Monocacy

by B. Franklin Cooling

At Monocacy, Maryland on July 9, 1864, the decisive battle of Robert E. Lee's 1864 offensive against Washington D.C. occurred. There the Union's Lew Wallace fatally delayed Jubal Early's onrushing army and saved Washington from the threat of capture in an election year. Literally a struggle to gain time, Monocacy was one of the most important battles of the war, declared Abraham Lincoln's Register [sic] of the Treasury, Lucius E. Chittenden. Confederate Brigadier General John B. Gordon remembered it as among the hardest fought contests of the war. Monocacy is a story rich in drama and irony. Sent to defend a crucial railroad bridge, Union forces fought gallantly for that highway to Washington, embroiling Early's veterans in a bloodbath along the Monocacy River. Early lost a crucial day in the heat and drought of mid-summer, a delay that perhaps cost the Confederacy a chance to change the course of history.