“As they retired, one man who had been dismounted in the charge, and was running out on foot, turned as he passed the general, and discharging his pistol inflicted the fatal wound.” J. E. B. Stuart’s staff member and first biographer, Major Henry McClellan, wrote of Stuart’s mortal wounding at Yellow Tavern.
I have met many people over the years while researching the Civil War, particularly James Ewell Brown “Jeb” Stuart. I once got a photo through the mail of the grave of John Huff, a Michigan Cavalryman, who was credited for years as being the man who shot Stuart at the Battle of Yellow Tavern on May 11, 1864, with a joking note stating, “Tom, I know how much this will mean to you.”
Pvt. John A. Huff was born on November 14, 1819, in Hamburg, Erie County, New York. He died a month after Stuart on June 23, 1864. Find A Grave states that Huff “was shot in the head during battle at Hawes Shop, on May 28, 1864, in Hanover County, Virginia, seven miles east of Yellow Tavern. After several weeks in a military hospital, he was sent home by train to die.”
In studying the Civil War, you learn that not everything you have learned is true, and if a lie is told enough, it becomes the truth. I do not believe that John Huff shot J. E. B. Stuart. John Huff served in Company E, 5th Michigan Cavalry. He was one of George Custer’s men.
“Two months after Yellow Tavern, Colonel Russell Alger, the commander of the 5th Michigan, claimed John Huff was the man who shot Stuart. Alger stated Huff opened fire on an officer ‘accompanied by a large staff and escort, carrying a battle flag.’ George Custer took his subordinate at his word and repeated the claim in his own report of the campaign. Further credence was given to these claims since Huff was a former member of ‘Berdan’s Sharpshooters’ and considered a crack shot.”
Now if George Custer wrote it, I tend to find it suspect. As my mother always said, “Crazy Horse was a great American.” Stuart was alone with the 1st Virginia Cavalry when he was mortally wounded and did not have his staff or his battle flag with him at the time of his wounding.
I am not the only one who thinks that John Huff is not the man who shot Stuart. In an Emerging Civil War blog, “Unwritten History: Who Shot J.E.B. Stuart?” by Daniel Davis, posted on May 11, 2017, and quoted above. He wrote, “…the 5th Michigan was not one of the units employed by Custer to spearhead the main attack. The regiment launched their attack to the right of Stuart’s location and outside of the general vicinity where he received his wound.”
In the best article I have ever read on Yellow Tavern, Robert E. L. Krick wrote in an essay, J.E.B. Stuart’s Last Ride and Sheridan’s Raid, in Gary Gallagher’s The Spotsylvania Campaign, published in 2010, that John Huff’s regiment was not near Stuart when he was shot. I will always take the word of a Krick over a Custer.
Footnotes are always the most interesting place to learn history. Krick wrote in a footnote on pages 164-65: “Huff’s regiment likely fought a little farther west than the Telegraph Road. More significant, nearly all Confederate sources (with no agenda and nothing at stake in this instance) noted that Stuart …consider it very likely that whoever shot Stuart did so unwittingly.” On the other hand, Stuart reportedly told his doctor that the Yankees, “evidently recognizing his well-known person,” purposely shot at him. The doctor’s account reported that Stuart returned this fire with all six rounds from his revolver before falling wounded.
We will probably never know who shot Stuart. With what is known and the location of Custer’s regiments on the field, it is more likely that a trooper from the 1st Michigan shot Patrick County’s most famous Southern soldier. As Davis wrote, “After the war, a trooper from the 17th Pennsylvania Cavalry who fought at Yellow Tavern best summed up the circumstances surrounding the event: It seems rather strange to me that so important an occurrence, if the facts were definitely known, should have remained unwritten history all these years.”
After he was wounded, Stuart was taken into his brother-in-law, Charles Brewer’s, home on Grace Street in downtown Richmond. Brewer had taken care of Stuart in 1857 when a Cheyenne shot Stuart. Stuart died on May 12, 1864, around 7:30 p.m.. Today, the site is the Richmond Police Department’s parking deck. Stuart was buried in Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery, high on the hill above the James River, named for another James Stuart, King James I of England.
