Once the Union realized the Confederate Army was headed to Washington, time was of the essence. Initially, the Union high command had been unsure of Early’s objective. Johnson’s and Gilmor’s raids suggested Baltimore or the main Union railroads were the probable Confederate objectives. Grant himself was preoccupied with Petersburg and slow to react. The only thing standing in Old Jube’s way was about 7,500 troops commanded by Union major general Lew Wallace.* Ordered to hold the iron B&O railway bridge across the Monocacy River, Wallace telegraphed back, “I will hold the bridge at all hazards. Send on the troops as rapidly as possible.”1 True to his word, Wallace and his valiant men, many inexperienced recruits, took a stand on July 9, against Early’s superior force in the bloody Battle of Monocacy, outside Frederick, Maryland.
Wallace understood his role—to buy time and delay Early. As Wallace’s troops battled, he eyed his watch, writing years after the war, “Five hours from my very able antagonist, General Early! I counted them, beginning at seven o’clock, not once but many times, much as I fancy a miser counts his gold pieces.”2 Nonetheless, Wallace’s telegram to headquarters later on July 9 sounded an ominous alarm: “I have been defeated … the enemy are not pursuing me, from which I infer they are marching on Washington.”3 After defeating Wallace, the Confederates torched the buildings around the railway trestle but did not have enough powder to blow it up. They also made a feeble attempt to blast the bridge and sever the vital B&O Railroad trestle with solid shot from a cannon, resulting in only minor damage to the stout iron structure. But most importantly, Early’s battle with Wallace would cost the Confederates a precious day on the road to Washington.
Battle-weary, Early and his men continued their long, hot march on July 10 another thirty miles before reaching Rockville, Maryland, about twelve miles from Washington. “[The day] was an exceedingly hot one, and there was no air stirring.… [We] were enveloped in a suffocating cloud of dust, and many of them fell by the way of exhaustion.”4 The sun and scorching heat had a debilitating effect on man and beast alike. Early rode ahead of his men and through his field glasses could see the Capitol dome in the distance and the Union defenses in front of him “but feebly manned.”5
Riding from Rockville to Washington’s Tenleytown, Brigadier General “Tiger” John McCausland and over a thousand of his cavalrymen probed the Union defenses in advance of Early’s main force. Hailing from the Kanawha Valley, where Thurmond’s Rangers operated, ardent Confederate McCausland before the war taught at VMI with Stonewall Jackson. He was nicknamed “Tiger John” because of the aggressive pressure he placed on his men. That day and night he pushed his men into Washington. Lacking some of the Confederacy’s best scouts, such as Mosby or Gilmor, the Southerner hunted for weaknesses in the capital’s inner belt of defenses, looking for a clear avenue of advance.
McCausland later revealed, “I don’t think many people, North or South, realize how close Washington came to falling into Rebel hands that summer.… I rode with my staff into the defenses.… Your capital was practically undefended! I sat there on a big gun and looked at the lights and wished I had men enough to go ahead and capture the place and end the damned war!”6 While no one knows exactly where McCausland allegedly looked at the lights of Washington, it most likely occurred at Fort Gaines, the present-day location of the American University campus, which was on reserve status, making it largely devoid of a garrison.
One of Lee’s most trusted generals and future Democratic senator from Georgia John Brown Gordon confirmed the gaps in Union defenses: “I myself rode to a point on those breastworks at which there was no force whatever. The unprotected space was broad enough for the easy passage of Early’s army without resistance.”7
Compounding matters, the Union lacked a unified command. No one seemed to want to take responsibility for the potential unfolding debacle. Union chief of staff Major General Henry “Old Brains” Halleck, in a dereliction of duty, ducked directly commanding the Union forces defending the capital. He acknowledged weakness in the Federal fortifications in his correspondence to Grant: “The forces in some parts of the entrenchments, and they are no means reliable, being made up of all kinds of fragments, should give away before they can be re-enforced from other points. A line thirty-seven miles in length is very difficult to guard at all points with an inferior force.”8
Despite McCausland’s potential opportunity near Fort Gaines, Early directed his effort at Fort Stevens, which defended the northern and one of the main approaches into the city—the Seventh Street Pike. Only a total of 209 souls manned the ramparts, and they were all that stood in the way of Early’s corps of combat veterans.9 The delay at Monocacy, a lack of scouts, and the weather all played a role in delaying Early’s potential attack. Those Union troops included one-hundred-days men, National Guard troops from the 150th Ohio Volunteer Infantry who had been federalized two months earlier to serve only one hundred days. The green Ohioans, who had been initially promised duty in a safe area, now bought precious time for the arrival of Union reinforcements. Skirmishing hundreds of yards in front of the fort, the men slowly fell back as Early’s massive forces moved into position.† To augment the citizen-soldiers from Ohio, the Federals recruited anyone possible. “Every available man in Baltimore and Washington put in the trenches,” recalled one participant.10 Secretary of War Edwin Stanton ordered all military-age men to man fortifications, including soldiers convalescing in the city’s hospitals. Clerks, messengers, invalids, “military riffraff … a sorry lot they were … laid down their pens, and off they went to ‘report’ for military duty,” explained one Federal official.11 Lincoln remarked that he doubted there were enough troops to hold the Union defenses and that the reinforcements on the way “will scarcely be worth counting. Let us be vigilant and cool. I hope neither Baltimore nor Washington will be sacked.”12 But the valiant Ohioans, later reinforced by dismounted Union cavalry, skirmished just long enough for advance elements of the VI Corps to arrive in the nick of time to augment the fort’s measly garrison.
Fortuitously, steamboats carrying the desperately needed Union reinforcements from the VI and XIX Corps began to arrive on the afternoon of July 11. Lincoln stood on the wharf on the Potomac and greeted thousands of troops as they marched toward Fort Stevens. Advance elements of Major General Horatio Wright’s VI Corps arrived at the fort around 3 p.m. As both sides clashed, Lincoln himself fearlessly stood on a parapet to view the action as bullets flew from both sides, becoming the only sitting US president in history to come under enemy fire during a time of war. Wright later recalled, “When the surgeon was shot after I had cleared the parapet of everyone else, [Lincoln] still maintained his ground till I told him I should have to remove him forcibly.… He agreed to compromise by sitting behind the parapet instead of standing upon it.… He did so rather in deference to my earnestly expressed wishes, than from any considerations of personal safety.”13
As the sun went down, the Confederacy’s window for seizing the capital also closed. Had the Southern general attacked as soon as he arrived at the fort or had better intelligence on Union weak points, his forces could possibly have pierced the Federal defenses and altered the course of history. Early could have also dispatched smaller parties of Confederate troops to incinerate the capital. His raid had already placed in doubt Lincoln’s chances for reelection; his success might have sealed the president’s fate. The capture or burning of Washington could have been the death blow to the political will in the North, which had waned after the slew of Southern victories.
The exhaustion of his men, who had been fighting and marching for days, combined with the arrival of Union reinforcements, caused the Confederate general to break off the engagement and withdraw his forces from the capital on the evening of July 12, crossing the Potomac at White’s Ferry. The Federals hoped to catch the cantankerous Confederate before he escaped to the relative safety of the Shenandoah Valley. But lacking confidence in Hunter, General Halleck dispatched George Crook to command Hunter’s Army of West Virginia to join with Wright’s VI Corps to smash the Southern army. Plodding through Virginia, the combined force failed to intercept the bulk of Early’s troops as the Rebels passed through Snickers Gap in the Blue Ridge Mountains, which led to the Shenandoah. Crook’s force collided with Early’s rear guard on July 17 at Cool Spring, Virginia. Leading Crook’s troops, Blazer’s Scouts found the area “infested with Rebs.” Blazer’s men “served as sharpshooters and got highly complimented,”14 recalled Asbe Montgomery. Despite the Scouts’ success, the Battle of Cool Spring was a Confederate victory that forced a Union withdrawal.
Early’s raid shocked public opinion in the North to its core. The fall of the capital could have opened the door to foreign intervention or recognition of the Confederacy from England or France. The United States had carefully been watching France after it initiated regime change in Mexico with the installation in 1864 of Maximilian von Habsburg as emperor and his tens of thousands of occupying troops. Across multiple fronts, over the course of several months, the Union strategy to win the war stalled. Outside Petersburg, Lee kept Grant’s massive army at bay. Grant’s losses against Lee were appalling: 70,000 were killed, wounded, or captured. Grant’s multipronged offensive against the Confederacy seemed stymied.
Bond sales on government debt to finance the war provided half the amount needed. Financially, the value of the dollar plummeted while gold skyrocketed.15 The Confederate Secret Service also had an operation to accelerate the dollar’s decline. Thompson set up an arbitrage scheme by sending an agent to New York who would purchase gold and export it overseas, “selling it for sterling bills of exchange, and then again converting the exchange into gold.” The scheme, according to Thompson, had “a marked effect on the market,”16 until the Secret Service agent’s former partner was arrested, which caused the agent to shut down the operation and flee to Canada. Thompson also urged the Sons of Liberty and others to convert their paper money into gold. As the greenback sank, the Democratic Party’s stock continued to rise.
In the lead-up to Early’s attack, George Sanders dropped another bomb on the Lincoln administration: a phony peace conference. Sanders set up a trap to create a fake peace conference with the influential editor of the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley, an antislavery crusader who largely supported the war but now was horrified by the massive numbers of killed and wounded that had resulted from the stalled Union offensives. During the summer of 1864, Greeley called for negotiations and an armistice and was invited to attend a peace conference set up by Sanders and the commissioners. Most Democrats saw an armistice and cooling-off period as the key to negotiations, while the Confederates knew that once an armistice began, the war would never be restarted. Lincoln reluctantly allowed Greeley to attend, along with his private secretary John Hay, and met the Southerners in Niagara Falls, Canada, in the middle of July. Through clever machinations, Sanders tricked Lincoln into admitting the war would not end until the Confederates surrendered and slavery was abolished. The Confederates then portrayed Lincoln as uncompromising and as a saboteur of the negotiations.
Next, the oily Confederate sent a statement to the Associated Press that hit hundreds of other papers and turned the media against Lincoln, painting the president as a monster: “All the Democratic press denounce Lincoln’s manifesto in strong terms, and many Republican presses admit it was a blunder.” Sanders was overjoyed with the resulting propaganda victory for the South. Thompson described how “Lincoln’s manifesto shocked the country. The belief, in some way, prevailed that North and South would agree to a reconstruction, and the politicians, especially the leading ones, conceived the idea that on such an issue, Lincoln could be beaten at the ballot box.” The conference had a chilling effect on the Sons of Liberty also, as Thompson noted: “A lot of arms were purchased by [the Secret Service] and sent to Indianapolis.” The Sons of Liberty changed their tune from violence and insurrection to voting Lincoln out of office. With the prospects for the Northwest Conspiracy greatly diminished, “the trial of the ballot box should be made before a resort to force,”17 wrote Thompson.
Lincoln was despondent about the upcoming election: “I cannot but feel that the weal or woe of this great nation will be decided in the approaching canvass. My own experience has proven to me, that there is no program intended by the Democratic Party but that will result in the dismemberment of the Union.” Lincoln added, “You think I don’t know I am going to be beaten, but I do and unless some great change takes place badly beaten.”18