Confederate Military History. Robert White
in the State, and all were moving toward concert of action. The receipt of Kane's telegram was the match to the magazine. By seven o'clock on the 20th the Frederick company was assembled, took possession of the moving train on the Baltimore & Ohio railroad to Baltimore, and by eleven o'clock marched down Baltimore street to Monument Square. Monument Square was the forum of Baltimore, where the citizens always assembled in times of peril to consult and determine that the commonweal should receive no harm. They were the first reinforcements to Baltimore. Next came two troops of cavalry from Baltimore county, and next the Patapsco Dragoons from Anne Arundel rode straight to the city hall and presented themselves to Mayor Brown to assist in the defense of the city. The afternoon papers of the 19th spread all over the State during the next day, and the State rose. Early on the morning of the 20th the city council appropriated $500,000 for the defense of the city, to be used at the discretion of the mayor. The banks furnished the money in two hours. Capt. Wilson Carey Nicholas, with the Garrison Forest Rangers—afterward Company G., First Maryland regiment, seized the United States arsenal at Pikesville, where there was a deposit of antiquated arms and a considerable supply of gunpowder. All the city companies of militia were under arms in their armories. Col. Benjamin Huger, of South Carolina, who had been in command at Pikesville for some years, but who had just resigned from the army of the United States, was made colonel of the Fifty-third regiment, Maryland militia, composed of the Independent Grays and the six companies of the Maryland Guard. The command was admirably instructed, drilled and officered, and a majority of its officers and men afterward served in the army of the Confederate States. The mayor issued a notice calling on all citizens who had arms to deposit them with the commissioner of police, to be used in the defense of the city, and upon all who were willing to enroll themselves for military service. Under this call over fifteen thousand volunteers were enrolled and partly organized on Saturday, the 20th, and Col. Isaac R. Trimble was assigned to command them. The railroad stations and State tobacco warehouses were used for drill rooms. On Saturday night the bridges on the railroads leaving north from Baltimore were burnt or disabled by a detachment of police and of the Maryland Guard, acting under the orders of Governor Hicks. The governor was in Baltimore during the attack on the troops and was carried off his feet and out of his head by the furor of the hour. He gave the order to burn the bridges. He afterward strenuously denied giving it, but he gave it.
On Sunday morning, April 21st, the Howard County Dragoons, Capt. George R. Earltree, came in, and by the boat two companies from Easton, and news came that the companies from Harford, Cecil, Carroll and Prince George's were on the march. Three batteries of light artillery were out on the streets, and the city was braced up in tense excitement.
Just after the people had gone to church on that day, about half-past 10, two men rode down Charles Street, in a sweeping gallop, from beyond the boundary to Lexington and down Lexington to the city hall. They shouted as they flashed by, ‘The Yankees are coming, the Yankees are coming!’ Twenty-four hundred of Pennsylvania troops, only half of them armed, had got as far as Cockeysville, twenty miles from Baltimore, where they had been stopped by the burnt bridges, and had gone into camp. These couriers of disaster brought the news of this fresh invasion and it flashed through the city like an electric shock. The churches dismissed their congregations, their bells rang, and in the twinkling of an eye the streets were packed with people—men and women in the hysterics of excitement pressing guns, pistols, fowling pieces, swords, daggers, bowie knives, every variety of weapon, upon the men and beseeching them to drive back the hated invader. In an hour Monument Square was packed, crammed with such a mass of quivering humanity as has rarely been seen in human history.
Early that morning the mayor had gone to Washington on a special train to see the President and General Scott at the invitation of the former to the governor and mayor to visit him for conference as to the best way to preserve the peace. They arrived at an understanding that no more troops were to be marched through Baltimore. They were to be brought from Harrisburg down to the Relay House on the Northern Central railroad, seven miles north-west of the city, and thence by rail to Washington. General Scott proposed this plan to the President, if the people of Maryland would permit it and would not molest the troops. But if they were attacked, the general of the army said, he would bring troops from Perryville by boat to Annapolis and thence by rail to Washington. The President and General Scott both seemed to take it for granted that the Potomac would be blockaded. Mayor Brown returned from Washington with the assurance that the detachment at Cockeysville would be ordered back, and that no troops should attempt to pass through Baltimore. The wires were all cut north of the city and all communication by rail or telegraph between the capital and the Northern States was absolutely closed for several days. The Eighth Massachusetts, with Brig.-Gen. B. F. Butler, arrived at Perryville on the 20th, took the steamboat Maryland, and arrived at Annapolis on the 21st. On the 22nd, the governor called an extra session of the general assembly to meet at Annapolis on the 26th. On the 24th the governor, ‘in consequence of the extraordinary state of affairs,’ changed the place of meeting to Frederick. On its meeting there the Hon. James Murray Mason appeared before it, as a commissioner from the State of Virginia authorized to conclude a treaty of alliance, offensive and defensive, between the two States. The legislature had been elected in 1859 and was charged with no mandate for revolutionary times. Ten members from Baltimore were elected at a special election held in that city on the 24th, in the place of the delegation returned as elected in 1859, but unseated on account of fraud and violence at the election. The new members were the leading men of the town—merchants, lawyers, representatives of the great business of commerce and trade of a great city. They were John C. Brune, Ross Winans, Henry M. Warfield, J. Hanson Thomas, T. Parkin Scott, H. Mason Morfit, S. Teakle Wallis, Charles H. Pitts, William G. Harrison, and Lawrence Langston. It was evident in twenty-four hours that ‘conservatism’ would rule the councils of the general assembly, as it had done those of the governor, and that all the influence of that body would be exerted against any action by the State looking toward taking part in the revolution, which it was clear, was upon the whole country.
Captain Johnson had brought back his company from Baltimore, armed with Hall's carbines, an antiquated and rejected breechloader, and had got his men into some sort of shape. He remained in Frederick at the request of the State rights members of the legislature to guard and protect them from the Unionists of the town, who were loquacious and loud in their threats against ‘the Secesh.’ And the legislature was prompt to range itself on the side of peace and Union. It met on the 26th of April. On the 27th it issued an address disclaiming all idea, intention or authority to pass any ordinance of secession. It appointed Otho Scott, Robert M. McLane and William J. Ross commissioners to confer with the President of the United States and see what arrangements could be made to preserve the peace of the State. On May 6th these commissioners reported that they had had an interview with the President, and that he had assured them that the State of Maryland, so long as she did not array herself against the Federal government, would not be molested or interfered with, except so far as it was necessary for the preservation of the Union. But neither governor, general assembly nor commissioners to the President had the faintest conception of the real state of things in Maryland. She was devoted to the Union. She was hostile to secession. She abhorred the men who precipitated the Gulf States into revolution. She had no sympathy with slavery, for she had emancipated more than half her slaves and had established a negro State of Maryland in Africa, where she was training her emancipated servants to take control of their own destiny as free men, and this colony she supported by annual appropriations out of her public taxes. There was no involuntary servitude in Maryland, for as soon as a servant became discontented he or she just walked over the line into Pennsylvania, where they were safely harbored and concealed.
Therefore there was no sympathy in Maryland for the proceedings convulsing the Southern States. But the proclamation of the President, calling for 75,000 men ‘to redress wrongs already too long endured,’ changed the whole situation in the twinkling of an eye. It was no longer union or disunion, secession or State rights. It was a question of invasion and self-defense. The President had declared war on her sister State. Was Maryland to support that war, or was she to stand by with hands folded and see her friends and kindred beyond the Potomac put to the sword and the torch? War on a State was against the common right. The cause of each was the cause of all; and precisely as Maryland had responded in 1775 to the cry of Massachusetts for assistance, so now did the people of Maryland, over governor, over general assembly,