Yellow Tavern (1956)

Samuel H. Mitter is a native of Baltimore County, Maryland. He attended State Teacher's College at Towson, Maryland. Given his first Civil War item, a copy of Dr. Henry's Story of the Confederacy, in 1933, he still collects and studies Confederate materials . He has published in the Maryland Horse. Yellow Tavern SAMUEL H. MILLER on a tree crowned Tm.t. in Richmond's quiet Hollywood Cemetery, not far from the softly flowing waters of the James River, stands a column of weathered native stone. Below its shaft, near to his beloved wife and children, rests Major General J. E. B. Stuart. Let the sun dappling through the trees, the gently moving waters of the river, and the sanctity of the place carry us back in spirit to the year 1864. First to a home in Richmond where this man in the thirty-second year of his life lies dying. The surgeons have given him only a few hours to live. His wife is rushing through the troubled night to be with him. The President of the Confederacy has visited him. He lies still, a great hole torn in his side, bearing in soldierly fashion the exquisite pain that is wearing away his great strength. Now let us move back in time again and inquire how this came to be. On a map of Virginia place the second finger on Fredericksburg, with the index finger on Chancellorsville. Let your fingers slide south to Richmond ; this is the arena of the story. Slightly to the north of Richmond was Yellow Tavern. Here will be the crisis of the account. The inquirer into the battle of Yellow Tavern is at once confronted with an almost complete lack of reports from the Southern officers, many of whom were killed in the savage fighting of the spring and summer of 1863. The Northern reports are much more complete but they treat the raid as a whole and little emphasis is placed on the actual battle. Even the terrain is of little help for Richmond and its suburbs have grown over the field and many of the then existing roads are no longer there. With diligence, however, it is still possible by taking a word here and a phrase there to weave a picture of the battle and the campaign that saved Richmond — but at the cost of General Stuart's life. 57 58SAMUEL H. MILLER The probable reason for the scarcity of work on Yellow Tavern is the fact that most scholars and interested persons devote their time to the weightier battles that were being fought out at the same time in the Wilderness to the north and below Petersburg to the south. Yellow Tavern was a cavalry battle, one of the heaviest fought on this continent . General Philip Sheridan out of the north with twelve thousand troopers in three divisions of six brigades was met by Major General Jeb Stuart with two brigades of Fitz Lee's corps, some eleven or twelve hundred men. In May of 1864 the Army of the Potomac under General George Meade and directed by General U. S. Grant, pushed blindly into the Wilderness and was brought to a bloody halt by Lee's veterans of the Army of Northern Virginia. For three days, the 5th, 6th, and 7th, the Wilderness smoked and burned with savage fighting. Then, Grant side-slipped to his right, but Stuart's cavalry and some infantry held him until General Lee could concentrate behind them at Spotsylvania Court House. There for ten days the armies bled, but Lee's veterans held grimly. On the 8th, while the infantry locked in the deep woods, the Southern horse was roughly handled at Todd's Tavern. Then, on the 9th, two months to the day since Ulysses S. Grant had been made commander of the Northern Annies, General Philip Sheridan moved. Sheridan had reasoned that ". . . there was but very little space for a large cavalry force to operate on the left. . "l Generals Grant and Meade were in agreement with him; Meade's later report reads: "On this day, the 9th of May, Sheridan, with the Cavalry Corps, moved southerly, with orders to engage the...