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Updated: June 29, 2025
The day following this decided victory by force of arms, and by the stratagem of scouts, who obtained all needful information as to the intentions of the enemy, the Cavalry Corps retired from Ashby's Gap and established its headquarters at Aldie. Our outposts are near Middleburg. We are now receiving some exciting news from Maryland and the North.
Halting at a distance, Mosby saw Wyndham form his force into a compact body and move off toward Aldie at a brisk trot. He sent off the prisoners under guard of two of his men and followed Wyndham's retreat almost to Aldie without opportunity to inflict any more damage.
So, on Sunday, March 8, Mosby led thirty-nine men through the gap at Aldie, the largest force that had followed him to date. It was the sort of a foul night that he liked for raiding, with a drizzling rain falling upon melting snow.
Shrewd historians of the neighborhood made it a point to look up the dates of Brandy Station and Beverly Ford, of Aldie, Winchester, and Waynesboro', of Yellow Tavern and Five Forks, as well as to keep tab on subsequent events of which history makes no mention, but which troopers know well, for Summit Springs, Superstition Mountain, Sunset Pass, and Slim Buttes a daring succession of sibilant tongue-tacklers were names of Indian actions from Dakota to the Gila the old soldier loved to dwell upon, even if Donnelly's whiskey had not put clogs on his tongue.
It was not conceivable that Kilpatrick with three thousand men and six pieces of artillery Kilpatrick the bold, the dashing cavalryman, the hero of Middleburg and Aldie the conceiver of the expedition, who knew in advance all about the perils he must meet, the chances he must take that he would permit uncertainty as to what Dahlgren with but five or six hundred men and no artillery was doing to influence his own immediate action.
To work out the answer to such interrogations is generally the work of the cavalry; so that, when our orders for readiness to move were received, we saw before us a reconnoissance in force. We understand that already Rebel cavalry is raiding more or less in Maryland, and some exciting times are expected before long. Invasion of the Northern States. Kilpatrick at Aldie. The Bloody Battle.
The next morning, about daybreak, he and Beattie were wakened by one of the Chancellor servants and warned that a large body of Union cavalry was approaching up the road from Aldie. Peering through the window shutters, they watched about 200 men of the Fifth New York ride by, with Colonel Wyndham himself in the lead.
The chord line, as you see, carries you by Aldie, Haymarket, and Fredericksburg, and you see how turnpikes, railroads, and finally the Potomac, by Acquia Creek, meet you at all points from Washington. The same, only the lines lengthened a little, if you press closer to the Blue Ridge part of the way.
Aldie, besides being very hungry, has a great deal of tact, and believes in short prayers; nor will we delay to witness the breaking down of the strongholds of precision and ultra propriety, that almost always solemnizes the commencement of an entertainment; but the old Madeira having been passed around, we will listen to the conversation that is going on from different parts of the table.
This time, before scattering them, he told them to meet him at Zion Church, just beyond the gap at Aldie, on the night of the 28th. During the intervening ten days, he was not only busy gathering information but also in an intensive recruiting campaign among the people of upper Fauquier and lower Loudoun Counties.
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