It is not at all far-fetched to postulate that Early’s move into the Valley and his sojourn into Maryland actually prevented Grant in June or July 1864 from doing one of two things that could have broken Lee’s back: mounting an all-out assault on Richmond or drawing Lee out of his dug-in position to fight on Grant’s terms. Grant, with Lincoln’s backing, was ready to take some sort of decisive action that he strongly believed would hasten the end of the war.

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Before he learned of Early’s move into the Shenandoah and Maryland, Grant “had been planning some important offensive operations in front of Richmond,” his aide-de-camp, Lt. Col. Horace Porter, wrote in his war memoir. But Early’s move into Maryland caused the Union commander “to postpone these and turn his chief attention to Early.”

Grant, Lincoln said in a June 16 speech at the Philadelphia Sanitary Fair, is “in a position from whence he will never be dislodged until Richmond is taken.” Grant “is reported to have said,” Lincoln recounted, “‘I am going through on this line if it takes all summer….’”

Grant himself had boasted on July 5, the day that Early’s troops crossed the Potomac into Maryland, that he had “the bulk of the Rebel Army” besieged in Richmond and “conscious that they cannot stand a single battle outside their fortifications with the Armies confronting them.”

The “last man in the Confederacy is now in the Army,” Grant speculated in a letter written that same day to a friend from his hometown of Galena, Ill., steamboat magnate J. Russell Jones. “They are becoming discouraged, their men deserting, dying and being killed and captured every day. We [lose men, too] but can replace our losses.”

In a telegram Grant wrote to Halleck from City Point four days later, the same day Early fought Wallace at Monocacy, Grant spoke of his desire to complete his assembly of “a large force” outside Richmond by the 20th of that month. The object: to mount “aggressive operations” against Petersburg. But, Grant said, he would be willing to postpone said operations if “the rebel force now North can be captured or destroyed.”

That is essentially what happened. Lee’s bold move in sending Early to the Shenandoah Valley forced Grant to part with the VI and XIX corps—and to put off whatever “aggressive operation” he had envisioned—perhaps a final assault that might have crushed Lee’s army and ended the Civil War sometime in the summer or fall of 1864. At the very least, without Lee’s risky strategic move, chances are that it would not have taken Grant until April 1865 to win the war.

Lee’s “strategy in sending Early down the Shenandoah prolonged the defence of Richmond for nine months,” Thomas L. Livermore, a staff officer for Union Maj. Gen. Andrew Humphreys, wrote after the war. Lee’s move, Livermore said, “led Grant to reduce his force so much that he could not force a conclusion.”

Livermore calculated that the number of able-bodied Union troops arrayed outside Richmond and Petersburg dropped from 137,454 on June 30 to 93,542 on July 31, and ultimately to just 69,206 by August 31. The precipitous fall-off was due to the departure of the VI Corps to Washington, but also to casualties, illness and the fact that many Union soldiers simply went home when their terms of enlistment ended.

Those factors reduced the number of Grant’s troops around Richmond and Petersburg “by 25 percent in August,” Livermore said, a number that “remained for a long time below the danger line for a besieging force.”

The fight at Monocacy has come to be known as “the battle that saved Washington.” It was. It also very possibly was the event that played the most pivotal role in the series of actions that began with Lee’s June 12, 1864, order to send Early to the Valley, and ended a month later when Early escaped back into Virginia. That series prolonged the course of the Civil War by as many as nine long months, but it also ended with Washington, D.C., a capital city that was militarily and politically vulnerable, safe in Northern hands and the Union war effort spared from a potential disaster.

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