Determined to Stand and Fight

by Quint, Ryan;

  For more than thirty years, TED ALEXANDER served as a historian with the National Park Service, most notably at Antietam National Battlefield. He is also the founder of the Chambersburg Civil War Seminars. In 2016, he was the inaugural recipient of the Emerging Civil War Award for Civil War Public History.

  Numerous soldiers on both sides at the battle of Monocacy paused before the action began to consider the natural beauty of the river valley—something visitors can still do as they walk the battlefield and ponder what happened there. (cm)

  Near Monocacy Junction

  PROLOGUE

  JULY 9, 1864

  The bullet entered Pvt. George Douse’s face, blowing out the back of his cheek and then striking the young Vermonter in the right shoulder. As some of his comrades carried Douse back to the picket line’s reserve, Douse’s skirmishing partner, Pvt. Daniel B. Freeman, remained on his own.

  Freeman ducked down into the rifle pit he and Douse had dug, throwing dirt up against the iron rails of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. All around Freeman, rifles cracked as the 75 picked men of the 10th Vermont, paired with about 200 men of the 1st Maryland Potomac Home Brigade, skirmished and traded shots with the rebels across the fields from them.

  The opposing forces were positioned about three miles south of Frederick, Maryland. Behind the Union skirmish line wound the Monocacy River, and on the opposite banks of the river stood the rest of the Federal forces, getting ready to also enter the battle. Outnumbered and outgunned, the Federal soldiers had to stand and fight for the very defense of Washington, D.C. Only about fifty miles away from the firing line, Washington was a city in turmoil—with few troops ready to defend the capital’s defenses. The fight shaping up along the banks of the Monocacy would be a holding action for the Union troops—some may even say a forlorn hope—delay, delay, delay. If they ran, the road would be wide open to the nation’s capital.

  This perspective looks towards the National Park Service’s visitor center. On July 9, 1864, these fields were filled with skirmishers and battle lines. Confederate forces would have moved towards the camera, with Federal soldiers deployed behind the camera. (cm)

  Eighteen-year old George Douse survived his gruesome facial wound at Monocacy, recovering and living until 1914. (mnb)

  But such lofty ideals were probably far from Daniel Freeman’s mind at the moment. The fire from the Confederates was extremely close, he remembered even years later. He slid his rifle through some rails to fire, but the shot gave away his position. “I could not raise my head but a bullet would strike the rails in front,” he wrote, “and one bullet struck the stock of my gun, one went through my blouse and another through the top rail inflicting a slight scalp wound.”

  So it continued for hours, Freeman firing and ducking down to reload. He bit the ends of cartridges, poured gunpowder, rammed the bullets home, and thumbed percussion caps onto firing cones. Over, and over, and over. “I fired upwards of 100 rounds,” Freeman wrote matter-of-factly.

  Sometime after Douse’s wounding, Cpl. John Wright ran over to Freeman. The two of them were to move over, helping another Vermonter hard-pressed by the Confederates’ skirmishers. Freeman left behind his familiar rifle pit, running alongside Wright to their new position. “As Wright and I reached this outpost,” Freeman wrote, “Wright straightened up to take a view of the surroundings and was killed—shot through the head.”

  Picking Wright up, Freeman and the other Vermonter carried the corpse back to the rear of the picket. There, as they laid Wright down, sheltered for a moment by a contour of ground, an officer asked if anyone would go back to where Wright had just died to resume skirmishing with the Confederates. Freeman thought, and “after a moment,” said he would.

  So the Vermonter shouldered his rifle and ran back to the firing line.

  With his skirmishing partner wounded, Daniel Freeman found himself alone for most of the afternoon, trading shots with an overwhelming number of Confederates. Wounded at the third battle of Winchester in September 1864, Freeman took this image without a left boot for his pension file. (na)

  The Shenandoah River, which flows north from the valley it derives its name from, joins with the Potomac River at Harpers Ferry. (cm)

  The Shenandoah Valley

  CHAPTER ONE

  From the beginning of the war, both sides understood the importance of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Ranging some 200 miles and nestled between the Blue Ridge and the Allegheny Mountains, the Valley had a common moniker as the “Breadbasket of the Confederacy”—providing badly needed victuals to Confederate forces.

  Federal war efforts focused on denying the use of the Valley to their Confederate foes. Federal officers also hoped to use the avenues of advance deep into the heart of Virginia that the Valley offered. And yet, for all that strategic value, Union war leaders always seemed to put second-tier officers in charge of Federal forces sent to the Valley. This series of missteps began in the war’s first campaign, when the Federal high command failed to keep Confederate troops in the Valley from leaving to support the Confederate effort in their victory at Manassas.

  The worst failure, though, came in 1862. As Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan brought the largest army in the nation’s history up the Virginia Peninsula, a bewildering set of incompetent generals were run ragged by Maj. Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. Like knocking over dominoes, Jackson defeated the Federal officers—men like Nathaniel P. Banks, who lost so many supplies that the Confederates referred to him as “Commissary Banks,” and John C. Fremont, who was a better explorer than soldier. Jackson’s victories in the Valley made him internationally famous and left officials in Washington, D.C., fearing a move north. Thousands of Union soldiers, earmarked for McClellan on the Peninsula, instead stood guard elsewhere, watching for Jackson.

  EASTERN THEATER—In 1864, Virginia saw military campaigns in nearly every section of the state. For the Confederacy, retaining railroad hubs like Lynchburg and Petersburg was a strategic necessity. Federal forces hoped to wrest control of the Shenandoah Valley away, something Jubal Early set out to stop.

  More defeat in 1863—this time at the Second Battle of Winchester—a loss that opened the door for the Confederate invasion of Pennsylvania and led to Gettysburg. It seemed that no matter how many troops the Union high command sent to the Valley, Confederates sent them stumbling back in retreat.

  Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant hoped to change that. Coming east in the spring of 1864, Grant had no intention of allowing the Confederacy the freedom to maneuver troops around, shuffling men about to one endangered point after another. Before this spring, Federal armies had all operated in independent campaigns rather than in concert with one another; the Army of the Potomac’s strategic goal varied widely from that of the Army of the Tennessee, which varied from the Army of the Cumberland, and so on. Grant, however, planned differently.

  The armies would operate as one. They would time their Spring 1864 offensives together, striking the Confederacy with a wide sledgehammer that stretched from the familiar battlefields of Virginia, down to the mountains of Georgia and the rivers of Louisiana. As the general-in-chief of the United States Army, every soldier answered to Grant, and he intended to wield that power.

  As the Federal high command tried to strip away the Shenandoah Valley from the Confederacy, they were met by Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, who bewildered his foes in a lightning-speed campaign in the spring of 1862. (loc)

  Promoted to lieutenant general in early 1864, Ulysses S. Grant came east to oversee the 1864 campaign. He would make his headquarters with the Army of the Potomac but would simultaneously keep an eye on the other armies operating elsewhere. (loc)

  While Grant came into the field, Maj. Gen. George G. Meade still officially commanded the Army of the Potomac. The two men strained under the confines of the campaign, not aided by the failures in the Shenandoah Valley. (loc)

  In Virginia alone, Grant planned four campaigns. The Army of the Potomac would square off with
Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia with a new objective. No longer would the largest Federal army target Richmond, the Confederacy’s capital but, rather, Lee’s men themselves. “Lee’s army will be your objective point,” Grant told Maj. Gen. George G. Meade, the Army of the Potomac’s commanding officer, “Wherever Lee goes, there you will go also.”

  Grant planned the rest of the Virginian operations as such: Richmond would be Maj. Gen. Benjamin F. Butler’s target. Landing to the south of Richmond at Bermuda Hundred with his Army of the James, he would cut through the underbelly of rebel defenses. In southwestern Virginia, relative newcomers Brig. Gen. George Crook and Brig. Gen. William Averell were to cut the rail lines there, destroying them, preventing any further use.

  Gen. Robert E. Lee prepared his Army of Northern Virginia to face off against the Grant-Meade duo. Lee would also issue the orders that set the 1864 invasion of Maryland underway. (loc)

  And, for the Shenandoah Valley that had proved so troublesome for the Union war effort since the very beginning, Grant gave the reins to Maj. Gen. Franz Sigel. Sigel was tasked with finally neutralizing the Valley’s ability to feed and nourish Confederate forces, and to prevent Maj. Gen. John C. Breckinridge’s Confederates from reinforcing Lee once the combat began. It was an objective that left the onus for the heaviest fighting with Meade and Butler. When Grant explained his plans, President Abraham Lincoln summed them up as only he could: “Those not skinning can hold a leg.”

  The campaigns began in May, and almost immediately, Sigel ran into trouble. He delayed and hesitated, unsure and unconfident of his troops’ ability to fight. For every bit of momentum Sigel gave, Breckinridge gladly took. Their climatic battle came on May 15, outside of the small town of New Market. In the midst of a driving rain storm, Breckinridge and Sigel’s forces traded volleys and canister. Capped by a charge of the cadet battalion from the Virginia Military Institute, Breckinridge’s men shattered Sigel’s lines and sent the Federals retreating back towards the mouth of the Valley and their base of operations, Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. Another defeat was added to the resumes of Federal officers in the Shenandoah Valley.

  * * *

  Franz Sigel, a German immigrant to the United States in the late 1840s, had the task of capturing the Shenandoah Valley. Sigel’s movement through the Valley quickly fell apart. (loc)

  Sigel’s column up the Shenandoah Valley came to a grinding halt at the hands of Maj. Gen. John C. Breckinridge. Breckinridge, a former vice president of the United States, beat Sigel at the battle of New Market and would go on to be second-in-command of the invading force sent into Maryland. (loc)

  Following Sigel’s defeat at New Market, Maj. Gen. David Hunter took control of Federal forces in the lower Shenandoah Valley. Because the Shenandoah River flows in a northern direction, terminology for the Valley is a little different from what one may expect. To follow the river north meant to “go down the valley”—meaning that the Northern head, near Harpers Ferry, was the “lower Valley”—while to march south meant one went “up the Valley.” Hunter’s immediate goal was to march up the Valley and capture Lynchburg, a city that provided crucial railroad ties from southwest Virginia back towards the center of the state.

  Within fifteen days of Sigel’s defeat at New Market, Hunter had gathered the pieces of Sigel’s force, reformed them, and set out for the upper Valley. Left behind, Sigel now oversaw the Reserve Division of the Department of West Virginia, a command no one honestly expected anything of but which would become vitally important within a matter of weeks.

  As Hunter moved up the Valley, Confederate forces attempted to stop him. The Southern forces were hampered by the fact that Breckinridge, the victor of New Market, had been called with his forces towards Richmond. As Grant and Meade relentlessly pushed Lee, the Confederate commander desperately needed more men and so called on Breckinridge. While Breckinridge’s men helped Lee at the battle of Cold Harbor, their absence was sorely missed in the Valley. Small skirmishes broke out between the two sides before the first pitched battle of Hunter’s tenure, the battle of Piedmont, on June 5. Hunter won the battle, opening the rest of the Valley to his forces.

  David Hunter intended a new strategy for the Shenandoah Valley—absolute destruction. A radical Republican and staunch abolitionist, Hunter had little patience for secessionists, whether they be soldiers or civilians. Fighting for the Union and abolition, Hunter had already been wounded before—as a present for his 59th birthday, a Confederate riflemen shot him in the face at the First Battle of Bull Run. His decision while a commander in South Carolina to arm freed slaves made him infamous throughout the Confederacy and an outlaw in the eyes of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Now, as he made his way south through the Valley, Hunter left a trail of desolation.

  Following Sigel’s defeat at New Market, Maj. Gen. David Hunter replaced him. A radical Republican, Hunter sought to not only defeat the Confederacy but to punish its people. Hunter introduced a hard-war approach to the Shenandoah Valley, burning as he went. (loc)

  The onset of the greatest destruction came on June 11, when Hunter’s force reached Lexington, Virginia. As the home to the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), whose cadets had recently taken part in defeating Sigel, Hunter would not let Lexington off easy. The day after his arrival, Hunter let his troops loose. A 16-year-old girl living in Lexington wrote that the Federals immediately targeted the military college. “Sunday morning about 10 o’clock the Yankees set fire to the Institute, blew the walls down and destroyed the mess hall and professors’ houses. . . . All the Point property except the miller’s and toll houses were burned.” Federal forces also put to the torch the home of John Letcher, former governor of Virginia.

  After four days of remaining in Lexington, Hunter collected his troops and continued South. Only forty-five miles remained between him and his objective at Lynchburg.

  It had become readily apparent that Confederate help was needed in the Valley. After beating Sigel, John C. Breckinridge moved most of his command east, towards Richmond, to help Robert E. Lee against Ulysses S. Grant. Now Breckinridge hurried back to the Valley to face off against Hunter. While Breckinridge’s men served as the vanguard, it became readily apparent that other troops would be needed as well.

  Robert E. Lee, who believed Hunter “infested the Valley,” chose one of his most dependable commanders, Lt. Gen. Jubal Anderson Early, to deal with the problem. One of the most well-known Confederate commanders, the irascible general and his Second Corps were almost 130 miles away from Lynchburg, fighting against the Army of the Potomac near Cold Harbor on the outskirts of Richmond. But no matter the distance, Lynchburg and its crucial rail lines had to be saved. Early received orders from Lee on June 12 to “strike Hunter’s force in the rear, and, if possible, destroy it,” as Early recounted years later. So his men, battered from fights at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House, North Anna River, and Cold Harbor, boarded trains and headed towards their newest fight at Lynchburg.

  Hunter arrived outside Lynchburg before Early. Confederate forces ringing the hills of the city would need to hold on for as long as possible—a move Hunter aided by underestimating his foes. Delaying in front of the city, Hunter threw away precious hours, letting more and more Confederate reinforcements arrive. Soon, his underestimation turned to fear, as the shrieking whistle of arriving trains in Lynchburg cowed Hunter from further movements. Even without reinforcements, Confederate commanders in Lynchburg deployed psychological warfare, bringing empty trains into the city, whistles blowing and troops cheering the boxcars as if they were filled to the brim with newly-arrived troops, convincing Hunter he was vastly outnumbered.

  The opposing forces clashed for two days, June 17-18, filling the air with the rolling crackle of musketry and large clouds of dirty-white smoke that hung around the hills of the city. Hunter’s Federals retreated in the darkness of June 18, leaving behind a battlefield dotted with close to 1,000 casualties.

  Hunter’s trail of destruc
tion reached its zenith on June 11, 1864, at Lexington, Virginia. In response to its cadets’ participation in the battle of New Market, Hunter ordered that the Virginia Military Institute be put to the torch. (fm)

  The Federals moved back in the night towards Liberty (now Bedford, Virginia), the sound of creaking wagons and tramping soldiers competing for noise dominance. The difficult maneuver of retreating in the face of the enemy, Chief of Staff David Hunter Strother happily recounted, “was well conducted and successful.” A scathing Louisianan soldier wrote differently, however: “Hunter tucked his tail and ran like a wolf.”

  By sunrise of June 19, a final Confederate attack went forward, hoping to catch their foes unaware. But as the gray-and-butternut-clad troops charged, screaming their daunting rebel yells, they found empty positions where the day before Federal battle lines opposed them. Word soon raced back and the pursuit was on.

  * * *

  Early sent a dispatch to Lee on June 19, telling his commander of the victory at Lynchburg, and soon the Confederate forces chased after Hunter’s retreating column. It was a foot race—Early had to get to Hunter before the Unionist general reached the safety of the screening Blue Ridge Mountains.

  The race tested the strength of both forces. Strother, once so full of self-congratulation over the successful retreat from Lynchburg, just three days later wrote, “Worn out with fatigue, without supplies in a country producing little at best and already wasted by war, the troops are beginning to show symptoms of demoralization” as Confederate cavalry snipped at the column’s heels. But the Confederates, too, were worn down, as Early wrote later with a touch of the Lost Cause pathos he was famous for: “there was a limit to the endurance even of Confederate soldiers.”