by Quint, Ryan;
Word had clearly trickled down the Catoctin Mountain to Frederick, letting the town leaders know what was coming their way. So, at face value, asking for a lower sum for Frederick was not a bad idea, but what the town leaders did not know was that one of the ransoms, Hagerstown, had been poorly managed, and the Confederates were not going to make the same mistake twice.
Brigadier General John McCausland and his cavalry had been responsible for gathering Hagerstown’s ransom on July 6. McCausland had orders from Early to demand $200,000 from Hagerstown’s populace, but when McCausland gave the ransom, somehow a decimal had been misunderstood. The $200,000 ransom became $20,000, and with such a fumble, Confederate officers were going to look very closely at Frederick.
Confederate cavalry looted stores in Hagerstown on July 6, three days before Monocacy. They also made a decimal-point mistake that cost them $180,000—an error they would not repeat in Frederick. (loc)
Two of Early’s four commissioners assigned to get the ransom from Frederick were Wells Hawks (left) and William Allan (right). Both men had served as members of Stonewall Jackson’s staff before his death in 1863. (cv)(usahec)
Early himself did not see Frederick’s town council’s reply to the ransom. He had appointed commissioners to act in his stead, and these officers—Lt. Col. William Allan, Maj. Wells Hawks, Maj. John Harmon, and Surgeon Hunter McGuire—dismissed the counter out of hand. The sound of fighting grew to the south, and William Allan later wrote that he thought the town officials delayed “until the issue of the battle with Wallace should be ascertained.”
While fighting continued near the railroad junction, Confederate officers waited in Frederick. Major Henry Kyd Douglas, another of Early’s staffers, wrote that he “was appointed Provost Marshal of the town,” and rode the streets. Catharine Markell, a Southern sympathizer, noted that Douglas, amongst others, “called at noon.”
Other Confederates, however, did not prove so hospitable or patient. Diarist Jacob Engelbrecht remembered that the soldiers “stole all the Good horses & cattle, money, bacon, corn, oats &c that they could lay hands on. . . . The Rebs threatened to shoot people if they would not give up their money, horses, &c.”
By evening, the Federal troops were in retreat back to Baltimore, and the town leaders in Frederick could delay no longer. To furnish the $200,000, five banks were called upon, who gave up the money only after being promised by the town to be paid back. The resulting loans would haunt Frederick for nearly a century.
For more than 20 years, Marylander Charles Mathias championed the cause of reimbursement for Frederick. In 1986, just as it looked like Frederick would indeed get the money back, Mathias proclaimed “At long last justice has been served.” However, like all of Mathias’s prior bills, the plan was scrapped. (dod)
Table 1: Paying the Ransom of Frederick
Around 5:00 p.m., nine hours after first getting the demand, the town leaders had the money delivered to Maj. J. R. Braithwaite, who loaded the cash-filled wicker baskets into a wagon and then wrote out a receipt. As historian Benjamin F. Cooling notes, “In all, Early’s ransom reduced Frederick coffers by one-quarter of their capital.”
With their personal mission accomplished, the officers on Early’s staff celebrated. Alexander “Sandie” Pendleton, who had spent part of his childhood living in Frederick, led William Allan, Wells Hawks, and John Harman to a restaurant for a dinner more upscale than usual. “I recall especially the ice cream seemed delicious to us who had had no such delicacies for a long time,” Allan later wrote. “The owner gave us champagne too & we had a good time for an hour.”
The Confederate army rumbled out of Frederick on July 10, leaving the town to deal with the repercussion of the battle and the ransom. Gradually paying the five banks back, Frederick’s citizenry also had to cope with interest that piled atop the loans, so that by 1951, when the last payment was fulfilled, the Confederate levy actually cost the town some $600,000.
The city of Frederick eventually paid its entire debt off, although starting shortly after the end of the Civil War, officials tried to get the United States government to reimburse the city. On February 10, 1873, John Ritchie, serving in the U.S. House of Representatives, put forth H.R. 3894, which promoted “To appropriate three hundred thousand dollars for the relief of Frederick City.” Ritchie’s resolution went nowhere. A similar bill introduced in the 43rd Congress was tabled by the Committee on War Claims in 1876.
The inability to get reimbursed continued in the Twentieth Century. Maryland politician Charles Mathias, elected in 1961 as a member of the House of Representatives, proposed his first bill for Frederick that same year. Then, elected to the U.S. Senate in 1969, Mathias continued his crusade for Frederick, re-introducing the “Frederick Reimbursement Bill” every single year. Finally, in 1986, it looked like Mathias’s personal crusade would end in victory as a specification for a spending bill looked to pay Frederick back. But then, it too, like all others before it, was scrapped. Mathias left office a year later.
To date, 152 years after the ransom, Frederick has not received a cent of reimbursement from the United States government.
Located within an old furniture store that was also used by an embalmer, the National Museum of Civil War Medicine in Frederick tells the story of medical knowledge during the war. Visitors can tour through its multiple floors of exhibits and follow the footsteps of wounded soldiers from the battlefield to hospitals. (cm)
Medical Care and the Battle of Monocacy
APPENDIX C
BY JAKE WYNN
When the armies marched away from Frederick, Maryland, in the aftermath of battle in July 1864, they left behind a landscape marred by the day of terrible fighting. These scenes had been witnessed before in Maryland, but never this close to the 8,000 residents of the city known for its cluster of church steeples. The horrible sights and smells of a battlefield had before seemed distant to the residents of Frederick, over mountains or across borders in Virginia and at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Now they were right here, just three short miles from the heart of their city.
With the approach of Confederate raiders, many citizens evacuated the city, not wishing to discover the darkest heart of war. For the surgeons at work on the sick inside Frederick’s United States General Hospital #1 on the city’s south side, the arrival of Confederate forces in July 1864 marked an immense influx of patients with horrific injuries. This was not the first time these surgeons in blue were tested by gore of brotherly war, but the proximity this time would be unsettlingly close.
Yet the story of Frederick in the Civil War relates very closely with the rapidly-evolving narrative of battlefield medicine. The city received its first large war-time hospital late in 1861, when Union forces first arrived in the area in large numbers. By 1862, army surgeons had turned the grounds of the Frederick Agricultural Society into the growing United States General Hospital #1 with room for hundreds of patients. Two sturdy stone buildings, originally constructed as barracks during the Revolutionary War period stood at its heart. These “Hessian” barracks had seen war before, but nothing like what arrived in September 1862.
Maj. Jonathan Letterman, seated first from left with his staff (above), headed the Army of the Potomac’s Medical Department. Under Letterman’s direction, the Medical Department transformed into an extremely capable branch of the military service. Below, one can start to see how large an operation the evacuation of the wounded required, with hundreds of ambulances and even more horses. (loc)(loc)
In that month, the eyes of the world turned to Frederick. With armies passing down its streets, residents prepared for whatever might come next. The Army of the Potomac’s Medical Director, Maj. Jonathan Letterman, chose the city and its spacious public buildings as future hospitals for the wounded that would surely come from this Maryland Campaign. And they came—10,000 strong. Wounded and sick men poured into the city, dozens of ambulances arriving each day in the wake of the battles of South Mountain and Antietam. This horror pr
epared the citizens of Frederick for what came in July 1864.
“At the Barracks yesterday I saw at least 500 Rebel wounded & also of course prisoners,” wrote resident Jacob Engelbrecht on July 12, just days after the engagement. “Many had limbs amputated[.] I saw one operation of the amputation of the left leg of a Union soldier by Doctor Wier of United States Hospital. It took about 20 minutes.”
The prolific diarist captured this moment, in the immediate aftermath of the battle as patients were being brought off the battlefield just a few miles away. Not only the living, though, but the fallen as well. “There were 15 Rebel & 5 Union (dead) buried yesterday afternoon (Sunday July 10th) about 10 o’clock AM,” he added.
The Battle of Monocacy can be seen in the midst of a medical transformation within the military medical system as well. Prior to the ascendency of Letterman to command of the medical department of the Army of the Potomac in the summer of 1862, the evacuation of patients from the battlefield was a disorganized mess. Major Letterman ushered in the era of triage within American military circles. His evacuation system and overhaul of the ambulance service served the Union Army well in the massive battles fought between 1862 and the end of 1863. Letterman took a broken system and turned it into an efficient, lifesaving organization that brought triage to the American battlefield. For the first time, a wounded soldier’s care was organized and monitored from the instant he fell on the battlefield to the moment he was wheeled into a general hospital in a northern city. The Union Army’s medical care was never the same. The battles of Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg saw Letterman directly oversee the treatment and transportation of thousands of wounded and sick soldiers.
By the summer of 1864, although Letterman was no longer in command, his overhaul of military medicine within the Union Army had been enshrined as United States law on March 1, 1864, forever altering the course of American battlefield medicine and leaving behind a system that remains in place today.
With its testing at the previous battles from 1862 to 1863, Letterman’s system of evacuating wounded from the battlefield was tried and true. Soldiers wounded at Monocacy were retrieved and brought back to aid stations on both sides of the battlefield. First aid was rendered, and transportation procured to the rear to field hospitals occupying homes, barns, and tents close to the battlefield. Here, surgeons and their assistants worked diligently to save lives amid often horrendous conditions. In this age before germ theory, unclean instruments and hands led to rampant infections, and misery followed.
From the field hospitals, patients were to be evacuated to a more permanent facility. Luckily for those wounded on both sides at Monocacy on July 9, Frederick’s U.S. General Hospital #1 had been untouched by the Confederate marauding in the city and had 2,500 to 3,000 beds available. “It had on hand a full equipment of instruments, medical and quartermaster supplies which were not touched by the enemy,” reported surgeon Robert Weir years later. This full load of supplies would prove to be helpful for the influx of patients that came in following the engagement on the ninth.
The Frederick Examiner recorded that on Saturday, July 23, the hospital had 1,221 patients within its care. That figure nearly doubled its pre-battle quota. By the next week, an additional 575 patients were admitted to the wards of U.S. General Hospital #1. That week also demonstrates that repairs had been made to the damaged Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, as 565 patients were transferred out of the hospital and on to the larger general hospitals in cities like Baltimore and Washington.
The experience of Frederick in prior military campaigns made it ideally placed to handle wounded soldiers in July 1864. The hospital would remain a repository for Monocacy’s casualties for months following the battle and would continue taking patients from the subsequent campaigns. As Ulysses S. Grant and Philip Sheridan worked out a strategy for the Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1864, Frederick’s U.S. General Hospital #1 prepared to take on the sick and wounded from Sheridan’s enterprise through the rest of 1864.
Letterman’s first test came with the battle of Antietam, September 17, 1862, a fight that took place not far from Frederick. By the end of the fighting, thousands of wounded needed attention. The maimed flooded into Frederick, requiring the use of almost all public buildings. (loc)
One of the buildings used after Antietam was the Hessian Barracks, known during the Civil War as U.S. General Hospital Number One. Originally built in the late 1770s, the buildings were used to house Hessian prisoners of war from the American Revolution. Adapted for use as a hospital complex, it housed all of the wounded from the battle of Monocacy in 1864. A soldier detailed to the hospital as a nurse wrote, “The people here are very kind to the sick and wounded in bringing good things to eat.” (nmcwm)
The legacy of Civil War medicine in Frederick is continued to this day by the operations of the National Museum of Civil War Medicine. Located on East Patrick Street in downtown Frederick, the museum tells the complex and comparatively unknown story of the surgeons and medical officials who fought battles with death and disease long after the guns fell silent. The story of the Battle of Monocacy would not be complete without the addition of the medical story. The struggles of those struck down on the fields south of Frederick would stretch into the months and years that followed.
JAKE WYNN is a native Pennsylvanian and historian at the National Museum of Museum of Civil War Medicine in Frederick, Maryland.
Two monuments to Confederate soldiers stand at Point Lookout, Maryland. In the background sits a white marble obelisk constructed in 1876, with the larger obelisk in the foreground completed in 1911. Almost 3,400 Confederate soldiers died during the time Point Lookout served as a prisoner of war camp. (loc)
“Utterly Impossible For Man or Horse to Accomplish”:
The Johnson-Gilmor Raid
APPENDIX D
BY PHILLIP S. GREENWALT
Tired, frustrated, dusty, and grimy, Confederate Brig. Gen. Bradley T. Johnson trudged into Lt. Gen. Jubal A. Early’s headquarters in Middletown, Maryland, during the evening of July 8, 1864. Whatever renewed spirit he’d had being back on his native soil in Maryland and within miles of his birthplace had been dashed the day before. The over cautiousness of his commanding officer, Maj. Gen. Robert Ransom, had robbed him of the chance of capturing or ransoming the staunchly Unionist Western Maryland town of Frederick.
What awaited Johnson when he came to face to face with Early must have struck the Marylander as a cruel joke—an order that highlighted the desperation of the invasion of Maryland and underscored the drastic shortage of manpower the Confederacy faced by the summer of 1864.
The task Early laid before Johnson that night was “utterly impossible,” according to the cavalry officer. He was to strike out with his command, numbering approximately 1,500 cavalry troopers, on an approximately 140-mile venture to the southern tip of Maryland’s western Chesapeake Bay shore. His destination: Point Lookout. There, where the Potomac River emptied into the Chesapeake Bay, the fort-turned-prison housed between 10,000 to 12,000 Confederate prisoners—roughly the size of Early’s entire infantry force. Johnson was to liberate those prisoners.
JOHNSON-GILMOR RAID—Leaving Frederick on July 9 while the battle of Monocacy raged, Bradley Johnson and Harry Gilmor’s commands rode together until they reached Cockeysville. There, the two forces split with different objectives that included destroying railroad supplies and raising fear in cities like Washington or Baltimore (Gilmour is depicted by the solid line, Johnson by the dotted). The one objective that was not accomplished, however, was the very point of the cavalry raid: the liberation of Point Lookout. When it became clear that Jubal Early’s main forces would not get into Washington, the cavalry detachments were recalled.
Johnson’s orders called for him to rendezvous with a naval contingent under the command of Commander John Taylor Wood, who would be bringing small arms for the freed soldiers plus marines and sailors to help with the assault on the Union defenses.
; If the plan did not seem fantastical enough by this juncture, the next step stretched the bounds of credulity. Johnson was to march the freed soldiers back to Bladensburg, a Maryland town to the southeast of Washington, D.C., where they would cross the Potomac River and join up with Early’s forces. If Early was by then successful in his planned assault on Washington, further arms could be distributed from the arsenals captured during that engagement.
The target for Bradley Johnson’s raid, Point Lookout. Opened as a prisoner of war camp in the aftermath of the battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, by a year later some 15,500 soldiers were imprisoned there. Robert E. Lee hoped to free those men and bring them back into service, negating some of the heavy losses from the bloody spring 1864 fighting. (loc)
Besides the 140 miles to get to Point Lookout, Johnson had to travel more than a hundred additional miles to meet back up with the Confederate arm—and he had three days and nights to complete the entire mission. The plan stipulated “four days . . . to campaign nearly three hundred miles, not counting time lost to destroy bridges and railroads,” Johnson groused. Although he thought the entire scheme was “utterly impossible for man or horse to accomplish,” orders were orders, and he “would do what was possible for men to do.” The cavalry would sneak away the next day, July 9, beyond the left flank of the Confederate army while it was at the Monocacy River, and head toward his calvalry’s objective.
Riding in Johnson’s command was the 1st Maryland Battalion, now under the command of Maj. Harry Gilmor, along with what was left of the 2nd Maryland Cavalry. Gilmor was a native Marylander born near Towsontown—now Towson, Maryland—on January 24, 1838. He had been arrested during the Pratt Street Riots on April 19, 1861, in Baltimore and imprisoned in Fort McHenry. After his release, he travelled south, became a competent cavalry and partisan ranger, and accompanied the Army of Northern Virginia north to Gettysburg in 1863, where he served as provost marshal of the town during the Confederate occupation.
