Major-General Edward Johnson and Brigadier-General George H. Stenart, Jr., with some 2,500 men, were captured in that salient and taken to General Hancock, who extended to them a cordial greeting, shaking hands with Johnson; but Steuart turned his back on Hancock with the remark, "I refuse to shake hands with the enemies of my country."
Graduates from the United States Military Academy at West Point, these three fellow-officers had been social intimates in the regular United States Army prior to the war.
General Steuart afterward said to me and others that he had vowed he would never speak to a former such officer who followed Lincoln's war to the infamy of making soldiers of stolen negroes. I said to him, "General Steuart, your name will ever be revered for that act of patriotism and moral courage."
Who, besides this typical regular of Maryland ancestry and fame, would have thus "bearded the lion in his den," and with dogged perspicacity have inflicted this contemptuous rebuke?
George H. Steuart came of Scotch ancestry; J. E. B. Stuart's ancestors were from Wales. There was an absence of English in both.
Hancock was styled "The Superb," pluming himself par excellence worthy to be classed among the Southern chivalry of the United States Army before the war, who, in 1861, almost to a man, quit it (with not a few of Northern birth) to defend their sovereign States; so taught at the United States Military Academy; following the Democracy instituted by Washington and Jefferson, destroyed by the anarchy and communism of Lincoln, whose acaunt coureur was John Brown, the abolition rebel, justly executed for his crimes, so admitted by his own sister.
It was General Hancock's sublime privilege to be in supreme command at the execution of the martyr, innocent Mrs. Mary Surratt, sacrificed to satisfy the bloodthirsty Puritans. General McClellan as bravely arrested the Maryland Legislature, whom Seward (by the ring of his little bell) jailed many months, never venturing a trial. Seward, in a speech in the United States Senate, in January, 1861, denied the right of the government to coerce the seceded States.
