Early’s lieutenant, Maj. Gen. Stephen Dodson Ramseur, also believed an assault would have been costly. “Natural obstacles alone prevented our taking Washington,” he wrote on July 15. “The heat & dust was so great that our men could not possibly march further. Time was thus given the Enemy to get a sufficient force into his works to prevent our capturing them.” According to Ramseur, by the morning of July 12, the Union had “more men behind the strongest built works I ever saw than we had in front of them.”

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The “trip into [Maryland] was a success,” Ramseur wrote to his wife a week later. He noted that the Richmond newspapers were “‘pitching into’ Gen’l Early for not taking Washington.” But he defended his commander by arguing that if Early “had attempted it, he would have been repulsed with great loss, and then these same wiseacres would have condemned him for recklessness.”

Major Jedediah Hotchkiss, the famed topographical engineer on Early’s staff, echoed Ramseur’s words in a letter he wrote to his wife on July 15. On “Monday [July 11] we went up to the fortifications, & within 6 miles of the President’s House, but our Men were so much exhausted by the intense heat (I have never experienced warmer weather) that we could not go on to the assault of the works that morning….”

A Great Success?

Journalist and Lincoln confidant Noah Brooks characterized Early’s campaign as a strategic success. If “the invasion of Maryland was designed to create a diversion from Grant’s army, then in front of Richmond, that end was successful,” Brooks wrote in 1895. “And while a great force of effective men was kept at bay within the defenses of Washington, the bulk of Early’s army was busy sweeping up all available plunder, and sending it southward across the Potomac.”

Brooks went on to say that the news of Early’s invasion also had a significant impact on Northern morale. “In the country at large,” he said, “the effect of this demonstration was somewhat depressing. The capital had been threatened; the President’s safety had been imperiled; only a miracle had saved treasures, records, and archives….”

Journalist and author Edward A. Pollard, a Southern partisan, wrote in 1866 that “the results” of Early’s mission to Maryland “fell below public expectation [in] the South, where again had been indulged the fond imagination of the capture of Washington.” But, Pollard said, “the movement was, on the whole, a success.” Pollard claimed the main reason was because Grant “had been weakened, and the heavy weight upon Gen. Lee’s shoulders lightened.”

Alfred Roe, a Union private who as a POW had witnessed the fighting outside Fort Stevens, wrote in 1890 that Early “personally told me that he found, on facing Fort Stevens, that the purpose for which he was sent by Lee had been subserved; i.e, some troops, he knew not how many, had been drawn from Petersburg, and this very arrival, while it blocked his entrances, lessened Lee’s danger.”

Although Grant did not address the success or failure of Early’s mission in his memoirs, he did speak of “the gravity of the situation” in Washington on July 10 as Early “started on his march to the capital of the Nation.” Grant said he came to believe that Washington was only vulnerable on July 10 before Early had arrived, but not on July 11 and 12. “If Early had been but one day earlier,” Grant said, “he might have entered the capital before the arrival of the reinforcements I had sent.”

Early’s Version

Early himself sounded off about his reasons for not pushing into Washington soon after the affair ended. His version of his mission, which he continued to expound throughout his long life, in the main agreed with those who argued that an attack on July 11 or 12 would have been foolhardy.

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