Loudoun Thunder: The Campaign and Battle of Gettysburg

The Civil War campaign that would culminate at the small southern Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg was well underway by the middle of June 1863. The heat of summer in northern Virginia would beat down the men from both armies as the trudged their way northward toward the Mason-Dixon Line. Billowing dust and a lack of water along the routes north would also cause men to fall out of line. Many of them would collapse and die in their tracks while others simply could not go on until the oppressive sun dipped below the horizon. While the men struggled on, the promotion-seeking Alfred Pleasonton, the Federal cavalry commander, and his horsemen were tasked with locating the advancing legions of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Having fail to provide any solid information, Pleasonton received orders to move with this command into the picturesque Loudoun Valley between the Bull Run Mountains and the Blue Ridge on 17 June. Waiting in the valley would be elements of General Jeb Stuart’s Rebel cavalry division. The two forces would bump into each other near the small town of Aldie on the afternoon of the same day. The encounter marked the beginning of a five-day running fight between the two forces along the Ashby’s Gap Turnpike. When it was over, Pleasonton still had not procured the solid intelligence that his commanding officer, General Joseph Hooker, so desperately needed. With his fifth publication, the first book of Volume III in the Campaign and Battle of Gettysburg series, Kevin Campbell expands his coverage of the campaign by detailing the initial movements of the two armies that would eventually meet at Gettysburg and the heavy cavalry engagements in Virginia’s Loudoun Valley. Read more