Symposium Spotlight: Ryan Quint

“Determined to Stand and Fight” sounds like a gritty defense if ever there was one. Ryan Quint’s new book, Determined to Stand and Fight: Lew Wallace and the Battle of Monocacy, July 9, 1864, will be the focus of his talk at the Fourth Annual Emerging Civil War Symposium at Stevenson Ridge this summer.

“Approximately 15,000 Confederate soldiers under the command of Lt. Gen. Jubal Early marched nearly unopposed through the Shenandoah Valley and crossed the Potomac River in a third invasion of the war,” Quint says. “The Federal high command dismissed the movement out of hand even as Early’s men got closer and closer to the unprotected gates of Washington, D.C.”

And then, on July 9, along the banks of the Monocacy River, Early’s men ran up against a patched-together force led by Maj. Gen. Lew Wallace.

“Wallace’s stand at the Monocacy delayed Early enough that the engagement came to be known as ‘The Battle that Saved Washington,’” Ryan explains. “With the nation’s capital facing its greatest threat during the Civil War, Wallace’s great defense changed the tide.”

Ryan graduated from the University of Mary Washington and is a park ranger at the Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park. He is the book review editor of Emerging Civil War.

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Tickets for this year’s Symposium, Aug. 4-6, 2017, are available for $125 (order here). They include Friday night’s reception, speakers, keynote address, and historians’ roundtable; Saturday’s line-up of talks; coffee service and lunch on Saturday; and Sunday’s tour of the Brandy Station battlefield.