"When Washington, D.C. Came Close to Being Conquered by" Topic

… the Confederacy

"It may be altogether fitting and proper that the battlefield has come to this. A ragged half-block of grass surrounded by brick rowhouses, it lies between the main business district of Washington, D.C. and the suburb of Silver Spring, Maryland. I was greeted by a couple of hundred feet of eroding breastworks and concrete replicas of a half-dozen gun platforms.

It is not hard to be reminded here of lost causes and wasted lives; of how events often reel crazily away from the people who set them in motion, battering down winners and thrusting losers toward greatness. So what is left of Fort Stevens may be precisely the right memorial for the curious confrontation that occurred here, and for the weary men who led it…"

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Armand

Hi

Sorry but this is another myth. The Garrison of Washington was large then Early's force and unit of the AOP were shipped in. The battle on Monocacy was the key to slow him down for the AOP to arrive just in time.

Wackmole9 is right.

Disagree.

If the rest of the VI corps and the elements of the XIX corps don't arrive when they do, the only thing that would stop Early's command from breaking into Washington was Early himself.

Most of the forces manning the Washington defenses north of the Potomac would have been adequate quality to man the rifle walks of the forts. They might have been adequate to conduct a Zaragoza style block by block defense of the city of Washington, if they were deployed to do so, which they were not. They were not adequate gunners. They were probably not of adequate quality to man the rifle pits between the forts in the face of a Confederate attack. They were not of adequate quality to mount an open field counterattack once the Confederates broke through.

Plus let's be honest. The quality demonstrated by Washington's military leadership during the opening phase of Early's attack was low. These are the men who would have been called on to redeploy troops to respond to any Confederate breakthrough.

The arrival of the rest of the VI Corps and elements of the XIX changes everything.

Also Monocacy's reputation seems to be based more what it ended up doing rather than what the combatants sought to do. I have never read anything indicating that Wallace knew for certain that the rest of the VI Corps and the XIX were on their way to Washington when he chose to fight at Monocacy. A better explanation is that Monocacy was a position that allowed Wallace to cover both the routes to Washington and Baltimore. If Wallace was trying to buy time for additional troops to arrive to defend Washington, why did he retreat towards Baltimore? As for Early he didn't demonstrate any great haste at that point of the campaign.

Thanks!

Armand

Perhaps. But there was no way he was going to hold the city with more Union troops arriving. So in the long term nothing that would have changed the outcome of the war.

So in the long term nothing that would have changed the outcome of the war.

IF he burned the city to the ground who says Lincoln gets reelected?

I think that ship had sailed with Lee's failed Gettysburg campaign and the fall of Vicksburg. The experienced troops and officers, if not lost at Gettysburg, could have potentially prolonged the war by months or maybe a year, long enough to potentially have caused a Lincoln loss. The same if Vicksburg could have held out. IMO