Saving Washington: Lew Wallace and the Battle of Monocacy

Rebel Lieutenant General Jubal “Old Jube” Early found himself in an enviable position; he was just a few days’ march from what could be one of the most stunning triumphs of the Civil War. In the early summer of 1864, while Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant were stuck in trench warfare around Petersburg, Virginia, Early and his Army of the Valley had slipped away from the siege and moved into the Shenandoah Valley, successfully cleared it of two Union armies, exacted $220,000 in ransom from northern cities, and even burned the home of the federal postmaster general. The way was now tantalizingly clear to the heart of the Yankees: Washington, D.C.

The only thing standing between Early’s Confederate veterans—whose numbers ranged in panicky estimates from 14,000 all to way to 28,000—and the Union capital were a handful of novice troops. Commanding these untried soldiers was an officer who had been vilified for his role in the Union near-defeat at the bloody Battle of Shiloh two years before: Major General Lew Wallace of Indiana.

Wallace, commanding the Eighth Army Corps and the Middle Department based in Baltimore—whose job it was to train soldiers, not lead them into battle—knew that a sizable rebel force was coming his way. Without any orders from his superiors, Wallace decided to move his small force from Baltimore to the Monocacy River near the town of Frederick, just sixty miles from Washington. It was there on July 9, 1864, that Early and Wallace’s forces met. Although the northern troops repulsed five separate rebel charges, they were defeated. However, Wallace and his men did delay Early’s march on the capital by one day—enough time for the city to prepare to meet the Confederate threat. Giving orders to collect the bodies of the dead in a burial ground on the battlefield, Wallace proposed a fitting memorial for those who fell: “These men died to save the National Capital, and they did save it.”

Who was this man who saved the Union from disaster? A yearning for martial glory had long been a part of Wallace’s life. The son of David Wallace, the sixth governor of Indiana, Lew Wallace, as a child growing up in Brookville, had little interest in school; he even ran away from home at one point to serve in the Texas navy during the Texans’ struggle for independence from Mexico. Although he studied for a career as an attorney in his father’s Indianapolis law office, Wallace failed to pass the bar examination in 1846. (Later in life he told his wife that the practice of law was “the most detestable of human occupations.”) The nineteen-year-old Wallace volunteered for service in the army during the Mexican War. He was elected second lieutenant in the First Regiment, Indiana Volunteers, but saw no battle action.

Upon his return from the war, Wallace was admitted to the bar in 1849 and opened a law practice in Covington, where he served two terms as prosecuting attorney. He married Susan Elston on May 6, 1852, and the couple moved to Crawfordsville in 1853, where Wallace was elected to the state senate as a Democrat in 1856. Also that year he organized a military group called the Montgomery Guards. After learning about the French Algerian Zouaves, Wallace converted his company to their system, emulating their colorful uniforms, theatrical drill, and commando tactics.

  

Wallace was ready when hostilities commenced between the North and South with the firing on Fort Sumter on April 13, 1861. In his autobiography, Wallace said he believed that the “conflict would be long and great, but that it would also be crowded with opportunities for distinction not in the least inconsistent with patriotism.” The day after the war’s outbreak, Wallace visited the offices of Indiana governor Oliver P. Morton, who asked him to become the state’s adjutant general. Wallace agreed and became responsible for organizing the Hoosier State’s quota of six regiments (4,683 men) for the Union cause.

  

Just four days after President Abraham Lincoln’s call for six regiments from Indiana, Wallace had raised more than twice the number needed. These regiments numbered from the Sixth through the Eleventh in honor of the five Indiana regiments organized during the Mexican War. With his task complete, Wallace resigned from his adjutant general post and received command of the Eleventh Indiana Volunteer Infantry Regiment as its colonel.

  

Wallace’s self-proclaimed “love of a military life” next surfaced in a dramatic way. Before leaving Indianapolis for the war, Wallace had his men march to the Indiana Statehouse, where he made them kneel and swear an oath to avenge their comrades whom Wallace believed had been unjustly accused of cowardice by General Zachary Taylor at the Battle of Buena Vista in the Mexican War. The stirring scene and oath of “Remember Buena Vista!” caught the state’s and the nation’s fancy. The influential magazine Harper’s Weekly produced a full-page illustration of the scene for its readers.

  

The Eleventh Indiana was quick to see battle. In June 1861 Wallace and his men surprised Confederate forces in Romney, Virginia, driving them from the town—an operation called “a splendid dash” by President Lincoln. Moving back to the western theater of the war, the regiment participated in the successful campaigns under Grant’s leadership to capture Fort Henry and Fort Donelson. In March 1862, at thirty-four years of age, Wallace received promotion to major general—the youngest person to hold that rank in the Union army—and given command of a division. The road to further honor and glory seemed clear. All that changed, however, at the Battle of Shiloh.

  

On the morning of April 6, 1862, rebel troops under General Albert Sidney Johnston surprised Grant’s army, which was camped at Shiloh Church, just west of the Tennessee River, about twenty miles north of Cornith, Mississippi, and pushed their blue-coated foes all the way to the river’s banks. Several miles to the north of the battlefield, Wallace received what were, to him, unclear orders from Grant. Wallace took his command on a confusing march (at one point even finding himself in the rear of the Confederate army) that essentially put his force out of action on the battle’s first day.

  

Wallace and his men, combined with reinforcements brought by Major General Don Carlos Buell, did join other Union soldiers to drive the Confederates from the field on the second day, but at an enormous cost. Of the 100,000 men who participated in the fight, 25,000 were killed or wounded, a number that exceeded all of the United States’ combat casualties in its previous wars. Indiana soldiers made up almost one tenth of the 13,000 Union losses. Wallace’s division suffered fewer than 300 casualties. After Shiloh, General Henry Halleck took to the field himself, demoting Grant to second in command.

  

Debate still rages today about Wallace’s action at the battle. The best analysis, to me, came from the Hoosier’s former commanding officer, Grant, who theorized that Wallace took the meandering route he did to “come around on the flank or the rear of the enemy, and thus perform an act of heroism that would redound to the credit of his command, as well as to the benefit of his country.” At the time, however, Wallace came in for heavy criticism for his tardiness and was eventually stripped of his command. He was informed of his removal by Governor Morton while on leave back home in Indiana. “Somebody in the dark gave me a push,” Wallace said later, “and I fell, and fell so far that I could almost see bottom.” Wallace, who regarded Halleck—a West Point graduate who was wary of “political” soldiers like Wallace—as being responsible for his removal, returned to his Crawfordsville home to await whatever fate had in store for him.       

  

Wallace was not completely “on the shelf” after the horror of Shiloh. In late summer 1862 he was called back into action to help bolster Union defenses around Cincinnati to help thwart an expected Confederate attack. The “turning point,” as Wallace termed it, in the re-establishment of his military career occurred on March 12, 1864, when he received orders from the War Department to take command of the Eighth Army Corps, and of the Middle Department, headquartered in Baltimore. “It was President Lincoln’s own suggestion—good enough in itself,” Wallace wrote of his new assignment in his autobiography. “Then, when I heard that General Halleck had called upon the President, and in person protested against the assignment, there was an added sweetness to it so strong that my disappointment in not being sent to the field was at once and most agreeably allayed.” Writing Major General William Tecumseh Sherman, Halleck lamented the decision to appoint Wallace, saying that it seemed “but little better than murder to give such important commands to such men, yet is seems impossible to prevent it.”

  

Shortly after receiving his orders, Wallace traveled to Washington to meet with Lincoln about his new duties. The president, Wallace recalled later, laid his large hand upon his shoulder and told him, “I believed it right to give you a chance, Wallace.” At the meeting’s conclusion, Lincoln called the Hoosier general back into the room and noted that he had almost forgotten there was an election approaching in Maryland, “but don’t you forget it.”

  

The election, which involved a constitutional amendment to outlaw slavery, was also the subject of Wallace’s subsequent meeting with Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. “It is kindness,” Wallace quoted Stanton, “saying it [the election] will be your first trial.” Stanton also informed Wallace that the president favored abolition, but warned him against the appearance of using the bayonet to sway voters.

  

Wallace swung into action. Petitioned by voting precincts to send troops to police the polls, the new commander met with Maryland governor Augustus Bradford. The two came up with a plan whereby Wallace would send the petitions for troops to Bradford, who would then make a written request for the soldiers to Wallace. Troops were eventually dispatched to every doubtful precinct in Maryland and produced the needed results. Wallace noted that in many instances, “the sight of the ‘blue-coated hirelings’ a mile away, so enraged the Secessionists they refused to go to the polls. In due time, of course, the convention was held, and slavery abolished by formal amendment of the constitution.” Wallace’s skills in handling his department, however, would soon be put to a sterner test.

  

In June 1864, with his forces besieged by Grant outside of Richmond, Lee concocted a daring plan and entrusted its performance to the hard-charging, sometimes foul-mouthed Early, a veteran of campaigns from First Bull Run through The Wilderness. In his memoirs, Early said that Lee ordered his forces into the Shenandoah Valley “to strike [Union General’s David] Hunter’s force in the rear and, if possible, destroy it; then to move down the valley, cross the Potomoc near Leesburg . . . or at or above Harper’s Ferry, as I might find most practicable, and threaten Washington city.”

Early and his men set out on their mission on June 13, 1864. The Confederate raid would, Lee hoped, accomplish two things. One, the raid might alarm officials in Washington enough so that they would order troops northward to defend the city, weakening Grant’s forces enough to give Lee’s army an opportunity to drive them from the rebel capital. Or, Lee reasoned, the raid might encourage Grant into striking first, perhaps another bloody assault like the one at Cold Harbor, that would reduce his strength enough for the South to strike back. There seemed to be no expectation on Lee’s part that Early would, in fact, enter Washington. Lee’s orders to Early were merely to threaten the city, and when Early suggested to him the idea of capturing the city, Lee said such a thing would be impossible. Lee was almost proven wrong.

  

By July 1 Early’s troops had chased two Union armies—one the aforementioned Hunter and the other commanded by Major General Franz Sigel—out of the Shenandoah Valley. He also plundered Federal stores at Harper’s Ferry, extracted $20,000 in ransom from Hagerstown residents, and $200,000 from the town of Frederick. The road to Washington seemed clear.

  

The Union’s reaction to this audacious Confederate effort was confused at best; Grant even telegraphed Halleck on July Third that Early’s corps was still near Richmond. One person who did suspect what was happening was Wallace. A day before Grant’s message to Halleck in Washington, Wallace had met with John Garrett, president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, at the general’s headquarters in Baltimore. Garrett’s railroad agents at Cumberland and Harper’s Ferry reported the appearance or rebel forces.

  

Without any orders from Washington, and without at first informing his superiors, Wallace acted. He did so even though he knew that his enemies, particularly General Halleck, might use any failure on his part as an excuse to be rid of him once and for all. In asking himself what the Confederates’ objective could be, Wallace could come up with only one to justify the risks involved—Washington. On the night of July 4 he and an aide took a train to Monocacy Junction (also called Frederick Junction) to survey the lay of the land. At this point the Georgetown Pike to Washington and the National Road to Baltimore both crossed the Monocacy River, as did the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. In deciding whether or not to make his stand at Monocacy, Wallace ran over in his mind all of the consequences the fall of the Union capital might entail. To him, “they grouped themselves into a kind of horrible schedule,” which included the following:

At the navy-yard there were ships making and repairing, which, with the yard itself, would be given over to flames.

In the treasury department there were millions of bonds printed, and other millions signed and ready for issuance—how many millions I did not know.

There were storehouses in the city filled with property of all kinds, medical, ordnance, commissary, quartermaster, the accumulation of years, without which the war must halt, if not stop for good an all.

Then I thought of the city, the library, the beautiful capital, all under menace, . . . of Louis Napoleon and Gladstone hastening to recognize the Confederacy as a nation.

There was one thought that hardened Wallace’s resolve to hold his ground against any attack. It was, he said, “an apparition of President Lincoln, cloaked and hooded, stealing like a malefactor from the back door of the White House just as some gray-garbed Confederate brigadier burst in the front door.” In deciding to stay and meet the foe with his “raw and untried” 2,300-man force, Wallace hoped that he would be able to make the enemy disclose the size of his force and his intended objective. If it was Washington as Wallace feared, the Union general wanted to delay the rebels enough to give Grant the time to send troops north to reinforce the city.

  

Early’s and Wallace’s forces first met on July Seventh just outside of Frederick. This initial skirmish went to Wallace, as the Confederates withdrew near nightfall. The Union commander’s message to Halleck in Washington was optimistic, stating that the rebels “were handsomely repulsed.” Things seemed to be going Wallace’s way when, that night, his forces were bolstered by veteran soldiers of the Third Division of the Sixth Corps under Brigadier General James Ricketts, which had been sent north by Grant. By the night of July Eighth, however, Wallace pulled his men out of Frederick and made his stand east of the Monocacy River, positioning themselves at both turnpike bridges, the railroad bridge, and several fords.

  

On the morning of July 9, the main body of Early’s force, which doubled Wallace’s numbers, hurled itself at the federal troops. The battle raged on for nearly six hours; Union troops withstood numerous attacks before retreating toward Baltimore. The fierce fighting, and heroic resistance offered by the Union troops, is best highlighted from the fact that two of them—Corporal Alexander Scott and First Lieutenant George E. Davis—both from the Tenth Regiment of Vermont Volunteers, were award the Medal of Honor for their actions at Monocacy. The federals lost ninety-eight killed, 594 wounded, and 1,188 missing in the battle. Early estimated his killed and wounded at 600 to 900 men. Wallace reported to Halleck that he was “retreating with a foot-sore, battered, and half-demoralized column”—not a report to inspire the confidence of his superiors.

  

Despite the pessimistic tone of Wallace’s battle report, he and his men had accomplished their task—they had delayed Early’s march on Washington by one full day. Early resumed his march to the city on July 10 and reached the outskirts of the city the next day. He was too late; Grant had sent enough men north to beat back the Confederates. Even though he did attempt an attack on the city on July 12, Early knew he was too late. He began the trek back South, but kept his bravado intact, telling Major Kyd Douglas, “Major, we haven’t taken Washington, but we’ve scared Abe Lincoln like hell!”

  

In his memoirs Early blamed earlier battle losses for his decision not to engage in a full-scale attack on the capital. He noted that fighting at Harper’s Ferry, Maryland Heights, and Monocacy had reduced his infantry forces to eight thousand in number. Those troops left were “greatly exhausted by the last two days’ marching, some having fallen by sunstroke, and not more than one-third of my force could have been carried into action.” The Confederate army retreated across the Potomac River at White’s Ford and returned to Virginia.

  

Wallace initially received little credit for his actions in delaying Early’s march on the capital. In fact, on July 11 he was relieved of command of the Middle Department by Major General E. O. C. Ord. That same day, an obviously upset Wallace wired Secretary Stanton: “Does General Ord report to me, or am I to understand that he relieves me from command of the Department. If so, what am I to do?”

The tide soon turned on Wallace’s behalf as officials realized his daring stand at Monocacy had saved the capital from disaster. In a July 24 letter to his friend B. J. Lossing, Wallace reported that Stanton had complimented him on the Battle of Monocacy, saying it was “timely, well-delivered, well-managed, and saved Washington. The stories about my removal are all bosh. On the contrary, you may set me down as on the rise.” Wallace was right; just four days later he received orders from the War Department, under the direction of President Lincoln, to resume command of the Eighth Army Corps and the Middle Department. Writing his brother later that fall, Wallace boasted that he could say what no other general officer in the army could—that a defeat did more for him than all the victories he had been involved in.

  

Wallace’s gallant stand at Monocacy may have faded from people’s memories as his other subsequent accomplishments took center stage. But no less an authority than Grant fully appreciated Wallace’s role on that critical day. Writing about the Battle of Monocacy in his classic memoirs, Grant noted the following: “If Early had been but one day earlier he might have entered the capital before the arrival of the reinforcements I had sent. Whether the delay caused by the battle amounted to a day or not, General Wallace contributed on this occasion, by the defeat of the troops under him, a greater benefit to the cause than often falls to the lot of a commander of an equal force to render by means of a victory.”