by Quint, Ryan;
Blockhouses like the one seen in the middle of this drawing were constructed to defend key positions along the Monocacy River, such as the B&O Railroad bridge, seen in the background. The 24-pounder howitzer that was being used to such good effect before it was loaded incorrectly was positioned next to one such blockhouse. Retreating Federals burned the blockhouses, and their exact whereabouts today are unknown. (mnb)
Wallace’s order passed down the ranks and came to the 9th New York Heavy Artillery. Soldiers “procured sheaves of wheat from a near-by field, and placed them under the southeast corner of the roof of the bridge,” the New Yorkers’ regimental historian wrote. Three soldiers went forward and lit the wheat; the fire soon “wrapped the roof in flames like magic.” Glenn Worthington added more details, writing, “The dry shingled roof and long seasoned pine weather-boarding burned like tinder, and quickly the flames were mounting skyward. A great smoke began to fill the sky and blot out the sun. But the roaring flames did their work rapidly, and soon the large timbers began to fall into the water.”
Before the bridge was burned, the New York companies skirmishing on the western bank of the river were withdrawn back across the Monocacy, but somehow the word to fall back did not reach either Lt. George Davis or Cpt. Charles Brown. Seeing his route across the Monocacy now a fully engulfed conflagration, Davis sent a man swimming across the Monocacy to try to get an explanation. The officer supposed to be in charge of the skirmish line (but who instead spent the battle hiding near the Gambrill Mill) sent back the baffling reply, “I supposed you was all over this side the river before the bridge was burned.” Davis and Brown were on their own.
Wallace’s shortage of troops to help defend all of his points could have been aided by more of Ricketts’s soldiers, but in what became a third problem almost 1,000 of the division soldiers never showed up. Taking up the rear of the division’s column, Col. John Staunton officially commanded Ricketts’s 2nd Brigade. Staunton had two regiments of infantry and part of a third, but he spent the entirety of July 9 about eight miles from the battlefield. The soldiers with him never fired a shot at Monocacy, and a month after the battle, a court martial convened to try Staunton for his failure to appear on the battlefield. Brigadier General Ricketts testified that he had specifically ordered Staunton, on July 8, to move his men up towards the Monocacy Junction. For his defense, Staunton blamed B&O agents, one of whom, according to Staunton, had told him the railroad “had received orders to suffer no trains to pass beyond that point.” Staunton also called a number of witnesses to testify that, throughout the day, they heard no cannonading to hint of a battle in the distance. The commission trying Staunton did not believe him, and it found him guilty of “Disobedience of Orders” and “Neglect of duty to the prejudice of good order and military discipline.” Staunton was kicked out of the army and “forever disqualified from holding any office of honor, profit, or trust under the government of the United States.” But Staunton’s future punishment didn’t help Wallace in the early afternoon of July 9.
An inset of a map showing the route of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. While Lew Wallace’s main force fought at the Monocacy, his only possible reinforcements—under Col. John Staunton—stayed eight miles away at Monrovia. (loc)
Continuously looking for Staunton’s men and never finding them, Wallace knew he could not hold off Early’s forces indefinitely. Shortly after 1:00 p.m., Wallace sent a message to Ricketts alerting him to the situation and telling him to be ready to pull out when the Confederate pressure became too much. Ricketts passed along the message to Col. William Truex, holding the Federal line at the Thomas farm, and added, “We are ordered to be ready at once to retire by the road to the Baltimore Pike.” Wallace had admitted to himself that he would eventually have to retreat to Baltimore—the question that remained now was when.
* * *
“Tiger” McCausland caused another problem for Federal forces when he sent his brigade forward once again around 2:00 p.m. After their first bloody repulse earlier in the day, the Virginia troopers rallied near the Worthington farm. “It may appear almost incredible to one uninformed that soldiers who have just a few hours before been through a hell of deadly gunfire,” Glenn Worthington wrote, “can be so soon rallied and again made to charge a foe superior in numbers . . . Yet that was the case done with these troopers [.]”
Instead of sending his men straight down into Ricketts’s waiting men again, McCausland peeled his brigade off towards the right, hoping to outflank the Union battle line. Using natural folds of land, especially Brooks Hill next to Clifton, McCausland’s men advanced towards Ricketts’s left flank.
Taken from the perspective of the Federal battle line, this photograph looks uphill towards the Worthington farm. McCausland’s men formed near the home and attacked downhill. Beside the Worthington house rises Brooks Hill. The bales of grain would have been scattered across the battlefield as the local families ceased their farming once the armies came into contact. Today, I-270 is located at about the middle of this photograph. (mnb)
The Union soldiers finally saw the Virginians as they came out from behind their natural cover and charged forward, yelling their rebel yells as they advanced. Outflanked, Truex’s 1st Brigade started to fall back, yielding the fields around C. K. Thomas’s farm to McCausland’s men. Charging on the heels of the retreating Federals, the cavaliers took up position around the fort-like brick building and opened fire.
Reacting to the Confederate incursion, Colonel Truex ordered some of his regiments to mount a counterattack and push them out. To help extend the Federal line, the last of the reserves, the bulk of the 10th Vermont, was called to double-quick into position near the Georgetown Pike and Baker Valley Road. With the Vermonters coming onto the scene, the majority of Truex’s brigade attacked up the hill and into the face of McCausland’s men.
After McCausland’s troopers gained possession of the Thomas farm, Federal soldiers organized a counter-attack. They pushed up from the base of the hill, charging towards the camera’s perspective and pushing the Confederates out of the home and back towards their starting point at the Worthington farm. (rq)
Truex’s men advanced “in gallant style,” read the brigade’s official report, “driving the enemy before them and occupying the [Thomas] house.” The fighting was heavy and close, with the major of the 14th New Jersey writing that they engaged “the rebels around the corner behind the trees and everywhere else.” One of Ricketts’s staff officers wrote to his father that the Confederates retreated “with very heavy loss at the brick house especially on our left—when the road & yard were literally filled with them[.]”
Evicted from the grounds of the Thomas farm, McCausland’s men retreated once again, moving back to the Worthington farm. The brigade’s two attacks had cost it dearly in both enlisted men and officers, leaving a trail of dead and wounded that marked their furthest advances, but since McCausland never filed a report, getting an official tally is difficult. Alexander St. Clair remarked that “it seemed that the entire brigade would be killed or captured.” But then, as the Virginians crested near the Worthington farm, their situation improved. “Soon,” St. Clair wrote, “we were cheered by seeing Gordon’s grey coats emerge from the woods on our right.”
After having skirmished with the Federals at Harpers Ferry on July 6–7, Maj. Gen. John Gordon’s division trailed the rest of the Confederate Army. On the morning of July 9, Gordon’s men closed in on Frederick. “We marched leisurely along that morning in the direction of Frederick City,” one of Gordon’s soldiers, I. G. Bradwell, later remembered, “guying each other and feeling sure that our brigade of cavalry and our advance troops could easily drive out of our way any force of the enemy they might meet. But in this we were mistaken.”
Gordon’s men, for lack of a better word, lounged in the rear of the Confederate battle line. “We made ourselves comfortable and lay down under the shelter provided,” a Confederate soldier wrote, “to look at the battle, something we had
never done.”
The interior walls of the Thomas home still bear damage from the battle of Monocacy. The house today is park headquarters for the Monocacy National Battlefield and is open to the public only during specific events, so please check before entering. (rq)
But then, Gordon wrote, “About 2:30 p.m. . . . I was ordered by Major-General Breckinridge to cross the Monocacy about one mile below the bridge and ford on the Georgetown pike [sic], which was then held by the enemy.” Grabbing their rifles and falling in, Gordon’s three brigades made their way down to the Worthington-McKinney Ford to cross the river.
As his men waded the ford, Gordon “rode to the front in order to reconnoiter the enemy’s position.” He came across the remnants of McCausland’s troopers and saw, in the distance, “the enemy was posted along the line of a fence on the crest of the ridge running obliquely to the left from the river.” Seeing Ricketts’s battle line in front of him, Gordon’s task was finding a way to crack it.
John Gordon had some of the best troops in the entire Army of Northern Virginia to accomplish that objective. But that title of being the best had come at a devastating cost: his three brigades were a conglomerate, forced to consolidate in the wake of the bloodletting in the Overland Campaign. Combined, his three brigades had the remnants of 31 infantry regiments, but his division only numbered approximately 3,600. The division included the survivors of the famed Stonewall Brigade (the same brigade with which Thomas Jackson had earned his nickname, “Stonewall,” at First Manassas), the ferocious Louisiana Tigers, and a brigade of determined Georgians that Gordon had commanded personally until recently. The Stonewall Brigade, consisting of five regiments, had been consolidated into a single regiment, yet still only numbered 249 men.
It was with this force of elite but depleted soldiers that Gordon now planned his attack.
Gordon placed his three brigades in a single line. On the right flank were Brig. Gen. Clement Evans’s Georgians, the brigade that Gordon himself had commanded. Next to Evans, in the center, were the consolidated brigades of Louisianans under the command of Brig. Gen. Zebulon York, a son of Polish immigrants who had actually been born in Maine but who now fought for the Confederacy. Brigadier General William Terry’s Virginians, including the Stonewall Brigade and another brigade’s worth of consolidated regiments, held Gordon’s left flank.
Bringing his division onto the field, Maj. Gen. John B. Gordon organized his attack in the same sequence that the brigade commanders are organized here (from left to right): William Terry, Zebulon York, and Clement Evans. They all commanded hard-fighting veterans, but all three men commanded little more than shadows of former brigades because of the heavy casualties earlier in the spring. (loc)(loc)(loc)
Behind Gordon’s line, Lt. Col. J. Floyd King, commanding a battalion of artillery, struggled to get guns into place to support the infantry attack. “On reaching the Monocacy it was found difficult to approach and even more difficult to cross with artillery,” King reported. The artillerist finally managed to get one battery, the Monroe Virginia Artillery, over the Monocacy and up near the Worthington farm, where the gunners unlimbered. King decided to move his other batteries into enfilading positions on the western side of the river, where they could still do heavy damage to the Federal line without having to deal with the fords.
Once his three brigades and artillery support were in place, Gordon prepared to advance. He had decided to attack en echelon, meaning in a staggered wave formation, starting on the right with Evans’s Georgians. The echelon formation was useful in order to isolate Federal units who would get sucked into defending against Evans’s men, leaving York or Terry to advance a few minutes later and thus get into flanking positions.
It was close to 3:30 p.m. when Gordon started his attack. The climax to the battle of Monocacy was about to explode in a flurry of violence.
Looking from the 10th Vermont Monument over the ground where Gordon’s men attacked. Dedicated in 1915, part of the plaque says, “This monument was erected by the state of Vermont to designate the position of the 10th Vermont Infantry during the battle fought here on the ninth day of July 1862 to save Washington, ‘and we saved it.’” The Vermonters suffered 56 casualties during the battle. (cm)
Gordon’s Attack
CHAPTER NINE
3:30-5:00 P.M.
With his troops in place, Brig. Gen. Clement Evans was just about prepared to start Gordon’s attack. Riding along the front of his line, Evans called out to his men, “We are now on the flank of the enemy. Their left rests on the edge of this wood in our front. You must advance quietly until you strike them, then give a yell and charge.” One of McCausland’s troopers also remembered that Evans arrogantly added, “Come on, Georgians, follow me—we will show these cavalrymen how to fight.”
His speeches concluded, and with skirmishers leading the way, Evans gave the order to advance.
Calmly, Gordon watched them go. Observing Gordon’s demeanor, one of his soldiers wrote, “I shall recollect him to my dying day . . . he was sitting on his horse as quietly as if nothing was going on, wearing his old red shirt, the sleeves pulled up a bit, the only indication that he was ready for the fight.”
Evans’s Georgians moved closer towards the Federal battle line holding steady near the Thomas farm. Near the left flank, the 10th Vermont’s colonel called out, “Wait, boys, don’t fire until you see the C. S. A on their waist belts and then give it to ’em.” Then, as the Georgians reached the fence line dividing the Worthington and Thomas farms, the Federals curled their fingers around triggers.
“The command ‘fire!’ rang out along our line,” a soldier in the 106th New York recalled, “then ‘load and fire at will,’ and such a fire was kept us that no mortal power could face and cross that field.”
GEORGETOWN PIKE—Gordon’s division of three brigades surged towards Ricketts’s line and, in about an hour and a half, broke the Union line of resistance on Lew Wallace’s left flank.
John Gordon agreed with the New Yorker’s assessment. “As we reached the first line of strong and high fencing,” he wrote, “and my men began to climb over it, they were met by a tempest of bullets, and many of the brave fellows fell at the first volley.” Georgians were shot down, leaving bloodied gaps where men had stood just moments before. The rest tried to push on.
Pvt. George Nichols of the 61st Georgia charged forward towards the Federal line near the Thomas farm. (gn)
Leading his men on horseback, Clement Evans soon became a casualty as a Federal bullet struck home. The worst damage to the brigadier general did not come from the bullet, though, but rather from Evans’s pouch of sewing needles and clothing repair utensils. John Gordon remembered of Evans’s wounding: “A Minié ball struck him in his left side, passing through a pocket of his coat, and carrying with it a number of pins, which were so deeply embedded that they were not all extracted for a number of years.” Evans would survive his wound, but for now he was out of the action and command devolved to Col. Edmund Atkinson to continue the attack.
Evans did not have a monopoly on grizzly wounds. Private G. W. Nichols, fighting in the 61st Georgia, left a particularly gruesome memory. “Here I saw one of Company A of our regiment, Thomas Nichols (though no relative of mine) with his brains shot out. When I saw him he was sitting up and wiping his brains from his temple with his hand. I went to render him some assistance and did so by giving him some water. He seemed to have some mind, for he said he wanted to go back to Virginia and get a horse and try to get home and never cross the Potomac again. He lived twelve hours before death came to his relief.”
In their uneven fight before the other brigades came up to help, the Georgians lost officers besides Evans as they tried to push against Ricketts. Colonel John Lamar, commanding the 61st Georgia, as well as his second-in-command, were both killed. Reflecting on Lamar’s death, a Confederate officer wrote he “had but six months before married the charming Mrs. [Carter], of Orange county [sic], Virginia.” The Georgians were
being shredded, and they desperately needed help.
Gordon worked to bring up Zebulon York’s Louisianans. The newcomers charged straight ahead, striking at Ricketts’s troops around the Thomas farm. York reported that “My veterans marched under fire with the precision of automata.” Closing in, the two sides continued volleying back and forth, and York asserted that “Our fight at the Battle of Monocacy [emphasis in original] was of the [fiercest] and bloodiest that my command has ever been engaged in, considering the number ingaged [sic].”
Maj. James Van Valkenburg took command of the 61st Georgia when its first commander, Col. John Lamar, was killed near the Thomas house. Leading the Georgians forward, Van Valkenburg was also killed. The two were buried on the Thomas farm the day after the battle in a small ceremony attended by John B. Gordon. Both men’s remains were removed to Georgia after the war. Van Valkenburg had been heralded as the “hero of the Wilderness” when he had led an attack resulting in the capture of the 7th Pennsylvania Reserves on May 5, 1864. (Photo used with gracious permission by the Van Valkenburg Family Association.)
The Confederates were making the Federals pay for their tenacious stand. Across the river and at the Worthington farm, Confederate gunners added their shells to the infantry’s musketry. An officer in the 122nd Ohio, fighting on Ricketts’s right, summarized the end result as “a murderous fire” that knocked men out of their ranks. To try to escape the bullets and shells, the Federals sought whatever cover they could, even utilizing the crop fields to their front. “[I]t is an interesting sight to see shocks of wheat used as a defense by our soldiers,” the historian of the 9th New York Heavy Artillery remarked. “Also the hedges and trees in the Thomas yard are thoroughly utilized.”
