Crosshairs on the Capital

In an era of battlefield one-upmanship, the raid on the Nation’s Capital in July 1864 was prompted by an earlier failed Union attempt to destroy Richmond and free the Union prisoners held there. Jubal Early’s mission was in part to let the North have a taste of its own medicine by attacking Washington and freeing the Confederate prisoners at Point Lookout in southern Maryland. He was also to fill the South’s larder from unmolested Union fields, mills and barns. By 1864 such southern food raids h