Monocacy

On July 9, 1864, roughly six miles outside Frederick, Maryland, Confederate and Union soldiers clashed at Monocacy, sometimes called Monocacy Junction, in an engagement tied to that year's Valley Campaigns during the Civil War. Lt. Gen. Jubal A. Early led the Confederate side to victory over Maj. Gen. Lew Wallace's Union command. This clash formed one piece of Early's broader push down the Shenandoah Valley and up into Maryland, a maneuver meant to pull Union troops away from their siege against Gen. Robert E. Lee's forces at Petersburg, Virginia.

Monocacy stands as the farthest north any Confederate victory reached during the conflict. Once the fighting ended, Wallace's men fell back toward Baltimore while Early's army pressed onward toward Washington. Yet the single day lost in this engagement proved costly for the Confederates, since it gave Union reinforcements just enough time to reach the capital ahead of them. Three days later, on July 12, Early tried to seize Washington at the Battle of Fort Stevens, but his effort failed, forcing the Confederates back into Virginia.

Background

During the spring of 1864, Grant, serving as Union General-in-Chief with the rank of Lieutenant General, set in motion a plan to move troops against Confederate forces in Virginia in a coordinated fashion, a scheme that became part of what historians call the Valley Campaigns of that year. Amid this effort, Confederate forces under Lt. Gen. Jubal Early handed Union troops a defeat that cleared the way toward Washington, D.C. Fighting first broke out near Lynchburg, Virginia, on June 17 and 18, when Early's men clashed with those of Maj. Gen. David Hunter. Afterward, Early swelled his ranks to nearly 16,000 soldiers and pressed onward toward Martinsburg, West Virginia, where the smaller Union garrison abandoned the town rather than face him. Two days later, on June 19, Federal soldiers stationed at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, set fire to the span crossing the Potomac River rather than let it fall into Confederate hands.

Grant's response to these threats near Martinsburg and Harpers Ferry came on July 5, 1864, when he ordered two brigades, numbering roughly 5,000 troops from the VI Corps' 3rd Division under Brig. Gen. James B. Ricketts, to leave City Point, Virginia, for Harpers Ferry. Before these reinforcements could reach the capital, the sole obstacle standing between Early and Washington consisted of about 2,300 men, most of them Hundred Days volunteers, commanded by Maj. Gen. Lew Wallace. Wallace, who later gained fame as the author of Ben-Hur, oversaw the Middle Department and VIII Corps from his headquarters in Baltimore at this time. Very few of his soldiers had ever seen combat. Wallace himself was no stranger to command, having once held the distinction of being the youngest major general in the Union army, yet his reputation had suffered after critics held him responsible for the heavy losses suffered on the opening day of the Battle of Shiloh.

Warning signs of Early's approach first surfaced on June 29, when Baltimore and Ohio Railroad agents stationed at Cumberland, Maryland, and at

Battle

Wallace approached the fight with two clear aims: hold the Washington road for as long as possible and keep open a path by which his troops could withdraw. Between roughly 9 and 10 a.m. on July 9, the Confederate division under Maj. Gen. Stephen Dodson Ramseur ran into around 3,500 of Rickett's soldiers positioned on the bluffs above the spot where the Georgetown Pike bridge spanned the river. At nearly the same time, Maj. Gen. Robert E. Rodes's division engaged Tyler's brigade, which held the stone bridge carrying the Baltimore Pike over the water. Meanwhile, Clendenin's cavalry watched the river from a point further downstream. Confederate forces learned from captured prisoners that the full VI Corps stood before them, a discovery that made them wary and slowed any attempt to exploit their larger numbers.

Early judged that striking straight across the Monocacy would cost too many men, so he dispatched Brig. Gen. John McCausland with roughly 1,100 cavalry troopers along Buckeystown Road in search of a crossing point that would let them swing around the Union position. McCausland found his way over the river below the McKinney-Worthington ford, roughly a mile past the Georgetown Pike bridge, and struck at Wallace's left flank. The uneven ground concealed from McCausland's men that four veteran regiments under Ricketts had already positioned themselves behind a fence running between the Worthington and Thomas properties. As a result, a single Union volley shattered the front of McCausland's advance and threw the rest of his force into disorder. He regrouped and tried once more, yet failed to crack the Federal line and pulled back.

Since the cavalry alone could not dislodge the Union flank, Early called on Maj. Gen. John B. Gordon's infantry to cross the ford and join the assault. Gordon struck with three brigades in a coordinated push against both flanks and the center of Ricketts's position. The Union right gave way under this pressure, opening the line to flanking fire from the Confederates. At the same time, Ramseur's continued assault on the center, combined with Confederate artillery firing from across the river, prevented Wallace from sending reinforcements to Ricketts. With his position no longer tenable, Wallace ordered his men to fall back toward Baltimore, leaving Tyler's brigade with a small detachment to defend the stone bridge. Clendenin's cavalry took up a position five miles south along the Georgetown Pike to cover the retreat. Around 6 p.m., Rodes's troops made a last attempt to seize the stone bridge, though by then most of the Union soldiers had already begun their march toward Baltimore. By nightfall, Wallace's outnumbered command had repelled five separate assaults before finally yielding the field.

Aftermath

As afternoon gave way to evening on July 9, Federal troops pulled back toward Baltimore, having suffered casualties exceeding 1,294 men killed, wounded, or taken prisoner. This marked the farthest north a Confederate army would ever claim victory during the conflict. Early's men held the ground at Monocacy that day, though the price included somewhere between 700 and 1,000 Confederate soldiers killed or wounded, along with a full day lost from their march schedule.

In a telegram to Halleck, Wallace explained that his men had held out until five in the afternoon before a Confederate force he judged to number 20,000 finally broke through and pushed them back. Despite the retreat, the mission had succeeded in one crucial respect: Early's push toward the capital had been set back by an entire day because of the stand made at Monocacy Junction.

Once word of the retreat reached him, Grant used his authority as general-in-chief to replace Wallace with Maj. Gen. E. O. C. Ord as commander of those troops. Wallace himself remained unaware of this change until July 11, by which time his men had already reached Baltimore. Even so, he continued overseeing administrative duties for the Middle Department. Once officials in Washington learned how much Wallace and his soldiers had done to protect the capital, opinion shifted, and on July 28 he was returned to full command of both the VIII Corps and the Middle Department.

With Wallace's forces withdrawn to Baltimore, nothing stood between the Confederates and Washington. The march toward the capital began on July 10. By midday on Monday the eleventh, Early had reached Fort Stevens, close enough to make out the Capitol dome through his field glasses. Heat and the strain of marching had left many of his soldiers straggling far behind, so rather than attack immediately, he chose to wait until the twelfth. Skirmishing and artillery fire broke out on the eleventh even before the main assault, but by then Early's opportunity had slipped away. The VI Corps, sent ahead by Grant, had already taken up defensive positions in the city. Early's infantry, now down to roughly 8,000 men fit for duty, lacked the strength to press forward. By July 14 his army had recrossed the Potomac at White's Ferry back into Virginia.

Elisha Hunt Rhodes of the 2nd Rhode Island Volunteers described the scene on July 12: his unit advanced in battle formation into a peach orchard before Fort Stevens, where fighting grew intense. He noted that with the President and a number of ladies watching, every soldier fought harder than usual, and without their reinforcement the defenders already in the forts might well have been overrun. He added that Jubal Early had lost his chance by not attacking earlier that morning.

What Early lost at Monocacy was time, a full day's march, and with it any real chance of seizing Washington. Turned away from the capital, his troops withdrew into Virginia, closing out the final Confederate attempt to bring major fighting north of the border. Federal units in the region tried to run him down afterward, but a lack of unified command let him escape. Grant's answer was to create the Middle Military Division, uniting command over Maryland, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, the District of Columbia, and the Shenandoah Valley so that operations against Confederate forces there could be better coordinated.

In his own account of the 1864 campaign, Early addressed claims made in Northern newspapers, noting that some had suggested he might have taken Washington sometime between Saturday and Monday. He countered that on Saturday he had been engaged at Monocacy, thirty five miles away, against a force he could not afford to leave unchallenged behind him. Only after dealing with that force, moving as fast as circumstances allowed, did he reach the fortifications outside the city, and even then not until past noon on Monday, with his men worn out from the effort.

Grant later reflected in his memoirs on what Wallace's stand at Monocacy had achieved. He wrote that had Early arrived just one day sooner, he might have taken the capital before reinforcements Grant had dispatched could arrive. Grant credited Wallace's loss on the battlefield with providing a greater service to the cause than many commanders manage to achieve even through outright victory with a comparable number of troops.

Toward the end of July, Wallace arranged for the d