Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #281293 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-10
• Released on: 2008-06-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

From Publishers Weekly
How small can a Civil War battle be and still claim the mantle of war-changing decisiveness? That proposition is tested in this engaging account of the 1864 Battle of Monocacy Junction, in which some 16,000 Confederate troops trounced 5,800 bluecoats on a Maryland field. Not a surprising outcome, but Leepson (Flag: An American Biography) contends that Union Gen. Lew Wallace's doomed stand held up Confederate Gen. Jubal Early's surprise lunge at Washington, D.C.—which was held only by a hapless force of invalids, militia and government clerks—by one crucial day. The result was a photo finish, with Union reinforcements arriving in the nick of time to save the capital from capture (hence the decisiveness). Leepson lucidly narrates the campaign, adding color commentary about Early's panoply of abhorrent personal traits and the incompetence, apathy and possible drunkenness that prevailed among Union commanders, along with plenty of vignettes of the horror and pathos of war. He also debunks the campaign's premier anecdote, which has Lincoln coming under rebel fire while looking out from Washington's ramparts (true, he finds) and getting chewed out—Get down, you fool—by a young Capt. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (false). Gettysburg it ain't, but it's still a hard-fought, dramatic episode that Leepson brings vividly to life. Photos. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley

On July 10, 1864, about 8,000 Confederate troops under the command of Gen. Jubal A. Early stood at the doorstep of the District of Columbia. Literally. They were "bedded down alongside the Georgetown Pike, strung out along a five-mile stretch from Gaithersburg to Rockville." The city of Washington was protected by an impressive array of fortifications -- Early appraised them as "exceedingly strong" -- but defensive manpower was sorely lacking; though nearly 35,000 troops were needed to protect the city, only about 10,000 were on hand, "nearly all of whom were physically incapacitated in some way or had never fired a weapon."

Yet Early, who certainly was no coward and, indeed, in the past had been feared by Union commanders for his boldness and inventiveness, chose not to attack. Whether he could have occupied the city has been endlessly debated, but that he chose not to try probably was a turning point in the war. As Marc Leepson writes:

"If [Early] broke through the ring of forts surrounding the city, Confederate veterans would be running loose on the streets of Washington, D.C. The U.S. Treasury, virtually undefended, was sitting ready for looting. Tons upon tons of brand-new, desperately needed war supplies, from blankets to rifles, were there for the taking. The president himself was a target of opportunity, not to mention the U.S. Capitol and dozens of other government buildings. . . . A 'rebel occupation of Washington for however brief a time,' former secretary of the Senate George C. Gorham later wrote, would have brought about 'serious consequences.' One of them 'would almost certainly have embraced the recognition of the Southern Confederacy by France and England, both of which governments were understood to be extremely desirous of even a slight pretext for such action.' "

That this did not come about, Leepson argues in Desperate Engagement, can be traced to two factors. The first and most obvious is that at the last minute Washington's defenses were significantly improved because, at the orders of Ulysses S. Grant, the seasoned troops of the Union's Sixth and Nineteenth Corps were rushed to the city from the Richmond area. The second is that three days before, Early had been forced into a fight he did not want at Monocacy, in Maryland a few miles from the town of Frederick, against federal forces under the command of Gen. Lew Wallace. Early prevailed in that engagement, but at considerable cost: "His ranks were thinned by the hundreds of men killed or severely wounded at Monocacy," and "of those remaining, large numbers were unfit for battle because they suffered from exhaustion after marching two days after the fight at Monocacy in what Union prisoner of war W.G. Duckett called the 'almost suffocating' heat."

All of which is to say that in this book we find ourselves firmly implanted in the land of what might have been. If Wallace had not possessed what he called "the determination to stay and fight," Early and his fresh troops would have had a straight shot to Washington. If Early had not been delayed at Monocacy, Grant might not have had time to grasp the seriousness of the threat to Washington and certainly would not have had time to rush crack troops to its defense. If Early had occupied Washington, all the dire consequences elaborated above probably would have arisen, and doubtless many others as well. The Confederacy still would have been in dire straits -- militarily, economically and politically -- but it would have been in position to sue for a peace far more favorable to its interests, probably one that would have maintained slavery in the Confederate states.

As is usually the case when we enter the land of might have been, the most salubrious effect of the exercise is to remind us that in war nothing is foreordained and the line between victory and defeat almost always is incredibly thin. When Robert E. Lee sent Early on his mission to Washington, he believed that Grant "would be forced to send a significant number of his troops from outside Richmond and Petersburg to defend the Union capital," and even though the mission failed to achieve its grandest goals, it did achieve that one. Grant might well have taken Richmond in the summer of 1864, ending the war then instead of in the spring of 1865, sparing untold thousands of lives and leaving both sides in better condition to reunite. As Leepson writes: "The July 9, 1864, fight at Monocacy has come to be known as 'the battle that saved Washington.' It was. It also very possibly was the battle that played a pivotal role in the series of events that started with Lee's June 12, 1864, order to send Early to the [Shenandoah] Valley. That series of events prolonged the Civil War for as many as nine long months."

In great measure this was due to Lew Wallace. He is best known now for his hugely successful novel Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1880) and the three Hollywood adaptations of it, but there was much more to him than that. His "long, eventful life" included journalism, law, the army and politics. By the spring of 1864, at age 37, he was "commander of the Eighth Army Corps and of the Middle Department based in Baltimore," his authority including "all of Delaware and Maryland from Baltimore West to the Monocacy River." He "was, in effect, the military governor of the city of Baltimore (with nearly 250,000 people, the nation's third largest) and the state."

Wallace was ambitious and packed a not-inconsiderable ego, but he was also principled and patriotic. He "had no formal military training," but at Monocacy he "chose an excellent defensive position," with "the [Monocacy] river in front of him, a river with few easily crossed fords." His force of 5,800 men was far inferior to Early's, which was somewhere around 16,000, but Early did not want to engage him: "The last thing he wanted was an all-out field battle against a significant enemy force bolstered by hardened, veteran Sixth Corps troops holding high ground on the other side of a river," but that is exactly what Wallace gave him. It ended only when "the overpowering, massed Confederate artillery" forced the issue and sent Wallace's forces into retreat. He left the battlefield "believing, he said to his dying day, that by holding up Early for nearly an entire day, he had reached his goal of giving Grant time to get experienced troops up from Petersburg to defend Washington and letting [Union army chief of staff Henry] Halleck know, with no degree of uncertainty, that Early and his men would be moving on a beeline toward Washington."

All of which is probable but scarcely certain. Had Wallace not possessed the foresight and determination to ignore Halleck's indecision and timidity, the capital of the United States might well have fallen into Confederate hands, but by the same token some other obstacle might have arisen in Early's path. On the whole, nevertheless, Leepson's arguments are persuasive, though it must be said in candor that he does not advance them in prose of any distinction or interest. Writing about military maneuvers and military commanders is a tricky business that can lead to confusion and cameo biographies indistinguishable from each other. These are traps that Leepson does not entirely avoid. He seemed more at home in a previous book, Saving Monticello, in which military history was of no consequence.

Still, Desperate Engagement will (of course) be of interest to Civil War buffs, whose numbers remain legion nearly a century and a half after the war's end, and to many other readers as well. Wondering about what might have been is a game more than a study of history, but it is an instructive, useful game that deepens our understanding of history's uncertain, unpredictable path.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
Old Glory was the topic of popular historian Leepson's previous book (Flag, 2005), and the Stars and Stripes flutter again in this volume. So does the Confederate battle flag, for Leepson's topic is Jubal Early's advance on Washington, D.C., in July 1864. Chronicling the episode generally from commanders' post facto accounts, Leepson captures the consternation provoked by the appearance of Early's force before the federal capital. Although small by Civil War standards, Early's army outnumbered the Union's locally available troops and routed them at the Battle of Monocacy. The defeat delayed Early, however, and Union reinforcements arrived in the nick of time, dissuading Early from assaulting the city's fortifications. That's the shape of the strategic story, while an associated anecdote will attract interest from Civil War buffs, namely, the exact circumstances of President Abraham Lincoln's exposing himself to the gunfire of Early's rebels. Leepson judiciously turns over the veracity of its details and acquits himself well in the overall battle narrative, producing a campaign history that will count with the Civil War set. Taylor, Gilbert

Customer Reviews

Good description of a desperate struggle
The battle at Monocacy Junction in July, 1864 is not as well known as other engagements during the Civil War. But it may well have been as important, at least, as some better known battles. "Desperate Engagement" describes the context for the battle, its actual occurrence, and then the aftermath and a series of reflections.

In short, Jubal Early and the 2nd Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia were sent to the Shenandoah, to clear it of Northern troops, as Generals Sigel, Hunter, and Crook had been attacking the area. And, if the opportunity arose, to advance on Washington, D. C. itself, to (perhaps) free Confederate prisoners, to force General U. S. Grant to divert soldiers from his siege in Virginia to relieve pressure on the Capitol, maybe to even occupy parts of the city.

This book outlines why Early was given this assignment and how he carried it out. Incompetent generalship by Generals Sigel and Hunter allowed Early to cross the Potomac and head toward Washington in summer, 1864. The threat was real, but the Unions forces in Washington, D. C. were few in number and poor in quality. Many were recovering from wounds suffered on the battlefields of the East; others were brand new troops without any real training; others were simply subprime in one way or another. The center of government was surrounded by powerful forts--but there weren't the troops to make these forts formidable obstacles to the Confederates.

General Lew Wallace had pretty much a desk job; he had been shelved as a battlefield commander after Shiloh (and one could argue that his poor response was as much due to Grant's bad staff work as to Wallace's own ineptitude on that occasion). This was long before he penned "Ben-Hur"! Seeing the danger to Washington, D. C., he pulled together a scratch force--nowhere large enough to defeat Early's oncoming troops, but, he hoped, enough to slow the Confederate forces down until Union regulars arrived from Virginia. Indeed, Grant was forwarding the 6th Corps and elements from yet another Corps to relieve the Capitol. The first division to arrive from Virginia, Ricketts' Division of the 6th Corps, was called to Monocacy Junction by Wallace.

There, they fought a battle against the Confederate forces, badly outnumbered, until a flanking attack by the southern troops made his position untenable. Wallace's battered forces withdrew, leaving the road open to Washington, DC. However, by some accounts, it took so much time to defeat Wallace's troops that the Union forces of the 6th Corps arrived before Early could take advantage of the defensive weaknesses of the Capitol.

There follows an engaging discussion of the differing perspectives by actors and historians about the battle at Monocacy Junction. All in all, a nice book, crisply written, on a battle worth knowing something about.

Good Overview of Early's Attempt on Washington
The book is not only about the battle of Monocacy, this ends in the first third of the book but also about the attempt of Jubal Early to capture or at least threaten Washington. My only real critique is that in the begining he keep hyping the battle, much like Stephen Ambrose's overuse of supurlatives that get tiring to read-let the story tell it self! It is a good story, well researched and written and I would recommend it to even the casual reader.

Fascinating forgotten piece of history
Extremely well researched historical work. Extensive use of quotes from private letters, messages and other contemporary writings bring the intestity of the event to life. Military buffs will find the extensive details of the events of particular interest. To think but for a difference of a day the South might have well invaded Washington DC and could have dramatically changed history either causing England to recognize the South and break the blockade and/or end the war in a way very different from what happened at Appomattox 9 months later.