Knowing Your Enemy’s Strength: A Lesson from J.E.B. Stuart

 David Alan Black

Perhaps no event better typifies the brilliance and courage of the Confederate soldier than J.E.B Stuart’s famous “Ride around McClellan” that occurred 141 years ago this week.

General Robert E. Lee had just assumed command of the Army of Northern Virginia in defense of the Confederate capital. He immediately ordered Stuart to “gain intelligence for the guidance of future operations” against General George B. McClellan’s powerful army, which was threatening Richmond from Virginia’s Peninsula. Taking 1,200 of his finest cavalrymen, Stuart set out on June 12, 1862. Rather than riding toward the enemy, he headed westward as if he and his force were moving to reinforce the Southern troops in the Shenandoah Valley. When, on the next day, Stuart changed direction and headed eastward, his men knew that he was leading them in a dangerous raid against McClellan.

It was a dramatic moment, described by Douglas Southall Freeman as follows: “The moment it turned toward the East, a stir went down the files.... [The] men had suspected that McClellan’s flank was their objective, and now they knew it. The day for which they had waited long had come at last. They were to measure swords with the enemy.”

In Mort Künstler’s painting Stuart’s Ride, the drama of that moment is captured as Stuart rides at the head of his troops, his ostrich plume and red-lined cape waving behind him. As the column cuts across a grassy pasture heading for roads eastward, the early morning sun highlights Stuart’s face and the unfurled battle standard behind him.

In three days Stuart made a complete circuit of the Union forces, capturing prisoners, arms, horses, and equipment and helping to set up the Confederate victory at Gaines’s Mill. Upon returning to report his findings to General Lee on June 15, 1862, Stuart had created an unsurpassed legend of daring that would follow him throughout the war. General Longstreet had this to say in his book From Manassas to Appomattox: “This was one of the most graceful and daring rides known to military history, and revealed valuable facts concerning the situation of the Union forces, their operations, communications, etc. When congratulated upon his success, General Stuart replied, with a lurking twinkle in his eye, that he had left a general behind him. Asked as to the identity of the unfortunate person, he said, with his joyful laugh, ‘General Consternation.’”

The courage and daring of Stuart and his horse soldiers is a reminder that it is always a serious mistake to underestimate one’s enemy. The New Testament has a great deal to say about the devil and his schemes. It is therefore good military strategy to know what the enemy has and what he is up to. True, greater is He that is in us than he that is in the world. However, this does not mean that we should be ignorant of Satan’s devices. We need to know something about our adversary because the Holy Spirit Himself has given us so much information on the subject.

C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters are purported to be correspondence from an administrative functionary in Hell to his nephew Wormwood, who is a frontline tempter. The book is filled with advice about how to make a Christian turn away from God. Lewis’s devils do not run around causing evil in obvious ways. Instead, they seek to exploit common human weaknesses and then allow the humans themselves to cause all the evil in the world.

In this decadent day of political correctness, secularism, and the fatal philosophy of relativism, I think the following excerpt is instructive indeed:

My dear Wormwood,

I note what you say about guiding your patient’s reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend. But are you not being a trifle naïve? It sounds as if you supposed that argument was the way to keep him out of the Enemy’s clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. At that time the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning. But what with the weekly press and other such weapons we have largely altered that. Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn’t think of doctrines as primarily “true” or “false”, but as “academic” or “practical”, “outworn” or “contemporary”, “conventional” or “ruthless”. Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous—that it is the philosophy of the future. That’s the sort of thing he cares about.

The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle on to the Enemy’s own ground. He can argue too; whereas in really practical propaganda of the kind I am suggesting He has been shown for centuries to be greatly the inferior of Our Father Below. By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result? Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favour, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it “real life” and don’t let him ask what he means by “real”.
 
Your affectionate uncle

Screwtape  

Someone once foolishly said, “God is the Great I am; Satan is the great I am not.” The devil is never happier than when he has convinced people that he is non-existent. Friend, if you don’t believe that you have a real enemy on your hands, you need to take a three day ride and see the strength of the adversary!

June 9, 2003

David Alan Black is the editor of www.daveblackonline.com.

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