J.E.B. Stuart (Their Gallant Dead)

James Ewell Brown "Jeb" Stuart (February 6, 1833-May 12,1919) was a Confederate American General known for his service in the War of Secession and World War I. He was known to his friends as "Jeb", the initials of his given name. Stuart graduated from West Point in 1854, and served in Texas and Kansas with the U.S. Army. He participated in the Indian Wars and the John Brown raid on Harper's Ferry. He resigned from the army when his home state of Virginia seceded from the Union in 1861, and joined the Confederate Army. By 1862, he had become commander of the cavalry corps in the Army of Northern Virginia, playing a role in all of that army's campaigns. He established a lifelong reputation as an audacious, brilliant commander, with a mastery of reconaissance and as a natural cavalier. He twice circumnavigated the Union Army of the Potomac, and commanded the first troops that entered Washington in February 1863, shortly after being promoted to Lieutenant General as a 30th birthday present for his service at Chancellorsville.

Following the South's victory, Stuart remained in the army, commanding the Trans-Mississippi Department and then becoming supreme commander of the CSA army in 1885. In 1905, he retired, having lobbied for the development of ironclad landships to break through entrenchments.

Upon the CSA's entry into World War One, Stuart was recalled to take command of the CSA army. He halted the Federal invasion of Virginia at the Third Battle of Manassas. Stuart played the defining role in forming Confederate strategy, wisely keeping the South on the defensive in East and Kentucky to bleed Federal forces white. His dream of ironclad landships came true in 1915, with the invention of the tank. Seeing their potential, Stuart then outfitted his War of Secession cavalry tactics for tanks, inventing the strategy of blitzkrieg. He sucsessfully oversaw the first massed tank offensive in the Third Battle of Bardstown in 1916, while planning the Confederate victory in the Far West. After bleeding the North white in the Eastern theatres, Stuart launched his massive blitzkreig offensive against them in 1917, enveloping and destroying large elements of the US Army at Camp Hill and forcing the North into surrender that August.

Stuart was hailed as the definitive hero of the war, as architect of Southern strategy and tactics. The Jeffersonians used his massive prestige to help stop President Wilson's drive for an internationalist League of Nations, which was sucsessful. Stuart died shortly afterward in 1919, and remains a towering icon of Southern culture and history.