Desperate Engagement: How a Little-Known Civil War Battle Saved Washington, D.C., and Changed the Course of American History

303 pp. The Battle of Monocacy, which took place four miles south of Frederick, Maryland on a blisteringly hot day in 1864, was a full-field engagement between some 12,000 battle-hardened Confederate troops led by the controversial Jubal Anderson Early, and some 5,800 Union troops, many of them untested in battle, under the mercurial Lew Wallace. When the fighting ended, Early had routed Wallace in the northernmost Confederate victory of the war.