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

North Carolina. Having completed this mission, Captain Smith, like most of Stonewall’s other staff officers, was invited to join the staff of his successor, General Ewell. By the time the “invitation” reached him in Richmond, Ewell’s corps was already crossing the Potomac. Captain Smith set out after the army alone.
    About sunset on Sunday he reached Greencastle, Pennsylvania, where groups of young farmers and their ladies were gathered on the street corners. Smith was halfway through town before he grew aware of his conspicuousness “in the uniform of a Confederate captain, with side-arms rather ornamental than useful.” Suddenly apprehensive, he covered his fear by elaborately bowing to the farmers and lifting his cap, as he said, “to the astonished ladies” until he was on the open road again. There he shook his horse into a quick gallop and did not stop riding until daybreak the next morning, when he saw Confederate sentries guarding the well-built houses in Chambersburg.
    Passing the public square, Captain Smith pushed his exhausted horse on the less than a mile to the woods on Mr. Messersmith’s farm. There the commanding general’s headquarters tents loomed in the grove through the mist of a cloudy Monday morning. Captain Smith was looking for someone to report to when General Lee, drawing on his gauntlets, came out of his tent and approached his gray horse, Traveler, held by an orderly.
    Recognizing the staff officer of his late lieutenant, the General beckoned Captain Smith toward him. After asking the young officer solicitously about Mrs. Jackson, he inquired if Smith, so recently from Virginia, had any knowledge of General Stuart.
    By chance, Captain Smith had crossed the Potomac the day before with two troopers bearing dispatches for detached cavalry units, and they had casually told him that on the preceding day (Saturday the 27th) they had left the main body of cavalry under Stuart in Prince William County back in northern Virginia. When Smith passed on this information, General Lee, he said, “was evidently surprised and disturbed.”
    Captain Smith moved away to join friends on Lee’s hospitable staff for rest and refreshment before continuing on to report to General Ewell. It became his turn for surprise when the General’s A.A.G, Captain Walter Taylor, also pressed him for information about Stuart’s cavalry. Then Smith was told that not since Lee wrote Stuart a message on the night of the 23rd, six days earlier in Virginia, had there been any communication between the army and its cavalry.
    Even now, Taylor said, A.P. Hill was warily moving his corps through the winding passes of South Mountain in the rain to discover the whereabouts of the enemy on the other side of the low range of hills. Ewell had been ordered back from Carlisle and Early from York, and the separated corps of the army were to recontract east of the mountains in the area of Cashtown and Gettysburg. No one could even guess what had happened to Stuart. General Lee was worried both about the fate of his former cadet and about having to concentrate in unfamiliar country without cavalry.
    For not only had Stuart disappeared with the three most experienced brigades, but Lee did not know the whereabouts of any of the cavalry units he had scattered for screening on the northward march.
    The brigades of Beverly Robertson and Grumble Jones were to have guarded the mountain passes in Virginia until the army had crossed the Potomac, and then followed it. Before the spy Harrison had reported the night before, Lee could assume that those brigades remained away because Hooker was still in Virginia. Now he knew that Hooker’s army, under Meade, was across the mountains from him and that it was Stuart who was still in Virginia. The Union army separated Lee from his own cavalry. This disturbing intelligence only deepened the mystery of why Jones’s and Robertson’s brigades had lingered south of the Potomac after the enemy had crossed