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Stuart didn't "wander off" and he wasn't joyriding prior to Gettysburg. Stuart commanded the rear guard as the rest of the army moved west of the Blue Ridge and north across the Potomac. At that point, he was then needed at the head of the army, not the rear. The question was how to get there. The safe option was to double the column and work his way slowly to the front, moving along roads choked with wagons, infantry and cattle. That would have taken a week, during which time the cavalry would have been useless.

During the early planning of the invasion, however, Stuart had proposed an alternative, striking for the downstream fords of the Potomac and moving east of the mountains. That would put him on the flank and rear of any federals north of the river, disrupt Union communications and supply, and mask confederate intentions by presenting a broader front of invasion. The risk was that he would be separated from the army.

In any event, the key point is that Stuart presented this plan to Lee, who approved it. Stuart was not freelancing. The plan came unglued mainly because the Army of the Potomac, in 1863, was moving a lot faster than it had in 1861/62. The command issues were getting sorted out. Stuart encountered Union infantry marching north from the Rappahannock line, and moving fast. Stuart fell behind schedule because he had to detour south and east to avoid the Federal columns. As it was, he crossed the Potomac at Rowser's Ford just hours after most of the Federals had completed crossing at Edwards Ferry, eight miles upstream opposite Leesburg. With a little better situational awareness, the Federals could have held the downstream fords and prevented Stuart from reaching Gettysburg at all.

The celebrated meeting between Lee and Stuart on July 2 at Gettysburg, in which Lee is supposed to have chastised Stuart, is probably a myth. It apparently originated with a critical piece written by Tom Rosser, who had an anti-Stuart ax to grind, years after the war. This was during the period following Lee's death, when other confederates began to (1) deify R.E. Lee and (2) construct the Lost Cause mythology. Since Lee was deemed infallible, the hagiographers had to blame his subordinates for the disaster in Pennsylvania, with Stuart, Longstreet and Dick Ewell all being targets. To his credit, Longstreet stood his ground and maintained that Lee had erred. This, of course, was correct but inadmissible in the South at that time. Along with becoming a Republican and being a constructive citizen after the war, this is what made Longstreet a turncoat in the eyes of much of the South.