By Tom Perry
“He will regret it but once, and that will be continuously.” J. E. B. Stuart said this of his father-in-law, Philip St. George Cooke, when the latter did not resign his commission in the U. S. Army and join Virginia and the Confederate States of America.
The man, noted for his authorship of an Army cavalry manual and sometimes called the “Father of the U.S. Cavalry,” was born near Leesburg, Virginia, on June 13, 1809. He graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, in 1827.
Cooke married Rachel Hertzog in late 1830. They had one son, John Rogers Cooke, and three daughters: Flora, who married Stuart; Maria, who married Charles Brewer; and Julia, who married Jacob Sharpe.
During Cooke’s time in the West, he encountered many notable persons, including “Col. Henry Dodge, Gen. Henry Leavenworth, Artist George Catlin, Lt. Col. Stephen W. Kearny, and captains Edwin V. “Bull” Sumner, David Hunter and Nathan Boone, the youngest son of Daniel Boone. Young first lieutenant Jefferson Davis, the future president of the Confederate States of America, also enlisted in the expedition, as did guide and interpreter Jesse Chisholm, the namesake of the Texas-Kansas cattle trail. Kit Carson praised Cooke ‘as efficient an Indian fighter as I have ever accompanied; that he is brave and gallant everyone knows.’ ”
He served in the West and fought in the Black Hawk War in 1832. In 1833, the year his future son-in-law was born at Laurel Hill, in Ararat, Patrick County, Virginia, Cooke was promoted to first lieutenant in the newly formed 1st U.S. Dragoons.
Before the Civil War, served in the Mormon Battalion; developed a southern route to California, called Cooke’s Wagon Road, before the Gold Rush. Cooke knew Brigham Young. Cooke took part in the Utah expedition of 1857–1858. Cooke observed the U.S. Army during the Crimean War in what is now Ukraine and commanded the Department of Utah from 1860 to 1861.
In 1858, Cooke wrote a two-volume manual on cavalry tactics, published in 1862. “It was a controversial work at the time, and the War Department chose not to make it the basis for official doctrine. Cooke espoused the value of mounted attacks as the primary purpose for cavalry forces; others, more sensibly, realized that the emergence of the rifled musket as an infantry weapon made the classic cavalry charge essentially obsolete and recommended a mission emphasis on reconnaissance and screening.”
Cooke was the author of a variety of memoirs of his service: Notes of a Military Reconnaissance, from Fort Leavenworth, in Missouri, to San Diego, in California (1848), Scenes and Adventures in the Army: or, Romance of Military Life (1857), Cavalry Tactics (1862), Handy Book for United States Cavalry (1863), and The Conquest of New Mexico and California (1878).
Cooke’s son, John Rogers Cooke, joined the Confederate States, along with his son-in-law, J. E. B. Stuart. Flora Cooke married Stuart in 1855 in Kansas Territory, and they had one son, Philip St George Cooke Stuart, born June 26, 1860. When her father did not join Virginia, the Stuarts changed their son’s name to J. E. B. Stuart Jr. We are now up to J. E. B. Stuart VII.
Cooke chose to stay with the Union, writing, “I owe Virginia little; my country much. She has entrusted me with a distant command; and I shall remain under her flag as long as it waves the sign of the National Constitutional Government.” Cooke wrote, “At fourteen years of age I was severed from Virginia; the National Government adopted me as its pupil and future defender; it gave me education and a profession; and I then made a solemn oath to bear true allegiance to the United States of America, and to ‘serve them honestly and faithfully against all their enemies or opposers whatsoever.’ This oath and honor alike forbid me to abandon their standard at the first hour of danger. In the national service, I have been, for thirty-four years, a Western man, and, if my citizenship be localized, a citizen of Missouri. … To cut this Gordian knot of horrors my sword had instinctively turned against the usurping ‘majesty’ of cotton. I owe Virginia little; my country much. She has entrusted me with a distant command; and I shall remain under her flag as long as it waves the sign of the National Constitutional Government.”
Cooke encountered his son-in-law, Stuart, when the latter made his first “Ride Around McClellan,” embarrassing Cooke. He led a controversial cavalry charge at Gaines’s Mill (1862) and eventually left the Army of the Potomac. After that, Cooke spent the war on various desk jobs within the U.S. Army.
After the war, “Cooke commanded the Department of the Platte from 1866 to 1867, the Department of the Cumberland from 1869 to 1870, and the Department of the Lakes. claiming its commanders were inept. Following the war, his involvement in a massacre by Lakota Sioux further tarnished his reputation. He retired from the Army with almost 50 years of service on October 29, 1873, as a brigadier general.”
In the 1880s, he reconciled with his son. In a poignant scene, Flora Cooke Stuart wrote of visiting her parents in Michigan after years apart, accompanied by her children. In a letter I found years ago, she wrote that it was raining on the train platform when she saw her father again, and she thought it was rain, but it was tears streaming down his cheeks as he saw his daughter and his two grandchildren. Philip St George Cooke died on March 20, 1895, in Detroit, Michigan, and is buried in Elmwood Cemetery.
