Fifty years ago C. S. Lewis criticized secular culture for its derision of heroic virtues, and warned that the natural result would be the creation of “men without chests”:  men who lack the courage and self-sacrifice to be heroes.

The Southern Confederacy did not lack for men with chests.  One of the bravest of heroes was a young man from Alabama who became an adopted son of Virginia.  John Pelham fought for the Army of Northern Virginia and won praise from Lee, Jackson, and Stuart. Finally, far too young, he sacrificed his young life for the Southern cause.

In April 1861, despite having completed his course work and final examinations at West Point, Pelham resigned his cadet commission and followed Alabama out of the Union.  He offered his services to the young Confederacy, which then was desperately mustering and training troops to defend home and hearth against President Lincoln’s threatened invasion.

He won acclaim at Manassas when the green troops he had trained into an artillery battery boomed destruction upon the Union right, which threatened to flank the Southern lines and end the war in the first battle.  Ordered to retreat to the hill of the Henry House, Pelham was overheard exclaiming, “I’ll be dogged if I’ll run any farther”, and he ordered his guns unlimbered.  Pelham’s stand helped General Thomas Jackson earn his eternal name of Stonewall, and the general praised the young lieutenant in his battle report, a rare event both for Pelham’s youth and Jackson’s reluctance to praise.

Pelham’s growing reputation for bravery, skill, and coolness under fire drew the attention of J.E.B. Stuart, who Robert E. Lee would soon select to command all the cavalry in the Army of Northern Virginia.  Stuart found in Pelham the man who would give flesh to an idea:  the Stuart Horse Artillery.

Soldiers in earlier wars had attempted to marry the firepower of artillery with the slashing, lightning strikes of cavalry, but Stuart and Pelham developed it into a frightening weapon.  Under Pelham’s command, with his bold bravery and unerring eye for terrain, the Stuart Horse Artillery could ride at speed with the cavalry, then deliver a devastating fire that swept away blue lines like the wind.

In battle after battle, Pelham would race his little guns to where the fighting was fiercest and, coolly oblivious to shot and shell raining around him, would turn the tide of battle.  When the Army of Northern Virginia waged a desperate stand along the banks of Antietam Creek, Pelham held Lee’s left with cannon that turned Miller’s Cornfield into an eternal synonym for death.  One Union officer wrote that the cornfield was so strewn with bluecoated bodies that a horse could cross the entire field without touching ground.  Pelham’s defense won high praise from Stonewall Jackson:  “With a Pelham on each flank, I believe I could whip the world!”

At Fredericksburg, Pelham spotted an entire Union corps of 50,000 troops moving toward a gap in the Confederate right.  Dashing two guns far out in front of his lines, he stopped the enemy charge until Jackson could prepare a defense.  He coolly directed the firing while dozens of Yankee cannon blazed at him.  Looking through his fieldglasses at the carnage wreaked in the blue lines by Pelham’s guns, General Lee remarked, “It is well that war is so terrible.  Were it not so, we should grow too fond of it.”  Yet the commanding general could not help but admire the bravery of the young artillerist who made war so terrible for the South’s enemies:  “It is glorious to see such courage in one so young.”

Pelham’s gentle manners and handsome blond looks set many a Southern lady’s heart aflutter.  No lass could believe that this shy charmer was the one whose eyes blazed in battle and whose name vibrated throughout the South.  One whose heart Pelham won was the raven-haired Belle Boyd, who used her breathtaking beauty to obtain strategic information from Northern officers.  She gave Pelham a Bible, and inscribed on the cover page in Belle Boyd’s delicate script was a pledge of love.

After the Fredericksburg defeat, the Union army retreated into winter camp while Lincoln searched yet again for a commander who could “whip Bobby Lee.”  Three months later, Lincoln’s selection, Joseph Hooker, sent his cavalry splashing across the Rappahannock at Kelly’s Ford in the pre-dawn hours of St. Patrick’s Day, 1863.  The 3000 Union horsemen easily brushed aside the Confederate contingent guarding the ford.  As Pelham raced from the little town of Culpeper toward the sound of battle at the ford, he waved to pretty Bessie Shackelford as she stood on the porch of her parents home.

The Southerners stopped the Union advance, but as Pelham joined a charge to drive the Yankees back across the river, an artillery shell burst overhead and knocked him from his horse.  He was carried unconscious to the Shackelford home, where three surgeons pronounced his wound hopeless.  A tiny piece of shrapnel had penetrated the skull and the back of the head.

Bessie Shackelford and her mother bathed the young hero and dressed him in his Confederate uniform.  All night his friends remained with him, the room lit by candlelight.  At one in the morning of the 18th, he opened his eyes, gave a deep breath, and died.

His body was placed in a coffin under a guard of honor, and a window was cut so that  mourners could gaze upon the peaceful face.  After 36 hours in the Richmond Capitol, during which thousands paid their respects, the body was placed on a train for the long ride home to Alabama.

Women stopped the train at every station, piling the casket high with flowers.  Finally John Pelham reached the train station at Jacksonville, Alabama.  His brother described the scene:  “It was a beautiful moonlight night the last of March and as the casket, covered with white flowers…borne by white-haired old men, followed by girls with uncovered heads, to us it seemed a company ‘all in white’.”  The children of the village filled his grave with lilac blossoms, and Alabama buried her greatest hero on a hill in the corner of the beautiful, tree-filled Jacksonville cemetery.

He had commanded the Stuart Horse Artillery for only 22 months.  The best and brightest
days of the Confederacy were now ended.  The next few months would bring the death of the incomparable Jackson, the failure of Stuart at Gettysburg, and the beginning of the long, dark slide to Appomattox.

John Pelham served Alabama , Virginia, and the Southern Confederacy with courage and
commitment.  His life reveals today’s sports and movie “heroes” to be the “men without
chests” that C. S. Lewis warned would come.

Written by Bryant Burroughs is a corporate executive, freelance writer, associate editor of Southern Partisan Magazine and a regular contributor to the Virginia Gentleman