General J.E.B. Stuart

James Ewell Brown "Jeb" Stuart was one of the most famous and flamboyant Confederate officers, in command of Lee's cavalry for most of the Civil War. In Flags in the Dust he and "Carolina" Bayard Sartoris, Stuart's friend and aide-de-camp, embody the spirit of chivalry and romantic daring that the narrative identifies with pre-Modern life. Aunt Jenny, who tells the highly-colored story about him and Bayard as mythic heroes, says she danced with Stuart once, before the war, in Baltimore. Stuart appears a second time in the fictions in Go Down, Moses, but Cass' reference to him in that novel is based on the most discreditable of his military excursions: when Stuart decided to "ride his whole command around the biggest single armed force this continent ever saw" (274) during Lee's invasion of the North in 1863, his absence from the battlefield at Gettysburg contributed to the Confederate defeat.