Beginning on July 14, 1864, the day after he crossed back into Virginia, and to his dying day 30 years later, Early considered his four-week campaign a great success. He also maintained that the reason he did not invade Washington on July 11 was because his men were near exhaustion and that he didn’t invade on July 12 because he would have faced a force of numerically superior veteran Union troops, protected by forts and entrenchments.

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Early laid out his main points for the first time in the after-action report he sent to Lee on July 14. First, he said, he didn’t hesitate when he arrived at the outskirts of Fort Stevens on July 11 because he had mistaken the ill-equipped troops he saw for VI Corps men, but rather because his men were not physically capable of attacking at that time. Second, that same day he saw for himself that the Washington defenses were nearly impregnable. The fortifications, he reported, “we found to be very strong and constructed very scientifically.” Third, despite points one and two, Early decided to attack on Tuesday morning, July 12, but changed his mind only at the last minute when he saw that the VI Corps troops had indeed arrived at the Washington forts. After “consultation with my division commanders, I became satisfied that the assault, even if successful, would be attended with such great sacrifice as would ensure the destruction of my whole force,” he said. “If unsuccessful,” Early continued, it would have “resulted in the loss of life of the whole force.” Early argued that sort of loss “would have had such a depressing effect upon the country, and would so encourage the enemy as to amount to a very serious, if not fatal, disaster to our cause.”

Adding up all those factors, Early theorized, “will cause the intelligent reader to wonder, not why I failed to take Washington, but why I had the audacity to approach it as I did, with the small force under my command.”

Early repeated that argument for decades in countless newspaper and magazine articles, speeches, letters to newspaper editors and in his two war memoirs, A Memoir of the Last Year of the War for Independence in the Confederate States of America and Autobiographical Sketch and Narrative of the War Between the States. The latter book, which Early published in 1866, was the first Civil War memoir written by one of the war’s prominent figures.

Early added a new wrinkle to the story in a letter to the editor that appeared in the December 14, 1874, edition of the Richmond Sentinel: Lee did not ask him to invade Washington. Lee, Early said, “did not expect that I would be able to capture Washington with my small force; his orders were simply to threaten the city.”

The object of his entire four-week campaign, Early said, was not to invade Washington but to influence Grant to send significant numbers of troops away from Richmond and Petersburg. Lee, he said, “would have been gratified if I could have taken Washington, but when I suggested to him I would take it if I could, he remarked that it would hardly be possible to do so….”

Lee, in fact, did stress from the beginning that getting Grant to move troops out of Richmond—along with pushing Hunter out of the Valley—was his main goal on June 13 when he sent Early to Lynchburg. It “was hoped,” Lee wrote to Secretary of War James A. Seddon on July 19, “that by threatening Washington and Baltimore Genl Grant would be compelled either to weaken himself so much for their protection as to afford us an opportunity to attack him, or that he might be induced to attack us.”

Lee also listed several “collateral results” of Early’s mission, primarily “obtaining military stores and supplies.” Lee’s overall assessment of Early’s performance was positive. So “far as the movement was intended to relieve our territory in that section of the enemy, it has up to the present time been successful,” he told Seddon.

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