The Comanches
A History of White's Battalion, Virginia Cavalry
9781465622365
102 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
In commencing the story of the brave deeds performed during the dark days of the great civil war in America by the gallant band known as "White’s Battalion," it will be proper to give a short sketch of the man who, as chief of the “Comanches,” gave to the Thirty-fifth Battalion, Virginia Cavalry, its existence, and led it through so many campaigns, battles and raids, to occupy a place in the history of the war second to no command of its numbers, and distinguished under the special notice of such men as “Stonewall” Jackson, Richard S. Ewell, J. E. B. Stuart, William E. Jones, Thomas L. Rosser and the gallant Butler of South Carolina; besides receiving the highest encomiums from the greatest cavalry commander since the days when Murat led the squadrons of Napoleon—General Wade Hampton—and of Robert E. Lee, before whose fame the most splendid garlands of glory that wreathe the brows of the noblest men of earth in all time, pale as does the silver moon-beam before the radiant rays of the noon-day sun. Elijah V. White was born near Poolsville, Montgomery County, Maryland, on the 29th of August, 1832, and continued at his father’s home until he was sixteen years of age, when he was sent to Lima Seminary, Livingston Co., N. Y., to be educated. Here he remained for two years, at the expiration of which he attended Granville College, in Licking Co., Ohio, for two more years, when he returned to his home in Maryland. During the war in Kansas, in 1855 or ’56, he went to that territory, and joining a company from Missouri, took an active part in the troubles that then threatened to overthrow the pillars of the old Constitution in the terrible maelstrom of abolitionism that afterwards swept away their foundations. After the Kansas war closed, young White came home, and shortly afterwards bought a farm on the south bank of the Potomac, in Loudoun county, Virginia, where he took up his residence in 1857, and on the 9th of December of the same year married Miss Sarah Elizabeth Gott. At the first signal of war, given by John Brown at Harper’s Ferry, in October, 1859, White was a Corporal in the Loudoun Cavalry, a company then commanded by Capt. Dan. T. Shreve, with which he took part in the scenes of excitement that followed this mad attempt of Northern fanaticism to sweep the twin scourges of fire and blood over the South. At the breaking out of the war in 1861, White was still a member of this company; but owing to a change of its officers, which, to a great extent, damaged its efficiency, he left it and attached himself to the company of Capt. Frank Mason, in Ashby’s Legion, with which he served until the autumn of that year, being engaged principally in scouting, much of which he did under the orders of Col. Eppa Hunton, who, during the summer, commanded in Loudoun county. On one of his scouts for Col. Hunton, in Maryland, he captured the first Yankee prisoner of the war in the person of one Costine, of Gen. McCall’s staff. When Gen.
