To the Gates of the Capital

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The following morning, July 10, Early’s forces began to move out along the Georgetown Pike on a straight line toward Washington. The going was slow because of the punishing heat and the exhaustion the men still felt from the march through the Valley and the hard fighting at Monocacy. Early spent that night bivouacking in and around the cities of Rockville and Gaithersburg, about 10 miles outside Washington.

Union commanders scrambled to put together a force of volunteers to defend the city as panic continued to grip its inhabitants. Army Chief of Staff Henry “Old Brains” Halleck urgently put out the word for more volunteers. “We are greatly in need of privates,” Halleck said. “Any one volunteering in that capacity will be thankfully received.”

Unlikely prospective privates immediately offered their services. On the night of July 10, “the motliest crowd of soldiers I ever saw,” as one soldier observed, was organized primarily to man Forts Reno and Stevens, the two largest forts guarding the northwest quadrant of the city. The motley crew consisted of, among others, quartermaster employees, staffers from the War, Navy and State departments and convalescents from military hospitals. Or, in the words of another Union soldier, a collection of “counter jumpers, clerks in the War Office, hospital rats and stragglers.”

At 6:20 the next morning, Early’s men began moving out from Rockville and Gaithersburg. When they were within a few miles of the capital, they exchanged fire with Union pickets. The Confederates then marched to Silver Spring, just outside the city. Early himself arrived a short time after noon and reported that the defenses of Washington were “but feebly manned.”

At 8:45 p.m. on July 9, just a few hours after Wallace’s defeat at Monocacy, Halleck had relayed an order from Grant to Maj. Gen. Horatio Wright, the 44-year-old commander of the Army of the Potomac’s VI Corps, outside Richmond. The order instructed him to bring the remaining two divisions of his corps “at once” to City Point, get them into troop transport ships and report to Halleck as soon as they arrived in Washington. The ships made it to the old Sixth Street Wharf in Washington at noon on the 11th—just as Early was contemplating Fort Stevens for the first time and pondering an attack on the “feebly manned” post and city.

But Early held back. The heat and long march had taken its toll on his men. “When we reached the right of the enemy’s fortifications” at Fort Stevens, Early informed Lee three days later, “the men were almost completely exhausted and not in a condition to make an attack.” By the time Early felt his men were ready, it was too late. Union VI Corps men had been rushed into place at Fort Stevens, rendering any prospect of a successful assault remote at best.

So Early decided not to invade Washington, and the Point Lookout raid was called off. Early, however, stuck around the capital for two days to wreak other kinds of havoc. He and his men engaged Union forces outside Fort Stevens and Fort Reno in 48 intermittent hours of skirmishing that resulted in some 300 Union casualties and an equal, if not larger, number on the Confederate side.

Lincoln made brief appearances on July 11 and 12 to see for himself what was happening at Fort Stevens. On the 12th, while Lincoln was standing on the fort’s parapet, a Union officer next to him was shot by a Confederate sharpshooter firing from a tree on what is now the grounds of the Walter Reed Army Hospital. That marked the first—and only—time in American history that a sitting U.S. president came under hostile fire in a military engagement.

Early on Wednesday morning, July 13, Early took his troops back into Virginia. The Union forces did not give chase. The “great rebel raid,” New York Times correspondent William Swinton reported on the front page of the newspaper’s July 15 editions, “is over.” It “abruptly ends the boldest, and probably the most successful of all the rebel raids.”

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