After Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee's victory at Chancellorsville in May 1863, he led the Army of Northern Virginia west to the Shenandoah Valley, then north through central Maryland and into Pennsylvania, while Union Gen. George G. Meade, who replaced Gen. Joseph Hooker on June 28, led the Army of the Potomac in pursuit before the armies collided at Gettysburg on July 1 and the defeated Confederates retreated into Virginia on July 14. During June 17-21, 1863, cavalry battles broke out along the roads, streams, and stone-walled fields of Loudoun Valley from Aldie west to the Blue Ridge as Lee's infantry moved stealthily toward the Shenandoah Valley under the protection of Gen. J.E.B. Stuart's screening cavalry. Stuart set up headquarters in Middleburg and sent Col. Thomas T. Munford's 2,000-man brigade east to Aldie, where turnpikes led toward Ashby's Gap and Snickers Gap and the Carolina Road lay just to the east. Meanwhile, Hooker ordered Gen. Alfred Pleasonton and his cavalry corps to locate Lee's infantry. On June 17, Union Gen. H. Judson Kilpatrick's 1,200-man brigade approached Aldie as part of Munford's command entered from the west, and that afternoon the 2nd New York Cavalry at the head of Kilpatrick's column struck a 2nd Virginia Cavalry company scouting east of Aldie. The New Yorkers charged with sabers and drove the outnumbered Confederates back past the mill, but the noise brought up the 5th Virginia Cavalry from Dover, and those Confederates, using pistols and sabers, chased the Federals back down the road in front of the mill. When additional Union cavalry arrived to support the New Yorkers, the Confederates withdrew west to higher ground, where the fighting soon resumed in earnest.