Free Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation by Clifford Dowdey Page A

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