This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [217]
As it turned out, he could create quite a lot. He got across the Potomac, knocked a pick-up Federal army out of the way on the banks of the Monocacy River, and then went straight for Washington, arriving just north of the city on July 11 and creating in the city a general hullabaloo such as had not been seen since the ironclad Merrimac had thrown Secretary Stanton into a panic in the spring of 1862. Government clerks, non-combat soldiers in the quartermaster corps, and convalescents from the hospitals were hastily called out, welded into something resembling a combat outfit along with a handful of state militia, and sent out to hold the fortifications that lay in Early’s path. The fortifications were very strong, but this scratch force was very weak, and it is just possible that Early could have plowed on through it and gone into Washington if he had moved fast. He could not have stayed there very long, to be sure, but the amount of harm he could have done to the Union cause just by occupying the town for a few hours is something to brood over.
Grant had seen the move as an attempt by Lee to make him ease the pressure on Petersburg, and he refused to rise to it. At the last minute, however, he realized that his own action in pulling the heavy artillery regiments out of the Washington fortifications had left the city almost defenseless, and he rushed the VI Army Corps up from the Army of the Potomac. It go to Washington just in time to drive Early off.
The VI Corps was probably the best combat unit in the army just then, and it was led by Horatio G. Wright, an unemotional, solid sort of fighting man, who was equal to the emergency. Wright got his men into the trenches north of Washington just as Early was preparing to assault. There was a brisk, somewhat indecisive little battle there — witnessed by Abraham Lincoln in person, who came out to Fort Stevens, in the center of things, and stood on the parapet to watch, almost giving General Wright apoplexy: a stray bullet might easily have killed him — and at last Early drew off, marched west through Maryland, and went back into the Shenandoah Valley. The whole venture had accomplished nothing very much except that it had thrown a prodigious scare into the Federal government and had reminded U. S. Grant that the attempt to take Lee’s army out of action would never succeed until the Shenandoah Valley had been made secure. Grant began casting about for ways to do something about this situation.
The valley was important for two reasons. It came up beyond the Blue Ridge, and all through the war it had offered the Confederates a handy approach for invasion of the North; it ran from southwest to northeast, so that a Confederate army that used it moved directly toward the heart of the North, while a Union army that followed it would go off at an angle, away from Richmond and the sensitive areas of the Confederacy. In addition, it was a highly fertile and productive garden spot whose meat, corn, and wheat helped supply Lee’s army and the people around Richmond and also served to support any southern army that chose to operate toward the Potomac. Before Lee could be taken out of the war the valley itself would have to be taken out.
Early in August, Grant picked the man for the job — wiry little Sheridan, who had begun his Civil War career as a quartermaster captain in the West, had become a cavalry colonel and then a brigadier and later divisional commander in the infantry, and who was now making the cavalry corps of the Army of the Potomac a fighting unit of considerable prowess.