by Quint, Ryan;
Two of Rodes’s brigades, commanded by Col. Philip Cook and Brig. Gen. William Cox, advanced on Tyler’s Federals. Standing with his combined 144th and 149th Ohio, Col. Allison Brown reported that the Confederates attacked “along my entire front, and at the same time my left flank was turned. I now discovered that the enemy had gained a position in the woods, on the east side of the river in my rear, and was preparing to take possession of the bridge, thus cutting off my retreat entirely.”
Brown’s men fired into the oncoming Confederates, but Rodes’s men, as well as some of Ramseur’s, soon started to have the advantage. Firing back into the Ohio ranks, the Confederates bowled many of the Federals over. Colonel Brown, in the midst of the heavy fire, gave the order to retreat. “Our men are getting cut all to pieces. Every man must save himself,” an Ohio musician in the rear worriedly wrote in his diary.
As Tyler’s brigade broke to cross the Stone Bridge back to the east side of the Monocacy, some of the Ohioans “continued firing as they ran until the Rebels got so close to them that they had to throw away their guns to escape.” Tyler’s men made it to their bridge, but as at the railroad bridge, the Confederates pressed close on their heels. “I will not pretend to give you a faint idea of the terrible sight which was presented to the beholder,” an Ohioan wrote.
On the eastern side of the Monocacy, Colonel Brown managed to rally some of his men in an orchard, and they “fired several rounds at the enemy. . . . This checked the pursuit, and enabled the main part of the command to gain the road on the hill.” After Brown’s quick rally, the Ohioans took up a quick step on the Baltimore Pike and retreated from the field. Going into the fight with some 600 men, Brown was only able to get about half out of the position, a testament to the confused and chaotic conditions around the Stone Bridge.
General Erastus Tyler nearly became a casualty as he tried to get his brigade off the battlefield. Riding down the Baltimore Pike, the Federal officers “came upon a squad of rebel cavalry,” one of Tyler’s aides wrote. “Seeing that we were Federal soldiers they fired upon us, and either wounded or captured our Orderlies. We at once put spurs to our horses and dashed down the road for about a mile, when, discovering that they were pursuing, and as our horses were well worn out, would soon overtake us, we turned from the road into the woods[.]” The maneuver allowed Tyler and his staff to lose the Confederates, but they spent the next two days hiding in the woods until found by Federal cavalry.
* * *
The last fighting on July 9 between the two sides came about five miles south of the Monocacy Junction. Whereas the rest of Wallace’s force retreated towards the Baltimore Pike, the 8th Illinois Cavalry had made its way south on the Georgetown Pike. Pursuing them were the tired and bloodied men in John McCausland’s Virginia brigade. The two sides sparred along the Georgetown Pike until the 8th Illinois arrived at the small town of Urbana.
Of the 600 Union soldiers captured during the battle of Monocacy, half of them were scooped up during the retreat away from the Georgetown Pike and towards the Baltimore Pike, as is evident in this inset from a map drawn by Jedediah Hotchkiss. (loc)
Left to cover the retreat, Erastus Tyler’s men fell back from the stone bridge and tried to hold for as long as possible. The Ohioans and Marylanders with Tyler fought until they “learned that the main body of our army had moved away an hour and a half or two hours before,” a staff officer wrote. (lw)
Leading McCausland’s brigade, the 17th Virginia closed on the Illinoisans. Turning to face the Virginians, the 8th Illinois opened fire with their carbines and charged into the Virginians’ midst. In the middle of the cavalry melee, the bearer of the 17th’s flag was shot and dropped the flag. Scooping up the prize, the Illinoisans separated and repulsed a second attack that the Virginians made, killing the 17th’s major in that repulse. Breaking off from the engagement, the 17th returned to the Monocacy River, having added to their butcher’s bill from earlier with Ricketts. David Clendenin gave the captured flag to Lew Wallace, who later hung the flag in his hallway, and wrote that “the light breaking over my shoulders has a trick of turning the starred symbol into a red flash of such electrical effect that I must stop and look at it.”
As the Federals retreated from the battlefield, leaving the Confederates as the unquestionable victor, the town elders of Frederick had no choice but to acquiesce to Early’s ransom for $200,000. The money was split between the town’s banks, and the citizens of Frederick gradually paid back the money over nearly 100 years, paying the last remainder in 1951.
Jubal Early’s pursuit of Wallace’s defeated forces only lasted a couple of miles before he called it off. In his memoirs, Early said he decided to stop because he “did not want prisoners” that would inevitably slow his column. Regardless of whether he wanted them or not, during the battle and its aftermath, Early’s men captured about 600 men.
Beyond the captured, Early also inherited a bloody battlefield that he needed to tend to. The daylong fight along the Monocacy had led to approximately 2,100 casualties: 1,200 Federal and 900 Confederate. Subtracting the prisoners of war, there were 600 wounded and dead Union soldiers who lay across the field, stretching from the Baltimore Pike to the Worthington and Thomas farms. The heaviest concentration of Federal casualties fell at the Thomas farm, where Ricketts’s division suffered close to 1,000 losses, as opposed to Tyler’s brigade, which lost about 200 men at the Stone Bridge.
The wild cavalry melee between the 8th Illinois Cavalry and the 17th Virginia Cavalry outside of Urbana closed the fighting on July 9. Having already lost their colonel attacking near the Thomas farm, the Virginians lost their major as well as their flag to the Illinoisans. (lw)
Similarly for the Confederates, the heaviest losses came on the Southern end of the battlefield. Though records aren’t clear, it’s likely McCausland’s brigade suffered about 150 casualties in both of its attacks. Gordon’s division, by far, had the heaviest Confederate casualties of the battle. Advancing into battle with about 3,500 men in his three brigades, by the end of the fight Gordon lost 419 men in Evans’s brigade, 116 in Terry’s, and 163 in York’s, for a total of 698—approximately 20% losses.
In comparison to the fight at the Thomas farm, Confederate casualties elsewhere were extremely light. One historian guesses Rodes’s sharpshooters had 20 men killed or wounded at the Stone Bridge, and Ramseur probably lost a similar number since the 20th North Carolina, the regiment in his division with the most losses, came away from the Battle of Monocacy with 11 total casualties. John Echols’s division had spent the entire day in reserve, and though Breckinridge called it up later in the day, it did not fight and thus did not suffer any casualties.
Nicknamed the Nighthawk Rangers, the 17th Virginia Cavalry lost their flag at Urbana. Presented to Lew Wallace, the flag hung above his study in Indianapolis for years. It is now preserved in an enclosed case at the Monocacy Battlefield Visitor Center. (cm)
The Confederate troops tended to the battlefield, trying to care for the wounded when they could and settling down after the day’s fight. One of William Terry’s men found a full haversack on a dead Union soldier and that night he “ate a good supper out of my Yankee haversack and soon went to bed for the night.” Others, though, had their sleep interrupted. One of McCausland’s troopers bivouacked near “a small ravine near the center of the hardest fighting and down this ravine a stream was running.” Throughout the night, the trooper wrote, “A number of the enemy’s wounded had rolled down the banks into the stream. I could hear them turning in the mud and water, like hogs in a wallow, all through the night.” The care of the wounded continued into the morning and beyond (see Appendix C for full details).
When looking at the battle of Monocacy, its casualties do not amount to an Antietam, Gettysburg, or Chickamauga, but Lew Wallace’s stand nonetheless had crucial ramifications. He had gone to the Monocacy River to defend the B&O Railroad bridge and delay Jubal Early’s Confederates. Wallace failed to defend the bridge, but he did delay
Early.
But had he delayed Early for long enough?
* * *
About the time that Colonel Brown covered Wallace’s retreat, Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant telegraphed George Meade: “Send in the balance of the Sixth Corps to be forwarded to Washington.” Though it took about two hours for Meade to get Grant’s directive, he quickly replied, “The Sixth Corps has been ordered and will proceed at once to City Point.” Just as Ricketts’s division had marched to the steamers three days before, now the rest of the corps began to stir.
The end of the fighting left a battlefield scattered with carnage. Dead and wounded lay in contorted forms, and it fell to the Confederates to clean up the field. Reflecting on the heavy losses of his division in the fighting, John B. Gordon wrote two days later, “Oh Lord why am I spared & so many & so good men are taken around me. I cannot repay such mercy.” (nyin)
Marching out at 9 p.m., the Union soldiers made good time. Their march to the steamers, though, was much easier than Ricketts’s dry, dust-choked maneuver, with the Sixth marching quickly in the middle of the night without the restrictive heat. One of Meade’s staff officers jotted in his diary, “The remainder of the VI Corps left for Washington, at 11 this night.”
Help was on its way to the Union capital.
Placed in 1920 by VI Corps veterans, the rock and plaque at Fort Stevens commemorates President Lincoln coming under sharpshooter fire. Falling at Lincoln’s side is Cornelius Crawford, surgeon from the 102nd Pennsylvania, hit by a sharpshooter in the thigh. Regardless of the plaque’s drama, Crawford claimed throughout his life that he was not actually standing next to Lincoln when he was hit. (pg)
Fort Stevens
CHAPTER ELEVEN
JULY 10-14
The Confederates set off early on July 10, with John McCausland’s cavalry brigade taking up the vanguard. Following the Virginia cavalrymen, John Echols’s division, which hadn’t fired a single shot the day before, took up the march.
While Early’s advance set out, some of his other men targeted the iron B&O bridge. One of the Confederate soldiers trying to bring down the bridge wrote, “We also burnt and destroyed the Government Horses Depot and etc. tearing up the B&O RR and battering down the magnificent iron bridge with artillery.” Early’s men did substantial damage to the junction, but they did not fully destroy the bridge, as evidenced by the railroad company’s own annual report, where they reported the bridge “much damaged by cannon shot.” Days after the Confederates had moved on from the junction, railroad workers made their way to the Monocacy and repaired the bridge, putting it back into service by July 17.
The last of Early’s men moved down the Georgetown Pike around 1:00 p.m., the whole column snaking its way towards Washington, D.C. Morale remained high after their success the day before against Wallace. “This is the first victory we have gained north of the Potomac,” wrote one soldier in Terry’s brigade, “but I hope it may prove the precursor of many others.”
The Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles (left) thought little of the response from Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (right) to the news of incoming Confederates. (loc)(loc)
That morale and hope began to break down, though, as the Confederates ran into a new foe— the weather. By 2:00 p.m., the temperature reached a stifling 92 degrees; at 8 p.m. the heat had only dropped to 82. One after another, Confederate accounts seem to unanimously mention the heat and the chaos it caused on the Confederate columns. “The day was very warm and dusty,” cartographer Jedediah Hotchkiss wrote simply, but another soldier explained what the heat truly caused when, in his next day’s journal, he wrote, “I broke completely down yesterday. I have heretofore bragged of my endurance in marching; and for the first time in my life am too foot-sore to talk any further.” Early’s men marched about 20 miles on July 10 before stopping to sleep. The next day, Early figured, would bring his troops to Washington’s front door.
* * *
Fear and uncertainty gripped Washington, D.C. With the VI Corps still making its way from Petersburg and the city’s best garrison troops long-since stripped away for Grant’s use in Virginia, Federal officials now scrambled to patch together a defensive force to protect the capital. “The alarm in that city was intense,” an artillery officer remembered.
The military’s response did not impress some of Lincoln’s cabinet members. Attorney General Edward Bates wrote in his diary that he thought the Union generals, even Wallace and Sigel, “are helpless imbiciles.” Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles struck hard, noting, “It is evident there have not been sufficient preparations, but they are beginning to move. Yet they hardly have any accurate information.” Welles derided that Secretary of War Edwin Stanton “seems stupid, Halleck always does.” Welles continued on to make an extremely pertinent observation: “I am not, I believe, an alarmist, and, as I have more than once said, I do not deem this raid formidable if rightly and promptly met, but it may, from inattention and neglect, become so. It is a scheme of Lee’s strategy, but where is Grant’s?”
Grant and Halleck, after shrugging off Early’s invasion for so long, now had to play catchup. Halleck, especially, had to eat his words. On July 5, he had wired Grant to say, “Although most of our forces are not of a character suitable for the field (invalids and militia), yet I have no apprehensions at present about the safety of Washington, Baltimore, Harper’s Ferry, or Cumberland.” Now, though, five days later, Halleck had to rely on those same “invalids and militia,” and there certainly was apprehension about Washington’s capture.
The reconstructed Fort Stevens was put together in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a New Deal program during the midst of the Great Depression. A 2009 National Park Service (NPS) report on the status of preservation at Fort Stevens wrote, “Only those portions of the battlefield owned by the NPS retain integrity. All other areas have been altered beyond recognition since the period of significance [1864] due to intense growth of the surrounding metropolitan area.” Thus, the work by the CCC remains vital to interpreting the events of July 11-12, 1864. (rq)
A mixture of forts, redoubts, and other earthwork positions surrounded Washington, D.C. In 1862, a commission of engineers working on the forts had filed a report that suggested, “The total infantry garrisons required for their defense . . . is about 25,000.” The commission added that to operate the hundreds of cannons emplaced around the city would necessitate “about 9,000.” Of those 34,000 troops that the commission had recommended, the Federal authorities could rely on a little more than 14,000 “present for duty,” but of this number, most were convalescent or light-duty troops not suited to go toe to toe with Early’s men.
To respond to the threat while waiting for the veteran troops of the Army of Potomac, Federal authorities looked to every source. Montgomery Meigs, quartermaster of the army, even called out his clerks and office managers. The office men had some formal drilling, but that had been, in Meigs’s words, “over a year since, but the arms then issued having been recalled, the organization in the departments of Washington and Alexandria had not been kept up.” Holding muskets for the first time in more than a year, the clerks first needed refreshers on loading, firing, and maneuvering on the battlefield before they could go into battle.
Before reinforcements arrived in Washington, D.C., civilian clerks like these men were called to arms. Woefully ill trained, they nonetheless faithfully manned the defensive works around the city, holding long enough for the VI and XIX Corps to arrive. One civilian employee, E.S. Bavett, was killed and another wounded. (fm)
In the midst of this emergency, Halleck became inundated with telegrams from those offering their assistance to command—not to fight, but to command—and Halleck finally snapped at one man in New York City, “We have five times as many generals here as we want, but are greatly in need of privates. Any one volunteering in that capacity will be thankfully received.”
And so July 10 passed, with Jubal Early’s force, dogged by the heat, marching towards Wash
ington, and the Federals scrambling to meet them.
* * *
On July 11, Robert Rodes’s division took up the vanguard for the rest of the march into Washington. The heat continued to be a problem, with more men falling by the wayside, but by noontime, the Confederate infantry pulled up near Silver Spring, the mansion belonging to Francis Blair, the father of Lincoln’s Postmaster General, Montgomery Blair. From Silver Spring, the Confederates were four miles from the Capitol building. Captain Robert Park, 12th Alabama, noted that his men “are full of surmises as to our next course of action, and all are eager to enter the city.”
Early’s other divisions came up behind Rodes, and as the soldiers glanced Washington in the distance, “The sights of its domes and fortifications fired anew my men,” Brig. Gen. Zebulon York wrote.
The defensive bastion where Early’s invasion ground to a halt was originally constructed as Fort Massachusetts in 1861 (above), manned by men from the 3rd Massachusetts Heavy Artillery. After the death of Isaac Stevens (below), at the battle of Chantilly on September 1, 1862, the fort got a new name. (loc)(loc)
Before getting to the Capitol, though, the Confederates had to get through the ring of defenses about two miles away.
Seeing the Confederates advancing about two miles from their position, Union artillery opened fire. The heavy guns, some firing projectiles weighing 100 pounds, soared through the air and exploded as Rodes deployed the same sharpshooters that had fought at Monocacy two days earlier. One Confederate soldier yelled out that “the cursed Yankees are throwing flour barrels at us,” but the artillery fire, at that range and with the inexperienced gunners manning them, proved more a nuisance than a real threat. Exploding behind them, one Confederate soldier dismissed the artillery, writing, “we have never seen artillery used with such poor effect.”
