public way. When Stuart died on May 12, 1864, after being mortally wounded at Yellow Tavern the previous day, his last words were “God’s Will Be Done.” Robert E. Lee wrote of Stuart to the Army of Northern Virginia, “To military capacity of a high order and all the nobler virtues of the soldier, he added the brighter graces of a pure life, guided and sustained by the Christian’s faith and hope.”
If you would like to learn more, my book “God’s Will Be Done: The Christian Life of J. E. B. Stuart” covers his entire life, focusing on his Christian faith.
Tom Perry can be reached at freestateofpatrick@yahoo.com, and the J. E. B. Stuart Birthplace website is www.jebstuart.org.
