The second is J.E.B.  Stuart, as a cavalry leader second only to Jackson, and Sheridan, but with his reputation shadowed by a fatal mistake.  He was a past master of the sudden and daring raid, and on more than one occasion carried consternation into the enemy’s camp by a brilliant dash through it.  One of his most successful raids was made around McClellan’s army on the peninsula, shaking its sense of security and threatening its communications.  On another occasion, he dashed into Pope’s camp, captured his official correspondence and personal effects and made prisoners of several officers of his staff, Pope himself escaping only because he happened to be away from headquarters.  The one shadow upon his military career, referred to above, was his absence from the field of Gettysburg.

He was directed to take a position on the right of the Confederate army, but started away on a raid in the rear of the Federals, not expecting a battle to be fought at once, and he did not get back to the main army until the battle of Gettysburg had been lost.  The absence of cavalry was a severe handicap to the Confederate army, and Lee always attributed his defeat to Stuart’s absence; but Stuart maintained that he had acted under orders, and that the mistake was not his.  He was killed in a fight with Sheridan’s cavalry at Yellow Tavern, Virginia, a short time later.

And here we must end the story of the great soldiers of the Confederacy.  There were many others who fought well and bravely—­Bragg, A.P.  Hill, Magruder, Pemberton—­but none of them attained the dimensions of a national figure.  Weighing the merits of the leaders of the two armies, they would seem to be pretty evenly balanced.  This was natural enough, since all of them had had practically the same training and experience, and, during the war, the same opportunities.  Lee, Jackson and Johnston were fairly matched by Grant, Sheridan and Sherman.

The Southern leaders, perhaps, showed more dash and vim than the Northern ones, for they waged a more desperate fight; but both sides fought with the highest valor, and if the war did not have for the North the poignant meaning it had for the South, it was because practically all of its battles were fought on southern soil, and the southern people saw their fair land devastated.  In no instance did the North suffer any such burning humiliation as that inflicted on the South by Sherman in his march to the sea; at the close of the war, despite its sacrifice of blood and treasure, the North was more prosperous than it had been at the beginning, while the South lay prostrate and ruined.  So to the North the war has receded into the vista of memory, while to the South it is a wound not yet wholly healed.

* * * * *

There have been no great American soldiers since the Civil War—­at least, there has been no chance for them to prove their greatness, for there is only one test of a soldier and that is the battlefield.  When George A. Custer was ambushed and his command wiped out by the Sioux in 1876, a wave of sorrow went over the land for the dashing, fair-haired leader and his devoted men; yet the very fact that he had led his men into a trap clouded such military reputation as he had gained during the last years of the war.