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 by civil war:
“He was high and mighty. But the kindest creature to his slaves—and the unfortunate results of his bad ways were not sold, had not to jump over ice blocks. They were kept in full view and provided for handsomely in his will. His wife and daughters in the might of their purity and innocence are supposed never to dream of what is as plain before their eyes as the sunlight, and they play their parts of unsuspecting angels to the letter.”
—Anonymous Antebellum Confederate Women. Previously quoted by Mary Boykin Chesnut in Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, edited by C. Vann Woodward (1981)