On the 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th of October, 1862, General J. E. B. Stuart performed his most brilliant military feat in the raid on Chambersburg, Pennsylvania.
Fording the Potomac on the morning of the 10th, at early dawn, he proceeded to Mercersburg and thence to Chambersburg. The crossing of the river had been skilfully and bravely done, and the march of forty miles to Chambersburg was no mean task in the fifteen hours which had elapsed since morn. Fair weather marked the day’s ride, and at 9 o’clock at night the brilliant cavalry soldier of the Army of Northern Virginia housed himself and men in the quiet and quaint old town, well up in the boundaries of the Quaker State.
It was a new experience for the loyal men of the North to find the hungry Confederate raiders in their very midst and feeding themselves in their pantries and their horses at their granaries.
But the romance of the raid was to end here.
The Potomac, never very sure in its movements, might rise, and Stuart must then return some other way than the one he came. The splashing of the rain, relentless and constant, during the night, and the pattering of great drops as they drove against the window panes, awakened in his bosom the most harassing uncertainty; and throughout the long and (to him) almost endless hours of darkness, came the harrowing thought that the streams fed by the torrents now falling would swell the Potomac and thus cut off all possibility of escape for his command.
GENERAL J. E. B. STUART
His aides and guides, less troubled with responsibility, assured him that his fleet troopers would outride the currents that flowed toward the ocean; but the danger and the trials of the coming day and night rose up in the heart of the dashing commander and disturbed the quiet of his gay and chivalrous soul.
On the morning of the 11th he began his homeward march. Eighty miles from the boundary, where he might pass it, far into an unfriendly country, every resource of which was now placed under contribution to effect his capture or the destruction of his force, and with thousands of troops, both mounted and unmounted, converging to the points where he must pass, rendered his situation acutely desperate and such as to cause keenest apprehension and profoundest fear.
But with Stuart rode officers and men who never quailed. Hampton, Lee, Butler, Robertson, Jones and Pelham, and 1,800 men, the pick of Virginia, Maryland and the Carolinas, were in the saddle with him, and there was no foe they feared and none who could whip them except by brute force and superior numbers.