Chapter 1 The Monocacy River begins near the Maryland-Pennsylvania border just west of the small town of Harney, Maryland, six miles due south of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The river, the largest Maryland tributary to the Potomac, meanders southeast for about sixty miles. It flows a few miles east of the city of Frederick before emptying out into the Potomac about fifty miles northwest of Washington, D.C. The sixty-odd-mile swath of gently rolling woodlands and fertile farm fields surrounding the river in the western Maryland Piedmont Plateau is known as the Monocacy Valley. Archaeologists have found evidence that bands of nomadic Native American hunters inhabited the Monocacy Valley as early as the year 2000 BC. While there seem to have been few, if any, permanent Indian settlements, the valley was a favorite hunting ground for several tribes, including the Algonquian-language Piscataway and Nanticokes, which had settled in Maryland and Virginia's eastern coastal regions. The Monocacy River became an important source of transportation for the Indians, who also cut a series of trails through the densely wooded valley.

When the first Europeans came to western Maryland in the 1630s, they found the warlike Susquehannock living in settlements in the valley and to the north and east. During the next ninety years several other tribes-the Algonkian Shawnee, the Delaware, the Catawba, and the Tuscarora-either set up settlements or traveled through the area on hunting expeditions. The settlers and Indians were drawn by a pristine river valley just east of the two-thousand-foot Catoctin Mountain (and current-day U.S. Route 15) overflowing with chestnut, hickory, and oak forests abounding with deer, buffalo, black bears, muskrats, elk, caribou, and turkey-along with extremely fertile soil. The river itself and its tributaries teemed with fish, turtles, and terrapins. By the late 1720s, however, the Indian tribes were gone. They had fled west in the wake of a flood of European settlers, mainly Scots/Irish from Northern Ireland, English land speculators, and emigrants from the Palatinate region of the Rhine in Germany.

Many of the latter arrived from heavily German Pennsylvania via what was known as the Monocacy Road. That road began near York, cut southwesterly through Pennsylvania into Maryland through the Monocacy Valley, and then crossed the Potomac River and into Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. The Indians who lived in the Monocacy Valley may have disappeared by the late 1720s, but they left behind their name for the river and its surrounding area. The Seneca called the river Cheneoow-quoquey. The earliest European settlers in the 1720s called it Quattaro and Coturki, names that also were sometimes given to the nearby Potomac. The name that stuck, Monocacy, is a variant of the Shawnee word "Monnockkesey," roughly translated as "river with many bends."   There may have been a village called Monocacy established by German-speaking settlers from Pennsylvania around 1729 located about fifteen miles north of Frederick, near the current-day town of Creagerstown. It is the site of the first German church, known as the Log Church, erected in Maryland.

Archaeological and historical evidence that the little village did, in fact, exist, however, is inconclusive. What we do know for certain is that John Thomas Schley (171289), the leader of a group of some one hundred Palatinate Germans, founded the city of Frederick (then called Frederick Town) near the midpoint of the Monocacy Valley in 1745. Schley, historians believe, chose the name in honor of Frederick Calvert (173171), the sixth (and last) Lord Baltimore, who had inherited (but never set foot in) the English province of Maryland in 1751. The city of Frederick, standing as it did as a crossroads between the growing cities of the east and the frontier to the west, soon blossomed and became the largest city in western Maryland. It was here in 1755, a year after the start of the French and Indian War, that British major general Edward Braddock, the commander in chief of all British forces in North America, met with Benjamin Franklin (then a member of the Pennsylvania Assembly) and Braddock's trusted military aide George Washington. They came to Frederick to plan Braddock's next move-what turned out to be a disastrous expedition to try to take the French-held Fort Duquesne in what today is downtown Pittsburgh. Ten years later, in 1765, Frederick was the scene of a heated protest over the British Stamp Act. Twelve Frederick County judges issued a statement on November 23, condemning that much reviled taxation-without-representation legislation.

One of the judges, Thomas Johnson (17321819), became the state of Maryland's first elected governor and later an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Two other famed early American lawyers also called Frederick home: Francis Scott Key (17791843), best known as the author of "The Star-Spangled Banner," and his brother-in-law, Roger Brooke Taney (17771864), the fifth chief justice of the United States, best known for issuing the 1857 Supreme Court Dred Scott decision, which denied citizenship to all African Americans, whether they were slaves or freemen. By 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, the city of Frederick's population reached 8,143, and the surrounding Frederick County was home to some 40,000 people. Frederick grew, in large part, because of its geographic location as a natural east-west and north-south transportation hub and crossroads. The Baltimore Pike (also known as the National Road) connected Frederick with Maryland's largest port city to the east. The Georgetown Pike linked Frederick to the nation's capital some forty miles to the southeast.

The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O), the nation's first chartered passenger and freight railway, began construction in Baltimore in 1828. It reached the outskirts of Frederick in 1831. Like the Monocacy River, the B&O skirted Frederick about four miles to the southeast of the city. After protests from the city's fathers, the B&O laid tracks from a spot at the western bank of the Monocacy River and built a 3.5-mile spur into the city. The triangular piece of land, officially known as Frederick Junction, was commonly referred to as Monocacy Junction. The B&O erected a wooden bridge to span the Monocacy at the junction, then replaced it with a more-sturdy (and expensive) iron suspension bridge.   Maryland, sitting as it does below the Mason-Dixon line, was a slave state.

But it was also a geographically and socially divided border state. Tobacco plantations, which depended heavily on slave labor, dominated southern Maryland. The state's northern and western regions, on the other hand, had few slave-holding families and, in fact, were home to many freed blacks. When Fort Sumter fell on April 13, 1861, and the Civil War began, Maryland's citizens were nearly equally divided among those who supported the Union and those whose sympathies lay with the Confederate States of America (CSA). When troops of the Sixth Massachusetts Volunteers arrived in Baltimore by train on April 19 on the way to Washington, a prosecessionist mob attacked them. That urban skirmish resulted in the deaths of four soldiers and twelve civilians. Fearing that unrest would spread throughout Maryland, President Lincoln sent Gen. Benjamin Franklin Butler to occupy the capital of Annapolis on April 22.

On that day Gov. Thomas Holliday Hicks called a special session of the Maryland General Assembly to discuss where the state's loyalty would go. Instead of meeting in Annapolis, which was strongly pro-Confederate, Hicks, a member of the Native American Party (known as the Know-Nothings), took the legislature to Frederick, where sympathies strongly favored the Union. The General Assembly did not vote to secede, nor did it strongly support the Union. The legislators' goal seemed to be neutrality. On September 17, when the General Assembly gathered after a six-week adjournment, federal troops and Baltimore police officers arrived in Frederick to arrest prosecessionist members. That act ended the official movement in Maryland to align the state with the Confederacy. But it did not end Maryland's direct involvement in the war.

Much of that involvement centered on Frederick because of its location as both a north-south and an east-west crossroads. Contingents of Union troops bivouacked in the city and its surrounding areas, including Monocacy Junction, beginning in the summer of 1861. These included units assigned to guard the Monocacy Bridge and the railroad throughout much of the next four years. There were also large bands of Union and Confederate forces that moved into and out of Frederick and its environs during the war. Most of that action took place during the South's three invasions of the North: in September 1862, in July 1863, and in July 1864. Robert E. Lee's forty-five-thousand-man Army of Northern Virginia began crossing the Potomac near Leesburg, Virginia, on September 4, 1862, in the South's first invasion of the North. Three days later Lee's troops marched into Frederick.

They promptly took possession of the city without a shot being fired. Lee had hoped that he would be warmly greeted by pro-Confederates in Frederick. But his reception was lukewarm at best, a state of affairs memorialized in the (most likely apocryphal) poem .