The guns had scarcely fallen silent at Gettysburg before the questions and recriminations began. Disappointed Southerners refused to believe that the infallible Robert E. Lee could lose a battle, particularly one as vital as Gettysburg. Someone else must be to blame. Even after Lee himself had said (with much reason), "It is all my fault," supporters inside and outside the Army began looking about for a convenient scapegoat. They quickly found one in the outsized personality of Major General J.E.B. Stuart, Lee's flamboyant cavalry chief.

Criticism of Stuart, which began as a murmur among Lee's personal staff, soon exploded onto the front pages of prominent Southern newspapers, which were read by both private citizens and high-ranking members of the Confederate government. At issue was Stuart's supposed failure to provide Lee with crucial information about the enemy's troop movements in the days leading up to Gettysburg. This lack of accurate intelligence, it was said, had caused Lee to blunder into a battle he did not seek, on ground he did not choose. It was all Stuart's fault, for going off on an ill-advised raid around the Union army when Lee needed him close at hand. Contrary to popular belief, however, Stuart had followed Lee's orders strictly, if not perhaps totally, and he was innocent of the harshest accusations made against him. In no way did Stuart's raid deprive Lee of the cavalry needed to monitor his opponent's movements, only of the officers skilled enough to do so successfully.

How, then, did Stuart become the scapegoat of Gettysburg? Simply put, he was at the end of a long chain of mistakes and misjudgments stretching from the commanding general to a lone scout on horseback. Indeed, there is a certain inevitability to the miscarried raid and its aftermath, an inevitability rooted in the personalities of Lee, Stuart and the many others who contributed, either actively or passively, to the Confederate defeat at Gettysburg. And if Stuart himself was not completely blameless, he had a great deal of company.

Planning for the raid began on the morning of June 22, 1863, three days after the vanguard of Lee's army had crossed into Pennsylvania on its second massive invasion of the North, when Stuart asked Lee for guidance in the next phase of the campaign. Specifically, he wondered which route he should take while following the infantry into enemy territory. If he moved down the Shenandoah Valley west of the Blue Ridge Mountains, he might alert Union cavalry to Lee's hitherto carefully screened advance. If, on the other hand, he moved east from his camp at Rector's Cross Roads (near Salem), he could cross the Potomac between Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker's Union army and Washington, D.C. Such a move might throw the Federals into confusion and give Lee an extra advantage on his move north.

Stuart sent his request for guidance to Lee through I Corps commander Lt. Gen. James Longstreet, who responded with his own recommendation: "I think your passage of the Potomac by our rear at the present will, in a measure, disclose our plans. You had better not leave us, therefore, unless you can take the route in rear of the enemy." It was the first of several mixed messages Stuart received from his immediate superiors. Later that same day, Lee responded with a letter of his own, stating: "If you find that he [Hooker] is moving northward, and that two brigades can guard the Blue Ridge and take care of your rear, you can move with the other three into Maryland, and take position on General [Richard] Ewell's right, place yourself in communication with him, guard his flank, keep him informed of the enemy's movements, and collect all the supplies you can for the use of the army."

Based on Lee's instructions, Stuart began fabricating a plan for another dramatic cavalry raid that would pass around the rear of the Union army. It is possible, as critics later charged, that the recent disappointments at Brandy Station and Upperville (where the Union cavalrymen gave good accounts of themselves) might have made Stuart more eager than usual for an opportunity to reassert the superiority of his own vaunted cavalry and restore his slightly tarnished reputation. More likely, however, he was simply thinking along the same lines as Lee and Longstreet on how best to use his light cavalry in the upcoming campaign.

With Lee's and Longstreet's rather vague advice in hand, Stuart turned to his most trusted scout, John Singleton Mosby, for information on the best route to take into Pennsylvania. Mosby, who would later find fame as the commanding colonel of an effective independent cavalry unit in northern Virginia, Mosby's Rangers, was still serving on Stuart's personal staff. He rode into headquarters on June 23 with word that Stuart could pass safely around the rear of Hooker's widely dispersed army in western Maryland en route to Pennsylvania. Hooker, said Mosby, was lying idle along a 25-mile-long line from Leesburg, Va., to Thoroughfare Gap, just west of Haymarket, and the Federal line was stretched so thin that Stuart could simply ride through it. It was a dangerously overoptimistic assessment of the military situation, based on the assumption that the Federals would simply sit still and wait for events to overtake them. But Stuart trusted Mosby implicitly and was, at any rate, always ready to accept information that conformed to his own expectations.

Stuart liked the plan so well that he committed it to paper and showed it to the commanders of his two brigades, Brig. Gens. Fitzhugh Lee and Wade Hampton. He then detailed his strategy to Lee and Longstreet. Stuart's plan called for him to pass through Glasscock Gap, then head northeast, crossing the Potomac at Seneca Ford and joining Ewell in Pennsylvania. Stuart fully expected his cavalry to pass to the rear of the Union army, severing communications between Hooker and his own cavalry commander, Brig. Gen. Alfred Pleasonton, destroying transportation for the Union army, and taking pressure off Lee by creating a diversion and slowing down Hooker's movements. Once in Maryland, Stuart would wreck the C&O Canal and destroy railroad communications with Washington.

Stuart went to army headquarters at Berryville to await Lee's approval of his plan. He was sleeping out in the open under a poncho when Lee's response arrived. Stuart's adjutant, Major Henry McClellan, opened the letter (clearly marked "confidential") and woke Stuart to show him the message. Lee had written: "If General Hooker's army remains inactive, you can leave two brigades to watch him, and withdraw with the three others, but should he not appear to be moving northward, I think you had better withdraw this side of the mountain tomorrow night, cross at Shepherdstown next day and move to Fredericktown [Frederick]. You will, however, be able to judge whether you can pass around their army without hindrance, doing them all the damage you can, and cross the river east of the mountains. In either case, after crossing the river, you must move on and feel the right of Ewell's troops, collecting information, provisions, etc. Give instructions to the commander of the brigades left behind to watch the flank and rear of the army and (in event of the enemy leaving their front) retire from the mountains west of the Shenandoah, leaving sufficient pickets to guard the passes, and bringing everything clean along the valley, closing upon the rear of the army."

The second letter from Lee was ambiguous and somewhat illogical, especially when considering his first letter. Initially, Lee had told Stuart he was concerned that Hooker might "steal a march on us and get across the Potomac before we are aware." His first set of instructions ordered Stuart to link up with Ewell's right and "guard his flank," while also "collect[ing] all the supplies you can for the use of the army." That in itself was a rather contradictory order, especially for a cavalryman famous for his independent raiding sorties.

The second letter told Stuart he could move "if General Hooker's army remains inactive [emphasis added]" and simultaneously advised Stuart to enter Maryland west of the Blue Ridge Mountains or "pass around" the Federals east of the mountains and then "feel the right of Ewell's troops." Besides giving Stuart two dramatically different routes to take, Lee had softened the stipulation that the cavalry link up with Ewell and guard his flank. And his remark that Stuart should do as much damage as possible seemed to be directed more at a raiding party than a flank-guarding detail. Lee also gave Stuart the latitude to judge whether he could "pass around their army without hindrance. "It would be up to Stuart to decide what constituted a true hindrance, as opposed to a momentary complication.

The sleep-befuddled Stuart read Lee's second letter by firelight and characteristically interpreted it to mean that the commanding general had complete confidence in Stuart's judgment and was giving him the go-ahead to raid the enemy rear. Had Stuart read the letter in the cold light of dawn--that is to say, had Major McClellan not awakened him in the middle of the night and handed him the opened confidential letter--he might have sought a clarification of the orders. He was, after all, within easy riding distance of Lee's headquarters. Then again, he might not have, because even if the orders were not exactly clear, they were at least discretionary enough to allow Stuart to exercise his own judgment--and that judgment, as usual, was to go off raiding on his own.

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