American History Revised by Jr. Seymour Morris Read Free Book Online

hundred days, these men had hardly seen battle. And it showed. When they met the Confederate cavalry at the Maryland town of Frederick, the Confederates drove them out in an hour and even collected a $200,000 bounty for agreeing not to set the town on fire.
    Reinforcements from the North arrived, and at Monocacy Junction, three miles away, Wallace dug in his heels. He now had almost six thousand men, but it was hardly a fair fight: Jubal Early had fourteen thousand. And because Wallace didn’t know where Early would attack, he had to spread his troops over a defense line six miles wide. But he chose his spots well, concentrating on high points and fortifying selected defense spots. Then came the attack. “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes!” was the Union order. In one of the most ferocious battles of the war—it went on all day with much hand-to-hand combat—the Confederates finally won. The Union defenders gave it everything they had, suffering deaths and casualties of 1,900 compared with seven hundred for an invading army almost three times as big. It should have been a rout, but it was not: it was a slugfest. “A crimson current ran towards the river,” wrote one Confederate general.
    After a day of badly needed rest (half his soldiers were walking barefoot), Early’s troops resumed their march toward Washington, only to find that they had arrived a day too late: Grant’s reinforcements had just arrived. Exhausted from the fierce battle put up by General Wallace, Jubal Early made the reluctant decision not to invade Washington. He had missed his golden opportunity. Lincoln and Congress breathed a sigh of relief as Early retreated back south, never to appear again, and Wallace returned to the battlefield to supervise burials and to propose a monument to read: “These men died to save the National Capital, and they did save it.”
    Ulysses Grant agreed fully. In his
Memoirs
he wrote:
    If Early had been but one day earlier, he might have entered the capital before the arrival of the reinforcements I had sent….General Wallace contributed on this occasion by the defeat of the troops under him, a greater benefit to the cause than often falls to the lot of a commander of an equal force to render by means of a victory.
House in a Shambles
    1879 Seized by the Confederacy and ransacked by Confederate soldiers because its owner had been a U.S. naval officer from New York, this house had been bequeathed“to the people of the United States for the sole and only purpose of establishing and maintaining an Agricultural School for the purpose of educating as practical farmers’ children of the warrant office of the United States Navy whose fathers are dead.” But with all the problems it had after the Civil War, the U.S. government had more important things to do than run a farm school for navy warrant officers’ orphans, and so it rejected the bequest. Subsequently there ensued a lengthy legal wrangle among the decedent’s New York relatives, and the house lay abandoned. It looked as though the house would be headed for the wrecker’s ball and the great estate subdivided and sold off, like so many other estates.
    Finally, in 1879, one of the family members bought out his relatives and took possession. He found the house and grounds “in a dreadful state of disrepair.” The orchards, terraced gardens, flower borders, walkways, and roads “had all but disappeared.” The outbuildings had collapsed, the lawns were torn up by pigs, the gutters were falling down, the roof and skylights were rotting, windows were broken, and the basement was flooded with water. The once-elegant drawing rooms used by the President of the United States had been used as a grain storehouse.
    The rescue of this magnificent house actually was a two-part saga. Back in the 1830s, there existed a naval officer who ever since Jefferson’s death had sought to do whatever he could to honor “one of the greatest men in history. He