by Shelby Foote
Wilson, after a heartening beginning, fared even worse than the infantry in the end. Reinforced by Kautz to a strength of about 5000 horsemen and twelve guns, he struck and wrecked a section of the Weldon Railroad above Reams Station, nine miles south of Petersburg, then plunged on to administer the same treatment to the Southside and the Richmond & Danville, which crossed at Burkeville, fifty miles to the west. Near the Staunton River, eighty miles southwest of Petersburg, with close to sixty miles of track ripped up on the three roads, he turned and started back for his own lines, having been informed that they would have been extended by then to the Petersburg & Weldon. On the way there, he was harried by ever-increasing numbers of gray cavalry, and when he approached Reams Station he found it held, not by Wright or Birney, who he had been told would be there, but by A. P. Hill. Moreover, the mounted rebels, pressing him by now from all directions, turned out to be members of Hampton’s other two divisions, returned ahead of Sheridan from the fight at Trevilian Station. Outnumbered and all but surrounded, Wilson set fire to his wagons, spiked his artillery, and fled southward in considerable disorder to the Nottoway River, which he succeeded in putting between him and his pursuers for a getaway east and north. He had accomplished most of what he was sent out to do, but at a cruel cost, including 1500 of his troopers killed or captured, his entire train burned, and all twelve of his guns abandoned.
Grant had the news of these two near fiascos to absorb, and simultaneously there came word of still a third, one hundred air-line miles to the west, potentially far graver than anything that had happened close at hand. Wright and Birney at least had extended the Federal left beyond the Jerusalem Road, and Wilson and Kautz had played at least temporary havoc with no less than three of Lee’s critical rail supply lines. But David Hunter, aside from his easy victory two weeks ago at Piedmont and a good deal of incidental burning of civilian property since, accomplished little more, in the end, than the creation of just such a military vacuum as Lee specialized in filling.
Descending on Lynchburg late in the day, June 17, Hunter found Breckinridge drawn up to meet him with less than half as many troops. He paused overnight, preparing to stage another Piedmont in the morning, only to find, when it broke, that Jubal Early had arrived by rail from Charlottesville to even the odds with three veteran divisions: whereupon Hunter (for lack of ammunition, he later explained) went over to the defensive and fell back that night, under cover of darkness, to the shelter of the Blue Ridge. Early came on after him, and Hunter decided that, under the circumstances, his best course would be to return to West Virginia without delay. For three days Early pursued him, with small profit, then gave it up and on June 22 — while A. P. Hill was mauling Birney, south of Petersburg — marched for Staunton and the head of the Shenandoah Valley, that classic route for Confederate invasion which Lee had used so effectively in the past to play on Halleck’s and Lincoln’s fears.
These last were likely to be enlarged just now, and not without cause. With Hunter removed from all tactical calculations, nothing blue stood between Early and the Potomac, and with the capital defenses stripped of their garrisons to provide reinforcements and replacements for Meade, little remained with which to contest a gray advance from the Potomac into Washington itself. Lincoln had come up the James this week for a first-hand look at the war, but now it began to appear that he needed only to have waited a few days in the White House for the war to come to him.
So much was possible; Halleck’s worst fears as to the consequences of the southside shift for the failed assault might now be proved only too valid. But Grant was not given to intensive speculation on possible future disasters; he preferred to meet them when they came, having long since discovered that few of them ever did. Instead, in writing to Old Brains on June 23 he stressed his need for still more soldiers, as a way of forestalling requests (or, in Lincoln’s case, orders) for detachments northward from those he had on hand. “The siege of Richmond bids fair to be tedious,” he informed him, “and in consequence of the very extended lines we must have, a much larger force will be necessary than would be required in ordinary sieges against the same force that now opposes us.” Two days later, in passing along the news that Hunter was indeed in full retreat, he added that Sheridan had at last returned, though with his horses too worn down to be of any help to Wilson, who was fighting his way back east against lengthening odds. “I shall try to give the army a few days’ rest, which they now stand much in need of,” Grant concluded, rather blandly.
* * *
After frightening Hunter’s 18,000 away from Lynchburg, westward beyond the Blue Ridge, and enjoying a day’s rest from the three-day Allegheny chase that followed, the 14,000 Confederates took up the march for Staunton via Lexington, where on June 25 part of the column filed past Stonewall Jackson’s grave, heads uncovered, arms reversed, bands intoning a dirge with muted horns and muffled drums. This salute to the fallen hero was altogether fitting as an invocation of the spirit it was hoped would guide the resurrected Army of the Valley through the campaign about to be undertaken by his old Second Corps, now led by Jubal Early. “Strike as quick as you can,” Lee had telegraphed a week ago, as soon as he learned that Meade’s whole army was south of the James, “and, if circumstances authorize, carry out the original plan, or move upon Petersburg without delay.”
The original plan, explained to Early on the eve of his departure from Cold Harbor, June 13, was for him to follow the slash at Hunter with a fast march down the Valley, then cross the Potomac near Harpers Ferry and head east and south, through western Maryland, for a menacing descent on the Federal capital itself. Lee’s hope was that this would produce one of two highly desirable results. Either it would alarm Lincoln into ordering heavy detachments northward from the Army of the Potomac, which might give Richmond’s defenders a chance to lash out at the weakened attackers and drive them back from the city’s gates, or else it would provoke Grant into staging a desperate assault, Cold Harbor style, that would serve even better to bleed him down for being disposed of by the counterattack that would follow his repulse. Given his choice, Early stuck to the original plan. After driving Hunter beyond the mountains, which removed him from all immediate tactical calculations, the gray pursuers rested briefly, then passed for the last time in review by their great captain’s grave in battered Lexington and continued on to Staunton, where their hike down the Valley Turnpike would begin.
Early got there next day, ahead of his troops, and reorganized the 10,000 foot soldiers into two corps while awaiting their arrival. By assigning Gordon’s division to Breckinridge, who coupled it with his own, he gave the former Vice President a post befitting his dignity and put thirty-five-year-old Robert Rodes — a native of Lynchburg, which he had just helped to save from Hunter’s firebrands, and a graduate and one-time professor at V.M.I., whose scorched ruins he viewed sadly, and no doubt angrily as well, after marching his veterans past that other V.M.I, professor’s grave — in charge of the remaining corps, composed of his own and Dodson Ramseur’s divisions; Ramseur, a North Carolinian, promoted to major general the day after his twenty-seventh birthday early this month, was the youngest West Pointer to achieve that rank in Lee’s army. The remaining 4000 effectives were cavalry and artillery, and these too were included in the shakeup designed to promote efficiency in battle and on the march. Robert Ransom, sent from Richmond for the purpose, was given command of the three mounted brigades (“buttermilk rangers,” Early disaffectionately styled these horsemen, riled by their failure to bring Hunter to bay the week before) along with instructions to infuse some badly needed discipline into their ranks. As for the long arm, it was not so much reshuffled as it was stripped by weeding out the less serviceable guns and using only the best of teams to draw the surviving forty, supplemented by ten lighter pieces the cavalry would bring along. Recalling his predecessor Ewell’s dictum, “The road to glory cannot be followed with much baggage,” Early stipulated that one four-horse “skillet wagon” would have to suffice for
transporting the cooking utensils for each 500 men, and he even warned that “regimental and company officers must carry for themselves such underclothing as they need for the present expedition.” One major problem remained unsolved: a lack of shoes for half the army. This would not matter greatly in Virginia, but experience had shown that barefoot men suffered cruelly on the stony Maryland roads. Assured by the Quartermaster General that a shipment of shoes would overtake him before he crossed the Potomac, Early put the column in motion at first light June 28. Already beyond New Market two days later, some fifty miles down the turnpike, he informed Lee that his troops were “in fine condition and spirits, their health greatly improved.… If you can continue to threaten Grant,” he added, “I hope to be able to do something for your relief and the success of our cause shortly. I shall lose no time.”
True to his word, he reached Winchester on July 2, the Gettysburg anniversary, and there divided his army, sending one corps north, through Martinsburg, and the other east toward Harpers Ferry, where they were to converge two days later; Franz Sigel was at the former place with a force of about 5,000, while the latter contained a garrison roughly half that size, and Early wanted them both, if possible, together with all their equipment and supplies. It was not possible. Sigel — who by now had been dubbed “The Flying Dutchman” — was too nimble for him, scuttling eastward to join the Ferry garrison before the rebel jaws could close and then taking sanctuary on Maryland Heights, which Early found too stout for storming when he came up on Independence Day. While one brigade maneuvered on Bolivar Heights to keep up the scare across the way, the rest of the Valley army settled down to feasting on the good things the Federals had left behind, here and at Martinsburg as well. Two days were spent preparing to cross the Potomac at Boteler’s Ford, just upstream near Shepherdstown, and distributing the shipment of shoes that arrived on schedule from Richmond. On July 6 the crossing began in earnest; a third gray invasion was under way. No bands played “My Maryland,” as before, but there was a chance for some of the veterans to revisit Sharpsburg, where they had fought McClellan, two Septembers back, from dawn to dusk along Antietam Creek. On they trudged, across South Mountain on July 8, breaking in their new shoes, and entered Frederick next morning in brilliant sunlight. East and southeast, beyond the glittering Monocacy River, the highway forked toward Baltimore and Washington, their goal.
Certain adjunctive matters had been or were being attended to by the time the infantry cleared Frederick. Coincident with the Potomac crossing, Imboden’s cavalry had been sent westward, out the Baltimore & Ohio, to wreck a considerable stretch of that line and thus prevent a rapid return by Hunter’s numerically superior force from beyond the Alleghenies, and simultaneously, by way of securing reparation for Hunter’s recent excesses in the Old Dominion, a second mounted brigade, under Brigadier General John McCausland — another V.M.I. graduate and professor — was sent to Hagerstown with instructions to exact an assessment of $200,000, cash down, under penalty of otherwise having the torch put to its business district. En route, McCausland somehow dropped a digit, and the Hagerstown merchants, knowing a bargain when they saw one, were prompt in their payment of $20,000 for deliverance from the flames. No such arithmetical error was made at Frederick, where McCausland rejoined in time to see the full $200,000 demanded and paid in retaliation for what had been done, four weeks ago in Lexington, to Washington College and his alma mater. No sooner had he returned than the third brigade of horsemen, under Colonel Bradley Johnson, was detached. Hearing from Lee, in a sealed dispatch brought north by his son Robert, that a combined operation by naval elements and undercover agents was planned for the liberation of 17,000 Confederate prisoners at Point Lookout, down Chesapeake Bay at the mouth of the Potomac, Early sent for Johnson — a native of Frederick, familiar with the region to be traversed — and told him to take his troopers eastward, cut telegraph wires and burn railroad bridges north and south of Baltimore in order to prevent the flow of information and reinforcements through that city when the gray main body closed on Washington, and then be at or near Point Lookout on the night of July 12, in time to assist in setting free what would amount to a full new corps for the Army of Northern Virginia. If things worked out just right, for them and for Early, the uncaged veterans might even return south armed with weapons taken from various arsenals, ordnance shops, and armories in the Federal capital, just over forty miles from Frederick, at the end of a two-day march down the broad turnpike.
Two days, that is, provided there was no delay en route: a battle, say, or even a sizeable skirmish, anything that would oblige a major portion of the army to deploy, engage, and then get back into march formation on the pike — always a time-consuming business, even for veterans such as these. And sure enough, Early had no sooner ridden southeast out of Frederick, down the spur track of the B. & O. toward its junction with the main line near the Monocacy, than he saw, drawn up to meet him on the far side of the river, with bridgeheads occupied to defend the crossings — the railroad itself and the two macadamized turnpikes, upstream and down — a considerable enemy force, perhaps as large as his own, with sunlight glinting from the polished tubes of guns emplaced from point to point along the line. Its disposition looked professional (which might signify that Grant had hurried reinforcements north from the Army of the Potomac, under orders from Lincoln to cover the threatened capital) but Early’s first task, in any case, was to find out how to come to grips with this new blue assemblage and thereby learn its identity and size, preferably without a costly assault on one of the bridgeheads. McCausland promptly gave him the answer by plunging across a shallow ford, half a mile to the right of the Washington road, and launching a dismounted charge that overran a Federal battery. Counterattacked in force, the troopers withdrew, remounted, and splashed back across the river. Though they were unable to hold the guns they had seized, they brought with them something far more valuable: the key to the enemy’s undoing. So Early thought at any rate.
By now it was noon, and he wasted no time in fitting the key to the lock. Rodes and Ramseur would feint respectively down the Baltimore pike and the railroad, while the main effort was being made downstream by Gordon, who would cross by the newly discovered ford for a flank assault, with Breckinridge in support. “No buttermilk rangers after you now, damn you!” Old Jube had shouted three weeks ago at Lynchburg, shaking his fist at the bluecoats as they backpedaled under pressure from his infantry, just off the cars from Charlottesville. He repeated this gesture today on the Monocacy, confident that victory was within his grasp whether the troops across the way were veterans, up from Petersburg, or hundred-day militia, hastily assembled from roundabout the Yankee capital and dropped in his path as a tub to the invading rebel whale.
They were both, but mostly they were veterans detached from the Army of the Potomac three days ago, on July 6, just as Early began crossing into Maryland. Warned by Halleck that Hunter had skittered westward, off the tactical margin of the map, and that Sigel too had removed his troops from contention with the 20,000 to 30,000 Confederates reported to be about to descend on Washington — which had nothing to defend it but militia, and not much of that — Grant loaded Ricketts’ 4700-man VI Corps division onto transports bound for Baltimore, along with some 3000 of Sheridan’s troopers, dismounted by the breakdown of their horses on the recent grueling raids beyond Burkeville and Louisa. Three days later, with Early across South Mountain and Washington approaching a state of panic, if not of siege, he not only followed through by ordering Wright to steam north in the wake of Ricketts with his other two divisions; he also informed Old Brains that he would be sending the XIX Corps, whose leading elements were due about now at Fortress Monroe, en route from New Orleans and the fiasco up Red River. This last came hard, badly needed as these far-western reinforcements were as a transfusion for Meade’s bled-down army, straining to keep up the pressure south of the James. Yet Grant was willing to do even more, if need be, to meet the rapidly developing crisis north of the Poto
mac.
“If the President thinks it advisable that I should go to Washington in person,” he wired Halleck that evening from City Point, while the last of Wright’s men were filing aboard transports for the trip up Chesapeake Bay, “I can start in an hour after receiving notice, leaving everything here on the defensive.”
Meantime Ricketts had landed at Baltimore, headquarters of Major General Lew Wallace’s Middle Department, including Maryland, Delaware, and the Eastern Shore of Virginia. Wallace was not there, however. He had left two days ago, on July 5, after learning that the rebels were at Harpers Ferry in considerable strength, their outriders already on the loose in western Maryland as an indication of where they would be headed next. A former Illinois lawyer, now thirty-seven years old, he had been at the time of Shiloh the youngest major general in the Union army, but his showing there had soured Grant on him; the brilliant future predicted for him was blighted; he was shifted, in time, to this quiet backwater of the war. Quiet, that is, until an estimated 30,000 graybacks appeared this week on the banks of the Potomac, with nothing substantially blue between them and the national capital. Wallace said later that when he pondered the consequences of such a move by Early, “they grouped themselves into a kind of horrible schedule.” If Washington fell, even temporarily, he foresaw the torch being put in rapid sequence to the Navy Yard, the Treasury, and the Quartermaster Depot, whose six acres of warehouses were stocked with $11,000,000 in equipment and supplies; “the war must halt, if not stop for good and all.” Accordingly, having decided to meet the danger near the rim of his department — though at considerable personal risk, for while he knew that Halleck was keeping tabs on him for Grant, watching sharply for some infraction that would justify dismissal, he could not inform his superiors of what he was about to do, since he was convinced that they would forbid it as too risky — he got aboard a train for Monocacy Junction, where the roads from nearby Frederick branched toward Baltimore and Washington. There he would assemble whatever troops he could lay hands on, from all quarters, and thus cover, from that one position, the approaches to both cities: not so much in hope of winning the resultant battle, he afterwards explained, as in hope of slowing the rebel advance by fighting the battle at all. Whatever the outcome, the delaying action on the Monocacy would perhaps afford the authorities time to brace for the approaching shock, not only by assembling all the available militia from roundabout states, but also by summoning from Grant, down in Virginia, a substantial number of battle-seasoned veterans to throw in the path of the invaders.