The Man Who (Almost) Conquered Washington

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NO LINGERING TRACE OF THREAT REMAINS. No historic markers, no relics, no ruins. Nothing but an abandoned two-story building squatting on the campus of American University, just northwest of Ward Circle.

I've come for the view.

It may be that here, on July 11, 1864, almost forgotten to history, an enemy of the United States looked down on the capital city, astride the barrel of a long gun. A chain of evidence, scraps of paper, and human memory, have brought me to this place.

But that fragile chain would shatter if it turned out that it was impossible to stand here and look down on the lights of Washington.

"I don't think many people, North or South, realize how close Washington came to falling into Rebel hands that summer of 1864," Confederate Brig. Gen. "Tiger" John McCausland declared in 1925. "Years afterwards, I told General Grant, when he was campaigning for president, that the last time I was in Washington was '64. He asked me if I was in disguise. 'Oh no,' I told him, 'I rode with my staff into the defenses of Georgetown. Your entire defending garrison had deserted! Your capital was practically undefended! I sat there on a big gun and looked at the lights and wished I had men enough to go ahead and capture the place and end the damned war!”

  No history book confirms that boast. Yet it may be true.

Which is why I was pondering the sightlines from the vacant two-story building. In 1864, the spot on which the building stands was Fort Gaines, the innermost link in a beltway of forts built to defend the Union capital.

McCausland was at the vanguard of a 15,000-man Rebel army commanded by Confederate Gen. Jubal Early. Newspapers called it "the invasion," but it proved to be only a hit-and-run affair. Still, this raid and the British burning of Washington in 1814 have been the only two military actions against the U.S. capital.

Legend has it that of all the raiders, McCausland penetrated deepest into the city. Exactly where isn't certain, but by McCausland's own account, the fort he entered would have to (a) have been temporarily deserted and (b) have had a great view of the city of Washington. Did such a place exist?

Since historians had not resolved the question, I decided to conduct my own search for clues to the whereabouts of this Confederate general during two days in July 1864. Much of what I stumbled on was unexpected, but nothing more so than the life of the man some called the last unreconstructed Rebel, and others a war criminal-a life recounted by a cottage industry of historians and biographers and, most surprisingly, a passel of living grandsons.

Dead since 1927, "Tiger" John McCausland was gone, but clearly not forgotten.

An Undefended Fort

Most of what happened during Jubal Early's raid on Washington is well documented. The capital at the time was an island in a hostile sea, flanked by one state in rebellion (Virginia) and another whose loyalty was barely enforced by bitterly resented martial law. More than 60 forts and 93 artillery batteries connected by 20 miles of trenches or rifle pits surrounded the city. The forts were named mostly for Union commanders, and some of the place names remain today: Forts Stevens, Sumner, Bayard, DeRussy, Totten, Lincoln, Ward.

The Confederates came at Washington from the north. They had marched through the Shenandoah Valley and captured Frederick, Md. Leaving there on July 9, 1864, they fought their way through Union troops under Gen. Lew Wallace (who would later write "Ben-Hur") at the Monocacy River a few miles southeast of Frederick and only 20 miles from Rockville.

The next night, July 10, McCausland's advance guard camped in Rockville. The summer was hot and dry. McCausland scouted the defenses northwest of Washington in the morning of July 11 while Early led the main force from Rockville to Silver Spring.

Union troops stationed on high ground at Fort Reno in "Tennallytown," which would later become the Northwest Washington area of Tenleytown, followed the progress of the Confederate columns from miles away by watching the dust clouds they raised.

At Silver Spring, Early's men turned south and headed down a route that followed the present course of Georgia Avenue. Union defenders made a stand at Fort Stevens, northwest of Georgia Avenue and Military Road, and at Fort DeRussy on a hill in Rock Creek to the west-both forts east of and farther out from the city than Fort Gaines. The two sides exchanged gunfire for a day before the Confederates with- drew.

President Lincoln went to both Tennallytown and Fort Stevens to watch, and came under fire himself. It was a minor battle, by Civil War standards, yet hundreds on both sides were killed and wounded.

McCausland's small force of cavalry had carried out its reconnaissance by riding southeast out of Rockville. It came down what is now Old Georgetown Road to Bethesda and turned south along the route of the present Wisconsin Avenue. And then, according to a 1941 master's thesis written by James Earl Brown, a graduate student at West Virginia University:

"When McCausland reached the vicinity of Tennallytown, outside of Washington, he came upon an unoccupied fort where he met one division of General Horatio G. Wright's corps coming out to occupy it. McCausland was soon driven back and Wright took possession of the fort."

Brown concluded that after McCausland withdrew from the fort on July 11, he remained in front of it, and with reinforcements sent from Early, "skirmished with the Federals" the next day.

Brown thought McCausland had stumbled upon Fort Gaines, citing "Letters and Papers (Family)." Others have written variously that McCausland scouted "the forts between Georgetown Pike and the river" and that he "took the forts in Georgetown," but none is as specific or appears as authoritative as Brown.

Among other advantages, Brown had the opportunity to talk to the general's children, especially his daughter, Charlotte. Sixty years had passed since Brown's paper, but I held out the unlikely hope that some family history had survived the decades.

Longevity is in the McCausland genes. Bright is 81. He didn't know of any family "letters and papers," such as those James Earl Brown referred to, nor about the general's taking a fort in Washington. But Bright told a story about another "Fort" his grandfather had taken:

In 1862, John McCausland was at Fort Donelson, Tenn., when Union troops under Gen. Ulysses S. Grant surrounded it. Bright says his grandfather's horse was shot from under him. A Confederate cavalryman saw this, shot a Union trooper from his horse and led it to McCausland.

"Grandpa named that horse Fort and rode him for the rest of the war. Later, he put him out to pasture here."

After the war, John McCausland was a man who both stood out from his neighbors and stood apart from them. Bright said his grandfather inspired paranoia-tinged tall tales among neighbors, who believed, among other things, that the turret- like cupola on top of the general's house was a watchtower. It was actually for ventilation.

Another McCausland grandson lives in southwestern Virginia. Alexander McCausland is 88. Not only does he remember his grandfather, but he lived with him for a time and the two used to go horseback riding together. His unpublished memoir, which tells the story of his grandfather's life, is called "I Rode With the Man Who Rode With Stonewall Jackson."

John McCausland was born in St. Louis in 1836. McCausland Avenue there was named for his father, a wealthy merchant who became the city's first tax commissioner. Orphaned at age 7, McCausland went to live with relatives near Henderson in what is now West Virginia. John McCausland graduated first in his class at Virginia Military Institute, went to the University of Virginia for a year, then studied law. He took a position at VMI, where both he and Thomas "Stone- wall" Jackson taught until the outbreak of the war. Just prior to that, in 1859, Jackson, McCausland and cadets from VMI were sent to Charles Town, W.Va., to maintain order at the execution of B-628 the abolitionist John Brown for leading the armed uprising that seized the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry.

McCausland was stationed be- hind the gallows and reported that he could have touched Brown as he waited to die.

Alexander McCausland remembers his grandfather as a commanding, intimidating man. After the young Alexander's arm was injured in a farm accident, a bad infection set in. A country doctor wanted to amputate. "Grandpa came into the hospital room.  'You aren't going to cut that boy's arm off!' he said, and he carried me out. I still have the arm." In four years of war, John McCausland had seen enough amputations.

But for my purposes, the most interesting thing Alexander McCausland had to say concerned James Earl Brown's interview of his family in 1940. Brown attributed his Fort Gaines hypothesis to family papers, but Alexander says he is sure the family didn't have any of the general's papers. He'd heard talk that the general got to some fort around Washington, but its name was never mentioned.

"Grandpa didn't like to talk about the war," Alexander said. "There was that Chambersburg thing." 

The New York Times denounced McCausland as "a desperate, ferocious and untamed freebooter, ready at any time to violate the usages of civilized warfare to gratify his dark and malignant passions." Lincoln wrote Grant: "You had better confer with [Confederate] General Lee and stipulate for a mutual discontinuance of house burning and other destruction of private property." Pennsylvania authorities put a bounty on McCausland's head and indicted him after the war for arson.

Today, there are no records in Chambersburg of the indictment. There is, however, Murray Kaufman, the man everyone there turns to about local history. And indeed, Kaufman has the definitive record of the burning, a panoramic view of the burned town that he pieced together from six old photographs-taken from the top of the unburned town hall-collected over 25 years in yard sales, antique stores and estate liquidations. Chambersburg was a surprisingly big town in 1864, and the fire damaged or destroyed at least 250 buildings.

Unreconstructed Rebel

           My visit to Chambersburg didn't get me any closer to determining whether McCausland's boast about staring down on Washington was true. Searching through various books on McCausland didn't help much either, though they did pro- vide some insight into the man. "Un- reconstructed Rebel," by Diana Johnson-an attorney in Mason County where McCausland's house still stands--relates an interview with the late John Wilson, who, as a boy, knew the general and remembered him "as a gruff man who chewed tobacco and always carried a pistol in his pocket."

           In "Tiger John: The Rebel Who Burned Chambersburg," David Phillips wrote that McCausland was nicknamed "Tiger John" by his soldiers because "he pressed them ever closer to their opponents."

           Phillips's book refers to a 1923 New York Times article about McCausland, "Last of Lee's Old Guard Tells of the Forlorn Hope." Written by the West Virginia reporter Garnett Eskew, the article recounted an interview with the elderly general, whom Eskew described as leading "the life almost of a recluse on the broad reaches of his 8,000-acre farm, with his one daughter."

McCausland told of being at Appomattox when Robert E. Lee surrendered to Grant to end the war in 1865. Noticing the rest of the Confederate army stacking arms, McCausland asked what was going on. Robert E. Lee's nephew Gen. Fitzhugh Lee replied, "Uncle Bobby has surrendered," and rode off. Then, according to McCausland, he turned to a comrade and said: "Let's get out of here. I'm not going to surrender."

"I didn't wait to get a parole, so technically have never surrendered," he told Eskew.

Phillips's book quotes a 1951 interview with Charlotte McCausland. She said her father wanted to return to the Kanawha Valley after Appomattox but was told "some Federal men were waiting to get him." So he fled to Canada and continued his exile in Ireland, England, France and Mexico.

As proud as McCausland would remain of his "unsurrendered" status, he wasn't too proud to solicit an 1867 letter from Grant declaring that as a "paroled prisoner of war," McCausland should be exempt "from trial for acts done by him during the war."

It was only with that letter in hand that he returned to West Virginia.

When McCausland died on Jan. 23, 1927, there was only one other Confederate general still living.

McCausland's coffin, draped with the Confederate battle flag, was laid out on the bow of a barge in the Kanawha River, then floated 20 miles downstream to a hill near Henderson.

A little more than a year earlier, the general had agreed to one final interview with Garnett Eskew, but the piece, headlined "They Called Him Town Burner,'" was not published until 1938. Eskew described the elderly warrior: "There he sat before me in the flesh-embittered, embattled, unbent-the last Confederate stronghold."

Eskew asked McCausland about Chambersburg. "God, how they hate me those Pennsylvania people!" McCausland replied. "Well, young man, my memory is very clear. My conscience is clear. And I have no apology to make. I held a commission in the Confederate army.... And I don't feel that I did anything to disgrace the uniform."

It was then that McCausland told Eskew about the raid on an unoccupied fort, and looking down on Washington.

Yet another McCausland grandson, George McCausland, 81, has read most of the books and articles about his grandfather. The family story that George remembers from his father, Sam, and Aunt Charlotte is that John McCausland was "the highest-ranking Confederate officer to look at Washington from the heights of Georgetown."

George has been to Washington many times and believes, as James Earl Brown concluded, that McCausland made it to Fort Gaines among the highest of the forts, and the closest to Washington. Of course, he has no proof, and bases his conclusions on McCausland's boast.

This is where you've got to be cautious, says B. Franklin Cooling, an authority on Washington during the Civil War and author of "Jubal Early's Raid on Washington" and "Mr. Lincoln's Forts: A Guide to the Civil War Defenses of Washington."

Though Cooling said he was intrigued by McCausland's claim, he believed the General may have suffered from the Confederates' propensity to exaggerate their accomplishments after the fact. His view is that the Confederate cavalry probably came within musket range of Fort Reno, north of Tennallytown near the present Friendship Heights, but no closer.

Cooling's skepticism gets support from William Offutt, who traced McCausland's whereabouts during the Washington raid in, "Bethesda, A Social History."

According to Offutt's book, "McCausland with perhaps three hundred men skirmished all morning [on July 11] along the fort line looking for weak points." But about noon, Offutt writes, McCausland sent a messenger to Early to say that the forts on the west side of the city were too strong. McCausland "pulled back to Bethesda," about three miles from Fort Gaines.

Still, Offutt does not completely discount the possibility that McCausland somehow got through to Fort Gaines. He noted a letter written by an aide to Early named James Henry Loughborough: Loughborough recounted how on the night of July 11, he was able to slip through Union lines by following "creek beds and animal runs he knew well" to have dinner with his parents at their home, then returned before dawn. An 1858 map of the area shows a house belonging to A. H. Loughborough only about 500 feet northeast of Fort Gaines. (The house, called Grassland, wasn't torn down until about 1955 to make way for NBC studios.)

Is it possible that McCausland continued his probes after noon on July 11, and like Loughborough, was able to slip through the lines, briefly occupying Fort Gaines that evening? After all, McCausland spoke of seeing the "lights" of the city.

"I could believe that," Offutt said. On July 12, McCausland's forces again "probed for weak places from Rock Creek to the River," Offutt believes.

Next-day dispatches in the Washington Star hinted at what was happening in the area. For example, the paper noted that William H. Birch, who lived two miles above Tennallytown (northwest of today's intersection of Wisconsin Avenue and Bradley Boulevard), fled when the Confederates came, but his house was shelled and the son of a tenant was killed protecting his property.

According to military documents in the voluminous Official Records of the Civil War, at 5:25 a.m. on July 12, 1864, Fort Reno, about a half mile from Fort Gaines, reported: "Rebel band heard playing, otherwise quiet." To which, Army headquarters in Washington replied curtly: "Fort Stevens is the real point of attack, the enemy's movement in front of Reno being but a feint."

In all of this, there is no direct evidence that John McCausland rode into a Union fort. Military records suggest that most of the forts in Northwest Washington, including DeRussy, Reno, Simmons, Mans- field and Sumner, were manned throughout the raid.

But Fort Gaines might be the exception. Union defenders were spread thin until reinforcements under Gen. Wright began arriving in the afternoon of July 11. Since Fort Gaines was inside the main line of forts, it might have been unmanned for a period of time as its command scattered to other forts closer to the rebel thrust at Fort Stevens.

But could McCausland actually have penetrated the Union's first line of forts and gotten to Gaines? Maps show a break in the trench lines between Fort Bayard (at River Road and Western Avenue) and Fort Reno in Tenleytown. McCausland could have ridden through that gap, especially at night. Confederate cavalry indeed threatened to penetrate the defenses there.

In a message sent at 10:55 p.m. on July 11, Fort Reno reported: "The chief officer of pickets says the enemy are apparently making every preparation for a grand assault, tearing down fences, bands playing. Cavalry is moving to our left [in the direction of Fort Gaines]. Cannot a part of the Sixth Corps [Gen. Wright's reinforcements] be moved up at once?"

Moreover, a Union report after the battle concluded that the Rebels had exploited a weakness in the fort system, and that additional artillery should be deployed, "taking position at first on the ridge between Tennallytown and Fort Gaines."

The report did not explicitly say that a Rebel force had advanced in- side the outer ring of forts on that ridge, but the implication is pretty clear: McCausland's men must surely have been in the vicinity of Gaines. And quite possibly, inside it, looking down a gun at the lights of Washington.

Line of Sight

           Today, you can't see any part of what was the Civil War city of Washington from where Fort Gaines was, or from Ward Circle, or from anywhere on the campus of American University. The exclusive Westover Place town houses and high-rise apartment buildings that line Massachusetts Avenue to the east block the line of sight, as does the new Russian Embassy on Wisconsin.

           But what about 137 years ago, when Fort Gaines was surrounded by farm fields and orchards, and the slope to the city was all but devoid of buildings or even tall trees? It's hard to visualize.

           But not if you have a computer, a program called Bryce 3-D, downloaded government topographic data, and historical maps of Washington collected over the years. Gene Thorp, a Washington Post cartographer and Civil War buff, had all the above. He fed the data into his machine, clicked on a screen full of squiggly lines, and a confusion of gray shapes slowly began to resolve into a three-dimensional landscape.

           In the foreground, a straight, fairly side of the city McCausland steep ridge materialized. We were looking at it from the north. "That would be Fort Reno," Thorp said, pointing to the left on the ridge. "And Fort Gaines is here to the right."

Looking from Fort Gaines, a substantial rise just to the south might have blocked much of the view. But off to the left, a smallish mound rose, clearly visible from the ridge.

"That would be Capitol Hill," Thorp said. On a July evening in 1864, it would have been a lovely view- Capitol Hill aglitter with gaslight.

Citation:

Johnston, James H. “The Man Who (Almost) Conquered Washington.” The Washington Post, 18 Mar. 2001, www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2001/03/18/the-man-who-almost-conquered-washington/b9aa0dcd-a622-43ce-b95d-8158db00aa1e/