MORE ON J.E.B. AT GETTYSBURG

“An Enduring Myth” in the March 2022 issue does a nice, succinct job of debunking the persistent “urban legend” that Robert E. Lee’s plan for Day 3 at Gettysburg involved a simultaneous assault by his infantry forces from the west and J.E.B. Stuart’s cavalry from the east. In addition to the reasons briefly alluded to by Hartwig, I do find baffling a claim in the 2005 book he references in the column (, by Tom Carhart) that four shots fired by Stuart’s horse artillery were designed as a “signal” to Lee—some seven miles away—that Stuart was ready to commence. The exchanges of fire between two large armies on the intervening battlefield and the possibility of acoustic shadows make this proposition implausible, to say the least. As Eric J. Wittenberg concludes in his book , these four shots were instead a form