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down the Shenandoah, and over the Potomac, scouring the country beyond even to Pennsylvania, for horses, cattle, and provisions, having defeated at the Monocacy near Frederick, a handful of Federal troops, comparatively considered (there were only one fourth of his own number, under Gen. Wallace). Among the troops at the disposal of Gen. Wallace, were one brigade of the Eighth Corps, some hundred days men, and militia, but, on the night of the 7th, Ricketts's division of our corps began to arrive at Baltimore from City Point, and was hurried out to the Monocacy by Gen. Halleck. Gen. Wallace placed the division of the Blue Greek Cross upon his left, the main point of attack covering the Washington pike and its wooden bridge.
Of the 1,959 lost in this affair, nearly 600 were of this division.
Gen. Wallace telegraphed to Gen. Halleck: ‘I am retreating with a footsore, battered, half demoralized column.
I think the troops of the Sixth Corps fought magnificently.’
While Wallace was retrograding toward Baltimore, that night, Early, having buried his dead, and placed his wounded in the hospitals of Frederick, moved twenty miles east unopposed, along the Georgetown pike, and on the night of the 10th camped near Rockville.
It was clear that he was at least going to make a demonstration against the capital.
The Confederate cavalry in the meanwhile, holding by detachments the fords of the Potomac, were gathering a vast amount of plunder and sending it back in the shape of breadstuffs, livestock, and horses, to be transported across the river into Dixie.
Sabbath morn, July 10, 1864, in the capital of the nation, was a season of feverish excitement.
Gen. Augur, commanding the defences of the capital, had collected heavy artillery, hundred days men, convalescents, invalids, sailors, marines, militia, clerks.
According to Gen. Barnard, ‘there was in the defences of Washington a total of 20,400; of that number, however, but 9,600, mostly raw troops, constituted the garrison of the defences.
Of the other troops a considerable portion was unavailable, and the whole would form an inefficient force for service on the line.’
But if the nation's capital were at this time seriously in danger when menaced by Early's force of invaders, succor was at hand; early in the afternoon of the 11th of July, 1864, Abraham Lincoln was on the Sixth Street wharf to greet the veterans of the First
Boston. Press of Deland and Barta, 1886.
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