The Big Questions

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Strong differences of opinion remain about the momentous questions and decisions involved in Early’s great rebel raid. Did Wallace’s stand at Monocacy save Washington by delaying Early just long enough for Grant to send experienced troops to stop the invasion, and what effect did sending those troops have on Grant’s plans for the summer of 1864? The most contentious question has been whether Early could have—and should have—invaded Washington. Debate also continues about the success of Early’s campaign, and the overriding question of what impact the invasion of Maryland, Wallace’s stand at Monocacy and the Confederates’ march on Washington had on the course of the Civil War—and on American history.

What can be said with certainty is that Lee forced Grant to part with the VI and XIX corps, the latter of which had been on its way to Richmond from Louisiana before Grant reluctantly ordered it to go straight to Washington. There is no doubt that moving all those troops away from Richmond in the first week of July altered Grant’s strategic timetable for a final push to end the war. But the other big questions remain.

Some observers, primarily but not exclusively Northerners, believed at the time that Washington was there for the taking when Early arrived at Fort Stevens at midday on the 11th. Lieutenant Colonel Aldace Walker of the VI Corps’ 1st Vermont Heavy Artillery Regiment (formerly the 11th Vermont Infantry) was part of the Union contingent that eventually defended the fort. He wrote in his 1869 memoir that he had “little doubt” that Early “might have taken [Washington] on either of the two days he spent in its neighborhood before” the VI Corps’ arrival from Petersburg.

Sylvanus Cadwallader, a Union war correspondent who was in Washington on July 11 and 12, agreed. “I have always wondered at Early’s inaction throughout the day [of Monday, July 11], and never had any sufficient explanation of his reasons,” he wrote in his 1896 war memoir. “Our lines in his front could have been carried at any point, with the loss of a few hundred men.”

Early “passed the night of the 10th within five miles of Washington,” Treasury official Lucius Chittenden wrote in his memoir. “Presumptively, he could have attacked the next morning, when a considerable portion of his force was at Silver Spring and above Georgetown, within two miles of the defences.” Had Early attacked on the morning of July 11, Chittenden postulated, he “would have met with no resistance expect from the raw and undisciplined forces, which, in the opinion of General Grant, and it was supposed of General Lee also, would have been altogether inadequate to its defence.”

Union Brig. Gen. Nelson A. Miles, who commanded a brigade at Petersburg while Early was invading Maryland and would eventually become a lieutenant general in the U.S. Army after the war, believed that Early squandered a golden opportunity on July 11. “Had Stonewall Jackson been in command of that force,” Miles wrote in his 1911 memoir, “the result would undoubtedly have been very serious, if not disastrous, to the Union cause.”

Presidential secretaries John Nicolay and John Hay, in their famed biography of Lincoln, accused Early of making “a serious error” on July 11 “in regard to the troops in front of him.” Early “always looked at his own force through the wrong end of his field-glass,” the authors wrote. That caused Early to pause, they said, and make “the most careful preparation.” But “before the preparations were completed, what he had imagined had become true: Wright with his two magnificent divisions had landed at the wharf, being received by President Lincoln in person amid a tumult of joyous cheering….”

Horace Greeley, the passionately anti-slavery, pro-Union editor of the New York Tribune, also believed Early could have “taken the city,” but only if he had “rushed upon Washington by forced marches from the Monocacy, and at once assaulted with desperate energy” on July 10. Even in that case, the mercurial editor wrote two years after the war, Early “might have lost half his army.”

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