Booknotes: The Johnson-Gilmor Cavalry Raid Around Baltimore

New Arrival:

• The Johnson-Gilmor Cavalry Raid Around Baltimore, July 10-13, 1864 by Eric J. Wittenberg (Savas Beatie, 2025).

This is the fourth volume in the Savas Beatie Battles & Leaders series. As demonstrated by the very first installment being a POW and escape memoir [Thirteen Months in Dixie, or, the Adventures of a Federal Prisoner in Texas (2022)], subject matter coverage is a bit wider than the series title implies, although the next three—Chris Mackowski's The Battle of Jackson, Mississippi, May 14, 1863 (2022), Ed Bearss's Outwitting Forrest: The Tupelo Campaign in Mississippi, June 22 - July 23, 1864 (2023), and now Eric Wittenberg's The Johnson-Gilmor Cavalry Raid Around Baltimore, July 10-13, 1864—unambiguously fit the mold.

On paper, the Point Lookout operation appears on sober reflection to have had an almost zero-percent chance of success, making it one of the more hare-brained military schemes the war produced. It ranks up there with the complicated plot to free the Confederate officer POWs from Johnson's Island on Lake Erie. Both are fascinating topics to contemplate, though.

From the description: "The thundering high-stakes operation was intended to free the suffering of 15,000 Confederate prisoners held at Point Lookout, Maryland, a peninsula at the confluence of the Potomac River and the Chesapeake Bay. The operation consisted of two mounted columns, one under Bradley Johnson and a second smaller one under Harry Gilmor. Each had different objectives. The former would move directly on Point Lookout, while the other destroyed bridges and created other mischief to tie up enemy forces. (The wild plot initially envisioned launching a simultaneous naval strike, which went awry at the 11th hour.) Success would have released thousands of men behind enemy lines, created significant chaos and, with a little more luck, returned veterans into the fighting ranks."

Other books have covered this topic before, but it is claimed that this one exceeds the others in research, depth, and "precision." As part of Wittenberg's overall analysis of the operation, his study also intriguingly "compares and contrasts this raid to a pair of other unsuccessful attempts to free Union prisoners of war—the Kilpatrick-Dahlgren Raid of February–March 1864, and the Stoneman Raid on Macon, Georgia, of July 1864—as well as Gen. George S. Patton’s attempt to free his son-in-law and other American prisoners in March of 1945."