From the book...
[The defence of Stuart's conduct in the Gettysburg campaign occupied Mosby's study and' thought over a considerable period of years. His championship of his beloved chief resulted in various controversies, to some of which acrimonious may be truthfully applied, as well as in considerable writing and publication on the subject. The account given in these pages was his final work and seems to answer all criticisms which have been aimed at his conclusions. The following letter to Mrs. Stuart explains, in a measure, some of his work on the Gettysburg campaign and the discussions which followed.]
Washington, D.C.,
June 9, 1915.
Mrs. General J. E. B. Stuart:
Dear Mrs. Stuart: I have received your letter in reply to mine inquiring if you had any unpublished correspondence left by General Stuart which I might use in my Memoirs of the war which I am preparing. I return McClellan's letter which is dated March 22nd, 1899. He claims credit for having first published, in reply to Colonel Marshall, General Lee's and Longstreet's orders to General Stuart which authorized him to go the route in rear of Hooker's army in the Gettysburg campaign. Governor Stuart and you know that this is not true. ... In the winter of 1886-87 I w&s in Washington settling my accounts as Consul at Hong Kong. Longstreet about that time had an article in the Century charging General Stuart with disobedience of orders; and Long's "Memoirs of Lee " also appeared about the same time with a similar charge. As I knew the inside history of the transaction and that the charge was false, I went to the office where the Confederate archives were kept and got permission to examine them. The three volumes of the Gettysburg records had not then been published. Colonel Scott gave me a large envelope that had the reports and correspondence of the campaign on printed slips. Very soon I discovered Lee's and Longstreet's instructions to Stuart to do the very thing that he did. I was delighted and so expressed myself to Colonel Scott. He was surprised that McClellan had made no use of them and told me that McClellan had spent several days in his office and that he had given him the same envelope and papers that he had given me. I told Mr. Henry Stuart, whom I met at the National Hotel, all about my discovery and that I should reply to Longstreet and publish this evidence to contradict him and Long. I also wrote to Mr. Wm. A. Stuart and to McClellan of my discovery and told them that I should reply to Longstreet. Mr. Stuart advised me to publish what I had discovered. These documents with a communication from me appeared in the Century about May or June, 1887. See "Battles and Leaders." ... In 1896 Colonel Charles Marshall delivered a violent philippic on General Lee's birthday against General Stuart. He imputed to Stuart's disobedience all the blame for the Gettysburg disaster. I replied to Marshall's attack in a syndicated article which was published in Richmond and Boston and again published Lee's and Longstreet's instructions to Stuart. With this article I also published for the first time Lee's letter to Ewell, written from Chambersburg on June 28th, 1863, which exploded the mythical story of the spy on which Marshall had built his fabric of fiction. Some time after my article appeared, in reply to Marshall, McClellan also published a reply to him with the documents which I had published nine years before in the Century. . . . But McClellan, like Lee's biographers, was silent about the Chambersburg letter. That it contradicts Lee's report, which Marshall wrote, is admitted by Stuart's critics; but to avoid the effect of it they say the date in the records is wrong. The only evidence they produce is that the report written a month afterward is not consistent with the letter. That was the reason I published the letter. But I have demonstrated that the time that a copy of it was received by Early from Ewell and the marching of Ewell's divisions in accordance with it confirm the correctness of the date. McClellan says that Marshall had not dared to answer him; and I can say that although I was the first to attack him he never dared to answer me. He also speaks of John C. Ropes, of Boston, having written him that his answer was conclusive. But Mr. Ropes had read my article in the Boston Herald and had written me the same thing a month before McClellan's appeared. Some years before I had read a review by Ropes of McClellan's "Life of Stuart", in which he seemed to be very friendly to Stuart, but he said that McClellan had made a very unsatisfactory defense of him on the Gettysburg campaign. I then wrote to Ropes and sent him Bedford's Magazine (October-November, 1891) with an article of mine that had Stuart's orders from Lee and Longstreet. Ropes wrote me that my article had changed his opinion, and that in the next volume of his history his views would conform to mine. Unfortunately he died before the volume was finished. So you see how unfounded McClellan's claim of precedence is. His book, as I told Mr. Henry Stuart nearly thirty years ago, does General Stuart great injustice. It deprives him of the credit of the ride around McClellan — I heard Fitz Lee urge General Stuart not to go on — it defends Fitz Lee against the just criticism of Stuart's report for his disobedience of orders that saved Pope's army from ruin and came near getting Stuart and myself captured; and it represents the great cavalry combat and victory at Brandy as "a successful reconnaissance" by Pleasanton, which means that he voluntarily recrossed the Rappahannock after he had accomplished his object and not because he was defeated. . . .
Very truly yours,
(Signed) Jno. S. Mosby