Civil War
In March and April 1862, Cooke served as an unpaid volunteer aide for Maj. Gen. J.E.B. Stuart in the Confederate cavalry. Cooke was a first cousin of General Stuart's wife, Flora Cooke Stuart. On May 19, 1862, he was formally commissioned as a lieutenant and officially joined Stuart's staff. Cooke participated in the Peninsula Campaign and Stuart's subsequent ride around the Union army of George B. McClellan, later writing a detailed description of the action. During the war, he served Stuart as an aide, ordnance officer, and assistant adjutant general, earning the rank of captain. Following Stuart's death at Yellow Tavern in May 1864, Cooke served on other generals' staffs, eventually rising to the rank of major by the end of the war. In 1863, he wrote the first of several popular biographies of Stonewall Jackson. He also published a novel on Jackson, Surry of Eagle's Nest (1866) as well as a biography of Robert E. Lee, officers that he had personally known.
Read more about this topic: John Esten Cooke
Famous quotes containing the words civil war, civil and/or war:
“I wish to see, in process of disappearing, that only thing which ever could bring this nation to civil war.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“The lakes are something which you are unprepared for; they lie up so high, exposed to the light, and the forest is diminished to a fine fringe on their edges, with here and there a blue mountain, like amethyst jewels set around some jewel of the first water,—so anterior, so superior, to all the changes that are to take place on their shores, even now civil and refined, and fair as they can ever be.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In peace the sons bury their fathers, but in war the fathers bury their sons.”
—Croesus (d. c. 560 B.C.)