Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation (10 page)

The letter also referred to the instructions sent two days before, in which Lee’s orders were clearer: “If you find that he [Hooker] is moving northward … you can move with the other three [brigades] into Maryland, and take position on Ewell’s right, place yourself in communication with him, guard his flank, keep him informed on the enemy’s movement. …”

Lee left to Stuart’s discretion only the place to cross the river and whether to move northward by the Valley or by circling Hooker’s army if he could “without hinderance.” Stuart was given no leeway regarding the purpose of the cavalry’s movement. In fact, the repetitive instructions reflected Lee’s anxiety over Stuart’s big risk, and in the second letter he showed that he urgently wanted Stuart to follow the army quickly: “I think the sooner you cross into Maryland, after tomorrow [June 24], the better.”

The last line of the letter, the last words that Stuart received from Lee in Virginia, read: “Be watchful and circumspect in all your movements.”

4

Committed to making the ride around Hooker eclipse even the celebrated ride around McClellan, Stuart ignored Lee’s provisos and accepted the anxious letter as authority for moving northward to the east of and around the Union army. “The commanding-general wrote me, authorizing this move if I deemed it practical”—that was the only mention Stuart made of the letter in his official report.

To “deem it practical,” Stuart was obliged to defy immediately the specific order to cross the mountains and move north by way of the Valley
if Hooker remained inactive.
To the best of Stuart’s knowledge, Hooker
was
inactive on the morning of June 24. He had been so informed by the irrepressible scout Major John Mosby. This slight, sandy-haired, cold-eyed lawyer, then twenty-nine years old and destined to become one of the most famous of all guerrilla leaders, was consistently accurate in his personal reconnaissances, and—as of the time he scouted Hooker’s army—Mosby was accurate in his report on it.

With no reason, then, to doubt Mosby, Stuart disregarded Lee’s reservation and planned to begin his ride around Hooker’s supposedly idle army shortly after midnight. His concentrated cavalry would begin to move eastward at 1:00 a.m. on June 25, though Lee had written that “the sooner” Stuart crossed into Maryland after the 24th “the better.”

By one of the odd coincidences that occurred throughout the campaign, Hooker began the movement of his army to the river on the same day. But, while Hooker’s movement belatedly removed the proviso that Stuart was not to circle the Federals if Hooker remained idle, his marching troops raised the other reservation: Stuart was not to circle if Hooker’s troops caused a “hinderance.” The Union army indeed caused such a hindrance that the encirclement ceased to be “practical.” By then Stuart was committed.

At this point it is necessary to know—as Stuart did not—what Hooker was doing.

Fighting Joe Hooker had experienced a very bad day at Chancellorsville. Some say he lost his nerve because, a chronic heavy drinker, he had forsworn the bottle in order to meet his large responsibilities. Be that as it may, Hooker was an ambitious man and as eager as Stuart to regain his glory. Nobody knew better how fast the ax fell on unsuccessful Union generals, for Hooker himself had maneuvered most unscrupulously to get the commanding general’s post from his predecessor, and he realized now that time was running out on him. He could not make mistakes or show indecision against Lee.

Fredericksburg lies fifty-five miles due south of Washington, and from there Lee had made his piecemeal movement to the mountains on a southward-dipping diagonal to the passes due west of Washington. He thus had followed, of necessity, the longest side of a triangle. While Lee was completing his withdrawal from Hooker’s front, Hooker had pulled his army back northward so that it remained on the direct westward line from Washington to the mountain passes into the Valley.

As the last of Lee’s infantry moved northward west of the Blue Ridge, Hooker separated his corps and stretched his army from the Centreville area (on that line from Washington to the mountain passes) northward to a crossing of the Potomac near Leesburg. The Potomac runs northwest from Washington, and Leesburg lies about thirty miles west of the capital and fifteen to the north. Hooker’s scattered army was so placed as to contract for a defense of Washington, an obsession of Lincoln’s, or for a crossing of the Potomac at Edward’s Ferry, near Leesburg. So far he had done everything right.

On June 25, Lee with the last of the infantry crossed the Potomac at Williamsport, thirty miles farther north and west of the mountain ramparts. Hooker shortly started to concentrate his army for a crossing at Edward’s Ferry. From there, east of the mountains, he could parallel Lee’s northward progress.

When Hooker started his troop concentration, his southernmost units were still southwest of Washington near a ridge called the Bull Run Mountains. This low range lies east of the Blue Ridge, which it roughly parallels until the two ranges merge at the Pennsylvania border and form South Mountain. When Stuart began his ride at 1:00 a.m. on June 25 his troopers were concentrated west of the Bull Run Mountains—between this range and the Blue Ridge, in the vicinity of a town named Salem. Stuart’s first move eastward was to cross the Bull Run Mountains, and it was in the rolling country beyond that he encountered a Federal infantry corps in movement. The “hinderance” to his own movement then began.

The hindrance was sufficiently definite and unmistakable to impose a conscious decision on Stuart. He must either turn back and take the safe way west of the mountains until he caught up with the army, or make a more circuitous swing around Hooker than he had originally planned. According to Stuart’s report, it never occurred to him to turn back. How?ever, doughty Mosby assumed that he would and returned to his lone operations, leaving Stuart without his most able scout.

By now Stuart had not only his heart but also his inflexible determination set on the dangerous way. Indeed, every de?tail of the cavalry’s movement had been planned for the audacious ride. The two brigades Stuart had left to guard the mountain passes until Lee was safely across the Potomac were those Stuart liked the least. One was commanded by Beverly Robertson, whom he distrusted with reason, the other by Grumble Jones, whose antipathy for Stuart at least equaled Stuart’s for him.

Although unpredictable Robertson was senior to dependable Jones, he commanded the smaller brigade. This disparity Stuart left them to work out between themselves. After all, they needed only to guard the passes and then fall in with the army. It certainly never occurred to Stuart that the two brigades would remain fixed, as if planted there, in an inanition of command which immobilized the men for whom Lee in Pennsylvania was anxiously watching.

Stuart’s mind was not on those men. His mind was on the ride. To that end, he had reduced his artillery to six guns and sacrificed his wagons, forcing his already worn horses and tired men to live off the country. To accompany him he had selected his three favorite brigades, and their’leaders were always primed for a fight or a frolic.

Wade Hampton, a militarily untrained South Carolina plantation grandee, commanded one brigade with a native ability that was steadily maturing with experience. As tireless as Stuart, the huge Hampton was so powerful and combative that in his youth he went into the woods seeking bears to fight with a knife.

Stuart was going to miss his friend Rooney Lee, the general’s son, about whom it was said “he was too big to be a man but not big enough to be a horse.” The Harvard-educated younger Lee had to be left behind because of the leg wound he had suffered at the hands of Pleasonton’s people. He was later to be taken by Federals from his mother’s house, where his leg was healing, and carted off to prison while his beautiful wife died.

Colonel John Chambliss would handle Rooney’s brigade, and he was becoming a good man. Chambliss was a West Pointer who, soon after graduation, had returned to work on his father’s large plantation in Virginia. Bringing his own stable of horses with him when he volunteered to defend his state, Chambliss, who had known his commanding officer at the Point, soon became adapted to the mold of a typical cavalry leader with Jeb Stuart.

For the third brigade, Stuart was heartened by the return to command of his other Lee friend, twenty-eight-year-old Fitzhugh Lee, the commanding general’s nephew. Fitz Lee was the
bon vivant
and the gourmet of the cavalry command. Perhaps not so meticulous in detail as Wade Hampton, he had the background of West Point and the regular army, and his love of fighting was native and joyous. He had been laid up with rheumatism, and Stuart had missed his laughter, but Fitz made it to the concentration for the ride North. He wouldn’t have missed it for anything.

These were not the lieutenants to counsel caution. All were of that breed which used to be called “tough gentlemen.” They were gentlemen in the tradition, tough by nature and habits of life, and they felt very personally about what the enemy had done to plantations and the horse country. When Stuart called: “Follow me!” they would be breathing on his neck and he would have to gallop hard to keep ahead of them.

It was the
elan
of his officers which Stuart responded to—not that last worried admonition from General Lee “Be circumspect”—as the troopers of the three brigades came galloping into the Salem area all during the day and early evening of June 24.

Their number totaled between 5,000 and 6,000 officers and men, probably closer to the lower figure. Stuart, preoccupied with his plans, failed to notice two ominous details in his command. The horses that were to move without grain already were gaunt from hard campaigning, and the men, instead of attending eagerly to details ot preparation, were lying like logs on the ground sleeping until the last minute.

In the 9th Virginia, of Rooney Lee’s brigade, the son of the commanding colonel wrote his mother of the brief camp at Salem. His regiment had been moved southward for the concentration, and he wrote that “this move, considering the direction our army was marching, filled us with astonishment, and was one the mystery of which none of us could understand.”

Such boys had been too long in the saddle, living on too short rations and exposed too constantly to danger, even to conceive of the adventures that haunted the imagination of their leader. None had his inexhaustible energy. Most of them were ready for a rest before they started. Aroused after midnight, the troopers moved automatically as they sleepily saddled and mounted their lean horses.

None sang that night the war song written to Stuart.

Come tighten your girth and slacken your rein;
Come buckle your blanket and holster again;
Try the click of your trigger and balance your blade
For he must ride sure that goes Ri … ding a Raid!

5

At one in the morning the men started their horses eastward through the pass in the Bull Run Mountains. The night ride was necessary to avoid the eyes of the Federal watchers in the mountain signal stations, and at daylight the troopers emerged unobserved on the blue rolling land called “the horse country of Virginia.” The limestone deposits produced grass that made for sturdy bones in the animals, and the meadowlands formed one of the great fox-hunting regions of the world. The people had lived graciously there before the war, with the stylized informality characteristic of hunting communities, and no area in the South produced more passionate Rebels. Also, no area in the South had been more fought over in the last two years, and only a wishful optimism could expect to find forage for horses or food for men in the naked countryside.

The beguiling landscape was dotted with crossroads villages, scarcely more than a country store or a blacksmith shop or a small public house. Each proudly bore a name, and the abundance of place names gives a false impression of density of population. A boy from the Deep South wrote his father of passing northward and dutifully chronicled the name of each place through which he passed. His letter sounded as if he were making the Grand Tour, when he had journeyed no more than twenty miles and beheld no settlement with as many as one hundred inhabitants. As Stuart’s men rolled eastward into the climbing June sun, their course was marked by the names of little places whose only significance was as points of designation, and it is confusing to try to follow in detail Stuart’s course by names of places no longer on maps.

On the first day out, the cavalry found their road to Centreville and the Potomac blocked by Hancock’s Federal corps in motion. Union wagon trains were long, and good soldier Hancock had, as Stuart reported, “his infantry well distributed through the trains.” The passage would require hours.

It was late now to turn back, but the Confederates could not go forward. Fixed on his plan and unable to endure the enforced idleness, Stuart passed the time by shelling Hancock’s trains as if to justify Lee’s order to do as much damage as possible. He gained only the passing satisfaction of forcing the marching troops to deploy in line of battle. During this pointless exchange his troopers found some grassland and lay on the ground while their horses nibbled.

Late in the day Stuart determined to move a few miles southward, “to deceive the enemy,” and to start fresh the next day on a southeasterly swing around Centreville.

As Lieutenant Beale wrote his mother, “That night was rainy and disagreeable, and we spent it without shelter or fires.” The next morning, Friday the 26th, not at all refreshed, the cavalry started out on Stuart’s revised longer course. That day they did not see a single blue soldier. Stuart observed that the horses were breaking down from lack of grain, and the columns were forced to halt again to graze the animals.