Section #1 - Three Days At Gettysburg
Chapter 36: Day Three: 3:30–5:00 PM
About the same time that Pickett is being turned back, a cavalry battle is under way three miles east of Gettysburg. The aggressor is Jeb Stuart, out to redeem his earlier absence by getting in the rear of the Union army and disrupting a possible retreat should the Cemetery Ridge assault succeed.
(Map by Hal Jespersen, www.posix.com/CW, CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
Stuart arrives south of the York Road with 6,000 sabers led by Wade Hampton, Fitz Lee and John Chambliss, expecting no opposition. But as he crosses through the Rummel farm, he encounters three blue brigades numbering 5,000 under D.M. Gregg, lined up at the junction of Low Dutch and Hanover Roads.
When the two sets of horsemen collide, one Union brigade in particular stands out: the four Michigan regiments led by 23 year old George Armstrong Custer, who, like Pickett, has graduated last in his class (1861) at West Point. Behind his cry of “Come on you Wolverines,” Custer forces Stuart to retreat from the field. (Jeb will survive the battle only to be killed in May 1864 at Yellow Tavern, while Custer dies much later, in 1876, at the Little Bighorn.)
