On the night of June 27, 1863, Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart crossed the Potomac River with 5,000 horsemen including artillery at “Rowser’s Ford” and proceeded to ransack Montgomery County. Stuart’s actions proved a catastrophe for the Confederacy because he should have been with Robert E. Lee’s army in Pennsylvania.

Moving blindly without his cavalry, Lee stumbled into the huge Union army at a place called Gettysburg where he was soundly defeated.

To deflect criticism, Stuart wrote a report glorifying his crossing at Rowser’s Ford as a heroic, superhuman effort. In more recent times, markers have been erected at the supposed site on the C&O Canal at Violette’s and Riley’s locks. Visitors marvel at the courage of Stuart and his men to cross the mile-wide river, filled with rocks, rapids, and whirlpools. But the markers, and history, misplace the site. It was actually two miles downriver in a placid, sandy-bottomed part of the Potomac on John Rowzee’s farm. Jim Johnston unravels the historical mystery.

 

About our Speaker, James H. Johnston
Jim Johnston is a lawyer, writer, and lecturer in Bethesda.  He has been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, White House History Magazine, Howard University Law Journal, Maryland History Magazine, and many others. He has written four books: The Recollections of Margaret Cabell Brown Loughborough, A Southern Woman’s Memories of Richmond, VA, and Washington, DC, during the Civil War (Hamilton Books, 2009); From Slave Ship to Harvard, Yarrow Mamout and the History of an African American Family (Fordham University, Press 2012); The War Story of Harold Johnston (Amazon, 2017); and, Murder, Inc.,The CIA under John F. Kennedy (University of Nebraska Press, 2020).

 

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