Monocacy Battlefield

Monocacy is the defeat that saved Washington. In July 1864, Jubal Early's 15,000 Confederates — Lee's Second Corps, sent north to clear the Shenandoah and threaten the capital while Grant's army was pinned at Petersburg — crossed the Potomac into Maryland with the road to Washington open. The only force between them and the capital was Lew Wallace's makeshift collection of 6,600 — garrison troops, hundred-days men, and one division of the Sixth Corps Grant had rushed north.

Wallace put them along the Monocacy River south of Frederick — blocking the Georgetown Pike at the covered bridge, holding the railroad junction. The battle on July 9 was a loss: Early flanked the line across the river farms, and by evening the Union army was retreating toward Baltimore, leaving 1,294 casualties. But the day Wallace lost cost Early the thing he needed — time. While Early buried his dead and marched on, Grant poured the rest of the Sixth Corps into Washington's defenses; when Early reached Fort Stevens on July 11, the works were manned.

Lew Wallace — later the author of Ben-Hur — judged it correctly: 'These men died to save the national capital, and they did save it.' The battlefield south of Frederick — the Worthington and Thomas farms, the covered-bridge site, the railroad junction — is the best-preserved 'what-if' of the war: the ground where losing bought the capital a day.

Monocacy is the archive's day file — the July 9, 1864 battle Wallace lost that delayed Early long enough to save Washington, on the river farms south of Frederick where defeat was the victory.