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About the Book
One day. Fourteen hours. Twelve thousand Union cavalrymen against 9,000 of their Confederate counterparts—with three thousand Union infantry thrown in for good measure. Amidst the thunder of hooves and the clashing of sabers, they slugged it out across the hills and dales of Culpepper County, Virginia.
And it escalated into the largest cavalry battle ever fought on the North American continent.
Fleetwood Hill at Brandy Station was the site of four major cavalry battles during the course of the Civil War, but none was more important than the one fought on June 9, 1863. That clash turned out to be the opening engagement of the Gettysburg Campaign—and the one-day delay it engendered may very well have impacted the outcome of the entire campaign.
The tale includes a veritable who’s-who of cavalry all-stars in the East: Jeb Stuart, Wade Hampton, John Buford, and George Armstrong Custer. Robert E. Lee, the great Confederate commander, saw his son, William H. F. Lee, being carried off the battlefield, severely wounded. Both sides suffered heavy losses.
But for the Federal cavalry, the battle was also a watershed event. After Brandy Station, never again would they hear the mocking cry, “Whoever saw a dead cavalryman?”
In Out Flew the Sabers: The Battle of Brandy Station, June 9, 1863—The Opening Engagement of the Gettysburg Campaign, Civil War historians Eric J. Wittenberg and Daniel T. Davis have written the latest entry in Savas Beatie’s critically acclaimed Emerging Civil War Series.
Eric J. Wittenberg is an accomplished American Civil War cavalry historian and author. An attorney in Ohio, Wittenberg has authored more than two dozen articles in popular magazines and a dozen books, including (with co-authors J. David Petruzzi and Michael F. Nugent) One Continuous Fight: The Retreat from Gettysburg and the Pursuit of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, July 4 - 14, 1863; The Battle of Brandy Station; and (with J. David Petruzzi) Plenty of Blame to Go Around: Jeb Stuart’s Controversial Ride to Gettysburg. Eric’s first book, Gettysburg’s Forgotten Cavalry Actions, won the prestigious 1998 Bachelder-Coddington Literary Award. The second edition won the Army Historical Foundation’s Distinguished Writing Award, for Reprint, 2011.
Daniel Davis has worked as a historian at Appomattox Court House National Historic Site and the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park. He is the co-author of several books in the Emerging Civil War Series, including (with Phillip S. Greenwalt) Bloody Autumn: The Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1864, Hurricane from the Heavens: The Battle of Cold Harbor, and Calamity in Carolina: The Battles Averasboro and Bentonville and (with Chris Mackowski and Kristopher D. White) Fight Like the Devil: The First Day at Gettysburg July 1, 1863. He resides in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
