Army Chief of Staff Henry "Old Brains" Halleck had sent Barnard's aide-de-camp, Lt. Col. Barton Alexander, to inspect the forts along the Potomac River on July 5—the day Early's men had crossed that same river into Maryland some 60 miles north, from Shepherdstown in West Virginia.

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Alexander, an engineer, found one lieutenant and 63 Veteran Reserve Corps men defending Washington at Chain Bridge, the northernmost entry point over the Potomac into the city. Only one man, a Private Spink of the 147th Ohio National Guard, manned the artillery batteries on the Washington side of the bridge.

Acting Ordnance Sergeant Spink, Alexander reported, "knows nothing about ordnance or artillery. In fact, no one at the bridge knows how to load the guns." Spink's job, he said, was cleaning the guns, "airing" the ammunition and sweeping the platform.

New York Herald war correspondent Sylvanus Cadwallader, who arrived in Washington on July 11 and toured the defenses, had a similar assessment. "The armament was insufficient, the ordnance supplies limited, and all of [the forts] were so weakly manned as to make any protracted resistance impossible," he wrote in his memoir.

n the morning of July 10, Early roused his troops from farms at Monocacy Junction, four miles south of Frederick, Md. Early had defeated Union Maj. Gen. Lew Wallace the day before at Monocacy, and on blisteringly hot July 11, Early led his men along the Georgetown Pike (now Route 355) on a straight line toward Washington.

The going was slow because of the punishing heat and the exhaustion the men felt from having been on the march since June 13—after Lee had ordered Early to go to the Shenandoah

Valley, boot out the Union troops, move into Maryland and "threaten" Washington. Early bivouacked July 10 in and around the cities of Rockville and Gaithersburg, about 10 miles outside Washington. When word arrived that Early had defeated Wallace just 45 miles west and was heading for the nation's capital, Union commanders scrambled to put together a force of volunteers to defend the city as panic gripped its inhabitants. Halleck urgently called for more volunteers.

"We are greatly in need of privates," Halleck said. "Any one volunteering in that capacity will be thankfully received."

On the night of July 10, "the motliest crowd of soldiers I ever saw," one soldier recalled, was organized primarily to man Forts Reno and Stevens, the two largest forts guarding the northwest quadrant of the city. The crew included, 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 from Rockville and Gaithersburg. Early himself arrived at the gates of Fort Stevens shortly after noon and found the defenses of Washington were "but feebly manned."

But Grant was reluctant to send troops away from Richmond and Petersburg. He had not given in until the late afternoon of July 9, after word came of the defeat at Monocacy.

At 8:45 p.m. on July 9, Halleck had ordered two divisions of the VI Corps (the rest had gone to Monocacy) to get to Washington from outside Richmond. The ships carrying the men made it to the old 6th Street Wharf in Washington at noon on the 11th—just as Early was first contemplating Fort Stevens and an attack on the "feebly manned" fort and city.

But 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 believed his men were ready, it was too late. The VI Corps men had arrived at Fort Stevens, rendering any prospect of a successful assault remote at best.

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