by Quint, Ryan;
Rodes’s sharpshooters advanced towards the fortifications, and they soon ran into the emergency forces that Halleck and others had thrown into the mix to cause delay. The inexperienced Union soldiers gave ground steadily, falling back to their forts. Following the sharpshooters, Rodes’s entire division excitedly advanced.
But then, suddenly, orders came to stop. In the distance, beyond the fortifications, Jubal Early saw clouds of dust rising, kicked-up by thousands of marching feet. The VI Corps had arrived.
* * *
Brig. Gen. Frank Wheaton’s men landed at the Sixth Street Wharf and double-quicked to Fort Stevens. After the Civil War, Wheaton served in the regular army and fought out west. He died in 1903 and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. (loc)
Lincoln personally waited at the Sixth Street wharves, watching the steamers getting closer and closer. The ships docked at noontime and soon began to offload their complement of troops. As the planks were lowered and the veteran troops in Maj. Gen. Horatio G. Wright’s corps disembarked, they were met by more than their president. Throngs of people gathered to greet them, some cheering, others pleading for help. “The people in Washington seemed to be very happy to see us and were much frightened,” one of the Federal soldiers wrote.
But as more of the soldiers offloaded, the citizens began to relax. “We had never before realized the hold which our corps had upon the affection of the people,” a soldier remembered. “Washington, an hour before was in a panic; now as the people saw the veterans wearing the badge of the Greek cross [the VI Corps insignia] marching through their streets, the excitement subsided and confidence prevailed.”
Wright’s men made their way through Washington, at first unsure which way to march before some staff officers pointed them towards Seventh Street. Filing through the city, the soldiers came to Fort Stevens, the main bastion defending Seventh Street (today Georgia Ave). Originally built in 1861 as Fort Massachusetts, the fort had since been added onto, and renamed in 1862 for Brig. Gen. Isaac Stevens, killed at the battle of Chantilly. Now Fort Stevens would host the last battle of Early’s invasion.
Since their halt, the Confederate troops had remained in place, sharpshooting and ducking from incoming Federal artillery rounds. Having realized that Federal reinforcements were arriving, Early balked at ordering an attack on the fortifications. “Under the circumstances, to have rushed my men blindly against the fortifications, without understanding the state of things, would have been worse than folly,” he wrote later.
When the VI Corps troops arrived at Fort Stevens, their first objective was to clear the Confederate skirmish line away from the front of the fort. A brigade of troops, under the command of Brig. Gen. Frank Wheaton deployed in front of the fort, and a heavy skirmish broke out. Gradually Wheaton’s men pushed back the Confederates, the two sides firing into the growing darkness. Early pulled his men back towards Silver Spring, then “held a consultation” with Breckinridge, Gordon, Ramseur, and Rodes.
According to one witness, Early’s infamous temper appeared during the meeting with his commanders, blaming them: “You have ruined our whole campaign . . . [I]f you had pushed in the Forts this morning . . . we could have taken them—Now they have reinforcements from Grant & we can’t take them without immense loss perhaps tis impossible.”
The largest prohibitor to Confederate success on July 11, however, was not any one commander’s decision but rather the extreme heat. With thousands of men falling out of line, many of the regiments could not have mustered many men in the ranks even if Early had ordered an all-out attack on the capital’s defenses.
The fighting at Fort Stevens resulted in more skirmishing as opposed to full-scale attacks. Both opposing armies were experts at such fighting by the summer of 1864. Thus, rather than resulting in heavy casualties, the fighting at Fort Stevens resulted in surprisingly light losses for both forces. (fl)
Early and his commanders decided to wait for morning and try the works one more time, but during the interlude, Early received a message from Bradley Johnson, returning to the army from his failed raid (see Appendix D). Johnson warned Early that additional reinforcements, these from the XIX Corps, would soon arrive and shore up Washington’s defenses even more. The new intelligence “caused me to delay the attack until I could examine the works again,” Early wrote later.
Before retreating into Virginia, Confederates burned the home of Lincoln’s postmaster general, Montgomery Blair (above). All that was left of the home were some of the exterior walls, which were barely standing on their own when photographed. (loc)(loc)
With daylight on July 12, Early rode forward and “found the parapets lined with troops.” A last dash against the works was out of the question. And, now that daylight lit the battlefield, Early needed to delay until darkness would cover his retreat back to the Potomac River.
As it had the day before, sharpshooting and cannonading characterized the fighting outside Fort Stevens on July 12. Some of the Confederate soldiers, unaware of Early’s decision to not attack, still waited for the order. “We looked every minute for the battle to begin, but with the exception of heavy skirmishing and some artillery firing on the Georgetown Road, there was none,” a soldier in Ramseur’s division wrote.
Inside Washington, much of the fear had dissipated with the arrival of the VI the day before. President Lincoln, noted one of his secretaries, “seemed in a pleasant and confident humor today.” After his morning business Lincoln went about his day, but the sound of the skirmishing and cannonading proved too tempting. In the afternoon Lincoln got in a carriage with his wife and Edwin Stanton and headed towards the firing. Lincoln’s adventures at the front nearly made him the most famous casualty of the battle.
Lincoln arrived at Fort Stevens and decided to climb up on the ramparts to look over the battlefield. All day, Confederate sharpshooter fire from out in the fields had forced the troops inside the fort to keep their heads down. Now, as the president of the United States climbed up, it would be no different. Standing next to Lincoln, a regimental surgeon soon tumbled backwards, shot in the leg. Lincoln quickly clambered back down behind the protection of Fort Stevens’s walls.
Historical lore of the battle says that Oliver W. Holmes, future associate justice of the Supreme Court, yelled at Lincoln, “Get down you fool!”— but it’s likely just that: lore. Lincoln’s near-miss is also usually accredited as the only time a sitting president ventured onto a battlefield, but President James Madison previously had found himself uncomfortably close to advancing British forces at the battle of Bladensburg in August 1814.
Lincoln’s near-miss marked the high point of the fighting at Fort Stevens on July 12. With darkness and the conclusion of fighting, Early began to pull his men back, ending the two-day battle outside Washington that resulted in some 600 casualties.
Not all his soldiers were happy to go. As one Confederate wrote, “for the lack of the dash of a [Stonewall] Jackson, Washington was saved from destruction and Abe Lincoln was reserved for a martyr.”
As the Confederates retreated from Silver Spring, they spared that home under orders of Major General Breckinridge, a close friend in the pre-war years of Francis Blair. But the Confederates eagerly burned the nearby home of Montgomery Blair. While Early denied giving orders for the building’s destruction, he asserted that “retaliation was justified by previous acts of the enemy,” and was more concerned that the burning structure would give away his retreating army’s position.
As he led his army away from Fort Stevens, Early looked to one of his staff officers, Henry Kyd Douglas, and said, “Major, we haven’t taken Washington, but we’ve scared Abe Lincoln like hell!”
“Yes, General,” Douglas answered, “but this afternoon when that Yankee line moved out against us, I think some other people were scared blue as hell’s brimstone!”
“That’s true,” Early retorted, “but it won’t appear in history!”
Evading Union pursuit, Jubal Early brought his army safely acro
ss the Potomac, back into Virginia, on July 14.
Early’s invasion was over.
Dedicated on the 50th anniversary of the battle of Monocacy, the United Daughters of the Confederacy’s monument commemorates the Confederate victory and overlooks the Best farm, where sharp skirmishing took place. (cm)
Conclusion
CHAPTER TWELVE
“The annual expedition of Confederate forces into Maryland and Pennsylvania has been inaugurated this year at about the usual time,” the Army and Navy Journal editorialized on July 16, 1864, two days after Early’s retreat. “The uniformity of the enemy’s appearance around Harper’s Ferry should now be nearly sufficient . . . to furnish the July almanac makers with another ‘About this time may be expected.’”
Beyond giving fodder for a tongue-in-cheek editorial, what were the ramifications of Early’s invasion, and the battle of Monocacy specifically?
For Maj. Gen. Lew Wallace, at least at first, the battle of Monocacy resulted in his dismissal. Major General Henry Halleck had always hated Wallace and what the citizen-soldier represented: amateur soldiers leading troops rather than West Point educated men like Halleck. With Wallace’s defeat at Monocacy, Halleck had a solid excuse to get rid of Wallace, and he did not hesitate to do so. On July 11, even as Washington fretted about its safety and officers looked under every crevice for possible troops to send to the front, Halleck wrote orders replacing Wallace with Maj. Gen. Edward O. C. Ord. Wallace kept his administrative position in Baltimore but had his military command, the VIII Corps, stripped away. Incredulous, Wallace nonetheless shored up Baltimore’s defenses in wake of that city’s fear of the Johnson-Gilmor Raid.
Halleck’s personal victory over Wallace was short lived, though. It did not take long for people to understand the importance of Wallace’s stand at Monocacy. “Our fight at Monocacy, although it resulted in our being compelled to fall back with considerable loss, yet certainly was of very great importance,” wrote James Read, serving on Ricketts’s staff, in a letter home. “Our resistance delayed them probably 48 hours in their march to Washington, and thus enabled the old troops to arrive there, before the rebels attacked.” Early’s force were not quite delayed the 48 hours Read cited, but the fight at Monocacy did slow the Confederate forces to allow reinforcements to be brought to Washington’s defenses. Others came to the same conclusion about Monocacy’s importance, including Montgomery Blair, smarting over the burning of his home. According to Halleck, who protested to Lincoln, Blair had said that “the officers in command about Washington are poltroons. . . . General Wallace was in comparison with them far better as he would at least fight.” Lincoln shrugged off Halleck’s protest.
The fields that played host to the battle of Monocacy were already familiar scenes in the Civil War by 1864. Perhaps most famously, in 1862 Robert E. Lee made his headquarters near the Best farm during the campaign that culminated in the battle of Antietam. Near the Best farm were lost the famous Special Orders #191, a blueprint to Lee’s campaign discovered by soldiers from the 27th Indiana. (cm)
Halleck soon bore the brunt of criticism that came following the Union invasion. “But how can Stanton have any confidence in Halleck, who cannot command even three broomsticks?” a Washington diarist wondered. “As for Lincoln, he must consider Halleck to be his military clown.”
Even Ulysses S. Grant, who himself performed less than spectacularly in response to the invasion, piled against Halleck when he suggested to Secretary of War Stanton that Halleck would be the perfect fit for an administrative role on the Pacific Coast. But both Grant and Halleck were to blame for the close call; both of them had waited too long to send reinforcements, instead opting to wait and hope that General David Hunter could get back from West Virginia in time to trap Early.
In the midst of the bombardment against Halleck, Lew Wallace was reinstated to command of the VIII Corps on July 28, 1864. He could not help but write to a family member of the irony of the situation with him and Halleck: “I am now really getting more credit than I deserve—so it always is with our people—the dog they kicked yesterday becomes the hero today—vice versa.”
Lew Wallace found himself second-in-command to the military commission that tried the conspirators in Lincoln’s assassination—a trial that ended in four conspirators hanging in July 1865 (above). About a month and a half after the Lincoln conspirators hanged, Wallace sat in command of the commission that tried Henry Wirz, commandant of the Confederate prison at Andersonville—a trial that also ended in a hanging, this time in November 1865 (below). Wirz reminded Wallace of a cat “when the animal is excited by the scent of prey.” (loc)(loc)
But was Wallace “getting more credit” than he deserved? In his official report, Wallace wrote that he wished to see a monument on the battlefield: “which I propose to write: ‘These men died to save the National Capital, and they did save it.’” One of the Union brigade commanders at Monocacy, Col. Matthew McClennan, wrote, “The battle of Monocacy was one of great spirit and importance, and in my belief saved the city of Washington from the raves of the enemy.”
Beyond the soldiers who fought at Monocacy, officials also knew the battle’s importance. A Treasury Department clerk wrote that Washington’s “capture and possession for a day would have been disastrous to the cause of the Union. Early would have seized the money in the Treasury, the archives of the departments, the immense supplies of clothing, arms, and ammunition in store.”
William “Billy the Kid” Bonney took up much of Wallace’s time during his tenure as the territorial governor of New Mexico from 1878-1881. Bonney was shot and killed four months after Wallace resigned the post. (loc)
And what of Lincoln’s reelection prospects? At a time when morale had nearly bottomed out due to the horrendous casualties of the Overland Campaign and the slow contest for the city of Atlanta, a Confederate force in Washington, even for a brief time, would have undoubtedly delivered Lincoln’s reelection bid a devastating, if not mortal, wound.
Ulysses S. Grant offered a final word for Lew Wallace in 1885. Over twenty years after the battle of Shiloh, he and Wallace had finally started to patch up their relationship. Grant struggled to finish his memoirs before throat cancer killed him and, writing about Early’s repulse outside Washington, opined, “There is no telling how much this result was contributed by General Lew Wallace’s leading what might well be considered almost a forlorn hope. If Early had been but one day earlier he might have entered the capital before the arrival of the reinforcements I had sent. Whether the delay caused by the battle [of Monocacy] amounted to a day or not, General Wallace contributed on this occasion, by the defeat of the troops under him a greater benefit to the cause than often falls to the lot of a commander of an equal force to render by means of victory.”
* * *
Jubal Early’s new opponent for the fall of 1864 in the Shenandoah Valley was Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan. Egotistical and not hesitant to step on others on his way to the top, Sheridan was given command of the operations in the Valley by Ulysses S. Grant. The troops who fought under Wallace at Monocacy soon found themselves in hard fighting under Sheridan. (loc)
The battle of Third Winchester (top) on September 19, 1864, marked Early’s first fight with Sheridan—a Federal victory that left Early retreating up the Valley. More battles followed, culminating with the battle of Cedar Creek (bottom) exactly one month after Winchester. Defeated in all the battles against Sheridan, Early’s forces were broken and the Confederacy’s hold of the Shenandoah gone forever. Robert Rodes and Stephen Ramseur, who had been so beneficial to Early on his march against Washington, were killed at Winchester and Cedar Creek, respectively. (loc)(loc)
What of Jubal Early—how did his campaign fare?
Depending on what sources one looks at, Early’s campaign had different objectives, but no matter what those objectives, Early’s invasion had a mixed-bag of results. In forwarding Early’s official report, Robert E. Lee wrote to the Confederate Secretary of War, James
Seddon, that with the invasion “it was hoped that by threatening Washington and Baltimore Genl. Grant would be compelled either to weaken himself so much for their protection as to afford us an opportunity to attack him, or that he might be induced to attack us.” In that regard, Early succeeded—both the VI and XIX Corps were sent to Washington, decreasing the total Federal forces at Petersburg. But nothing came from that change in the status quo—the daily grind of the siege lines continued unabated, and now, in the Shenandoah Valley, Early found himself hounded by those same Federal corps sent to protect Washington.
After the Civil War ended, Jubal Early temporarily fled the country rather than surrender. Here he sits in Havana, Cuba, with Thomas Turner, the former commandant of the infamous Libby Prison in Richmond, who had fled to avoid prosecution for the ill-treatment of Union prisoners. (je)
The first memorialization of the battle of Monocacy came in 1907 when surviving members of the regiment dedicated the 14th New Jersey monument. Unlike the usual battlefield monument that marks where a regiment fought, the New Jerseyans’ statue is a general marker of their time both on garrison duty at the Monocacy Junction as well as during the battle. Because of their experience near the railroad hub, the 14th earned the nickname “The Monocacy Regiment.” (rq)
And then there is the matter of what Early himself said was the objective of the invasion. While still forming his forces in the aftermath of beating Hunter, Early had written to Lee that he planned to “threaten Washington and if I find the opportunity—to take it.” Even after being stopped at Harpers Ferry, Early’s next move was to advance over South Mountain and “I then move on Washington.” In Early’s mind, this would be an invasion to capture the enemy’s capital regardless of what troops were sent against him. With that objective as the end point, Early’s invasion failed. The objective of capturing Washington, D.C., also raised Early’s move north beyond the diminutive raid that it is too-often depicted as, and instead moved it into the category of an invasion.