Battle of Aldie

You are passing through Aldie, a quiet Loudoun County crossroads that in June of eighteen sixty-three became one of the most ferociously contested cavalry grounds of the Civil War.

To understand why men were dying here, you have to understand what Robert E. Lee was hiding. By mid-June of eighteen sixty-three, Lee's Army of Northern Virginia was moving north through the Shenandoah Valley, screened by the Blue Ridge Mountains to the east. His cavalry commander, Major General J.E.B. Stuart, was strung along the mountain passes, keeping Union horsemen from peering over the ridgeline and discovering that a Confederate invasion was already underway. The Union Army of the Potomac had no idea where Lee was going. They sent their own cavalry west to find out.

On the morning of June seventeenth, Brigadier General Judson Kilpatrick's brigade, riding in the advance of Brigadier General David Gregg's division, came clattering down the Little River Turnpike and ran straight into Colonel Thomas Munford's Confederate cavalry near this gap in the Bull Run Mountains. What followed was four hours of mounted combat, charge and counter-charge, regiments wheeling in open fields and trading sabers and pistol fire at close range. It was the kind of battle that had become rare by eighteen sixty-three, when most Civil War fighting had settled into infantry trenches, yet here the horse soldiers fought the old way, regiment against regiment in open ground.

Kilpatrick was reinforced through the afternoon but could not break through. Munford finally withdrew toward Middleburg, and the Union troopers held Aldie, but at a cost of three hundred five men killed, wounded, or captured, nearly three times the Confederate total of around one hundred fifteen.

More importantly, Stuart held his screen. The Union cavalry never got a clear look into the Shenandoah. Lee's northward march stayed hidden for days more, until his army crossed into Pennsylvania and converged on a crossroads town called Gettysburg. The rides through Aldie, Middleburg, and Upperville in those June days were the intelligence duel that shaped everything that followed.