I Rode with Jeb Stuart: The Life and Campaigns of Major General J.E.B. Stuart

by H. B. McClelland, Burke Davis (Introduction)

Overview

Major-General J.E.B. Stuart (1833-1864) was one of the Confederacy’s greatest horsemen, soldiers, and heroes. As early as First Manassas (Bull Run) he contributed significantly to the Confederate victory, he subsequently displayed his daring and brilliance in the battles of Second Manassas, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Brandy Station—the most significant cavalry battle of the war, and Stuart’s finest moment. General Lee depended on Stuart for knowledge of the enemy for, as he said, Stuart never brought him a piece of false information. But Stuart was mortally wounded at Yellow Tavern in May, 1864. Not since the death of Stonewall Jackson had the South sustained so great a personal loss, his rollicking, infectious gaiety and hard fighting were sorely missed in the grim last days of Lee’s army.

By all accounts, I Rode with Jeb Stuart is the most reliable and persuasive portrait of Stuart offered by a contemporary, and is indispensable for any thorough knowledge of the great Confederate cavalryman.

“This book, which is both biography and memoir, is the richest source on the Civil War career of the plumed knight of the Army of Northern Virginia, Major-General James Ewell Brown Stuart. Though it has been out of print for generations, it is still read, and has fairly won its way onto the shelf of ‘classics’ of the war....It is by all odds the most reliable account of Stuart and his horsemen left by Stuart’s intimates....A reader who rides with Stuart through the Gettysburg campaign, until the Confederate infantry is safely south of the swollen Potomac, is not likely to forget the experience. In the light of McClellan’s narrative the ancient, wearying Confederate controversies over Gettysburg seem to lose a great deal of their importance.”—Burke Davis, Introduction, I Rode with Jeb Stuart

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781787203365
Publisher:	Golden Springs Publishing
Publication date:	01/23/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	349
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

HENRY BRAINERD MCCLELLAN (October 17, 1840 - 10 1, 1904) was an officer and adjutant general in the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War, a teacher and author.

Born at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1840, he was a son of surgeon and oculist Samuel McClellan and great-grandson of Samuel McClellan, a general of Connecticut troops in the American Revolutionary War.

After graduating from Williams College in 1858, he moved to Stony Point Mills in Cumberland County, Virginia where he became a schoolteacher. Shortly after the outbreak of the Civil War in June 1861, he enlisted in Company G, 3rd Virginia Volunteer Cavalry Regiment in Ashland, Virginia. He became a lieutenant and adjutant general of the regiment in May 1862 and was promoted to major in April 1863.

In May 1863 he was appointed adjutant-general to Major General J.E.B. Stuart and, as Stuart’s chief of staff, accompanied and greatly assisted him during the Gettysburg Campaign. After Stuart’s death in May 1864 at the Battle of Yellow Tavern, Virginia, he was appointed major and assistant adjutant general to Major General Wade Hampton III. He was paroled at Greensboro, North Carolina in April 1865.

After the war, McClellan moved to Lexington, Kentucky in 1869, where he accepted a position at Sayre Female Institute as a professor, became principal in 1870, and remained to his death in 1904.

BURKE DAVIS (July 24, 1913 - August 18, 2006) was a journalist, novelist, and nonfiction writer, best known for popular war histories. A native of North Carolina, he lived for about thirty years in Virginia, and many of his histories and biographies tackled Virginia subjects, such as Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, George Washington, and J. E. B. Stuart. He was awarded the Mayflower Cup in 1959 for his history To Appomattox: Nine April Days, 1865, and the North Carolina Award for Literature in 1973. He died in 2006.