On the blistering hot afternoon of July 11, 1864, bold, battle-hardened Lieutenant General Jubal Anderson Early sat astride his horse outside the gates of Fort Stevens in the upper Northwestern fringe of Washington, D.C. The enigmatic 47-year-old Confederate, a veteran of Antietam, Gettysburg, the Wilderness and countless other fights, was aboutto make one of the Civil War’s most portentous decisions: whether or not to order his 10,000 veteran troops to invade the United States capital.

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Almost exactly one month earlier, Early’s commanding general, Robert E. Lee, had made a bold, risky decision of his own. He had ordered Early’s Second Corps to cut itself out of the Army of Northern Virginia, which was hunkered down outside Richmond awaiting the next move by Union Army commander Ulysses S. Grant. The Federals had massed an unprecedented number of troops outside the Confederate capital, the final element in what Grant called his grand campaign to end the war.

In the predawn hours of June 13, Early marched his men out of their Richmond-area encampment and into the Shenandoah Valley. Lee had ordered Early to wreak havoc on Yankee troops in the Valley, then to move north and invade Maryland. Lee envisioned an audacious mission: to free some15,000 Confederate prisoners at the Point Lookout POW camp east of Washington in southern Maryland, and then, if Early believed the conditions were right, to take the war for the first time into President Abraham Lincoln’s front yard. Lee’s agenda also included forcing Grant to release a significant number of troops from the stranglehold he had built around Richmond.

Early enthusiastically followed Lee’s orders. He routed bumbling Maj. Gen. David Hunter at Lynchburg on June 18, then swiftly and stealthily moved his men through the Valley, crossed the Potomac at Shepherdstown, W.Va., on July 5 and slowly began to move east into Maryland. Panic erupted in the streets of Washington—and in Baltimore 35 miles to the north—when word reached the citizens that Early’s troops were heading in their direction. Washington, although ringed by an impressive array of interconnected forts and earthworks, was drastically underdefended in July 1864 because Grant had brought nearly every able-bodied soldier from its defenses down to Richmond and Petersburg to take part in his siege.

The First Hurdle: Monocacy

Early did not want to fight a full-scale battle in Maryland. His goal after crossing the Potomac was to march on Washington, just 50 miles to the southeast, and to free the Confederate prisoners at Point Lookout. Lew Wallace, the Indiana general who had been disgraced at Shiloh and was serving penance as the commander of the Union Middle Department in Baltimore, had other ideas. On his own, without any direction from a clueless War Department and Army high command in Washington, Wallace moved about 2,800 men, most of whom were short-term enlistees from Ohio, early on the morning of July 6 to defensive positions on the east bank of the Monocacy River four miles south of Frederick, Md. Wallace set up his defense at the Monocacy Railroad Junction, a vital crossroads where the National Pike led to Baltimore and the Georgetown Pike to Washington.

At almost the last moment, just before daybreak on Saturday, July 9, a contingent of 3,000 VI Corps troops under Brig. Gen. James B. Ricketts arrived on the scene, having marched from their positions on the outskirts of Richmond to City Point on the James River before taking steamers to Baltimore and trains to Monocacy. What followed a few hours later was a daylong battle in which Early’s numerically superior force of veteran troops defeated Wallace’s cobbled-together contingent.

But Early’s victory at Monocacy came only after hours of intense fighting that left just under 1,300 Union dead, wounded or captured and resulted in 700-800 Confederate casualties, primarily among Maj. Gen. John Brown Gordon’s brigade, which met the bulk of Ricketts’ men in three brutal assaults amid corn and wheat fields on both sides of the river. Late that afternoon Wallace retreated to Baltimore, while Early allowed his men to rest overnight on the battlefield.

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