Gettysburg Campaign: Jeb Stuart's Wagon Detour Leaves Lee Fighting Blind

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Fresh from victory at Chancellorsville, Robert E. Lee pushed for a second invasion of the North in the summer of 1863, arguing in a mid-May strategy meeting in Richmond against sending troops west to relieve Vicksburg. His army was starving in war-stripped Virginia, and he misread Copperhead newspapers as proof that Northern morale was breaking. The plan began to unravel on June 9 at Brandy Station, the largest predominantly cavalry battle on American soil, where Alfred Pleasonton's Union horsemen surprised J.E.B. Stuart. Stung by the criticism, Stuart took his three best brigades on a wide ride around the Union army, captured 140 supply wagons near Rockville, Maryland, and was out of contact with Lee for a crucial week. Lee had to rely on a spy, the actor Henry Thomas Harrison, to learn the Union army had crossed the Potomac.

The armies collided by accident at Gettysburg on July 1, when Henry Heth's division pressed into John Buford's dismounted cavalry. Lee's order to Richard Ewell to take Cemetery Hill if practicable went unexecuted, the Union fortified a fishhook line overnight, and George Meade, in command for just three days, shifted reinforcements along interior lines on July 2. Pickett's Charge on July 3 cost the attackers more than half their men. The episode then follows the rain-soaked retreat, an eight-mile wagon train of wounded, a flooded Potomac at Williamsport, a destroyed pontoon bridge, and Meade's council of war that urged caution while Lee built a new bridge and escaped on the night of July 13.

• Albert G. Jenkins's cavalry abducted up to a thousand African Americans in Pennsylvania and sent them south into slavery.
• Pennsylvania officials in Harrisburg shipped the state archives out of the city as refugees clogged the roads.
• Stuart's late swing into the Union rear on July 3 was stopped by Union cavalry that included a young George Armstrong Custer.
• Abraham Lincoln lamented that the army had Lee within its grasp and nothing he could say would make it move.
• Vicksburg surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant on July 4, the same day Lee began his retreat.