Confederate Military History. Robert White
and her body bound and manacled to the Union.
On April 18th a battery of United States artillery under Major Pemberton, accompanied by six companies of unarmed Pennsylvania militia, arrived by the Northern Central railroad from Harrisburg at Baltimore and marched via Howard street to the Baltimore & Ohio railroad station at Camden street, whence they were promptly dispatched to Washington. They were escorted through the city by a howling mob, who displayed secession flags (the Palmetto flag of South Carolina being conspicuous), and who emphasized their feelings by cheers for ‘Jeff Davis and the Southern Confederacy.’ They were unarmed and as weak looking as a drove of cattle as the regulars escorted them through the streets. But the telegraph flamed out the news of the secession of Virginia, and at night the story of the capture of Harper's Ferry by the Virginia troops, with whom were Marylanders led by Bradley Johnson. The town was afire the night of the 18th. From all quarters came tidings of troops from the North and West, concentrating on Baltimore. The efficient militia of Massachusetts, under Maj.-Gen. Benjamin F. Butler, a man of ability, vigor and executive capacity, were on the march to protect the capital and to save the nation.
The New York Seventh, the ideal soldiers of peace parades, but in reality a gallant and game set, was filling its ranks, its cartridge boxes and its haversacks, and standing at attention, waiting word of command and tap of drum. Pennsylvania was rallying to the call of her great governor. The Democracy of the West, roused by Douglas, was rising as one man to defend the flag, and one serried, unbroken line of steel stretched from the northeast corner of Maine to the Mississippi river, ready to march forward to invade, to crush and to conquer the South. There could be no misunderstanding as to the meaning of all this. It meant war—nothing but war. War by one section on another. War urged on by hatred, by malice, by greed, by desire for conquest, to overthrow institutions existing before the republic, to destroy a social order which had given the world soldiers, statesmen and philosophers, the peers of any who had ever lived. The common people of Maryland understood it. The plain people think with their hearts, and hearts on questions of right and wrong are more unerring than heads. They were all for the South, and they were all for arming and fighting—fighting there on the spot—the first man or men who should presume to attempt to cross Maryland to get at Virginia. But the upper class is always conservative. The ex-governors, the ex-senators, the ex-judges everywhere are always afraid. The ‘have beens’ ever recur to the peaceful times when they directed affairs, and always will be abhorrent of noise, of tumult, of violence, of force and of change. They cannot be leaders in revolution. Maryland. at this crisis of her history was cursed by just such ‘conservatism.’ It was caused by her geographical position. She could only follow. She can never lead in such a crisis. She lacked young leaders. Kentucky was in a worse situation, for her leaders led her into the quagmire of neutrality. Missouri was better off, for Jackson and Price on the one side and Frank Blair on the other were positive men, and promptly ranged the people of the State in arms, for their respective sides. Maryland had sons who were educated soldiers. Robert Milligan McLane came of soldier blood. His grandfather, Allan McLane, had been the comrade of Light Horse Harry in the campaign of Valley Forge and had led the Delaware Legion, as Lee had the Virginians. McLane graduated at West Point, served with distinction in the Florida campaign, but after that left the army and entered politics in Maryland. He had served in the State legislature, as representative in Congress from Maryland, and occupied a conspicuous place in the confidence of the State rights Southern people of Maryland. George W. Hughes had served with distinction for many years in the army of the United States and had won the grade of colonel in Mexico. He was now living in affluence and retirement on his plantation in Anne Arundel county. The party of action, the young men, looked to these old soldiers for advice and leadership. But they were too old soldiers to plunge into a fight without troops, arms, ammunition or a commissary department. Bradley Johnson and other young men were ready, but they had neither the experience nor the knowledge to qualify them for immediate leadership.
So on the night of April 18, 1861, Maryland was standing alert, braced up, ready to charge at the word. Virginia had seceded, the North was marching. Maryland was the outpost to receive the first attack. At that hour there was no division of opinion. The State rights clubs had been flying the secession flag, the stars and bars of the Confederacy, and the palmetto of South Carolina. The Union clubs had over their halls the stars and stripes; but during the afternoon of April 18th the Union flags were hauled down and the State flag of Maryland everywhere substituted. And the black and gold was everywhere saluted with cheers, with shouts, with tears. The telegraph gave hourly notice of the approach of the enemy. General Butler had left Boston; he had passed New York; he had gone through Philadelphia; he was on the Susquehanna. What next? Maryland held her breath. Through New England their route had been an ovation. Down Broadway in New York the people went wild, as they did through New Jersey and Philadelphia. There were eleven companies of Massachusetts troops attached to the Sixth Massachusetts under command of Colonel Jones. At Philadelphia an unarmed and ununiformed mob of Pennsylvanians, called a regiment, under Colonel Small, was added to Colonel Jones' command. They came in a train of thirty-five cars and arrived at the President street station at 11 a. m. Thence it was the custom of the railroad company to haul each car across the city, over a track laid in the street, to Camden station of the Baltimore & Ohio railroad, a distance of a little over a mile. Nine cars with seven companies got through to Camden station. But that was as much as human nature could bear. The mob of infuriated men increased every minute and the excitement grew. The stones out of the street flew up and staved in the car windows. The drivers unhitched their teams, hitched to the rear of their cars and made all haste back to President Street station, where had been left the unarmed Pennsylvanians and the rest of the Massachusetts regiment. These men were marched out of the station, formed in front of it, and then moved in a column of fours. toward Camden station. In the meantime the railroad track had been torn up, the bridge on the south dismantled and obstructed, and the march of the troops was necessarily laborious and very slow. The streets were packed with a dense mass of infuriated and excited men, encouraged by the apparent retreat of the troops and the success of the opposition to them. The foremost files had to force their way through this pack of humanity. George William Brown, mayor of the town, with a gallantry and chivalry beyond imagination, for he was a Southern man and certified his fidelity by fourteen months imprisonment in Union dungeons, placed himself by the side of the captain of the leading company and forced their way through the crowd. No man in Baltimore was more loved, respected and admired than Brown, and his escort of the ‘invader’ was submitted to while he was present. But as soon as he had passed stones began to hail on the column. The officers became rattled. Instead of halting and confronting their enemy, they accelerated the step until the march became a half run. Then a pistol went off; then a musket; then two muskets, three muskets cracked, and citizens fell and died in their tracks. Then reason fled. The mob tore the muskets out of the hands of the soldiers and shot them down. One man jerked the sword out of the hand of an officer and ran him through with it. Frank Ward, a young lawyer, snatched the flag out of the hands of the color bearer and tore it from the lance, and while making off with it was shot through both thighs. He survived though, to serve gallantly as adjutant of the First Maryland regiment, and is alive to-day. Marshal Kane had gone to the Camden station to protect the troops there, when news came of this melee on Pratt street. He swung fifty policemen down the street in a double-quick, formed them across the street in the rear of the soldiers and ordered their pursuers to ‘halt.’ They halted, and then with the mayor of Baltimore in front, the chief of police in rear, the baited, harried, breathless preservers of the Union reached Camden station, where they were loaded on trains and dispatched, panic-stricken, to Washington.
Outside the city limits, however, after the danger had passed, some heroic soul signalized his devotion to the flag by shooting in cold blood Robert W. Davis, a reputable and well-known citizen and merchant, whose crime was alleged to have been a cheer for Jeff Davis and the South. That evening, April 9th, Marshal Kane telegraphed to Bradley T. Johnson at Frederick: ‘Streets red with Maryland blood. Send expresses over the mountains of Maryland and Virginia for the riflemen to come, without delay. Fresh hordes will be down on us to-morrow. We will fight them and whip them or die.’
Johnson, since the failure of the conference convention of March to act, had been engaged in organizing companies of minute men to resist invasion, by bushwhacking or any other practicable method. He had corresponded with the captains