Vic Socotra

19 April 2009

Monocacy Creek

(Ram Rod)

I officially became a senior citizen when I signed up for the County-sponsored trip. It was $20 bucks, a bargain, really, and I heard that what the trip was going to see was in danger, and might not be there much longer.

I get ominous solicitations from the battlefield preservation folks all the time, and I usually reach in my jeans to throw in a couple bucks. It is hard to get something back when it is gone.

I hate organized tours, but what the hell. I signed up on-line for the guided tour of the Monocacy Creek battlefield, and a bonus drive down the line-of-advance of the Confederates when they attacked Washington from the north.

There were six of us in the group that met at eight o’clock sharp in the parking lot of the Lubber Run Recreation Center. With the exception of David, the County Historian and custodian of Fort C.F. Smith on the bluff above the George Washington Parkway, I was the youngest by about fifteen years.

My new companions included Kenneth, an erudite blind man with the camera; Barbara, a woman of a certain age who said little; Winky, a retired ONR employee originally from Mississippi; and Bill, a retired Naval Intelligence Officer of 70-odd summers.

It was the first time yesterday I said that “I’ll be damned,” but not the last.

I sat in the back of the long white Arlington County van, all by myself. Some joker had signed up, paid his $20 bucks, but failed to show at the Lubber Run Recreation Center, site of the former Henderson Mansion, and once officer's club to Arlington Hall Station. We waited a while, since the no-show was a paying customer, and even traced the blocks over to the Metro stop on the way out to see if he had missed a train connection.

Idiot. No one tries to make a hard appointment on the Metro weekend schedule.

The Battle at Monocacy Creek in July of 1864 was not a big deal, as things went in those days. The slaughters had become quite efficient by then, since the scale of things had increased wildly and the troops were disciplined and battle hardened.

Winky and Bill were old-timers; Winky used to walk to work from a town-house in Ballston just a few blocks away, and Bill had a couple tours at DIA when it took over The Hall at the stand-up back in the 1960s. They remembered when the Ballston Mall was the Parkington shopping center with the putt-putt golf, and Winky once purchased a truck from the Bob Peck Chevy dealership with the flying-saucer motif that stood at Ball's Crossroads.

We wheeled past that, and up the old Glebe road to cross onto the GW Parkway to hit the Beltway and thence the American Legion Bridge at Cabin John and into Maryland. The I270 merge was smooth enough, and I marveled at the changes I could observe to the newest additions to the low-density appurtenances to the High Tech Corridor. I must be pretty tunnel-visioned when I am driving, and I appreciated the opportunity to look around.

We were approaching Frederick on the freeway when David took an exit that led to Urbana, a little crossroads village whose crossroad had expanded almost to the stoops of the old country houses, and a followed what had been the Urbana Pike long before it became Md Route 355.

We rumbled across a 1930's-era cantilever bridge over a brown stream swollen with the run-off from the recent rains, and railway tracks, through brilliant green fields and eventually to a right turn into the parking lot of a spanking new visitors' center thrown up by the Park Service and filled with Boy Scouts.

I'll give you the Classics Comics version of the situation in 1864. "Unconditional Surrender" Grant is now in charge of the Federal Army, and he has taken the appalling losses at Cold Harbor in stride. He continues to press toward Petersburg, key to Richmond.

Bobby Lee is concerned. Every Federal commander before him would have scampered back to Washington to lick his wounds. Grant just continues to move forward. To support his offensive, he has stripped the capital of its garrison troops and put them in the field, concentrating the awesome mass of blue against the Confederate Capital.

Lincoln is running for election, and his former field commander Pretty-boy George McClellan is his opposition from the Democratic Party. Bobbie Lee thinks that only a bold stroke can wrest the advantage. Key factors: John Bull's entry into the conflict on the side of the South has become less plausible with the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, but London could be wooed with the prospects of a Confederate victory, however unlikely, now that the Mississippi belongs to Washington, headwaters to Gulf of Mexico.

Dividing one's force in the face of the enemy has worked for Lee before, and he conceives a bold plan. It is breathtaking. He is going to take and hold Washington hostage, or burn it to the ground.

To do so, Lee forms the Army of the Valley, assigns its 14,000 troops to doughty Jubal Early, and instructs him to march, double-time, to the Shenandoah and north. Cross into Maryland at Harper's Ferry, then race east to Frederick. Up to that point, the ultimate destination will not be clear to the Federals; the old National Pike runs straight from there into Baltimore, and the Urbana Pike connects south to the northern approaches to the forts guarding Washington.

The US Prisoner's Facility at Point Lookout near Baltimore holds 15,000 prisoners, give or take, a few, and a wild scheme to liberate and arm them with weapons landed from Virginia is part of the bold plan. At a stroke, 30,000 Confederates would be operating in the unguarded rear of the Union Army.

General Bradley T. Johnson is dispatched east to do so, after Frederick is ransomed for $200,000 in cash. Early's main body turns south, the objective now clear, and three miles south of town, approaches the Monocacy River and the approaches to Washington.

Grant is in a desperate race to reinforce the Capital before the Rebels arrive at the denuded forts.

Union General Lew Wallace is the only force in the field to attempt to stop Early, and his skirmishers are in the field in a line along the railroad tracks that parallel the north shore of Monocacy Creek, anchored at Best Farm, whose buildings have served as headquarters to both Armies. It was here that Lee's general orders to Stonewall Jackson were captured two bloody years before, and that precious intelligence contributed to the highly effective carnage at Antietam.

On this day, I tried to imagine July, in a thick serge uniform. I tried to imagine marching a hundred miles in less than a month. It was hot. the crops were a little more than knee high.

Loking southeast from the Visitor's Center, you can see Best Farm. What I did not know was how much things have changed so recently. I had heard the battlefield was under threat from development; it is true enough. I-270 bisects the cockpit of action, which is behind Best Farm, and the successful fording of the stream, and the flanking of Wallace's regulars. It is quite disconcerting, if you are attempting to fall into a revery of that day.

Looking at the field just now on Google Maps, it is more accurate to say that the battlefield has been saved. The Best Farm had grown and changed over the years. In the current satellite imagery posted by Google, the new center is not yet constructed. Best Farm had large modern barns and outbuildings.

It is sanitized, of course. The slave cabins are long gone; the place had been founded by French refugees from Haiti, and were renowned in their time for the harshness in their treatment of their servants. Maryland is sometimes known as the Free State, but it was not always.

The Park Service, bless them, has deconstructed the farm to what it looked like at the time of the battle. Across the river, Worthington Farm is as it was, sanitized, of course, and Thomas Farm, where the house changed hands three times as the Yankees desperately attempted to slow down the Rebel force that outnumbered them by nearly four times.

David told us that Wallace left behind 1,300 killed, wounded and missing. Early lost 900. A toll about the same as First Manassas, small beer compared to the big force-on-force encounters. But this one might have saved the Union.

We climbed back in the van and drove across the river to visit the Worthington Farm where two re-enactors, one in Blue and the other in butternut, made a presentation to the boy scouts on the lawn. Then up to to the Thomas farm, which is in the process of deconstruction.

Walking along the farm lane in the fields David was looking down. Something dark caught his eye and he nudged it with his toe. It was a piece of dark metal shaped exactly like a golf tee. He handed it to me, and I looked at it, baffled at why someone would be golfing here on these fields.

"It is the tip to a rifle ram-rod," David said. "Snapped off that day."

"I'll be god-damned," I said. I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the light breeze across the fields. These had been in corn that day, knee-high and easy to lose track of things.

Early had to camp that night and allow his troops to lick their wounds. By the time he got moving down the Urbana Pike and reached 7th Street and Fort Stephens, Grant had succeeded. The tough troopers of 6th Corps were in the forts, relieving the invalids and hundred-day men who had been there the day before.

Twelve hours was the difference between a sacked city and ignominious withdrawal. Standing there on the rampart, looking at the 30-pound Perrot rifle that is aimed into the brick rambler house across the street, you can see the upper floors of Walter Reed Hospital, which was open field when Early's men stood there.

President Lincoln did not panic. He traveled from the White House to the earthworks that guarded 7th Street. Later in the afternoon, I stood where he stood when the Rebel snipers got a shot at him, the only sitting President to come under enemy fire, and the only Commander in Chief to utter a tactical order in combat:

"May we open fire on the houses the Rebs are hiding in, Sir?"

"Yes," said the President.

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