Jeb Stuart's Christian Faith

Jeb Stuart’s Christian Faith         

Many years ago, at the Hillsville Flea Market, I had a man approach my tent. After looking over my titles, he came across “God’s Will Be Done: The Christian Life of J. E. B. Stuart.” He asked me, “How could a Christian fight for slavery” and walked off. My response to him was that he was a man of his time and when you apply today’s principles to a man, who lived 150 years ago, that is Presentism and is not the way you should ready history. I always find it amazing that people today think they are so perfect that in 150 years, no one will look back on them and not see problems. For instance, that smart phone in your pocket was made by slave labor in China. Does that make you a horrible person?

                Let’s look at James Ewell Brown “Jeb” Stuart’s life as a Christian. Stuart joined the Methodist Church while at Emory and Henry College. His father, Archibald Stuart, came from a long line of Presbyterians. His mother, Elizabeth Letcher Pannill Stuart, was a strict, religious, and disciplined woman with a love of nature. You can see many of these traits in her most famous offspring. Elizabeth was Episcopalian, a “High Church Episcopalian,” meaning she was almost Catholic in her outlook. Local tradition holds that she attended services on Lebanon Hill in Mount Airy, North Carolina, where the Episcopalians met in the old Methodist meeting house. This congregation would form Trinity Episcopal located on Main Street today.

On first arriving in New York at the tender age of seventeen with the temptation of New York City not far off, Stuart wrote to a cousin, "I expect that you as well as all my old friends about Emory have come to the conclusion that I have renounced the cross since I came to this place usually considered as so great variance with religion. But I rejoice to say that I still have evidence of a savior's pardoning love. When I came here I had reason to expect that many and strong temptations would beset my path, but I relied on him whom to know is life everlasting to deliver me from temptation and prayed God to guide me in the right way and teach me to walk as a Christian should."

At West Point, Stuart befriended Oliver Otis Howard, a self-righteous and opinionated abolitionist from Maine hated by most of the Southern cadets. Howard and Stuart faced each other across several battlefields during the years 1861 to 1864. Nothing shows Stuart's Christian faith more than his friendship with Howard. One reason that Stuart got along with Howard was that they attended bible study together. Howard managed the Freedman’s Bureau after the Civil War and became President of the African-American school that bears his name today, Howard University. The latter wrote in his autobiography, "I can never forget the manliness of J. E. B. Stuart…He spoke to me, he visited me, and we became warm friends.” Stuart and Howard did Bible study together.

He wrote to Howard about their faith after graduating, “I was gratified to learn that you were accomplishing so much good in a Christian sphere at West Point. I wish you from my heart God’s Speed. I devotedly trust that we both may in our day and generation be instruments of good.”

Howard wrote nearly fifty years later of his friend Stuart, “J. E. B. Stuart was cut out for a cavalry leader. In perfect health, but thirty-two years of age, full of vigor and enterprise, with the usual ideas imbibed in Virginia concerning State Supremacy, Christian in thought and temperate by habit, no man could ride faster, endure more hardships, make a livelier charge, or be more hearty and cheerful while so engaged. A touch of vanity, which invited the smiles and applause of the fair maidens of Virginia, but added to the zest and ardor of Stuart's parades and achievements. He commanded Lee's cavalry corps - a well-organized body, of which he was justly proud.”

After graduating from the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, Stuart eventually joined the First U. S. Cavalry in the Kansas Territory, where he founded a church in what is today Junction City, Kansas. The church is still there, and a plaque at the entrance honors the work of Lieutenant Stuart in its formation.

Stuart joined the Temperance Movement and gave speeches about the temptation of alcohol. During his time on the prairie, Lieutenant Stuart said during this time, "from the first I prayed God to be my guide and I felt an abiding hope that all would be well with us.”

While stationed on the prairie, Stuart never forgot where he came from as he sent his mother one hundred dollars and asked her to match it to start a church near Laurel Hill in a letter. “I wish to devote one hundred dollars to the purchase of a comfortable log church near your place because in all my observation I believe one is more needed in that neighborhood than any other that I know of; and besides, ‘charity begins at home.’ Seventy-five of this one hundred dollars I have in trust for that purpose, and the remainder is my own contribution. If you will join me with twenty-five dollars, a contribution of a like amount from two or three others interested will build a very respectable free church.” In 1859, when Mrs. Stuart sold the property in 1859, she sat aside one acre along the Volunteer Road, now The Hollow Road, for that church, but the church was never built.

The year 1859 was decisive in Stuart’s life professionally and spiritually. In April, Stuart and family left on the seventh for an extended trip east on a leave of absence for six months with permission to apply for two extensions.

Flora Cooke Stuart wrote in the margins of David French Boyd’s The Boyhood of J. E. B. Stuart that Bishop Hawkes confirmed J. E. B. Stuart in his mother’s Episcopal Church in 1859 in Saint Louis. Stuart wished to attend the Episcopal Convention in Richmond in 1859.

During the War Between the States, Stuart bought his men copies of the scriptures from his own pocket. He attended revivals and continued his faith in a very public way. When Stuart died on May 12, 1864, after being mortally wounded at Yellow Tavern, the previous day, his last words were “God’s Will Be Done.” Robert E. Lee wrote of Stuart to the Army of Northern Virginia, “To military capacity of a high order and all the nobler virtues of the soldier he added the brighter graces of a pure life, guided and sustained by the Christian's faith and hope.”

If you would like to learn more, my book “God’s Will Be Done: The Christian Life of J. E. B. Stuart” covers his entire life focusing on his Christian faith.