Determined to Stand and Fight

by Quint, Ryan;

  Sigel and Weber’s occupation of Maryland Heights pivotally changed the campaign. Before, Jubal Early’s men had seemed unstoppable, marching as juggernauts and gaining momentum with each day. But as daylight came on July 5, that momentum came to a stop. Throughout the war, Harpers Ferry seemed like a hot potato, constantly changing hands between the opposing armies. Most famously, Stonewall Jackson captured the town and its large garrison in 1862 by capturing Maryland Heights after a lackluster defense by the Union commander. With his guns imposed against the town, Jackson easily forced Harpers Ferry’s capitulation. Now, almost two years later, the Federals would not give up Maryland Heights so easy. Thomas Wood, who had written about the “Confeds” with cigar and lemonade, noticed the contrast: “Jackson had taught the Yankees that Maryland Heights was the key to Harper’s Ferry,” he wrote, “and since its first capture they had made the position quite formidable.”

  A quick capture of Harpers Ferry and its access to the Potomac River would have given Jubal Early a straight approach to Washington, D.C. But with Sigel and Weber literally above him, he hesitated. Early later admitted, “My desire had been to manoeuvre the enemy out of Maryland Heights, so as to enable me to move directly from Harper’s Ferry for Washington; but [the Federals] had taken refuge in his strongly fortified works . . . and an attempt to carry them by assault would have resulted in greater loss than the advantage would justify.”

  Jedediah Hotchkiss, the famed cartographer for Stonewall Jackson earlier in the war, continued his map-making skills for Jubal Early. His map for the action at Harpers Ferry shows the skirmishing through the town and the defensive Union positons atop Maryland Heights. (wra)

  With his original plan to move down the Potomac River ruined by the Federals atop Maryland Heights, Early needed to change his strategy. He sent out orders to his infantry commanders to swing back towards Shepherdstown, cross the Potomac River, and move towards the Heights from behind, hoping to evict Sigel and Weber. Crossing the Potomac River, many of the troops spent the night of July 5-6 near the old Antietam battlefield where reminders of the war’s bloodiest day hounded the soldiers. Captain Robert Park of the 12th Alabama jotted in his journal, “Memories of scores of army comrades and childhood’s friends, slain on the banks of this stream, came before my mind, and kept away sleep for a long while.”

  Sigel and Weber remained atop Maryland Heights, the heavy artillery hammering away at the Confederates maneuvering around the town below them. On July 6, John B. Gordon’s division closed in on the heights from the Maryland side, hoping for one last chance to push the Unionists off. For the next two days, July 6-7, Gordon’s men engaged in a series of skirmishes that produced a tremendous amount of smoke and noise, but few casualties. “Throughout the whole of this day [July 7],” one report from Gordon’s division read, “there was heavy skirmishing along the line and continued cannonading—Loses very light.”

  Though the losses may have been “light,” they still parried Early’s last attempt to capture Maryland Heights. The lieutenant general thus changed his plans—he would move his army north to the South Mountain passes and then move into the Monocacy River Valley. From there Early hoped to reach the Georgetown Pike, and, as he wrote to General Lee, “I then move on Washington.” But Early’s intended move through Frederick would bring him directly towards Lew Wallace.

  * * *

  On July 3, as the garrisons of Martinsburg and Harpers Ferry prepared for Early’s men to arrive, Maj. Gen. Henry Halleck continued to telegraph Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant outside of Petersburg. In an ironic case of those living in glass houses throwing stones, Halleck besmirched the command abilities of Sigel, Weber, and other Federal officers there. “You can . . . judge what probability there is of a good defense if the enemy should attack the line in force,” Halleck spat.

  Confederate soldiers bivouacked on the old Antietam battlefield on July 5-6, 1864. Memories flooded many of the Confederate soldiers of the fighting on September 17, 1862, that left almost 23,000 dead, wounded, and missing—the bloodiest single day in American history. (loc)

  Ordered to detach troops from his VI Corps, Maj. Gen. Horatio Wright (left) chose Brig. Gen. James B. Ricketts (right). Ricketts had seen plenty of action, being wounded and captured at the battle of First Manassas in July 1861, and commanding infantry at the battle of Antietam. (loc)(loc)

  But as the besieged troops atop Maryland Heights fought to a standstill, Grant and Halleck finally began to stir. On July 5, a full week after John Garrett’s first warning, Grant at last admitted from Petersburg, “I think now there is no doubt [Early’s] corps is away from here.” That same afternoon, Grant sent orders to Maj. Gen. George Meade to “Send in one good division of your troops,” in order to reinforce the garrisons at Harpers Ferry. The orders made their way to Maj. Gen. Horatio Wright, commanding the VI Corps, just after midnight the next day, July 6.

  Left to pick which of his three divisions would go, Wright chose Brig. Gen. James B. Ricketts’s 3rd Division, totaling some 4,000 men. As Wright sent orders to Ricketts, a second note arrived from Meade’s headquarters: “No artillery will accompany the division that is to embark” for Harpers Ferry. Leaving behind the trained and veteran gunners in the corps’ batteries was a decision the Federal high command would soon have reason to regret.

  Ricketts’s veterans were awoken early on July 6 with orders to march from their works outside Petersburg to the wharfs at City Point where steamers waited to take them to Baltimore. The march brought the men through mounds of dust so that, by the time the division reached City Point, the chaplain of the 10th Vermont Infantry remembered that the New Englanders were “so completely covered with dust that we were mistaken for a division of colored troops.” Another of Ricketts’s men wrote that because of the swirling dust kicked up by marching feet, “we could not see 20 feet from our selves, this added to the heat was dreadful.”

  After a hard and dusty march from their trenches at Petersburg, Ricketts’s troops arrived at City Point, where they loaded onto steamships like this, the Daniel Webster. Built in 1854, the Daniel Webster was originally designed to be a passenger ship between Boston, Massachusetts, and Bangor, Maine. It carried from Ricketts’s division the 10th Vermont and part of the 106th New York Infantry towards Baltimore. (sws)

  Once at City Point, the soldiers embarked on the waiting ships and made their way down the James River and towards the Chesapeake Bay. The soldiers appreciated the change of scenery, with Lt. George Davis remarking that they were “thankful for rest, pure air, and to be beyond the reach of shot and shell” for the first time since the opening of the spring’s bloody campaigns in May.

  The soldiers of James Ricketts’s division did not know it, but they would soon be embroiled in some of the bloodiest fighting along the banks of the Monocacy.

  The fields where fighting occurred west of Frederick on July 7 and 8 are completely urbanized. An interpretative sign from the Civil War Trails placed on the fringe of a parking lot discusses the skirmishing in the two days prior to the battle of Monocacy. (rq)

  First Contact

  CHAPTER FIVE

  FREDERICK, MARYLAND, JULY 7-8, 1864

  At Monocacy Junction, Maj. Gen. Lew Wallace continued preparing his troops. With Brig. Gen. Erastus Tyler serving as his second-in-command, Wallace managed to wrangle together three regiments of Maryland infantry, two of Ohio National Guardsmen, the battery of Baltimore Light Artillery, and some mounted Ohioans—a motley collection to be sure. Wallace was not exactly assuaged of his worries for defending the bridges over the river, later characterizing some of the inexperienced troops as “unexceptional.”

  Late on July 6, though, arrived Lt. Col. David Clendenin with his 8th Illinois Cavalry troopers. Technically not assigned to Wallace’s department, Clendenin nonetheless agreed to stay on and offered the use of his experienced troopers. The Illinoisans had spent the past couple of days sparring with famed rebel partisan, Col. John S. Mosby, around Point of Rocks on the B&O Rail
road.

  Early the next morning, Clendenin brought his roughly 230 troopers towards Middletown, about ten miles west of Frederick. With the newly arrived veteran troops, Wallace wanted to reconnoiter and find out exactly where Jubal Early’s vanguard was. The troopers were joined by two 3-inch rifles from Cpt. Frederick Alexander’s Baltimore Light Artillery—the section commanded by Lt. Peter Leary—while Alexander remained behind with the remaining pieces. Moving up the Hagerstown Pike, the Illinoisans and Baltimoreans crossed through the Catoctin Mountain while the sun climbed higher into the sky, growing to be “very oppressive,” the 8th Illinois’s historian remembered.

  Ahead of Clendenin’s small force lay the pickets of the Loudoun Rangers, a small, pro-Union outfit raised in Virginia. As dawn came, the Virginians ranged forward, getting closer to Middletown. The Unionists ran smack into Early’s vanguard, the cavalry brigade of Brig. Gen. Bradley T. Johnson, a native of Frederick, and whose men now deployed for action just ten miles from his home. Heading Johnson’s column were the troopers of the 1st and 2nd Maryland Cavalry, led by Maj. Harry Gilmor, another Maryland native.

  Lt. Col. David Clendenin brought experienced cavalry troopers with him to the Monocacy River, something Wallace desperately needed. In 1865, Clendenin served on the same commission as Wallace trying the conspirators in the Lincoln Assassination trials. (mnb)

  As the two sides opened fire, an interesting set of circumstances unfolded: pro-Union Virginians fought against secessionist Marylanders, who, despite their state’s official loyalty to the United States, now fought for the Confederacy.

  Gilmor brought up more Confederates, maneuvering through the streets of Middletown and opening up such a fire that one Loudoun Ranger described it as “a tornado over our heads,” thus forcing the Federals to fall back towards Catoctin Mountain. “We fell back in good order,” before meeting Clendenin’s force at the mountain pass, the Rangers’ historian wrote.

  Clendenin and his troopers would hardly have agreed with that historian’s summation. “The Loudoun Rangers are worthless as cavalry,” Clendenin wrote, while the Illinoisans’ historian said that the Virginians “had run back into [Frederick] at the first sight of a grayback.”

  Having left Frederick around 5:30 a.m., Clendenin didn’t hit Johnson’s Confederates until shortly after 10 a.m. He fanned his troopers out while Lt. Leary’s cannon continued firing. On the other side of the firing line, Bradley Johnson brought more cavaliers up to contest the ground between Middletown and Catoctin Mountain. Gilmor’s brother, Richard, became a casualty when one of Leary’s shots sent shrapnel into his leg and scattered the other rebels nearby.

  Lt. Peter Leary served as the second-in-command of the Baltimore Light Artillery. After the Civil War, he stayed in the United States Army, serving out west and retiring as a brigadier general. When he died in 1911, he was the last surviving officer of the Baltimore Light Artillery and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. (fw)

  Looking down the Old National Pike that runs through Middletown; in the distance rises South Mountain. On July 7, Confederate cavalry units came down the mountain passes towards the camera’s perspective, pushing Federal cavalry units back. (rq)

  For five hours the opposing troopers traded carbine fire while the artillery banged away. One of the Federal shells exploded as a company from the 8th Virginia cavalry deployed into line, killing ten and wounding another eight. The horrific aftermath left one hospital steward stunned. “Since the beginning of the war,” he wrote, “I have seen death in many of its horrid forms but never so frightful a wound” as from that shell.

  With mounting Confederate pressure, Clendenin moved back, re-crossing the Catoctin. As he did, he came upon Col. Charles Gilpin, commanding the 3rd Potomac Home Brigade and another of Alexander’s rifled-guns. Turning command of the force over to Gilpin, Clendenin stayed with the troops as they closed in on the western fringes of Frederick. “The gallant troopers of the Eighth never did better fighting than this,” the Illinoisans’ historian asserted—a strong endorsement considering some of these troopers had fired some of the first shots of the battle of Gettysburg a year earlier.

  Bradley Johnson’s Confederates followed their opponents closely. While he made his headquarters at John Hagan’s tavern on the road to Frederick, Johnson ordered some of his own artillery up to try help dispel the Federals. From the roof of his home, prominent Frederick resident Jacob Engelbrecht watched the two forces spar. The Confederate gunners dropped the tails of their pieces “about a mile from town,” Engelbrecht wrote. “They then commenced throwing shells & balls.” The noise attracted a number of other civilians who “ventured as near as it was prudent to see the skirmishing.”

  A 1903 reunion of surviving members of the pro-Union Virginia cavalry unit the Loudoun Rangers. The Rangers were all but wiped out later in the war fighting against Col. John Mosby’s Confederate partisans. (lhs)

  Having fallen back to the outskirts of Frederick, Colonel Gilpin’s Marylanders and Lieutenant Colonel Clendenin’s Illinoisans skirmished with Johnson’s Confederates until nightfall. Gilpin ended the night’s fighting with one last push with some of his companies, forcing out dismounted rebel troopers. With darkness limiting visibility, the two sides separated, “with a seemingly mutual understanding that it would be renewed in the morning,” as one New York Times reporter noted.

  * * *

  Brig. Gen. Bradley Johnson led the way with Confederate cavalry, clearing Middletown and moving on Frederick. A native of Frederick, Johnson found himself embroiled in sectional strife even before the Civil War started: in 1857, he caned prominent newspaper editor Frederick Schley. Schley survived the attack and scathed that Johnson was a “desperate coward.” Johnson’s home was seized during the war by Union forces, forcing him to settle in Richmond, Virginia, after the war. (loc)

  Throughout the fight, Lew Wallace remained at his headquarters. “The day was delightful,” he recounted some fifty years later. “All under the cloudless sky lay in a shimmer of sunshine. The wheat fields, houses, barns, the visible church-spires—everything describable and indescribable entering into the composition of the scene lent it a homelike sweetness peculiarly attractive.”

  The bark of one of the 3-inch rifles sent to the front broke that a reprieve.

  “Think I have had the best little battle of the war,” Lew Wallace enthusiastically telegraphed back to Baltimore that evening. “Our men did not retreat, but held their own . . . . Losses unknown.” One Federal aide would eventually hazard the guess that “Our loss during the day was two men killed, one officer 17 men wounded; whilst the rebels reported loss was 140 killed and wounding”— though this sounds more like wishful thinking.

  * * *

  Built in the late 18th century, John Hagan’s tavern served as headquarters for Brig. Gen. Bradley Johnson through the night of July 7-8, 1864. (cm)

  With the end of the fighting on July 7, Maj. Gen. Robert Ransom, commanding Early’s cavalry, ordered his troopers back to the Catoctin. The withdrawal infuriated Bradley Johnson, who had asked repeatedly to push his advance into Frederick proper. Instead of continuing forward, Johnson dejectedly wrote that “we lay all day the eighth in a drizzling rain on the mountain.”

  Major General Wallace wanted more information about the force in front of him, though, and once more sent out David Clendenin. Captain Edward Leib and a small detachment of the 159th Ohio Mounted Infantry joined Clendenin’s 8th Illinois, and together the horsemen set out. Again holding the vanguard, Maj. Harry Gilmor’s Marylanders opened fire as the Federals “advanced boldly to the very base of the mountain.”

  The skirmishing continued throughout July 8, but did not reach the intensity of the previous day. “[The skirmishers went languidly on,” Wallace later said. “Occasionally the artillery joined in and broke the monotony, the swish of the shells in flight giving the men lying upon the ground . . . occupation, if not amusement.”

  Maj. Harry Gilmor commanded the cavalry’s vanguard
through Middletown. After the war, he served as both the police commissioner and mayor of Baltimore. (loc)

  The “monotony” of the day would be broken, however, by the first arrival of Brig. Gen. James Ricketts’s VI Corps veterans.

  The voyage to the Monocacy had been absolutely exhausting: from the steamers in the Chesapeake Bay, the soldiers arrived in Baltimore late on July 7 and began to dock. From the ships, eager B&O Railroad agents ushered the soldiers onto waiting cattle cars, which started to slowly make their way out of the stations around 1:00 a.m. on July 8. Almost universally, the soldiers panned this ride. “The men passed a sleepless night on the crowded cars,” one Pennsylvanian remembered. A New Jerseyan remarked that he and his comrades were “pretty tired of [the] U.S. transporting us around.”

  As the trains stopped at the Junction, Col. William Henry, commanding the 10th Vermont Infantry, climbed down to meet with Wallace. According to his orders, Henry was not even supposed to stop at Monocacy. While Henry’s brigade commander, Col. William Truex, stayed at Baltimore to funnel more troops forward, Henry had gone ahead with the vanguard to keep the troops on the way to their original location, Point of Rocks, a point further down the B&O’s tracks. But with Early’s Confederates moving through South Mountain and onto Frederick, Wallace desperately needed help.

  Wallace described the situation to Colonel Henry. The Vermonter already had an idea of what was going on, having guessed in a letter to his wife from the steamer on the way to Baltimore that Ricketts’s division’s goal was “to look after Genl Ewell [Early’s predecessor].” Now Wallace filled in the rest, as up the road, Clendenin’s troopers continued skirmishing. After the discussion, Wallace folded the new arrivals into his command, regardless of their original orders to continue to Point of Rocks.