Yellow Tavern: The Death of Jeb Stuart
Near Richmond, Virginia
Six miles north of Richmond, at a crossroads near an abandoned roadside inn that locals called Yellow Tavern, the Confederate cavalry lost the man who had made it famous.
Major General James Ewell Brown Stuart, known everywhere as Jeb, had spent three years as the eyes of Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia: plumed hat, red-lined cape, banjo player riding with headquarters. His cavalry had screened Lee's movements, raided Union supply lines, and twice ridden entirely around the Union army. By the spring of eighteen sixty-four, Stuart was arguably the most celebrated soldier in the South.
Union General Philip Sheridan saw an opportunity. On May ninth, eighteen sixty-four, he gathered ten thousand Union horsemen and rode them south toward Richmond, openly daring Stuart to give chase. Stuart had fewer than five thousand men. He took the dare anyway, racing ahead to block the road at Yellow Tavern on the morning of May eleventh.
The battle was fierce but brief. Sheridan's numbers wore down the Confederate line through the morning. In the early afternoon, a dismounted Union trooper named John Huff, using a forty-four caliber revolver, shot Stuart through the abdomen at close range during the fighting near the Telegraph Road.
Stuart was carried into Richmond, where he died the following evening, May twelfth, eighteen sixty-four. He was thirty-one years old. Lee, on hearing the news, said he could scarcely think of Stuart without weeping.
Sheridan chose not to attempt an assault on Richmond itself, swinging east instead. The Union cavalry had won the field and killed the Confederacy's greatest horseman, but the capital held. The old tavern itself is gone. The crossroads where it stood is now deep inside the suburban north of Richmond.
