Fort Stevens 1864: Lincoln Under Fire and Montgomery Blair's Whiskey

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In June 1864 Robert E. Lee sent Jubal Early's Second Corps, more than 10,000 veterans, north through the Shenandoah Valley to threaten Washington and draw Ulysses S. Grant's troops away from Richmond. Early's men marched through a 47-day drought with temperatures above 90 degrees, lost a day fighting Lew Wallace at Monocacy on July 9, and reached Fort Stevens near Silver Spring on July 11. The capital's ring of 160 forts and more than a thousand guns was held by about 9,600 fit men, including raw recruits, the Invalid Corps and clerks of Montgomery Meigs's emergency division.

Exhausted Confederates stalled after finding barrels of whiskey in the cellar of Postmaster General Montgomery Blair's Silver Spring estate, while veterans of the Sixth and Nineteenth Corps arrived by steamship and marched to the trenches. Abraham Lincoln, who had ridden out with Mary, stood on the parapet under sharpshooter fire until a surgeon beside him was hit. On July 12 Daniel Bidwell's brigade cleared the orchards at a cost of more than 300 casualties, and Early withdrew across the Potomac on the night of July 13.

Engineer John G. Barnard found that only about 9,600 of 31,000 men on paper were fit to hold a rifle.
Alexander McCook organized the defense while sidelined generals in the city worked against him.
Accounts differ on who ordered Lincoln down, naming Horatio Wright or a young Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Early later joked that he had not taken Washington but had badly scared Lincoln.
Forty Union dead lie in a small national cemetery on Georgia Avenue and 17 Confederates at Grace Episcopal Church in Silver Spring.

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