THE CIVIL WAR: THE TRUE STORY BOOK 2

In Defense of Jeb

Tonia J. Smith

A widow at 28, Flora Stuart had to make a new life for her family—and help justify her husband's actions at Gettysburg.

In 1864, Flora Stuart was staying with a family 40 miles outside of Richmond when she heard that her husband, J.E.B. Stuart, had been wounded and taken to a doctor in the Confederate capital. Despite her best efforts, she arrived just hours after he died. Now she was a 28-year-old widow—nearly penniless, estranged from her own family, with no home of her own and two children under age 4 to rear. Over the following decades, she fashioned a new life for herself, innovative in some arenas and staunchly traditional in others. She became a prominent educator and never remarried. Devoted to her husband's memory, in the 1870s she would become embroiled in a bitter post-war controversy when former Confederates, brooding over the staggering losses, were tarnishing her husband's service at Gettysburg.

Flora Cooke first met 22-year-old Jeb Stuart when she was 19 and fresh out of Detroit finishing school. Her father, Lt. Col. Philip St. George Cooke, commanded the 2nd Dragoons in Fort Leavenworth where James Ewell Brown Stuart was a 2nd lieutenant. A whirlwind courtship ensued; on November 14, 1855, at Fort Riley, they wed. Over the next five years, the Stuarts had two children: a daughter born on their second anniversary and named for her mother, and a son born June 26, 1860, christened St. George Cooke Stuart. But their bliss was soon interrupted as the Civil War turned the Stuart-Cooke family into a micro-study of what was happening all across the country. Flora's husband, her brother, John Rogers Cooke, and her sister Maria's husband, Dr. Charles Brewer, left the U.S. Army to offer their services to the fledgling Confederacy while her father and her sister Julia's husband, Jacob Sharpe, remained with the Union.

Embittered by his father-in-law's decision to remain loyal to the Union, Stuart retaliated by changing his son's name to James Ewell Brown Stuart Jr. He promised Cooke would "regret his decision to remain with the Union but once and that will be continuously." For his part, Flora's father refused to have any further contact with her.

Stuart's star rose quickly in the Confederate constellation. Within 14 months he was promoted to major general, and a month later he was commander of all the cavalry of the Army of Northern Virginia. His cavalry reached superstar status with its celebrated rides around Union armies while on reconnaissance missions for General Robert E. Lee—even out-maneuvering his own father-in-law, who commanded Union cavalry during the Peninsula Campaign in 1862.

His brilliant career was cut short, however, when on May 11, 1864, he was mortally wounded at Yellow Tavern, Va.

Stuart was buried in Richmond's Hollywood Cemetery on May 13. Flora donned mourning for her husband's funeral and wore it for the rest of her life. But with so many immediate decisions to be made, she would have little time to mourn. Paramount was finding a home for herself and her children. They had lost little Flora to typhoid fever in 1862, but she still had 4-year-old Jimmy and 8- month-old Virginia Pelham to consider. One option would come from a surprising source.

After three years of silence, Flora's father wrote with an offer of safe passage so she could come to him in Washington, D.C. As tempting as the offer might have been, she honored her husband's wishes that his family remain in the South. In an exchange of letters discussing the fate of their children if either parent died, Stuart had written, "I wish an assurance on your part in the other event of you surviving me that you will make the land for which I have given my life your home, and keep my offspring on Southern soil." Flora took the advice of her brother-in-law William Alexander Stuart (called Alexander) and moved to Saltville, Va., where for the next 10 years she operated a small school with her sister-in-law Mary Stuart Headen. In 1875, Flora accepted a teaching position at the Carrington School in Richmond.