July 12, 1864---A Hell of a "skeer"

JULY 12, 1864:                   

The Battle of Fort Stevens (The Battle of Washington D.C.) (Day Two):  

With the rising of the sun, Union troops swarm out of Fort Stevens. Their mission: To clear the area around Seventh Avenue of Confederate forces. The clearing goes on all day at the cost of 300 Union lives. Confederates found hiding in farm outbuildings and in orchards are killed outright. Altogether, some 600 Southerners lose their lives. Although Jubal Early might have easily overrun the men fanning out of the fort, he becomes curiously inactive, “demonstrating” only slightly, and staying out of range of Fort Stevens’ big guns. As the afternoon wears on, Early gives an order to withdraw and head back to friendly territory in Virginia. “We couldn’t take Washington D.C.” he later said, “but we did give Old Abe a Hell of a skeer.”   

Not far away, Abraham Lincoln is not scared, but he is vexed. Along with the rest of official Washington, unofficial Washington, and the entire North, he has to wonder how the Confederacy, beaten down and without resources, always seems to manage to rise phoenixlike from the ashes to deliver well-placed blows to the Union.

 

Lincoln does understand that Early’s raid has been little more than a surprisingly effective stunt. He also understands that but for the colossal ineptitude of his own commanders, Early could not have reached Washington. He knows that if he only had more men of the caliber of Grant and Sherman the war would have ended already. He knows that, in terms of men and materiel, the Rebellion is nearly played out. But he also realizes that appearances have come to mean just as much as facts in this eminently political Civil War.

The Times of London trumpets: The Confederacy is more formidable than ever.”  Jubal Early’s raid starts all over again the silenced European table talk about international recognition of the Confederacy.  

The Press, both North and South, seizes on the “invasion” of Washington with all the frenzy and punditry one might expect of our modern-day media. Northern morale, shaky since Cold Harbor, plummets into a slough of despond, and the Peace Democrats and the Copperheads take a commanding lead in the polls. The Presidential election of 1864 is fifteen weeks away, and everyone, even Lincoln himself, is convinced that George B. McClellan will be President come November. Lincoln goes so far as to begin organizing a transition team to aid the new President-presumptive, and to Ulysses S. Grant he pens a confidential letter advising the General that either the war must be won by February 1865, or, at the very least, that the Union must invest Richmond by that date in order to assert the upper hand in the peace negotiations that McClellan will institute the day of his inauguration.

Yankee despair thickens the air. The Summer of ’64 is darker far than the Summer of ’62. Horace Greeley publishes several editorials calling for a general cease-fire. Unionism is at its nadir. In New York, diarist George Templeton Strong asks the question to which all the North wants an answer:  “Why don’t Grant and Sherman do something?”