Chapter 19

BALTIMORE IN THE DIVIDED NATION

BY 1860, BALTIMORE HAD PLAYED host to 12 presidential nominating conventions. Philadelphia, its nearest competitor, had attracted only three. Centrality and accessibility contributed to Baltimore’s status as America’s convention city. It was somewhat north of center on the Eastern Seaboard, close to the population concentrations of the Northeast, but further south and west than any of them. From the urban, industrial Northeast, Baltimore reached out to the rest of the country. The National Road connected Baltimore to the Ohio River, and steamboats on the Ohio and Mississippi connected the road with much of the West. Delegates from the Northeast and South could travel to Baltimore by water, and eventually by railroad. Baltimore’s principal attraction, however, may have been its proximity to Washington, to which it was linked by the B&O. But the city’s political placement may have seemed just as advantageous as its geographic location. Baltimore, as Eugene Rosenboom observed, was in “a border slave state but near enough to the Mason-Dixon line to be regarded as sectionally neutral. Hardly any local abolitionists were present to anger southern visitors. Nor would the harshest features of the slave system be in evidence to affront those from the free North.”¹

Toward the end of its run as the country’s convention city, Baltimore became the city where parties went to break apart and die. A forlorn fragment of the Whigs gathered in Baltimore for a final meeting in 1856. Nine states sent no delegates at all. The Whigs had no presidential candidate of their own. They endorsed Know-Nothing Millard Fillmore for the presidency, but rejected his platform.²

In April 1860, the Democratic convention met in Charleston rather than Baltimore. Its platform committee produced three different platforms—one for the committee’s majority and two endorsed by minorities. A majority of the convention adopted one of the minority reports. It failed to commit the party to protection of slavery in the territories and reflected candidate Stephen Douglas’s demand for “popular sovereignty”—allowing each territory to decide whether it would be slave or free. Delegates from the Deep South walked out of the convention. The remaining Democrats tried to settle on a presidential candidate. The chairman ruled that victory required a two-thirds vote of the entire convention, not just of the delegates present. Stephen Douglas needed 202 votes of the 250 delegates remaining after the southerners departed. After 57 ballots, he remained unnominated. Maryland delegate William S. Gittings introduced a motion that the convention reconvene in Baltimore. He reassured his fellow Democrats that “Baltimore was no longer a Plug Ugly town and promised the delegates a hospitable welcome.” The convention rejected Gittings’s proposal three times before agreeing to reconvene in Baltimore for one more effort at harmony. After much persuasion, most of the southerners who seceded in Charleston agreed to rejoin the party in Baltimore.³ The city was their accustomed gathering place. Perhaps a return to their old location might restore their old unity.

The home of Reverdy Johnson in Monument Square served as headquarters for Stephen Douglas. Democrats trying to prevent Douglas’s nomination set up shop directly across the square at the Gilmor House, where fire-eating Alabaman William L. Yancey was staying. At night, after the convention had recessed, partisans of the two factions staged rival political rallies on opposite sides of the square, with band music and speeches. The convention itself met at the Front Street Theatre, where the Douglas and anti-Douglas forces, along with several other factions, quarreled for five days. The anti-Douglas Democrats then walked out once more and set up their own convention at the Maryland Institute. The Maryland Institute Democrats nominated states’ rights candidate John C. Breckenridge of Kentucky, and the Front Street Theatre Democrats nominated Douglas.⁴

As the Democratic Party fell apart in Baltimore, another party was approaching its final days in the city, and still another was in Baltimore to gather itself together. By 1860, the American Party of Maryland retained its grip on political authority only in Baltimore and the governor’s office in Annapolis. But Know-Nothing governor Thomas H. Hicks was already readjusting his party affiliation, and so were his fellow politicians in Baltimore. A new party, the Constitutional Unionists, offered them a replacement for the burnt-out remains of the Know-Nothing skyrocket. Their supreme concern now was preservation of the Union. That was also the objective of the new Constitutional Union Party, whose convention met in Baltimore.

The Constitutional Unionists recognized Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky as their founder, though he declined to accept their nomination for the presidency. At the end of 1859, Crittenden had called together 50 of his congressional colleagues who were affiliated with neither the Republican nor Democratic Party. Most were steadfast Whigs or disconnected Know-Nothings looking for a new political home. A committee of 10 was appointed to oversee construction of a new political party to accommodate them and others of like mind. Under the auspices of the committee, an appeal “to the people of the United States” was issued in February 1860, announcing the new party’s platform—simply “Union and the Constitution.” John Pendleton Kennedy was one of the authors of the appeal. It summoned Unionists to choose delegates from their states for a national convention in Baltimore. Delegates from 16 states eventually assembled in a building on Fayette Street, the former First Presbyterian Church. Two delegations showed up claiming to represent Baltimore. The convention sidestepped controversy by seating both and splitting the city’s votes between them.⁵

Another difference of opinion, however, was more difficult to avoid. Some of the delegates urged that the first order of business should be nomination of a presidential candidate; others insisted that it should be the drafting of a platform. A Pennsylvania delegate declared that if the new party succeeded politically, he “wanted that success founded upon a principle and not upon a man”—in other words, a “definite platform.” Baltimore mayor Thomas Swann disagreed: “When Mr. Crittenden stood upon the platform to call the convention together, that was platform enough for Maryland.” Murat Halstead, a Cincinnati journalist who watched from the gallery, observed that “the worthies here in Convention assembled all fell to abusing platforms. There was probably as much discretion as virtue in this, for the delegates would find it impossible to agree on an expression of principles.” The delegates did agree that a committee consisting of one member from each state should consider all resolutions proposed on the floor of the convention, including the question of the party’s platform.⁶

The committee reported at the start of the next day’s session. The platform proposed, in its entirety, was “the constitution of the country, the Union of the States, and the enforcement of the law.” The delegates gave it nine cheers and passed it unanimously. This outpouring of unanimity was followed by a difference of opinion about the method of voting to be adopted in nominating a presidential candidate. It was resolved by an ingenious delegate from Virginia who suggested a scheme so complex that it satisfied almost everyone, except the Maryland delegation. Maryland had withdrawn from the first roll-call vote because, according to Halstead, its delegation was mystified by the voting scheme, which it could not get “through its head without a surgical operation.”⁷

Fortunately, it took only two ballots for Tennessee’s John Bell to achieve a two-thirds vote. His principal competitor was Sam Houston. By the time the roll call reached Virginia on the second ballot, Bell had secured a simple majority of the convention. To make his nomination unanimous, states that had already cast votes for other candidates went through the formality of changing them. Each declaration of unanimity for Bell was accompanied by speeches and ovations. Halstead complained that the convention was a bore: “too much unity here . . . to make it interesting.” It was unity sustained by deliberate ambiguity. “They propose to accomplish that political salvation so devoutly to be wished by ignoring all the rugged issues of the day.” In particular, Halstead noted, slavery was not once mentioned during the convention.⁸

Though delayed by a rainstorm, a “ratification” rally was held in Monument Square after the convention had concluded its business by nominating Edward Everett for the vice-presidency. The speakers’ platform erected in the square was 60 feet long with a 30-foot tower at each end. One tower bore a portrait of George Washington; the other, Henry Clay. An arch between the towers provided sufficient space to display the entire platform of the Constitutional Union Party: “The Union, the Constitution, and the Enforcement of the Laws.” US senator and former Know-Nothing Anthony Kennedy acted as master of ceremonies.⁹

VISIONS OF UNION

Senator Kennedy’s literary older brother tried to preserve the Union in his own way. At the end of 1860, he finished a long essay, later printed as a pamphlet: The Border States: Their Power and Duty in the Present Disordered Condition of the Country. It offered a brief against secession and a plan to defeat it without coercion. Much of John Pendleton Kennedy’s argument was aimed at South Carolina—the only state to have seceded when he was composing his essay. Kennedy asserted that behind all the Carolina bombast lay the same grievance that had roused South Carolinians during the nullification controversy of 1832. It was a matter of taxation. The state had seceded because its residents could no longer bear the tariffs imposed to protect northern manufacturers against foreign competition. The fevered defense of slavery, he insisted, was “a parade of idle and mischievous debate . . . a mere artifice of politicians.”¹⁰ The true disagreements reflected disparate material interests, not conscience, constitutional doctrine, or sacred tradition—in other words, were subject to resolution by practical compromise.¹¹

The achievement of that compromise, Kennedy claimed, was the duty of the border states (in which he included Virginia and North Carolina). Their task was to make North and South abandon fanaticism and see slavery for what it was. The border states were prepared for this duty because they had been “the chief and only sufferers from the inroads of organized abolitionists who had stealthily abstracted their slaves” and each year sent almost a million dollars’ worth of human chattel on the Underground Railroad bound for freedom. The border states, moreover, were most troubled by the difficulties of enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act. Yet they firmly believed that the best response to such incursions was “the due exercise of the power of the government,” not “resort to a covert revolution that seeks to legalize its action by taking the name of secession.”¹²

If the border states could respond so temperately to such direct aggression, without secession or violence, surely they could work out a peaceful resolution of the complaints voiced in the deeper South by people less immediately exposed to northern insults and attacks. If the border states’ mediation proved unsuccessful, and the Union disintegrated, then the border states might form a confederacy of their own. This would “serve as a centre of reinforcement for the reconstruction of the Union.” Northerners, wrote Kennedy, were far from unified on the issue of slavery. The more moderate among them—in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey—might find they had more in common with a confederation of border states than with stern New England abolitionists. A southern confederacy might be even more susceptible to the appeals of moderation. A polity founded on secession, after all, was inherently unstable. The states of the old Union—North and South—would gradually regroup around the country’s center.¹³

Kennedy’s plan for preserving the Union was an articulate and inventive expression of Baltimoreans’ more general determination to talk their way around the issue of slavery. But his attempt, like theirs, was ultimately a failure. After declaring slavery a mere pretext for disunion, Kennedy devoted much of his essay to a discussion of the subject. He had only to consider the results of the election held just a month before he finished his essay. Slavery was the pivotal factor in Maryland’s electoral realignment. Democratic gains were concentrated in rural counties with substantial slave populations. The Know-Nothings held on only in Baltimore.¹⁴

Kennedy’s attempt to sideline the issue of slavery overlooked the extent to which race itself was a source of rancorous division in his own state. In 1859, Colonel Curtis M. Jacobs, an Eastern Shore slave owner and a member of the General Assembly, introduced a bill to curtail the rights of Maryland’s free black people. The announced objective of his proposal was the abolition of “free-negroism.” The bill would require every African American in the state—both slave and free—to carry a pass, a document that might be used to restrict movement. It would also outlaw the manumission of slaves and prohibit the functioning of independent black church congregations. Free black people who fell into debt might be sold back into slavery, and those who left the state would not be allowed to return except as slaves. In short, Jacobs wanted to ensure that every black resident of Maryland lived in bondage.¹⁵

Baltimore’s black churches mobilized to fight the bill. The congregation gathered at Bethel AME Church at 3:00 o’clock one morning for an entire day of prayer and fasting to summon up the strength to defeat the legislation. Though black Baltimoreans could not vote, they could lobby. The city’s barbers, most of whom were black, urged their customers to sign a petition opposing the Jacobs bill. The General Assembly received a petition from 200 of Baltimore’s “best” white women protesting the proposed impositions on the liberty of free black people, and two of Baltimore’s most prominent attorneys circulated another petition among the city’s male elite in support of the same position. None of Baltimore’s newspapers endorsed the legislation. All of the bill’s proposals were defeated in the General Assembly. Weakened versions were later presented as referenda, and they were defeated as well.¹⁶

CITY ON THE EDGE

Less than a week after Abraham Lincoln was elected president, Baltimore’s new mayor delivered his inaugural message. George William Brown took note of his Reform Association’s sweeping victory over the Know-Nothings. He emphasized that the voters had supported the Reformers “on the ground . . . that national politics should be entirely disregarded in the administration of municipal affairs.” It took only a few moments for Brown to contradict himself. A period of “great prosperity” seemed to lie ahead for Baltimore, he said, “but the prospect has been suddenly clouded by the effect produced on some of the Southern states by the recent Presidential election.” The “welfare of this community is inseparably bound up with the preservation of the Union.”¹⁷

Like John Pendleton Kennedy, Mayor Brown struggled to avoid the questions that agitated national politics, but some of his constituents refused to let them go. Local organizations committed to Stephen Douglas and John C. Breckenridge continued to operate in Baltimore even after their champions had been defeated.¹⁸ The disputes that threatened to fracture the Union threatened public order in Baltimore.

One of Brown’s first acts as mayor was to invite the supervisory staff of the police department to his office. The mayor assured the marshal, his deputy, the department’s eight captains, and eight lieutenants that he “would do everything on his part to assist the police in the preservation of order and the protection of property.”¹⁹ Legislation drafted by Brown’s Reform Association had sharply reduced the mayor’s authority over the police. The mayor had just one vote on the state-controlled board of police. Perhaps Brown hoped to increase his personal influence with the police by dealing with them directly rather than through the board. Weeks after his meeting with the police commanders, he visited the central police station, accompanied by the department’s marshal. The mayor looked over the vagrants rounded up the night before and “expressed his approbation” for the marshal’s order to arrest “all such characters.”²⁰

Because the police operated under the authority of the state, the mayor’s informal influence might be needed to keep them responsive to local sensibilities. The mayor also needed their discreet assistance to contain local eruptions of sectional conflict. Shortly after Brown took office, many Baltimoreans began to run up a modified version of South Carolina’s Palmetto flag. It bore the familiar palm, but with a rattlesnake coiled around the trunk, encircled by 15 stars—one for each slave state. The Sun announced that it was “all the rage,” though Mayor Brown claimed that such flags were immediately hauled down wherever they appeared. One of the flags raised over a firehouse in West Baltimore attracted particular attention. It flew above a meeting of the “Southern Volunteers,” whose members and prospective members filled the firehouse and spilled onto the streets outside. The deputy marshal of police and 20 officers stood by to ensure that the proceedings did not get out of hand. The volunteers’ spokesman announced that the organization’s purpose was “the maintenance of Southern honor and the equal rights of the States in the Union.” Then a succession of resolutions won approval by acclamation. The Sun reported that these “were properly conservative in tone,” but “nevertheless breathed the true Southern spirit.” The organization enrolled 100 new members.²¹

Signs of impending trouble were difficult to ignore. But public officials in Baltimore and Maryland tried to overcome the difficulty rather than face the trouble. Governor Thomas Hicks, once a Know-Nothing but now a Unionist, resisted urgent demands that he summon the General Assembly into special session to determine how Maryland should respond to the national crisis. Hicks held his silence until he received an entreaty signed by a former governor and some of the state’s most prominent citizens, imploring him to call the legislature into session immediately. The governor responded that assembling the legislature to discuss the crisis would only inflame the excitement already far too prevalent in Maryland. He offered the sensible advice that Marylanders should wait for the new Lincoln administration to show its hand before acting on their anxieties about the policies it might pursue.²²

Severn Teackle Wallis, one of Baltimore’s most eminent attorneys, could not wait. He attacked Hicks not only for refusing to call the legislature into session but for urging Marylanders to “cling to the Union.” In the diminished Union, Maryland’s political role would be marginal at best. It had originally entered a Union in which Maryland was “a Central State, the tendrils of her prosperity fastening, upon every side, to the confederated communities around her. You break that confederacy in the midst, leaving her a border province with a foreign nation and perhaps an enemy beside her.” More to the point, clinging to the Union meant “clinging to the Republican party”—a partnership that few Marylanders could stomach.²³

In Baltimore, the Brown administration did its best to obscure the perils of a border city as the country fell to sectional warfare. In January 1861, for example, the Sun reported that a police captain “with a large body of men” had been “hovering about Fort McHenry, and a vigilant watch is being kept from the land and water side.” The official explanation for the police presence was that burglars were operating in the area, but there were hardly any houses to be burglarized in the vicinity of the fort, which had been defended by a single US Army sergeant until the police showed up. Two artillery companies, however, were on their way from Fort Leavenworth.²⁴ The police were holding the fort until the reinforcements arrived.

In the meantime, the municipality busied itself with familiar local issues. On January 8, 1861, the day before Mississippi seceded, Mayor Brown issued his annual message. A significant portion was devoted to the well-known irregularities by which the City Passenger Railway had secured the right to operate on Baltimore’s streets. Then he discussed the city’s water supply, the construction of a new jail, and the location of a new almshouse. Only at the end of his message did he mention the national crisis that was destroying the Union: “it is not within the province of the Mayor to make suggestions in response to proposed measures bearing on questions of national importance.”²⁵

Baltimore’s political authorities seemed determined to carry on business as usual even in the face of radically unusual circumstances. Like Mayor Brown, they acknowledged that the political survival of the nation was under threat, but they insisted that “national politics should be entirely disregarded in the administration of municipal offices.” This parochial principle carried less weight among Baltimore’s citizens than its public officials. The Southern Volunteers and the partisans of Bell and Breckenridge brought sectional loyalties and national issues into local politics. But some of Baltimore’s citizens seemed just as resolutely focused on local concerns as the city’s officials and just as resistant to the distractions posed by the crisis in national politics.

At the end of February 1861, after all the “cotton” states of the Deep South had seceded, some of the city’s residents felt that the time was right to construct a city hall. Their appeal, signed “Many Baltimoreans,” was published in the Sun. Baltimore had never had a proper city hall. It made do with buildings designed for other purposes. The city had leased a parcel of land on Holliday Street intended for such a structure, but had not yet secured the funds needed to build it. In the meantime, the officers of the municipality were housed in buildings already standing on the property, most of which had been private dwellings. According to “Many Baltimoreans,” these accommodations were “a disgrace humiliating to city pride and offensive to architectural taste.” Baltimore was the third largest city in the nation but did not have a city hall appropriate to its status. Its backwardness in this respect undermined its prospects in the competition for commerce and industry. “Many Baltimoreans” acknowledged the “national difficulties” of the time, but insisted that work on a city hall should proceed “whether the Union be permanently severed, peaceably or not.”²⁶

A few days before this plea, Abraham Lincoln passed through the city in the middle of the night on the way to his inauguration. His travel plans had originally included a stop in Baltimore, where he would deliver some reassuring remarks, as he had in the many towns along his route to Washington. On the advice of detective Allan Pinkerton, however, the presidential party traveled through Baltimore at night and in secret. Pinkerton had been retained by the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore Railroad to investigate a rumored plot to assassinate Lincoln during his stop in Baltimore. The plot, writes David Stashower, “stands as a defining moment marking a crucial transition from civilized debate to open hostilities.”²⁷ In less than two months, Baltimore would experience another crucial transition—from the threat of death to actual fatalities.

FIRST BLOOD

The war started at Fort Sumter, but the killing began in Baltimore. On April 18, 1861, state and local public officials finally acknowledged the possibility of a violent eruption. Governor Hicks issued a proclamation noting that Maryland’s “peculiar position” at the junction of North and South shaped its residents’ sharply divergent views about secession, union, and slavery. He urged them to “abstain from all heated controversy . . . to avoid all things that tend to crimination and recrimination.” Mayor Brown’s proclamation concurred and expressed his support for the governor’s pledge that no troops would be sent from Maryland except to defend Washington. In other words, the state’s soldiers would not participate in the “coercion” of the South, a touchy point even for local Unionists. In fact, it was the point that divided them. Constitutional Unionists opposed secession but insisted on conciliation of the wayward states. Unconditional Unionists insisted that secession was unconstitutional and should be met with force. The mayor, a Constitutional Unionist, stood for a moderate and conciliatory response, with the hope that “the storm of civil war which now threatens the country will at least pass over our beloved State and leave it unharmed.”²⁸

A day after the proclamations, a Baltimore mob attacked Massachusetts troops passing through the city on their way to defend Washington. The Massachusetts soldiers were among the first to respond to President Lincoln’s call for 75,000 men to protect the capital. Soldiers traveling by rail from northern states to Washington had to change trains in Baltimore. The Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore line delivered them to the President Street Station just south of East Pratt Street. The troops continued their journey in horse-drawn passenger cars along tracks on Pratt Street, west to Howard Street and then south to the B&O’s Camden Station, where they could board trains for Washington. The distance was something over a mile. The inconvenience was the product of a municipal prohibition against steam locomotives on city streets and the B&O’s success in preventing other railroads from building direct lines from Baltimore to Washington.

President Street Station, the starting point for the Pratt Street Riot of April 19, 1861. The riot resulted in the first fatalities of the Civil War.

Before the arrival of the Massachusetts regiment, several hundred volunteers from the North had marched through the city from various rail depots to Camden Station, with adequate police protection and little trouble. The Sixth Massachusetts together with some unarmed volunteers from Pennsylvania arrived at the President Street Station on the morning of April 19, and seven companies completed the journey from one station to the other. A growing crowd jeered and threw stones at them but could not block them. As the mob expanded, a load of sand was dumped on the tracks near the intersection of Pratt and Gay Streets, topped with anchors dragged from nearby docks and a mound of cobblestones. When the next passenger cars reached this obstacle, the team of horses was hastily shifted from the front to the rear of the cars in order to retreat to the President Street Station.²⁹

On their return to the depot, four companies of the Massachusetts regiment—about 220 men—disembarked and formed up to march to Camden Station. Outside, a small force of city policemen struggled with the mob. From the moment they stepped onto President Street, the soldiers had difficulty maintaining their formation as the crowd pressed around them. A member of the mob marching ahead of the soldiers unfurled the South Carolina flag, possibly a copy of the ones that had recently flown over the city, and for a moment the Union troops were marching behind a symbol of secession.³⁰ Then “a whirlwind of stones” swept over the soldiers In the short distance from the station to Pratt Street, three members of the regiment were knocked to the ground by bottles or rocks, but all managed to keep up.³¹

As they crossed the bridge that carried Pratt Street over the Jones Falls, the soldiers may have been held up by construction debris left behind by workmen who were making repairs to the bridge. It was here that the troops began to fire their muskets into the crowd that pursued them; members of the mob had reportedly been firing pistols at the troops for some time. The officer in command of the detachment, Captain A. S. Follensbee, ordered his men to march at double quick time. As they reached the west end of the bridge, they encountered Mayor Brown, who had received word about their situation while he waited for them at Camden Station. Brown, armed only with an umbrella, took a position beside Follensbee at the head of the column, with the hope that his presence might temper the rage of his fellow Baltimoreans. He suggested that the captain rescind his order to march at quick time because the troops’ hasty attempt to escape the mob might only encourage its pursuit. A member of the police board who had been waiting with Brown at Camden Station sent a message to Marshal George Kane instructing him to bring as many police officers as he could to protect the Union troops. Kane met them with about 40 policemen after the troops crossed Charles Street. His men formed a line, allowed the soldiers to pass through their ranks, and then pointed their revolvers at the pursuing mob. According to Mayor Brown, “The mob recoiled like water from a rock.”³²

The mob, however, had already killed four soldiers—two killed by gunshot, one beaten to death, and one who died of head injuries sustained in the “whirlwind” of missiles. Twelve civilians were dead. Thirty-six soldiers and an unknown number of civilians were injured.

The mob that met the soldiers was not the usual collection of Baltimore ruffians. More than half of those who can be identified held nonmanual occupations and owned more real and personal property than average Baltimoreans. Most were merchants or clerks or engaged in other commercial pursuits.³³ Customhouse clerks seem to have been active participants in the disorders. A witness who later testified in a court hearing said, “The people who were putting ankers [sic] on the track & abetting were as respectable in appearance as this Grand Jury.”³⁴

CHOOSING SIDES

Late in the afternoon, after the Sixth Massachusetts had boarded trains for Washington, a crowd gathered in Monument Square. Mayor Brown and other speakers condemned secession but also denounced the use of military coercion against the states of the Confederacy. Governor Hicks expressed his hope that the Union could be preserved, a hope that met a hostile response from the audience. Hicks then added that “I love my state and I love the Union, but I will suffer my right arm to be torn from my body before I will raise it to strike a sister state.”³⁵

The governor and the mayor had already sent a telegram to President Lincoln notifying him about the day’s violence and requesting that no more troops be sent through Baltimore. A few hours later, they sent a more detailed letter to the White House repeating the request. A trio of prominent Baltimoreans (one of them a Republican) carried the letter to Washington on a late-night train. They were followed by US Senator Anthony Kennedy and Congressman J. Morrison Harris, who met with the president, the secretaries of state, treasury, and war, and Commanding General Winfield Scott. That evening, a small group of men gathered at the home of Mayor Brown, where Hicks was an overnight guest. There had been no reply to the telegram sent to the president, and the conferees had heard that more Union troops were set to pass through the city. They decided to send out a detachment of police officers and the Maryland Guard, a military force of doubtful loyalty to the Union, to burn the railroad bridges north and northeast of the city so that no more federal troops would be able to reach Baltimore.³⁶

The next day, President Lincoln sent a telegram to Mayor Brown and Governor Hicks. Though he insisted that “troops must be brought” to Washington, he was not determined to bring them through Baltimore. General Scott had already suggested that federal troops could be marched around Baltimore rather than through it. “By this,” wrote Lincoln, “a collision of the people of Baltimore with the troops will be avoided unless they go out of their way to seek it. I hope you will exert your influence to prevent this.”³⁷

But Hicks and Brown had already burned their bridges. In trying to keep Baltimore peaceful, they had temporarily cut Washington off from the North and prevented troops from reaching the capital, where they were badly needed. The destruction of the railroad bridges might be construed as a hostile act against the Union. It was not the only one. Very soon after the meeting in Monument Square, Governor Hicks had called out the militia to keep order. Some had already mobilized themselves. At best, the troops’ loyalty to the Union was uncertain, and once mobilized, they might refuse to demobilize. Marshal Kane requested help from his friend Bradley Johnson in Frederick: “Streets red with Maryland blood; send expresses over the mountains of Maryland and Virginia for riflemen to come without delay. Fresh hordes will be down on us tomorrow. We will fight them and whip them, or die.” Johnson arrived the next day with 70 men. He later became a Confederate general.³⁸

Additional military manpower came from citizens spontaneously organizing into “associations for the defense of the city.” On April 21, Charles Howard, president of the board of police commissioners, requested that Colonel Isaac Trimble “take charge of all organized Bodies who may choose to place themselves under your orders.” Trimble would also become a Confederate general. Crowds ransacked hardware stores for firearms and ammunition. Trimble sought to obtain arms from several seceded states.³⁹

Some US Army officers in Baltimore resigned their commissions. One of them, Colonel Benjamin Huger, later a Confederate general, was given command of the Maryland Guard and another militia regiment, the Independent Grays. The city council appropriated $500,000 for the “defense of the city.”⁴⁰ There was no need to identify the aggressors.

Governor Hicks finally called a special session of the General Assembly. Baltimore’s aroused secessionists demanded it. They threatened to take matters into their own hands if he refused again,⁴¹ perhaps to summon up a convention of their own for a vote on secession.

Baltimore, it seemed, had shifted decisively toward the South. On April 24, a special election chose state legislators to replace the Know-Nothings expelled at the end of the last session, and it produced a solidly states’ rights delegation. There were no other candidates. But there was something out of character about Baltimore’s swing toward the South. The commercial and industrial city was an odd ally for the predominantly agricultural and slave-owning Confederacy, especially since the city’s economy did not depend on slavery and its residents were not powerfully committed to the institution. The South’s attachment to free trade was also out of joint with Baltimore’s interest in the protection of domestic industry by tariff.⁴²

Frank Towers suggests that the city’s realignment was an artifact of local politics. The Reformers who took control of Baltimore’s government in 1860 had defeated the Unionist Know-Nothings with the help of electoral reforms enacted by Democrats from the agricultural, slave-owning counties of Southern Maryland and the Eastern Shore. If the city’s Reformers turned away from the South, they would undermine their alliance with their legislative allies and find themselves isolated in their confrontation with Baltimore’s former Know-Nothings, now Unionists, who would gain strength from the federal patronage of the Lincoln administration.⁴³

For President Lincoln, the loss of Maryland to the Confederacy meant that the nation’s capital would be an isolated outpost in Confederate territory, cut off from troops and supplies from the North. After a White House meeting with Mayor Brown and another with Senator Anthony Kennedy, the president decided to avoid another confrontation with Baltimore’s southern sympathizers. The War Department directed the Union commander in Philadelphia to put Washington-bound troops aboard steamboats near the mouth of the Susquehanna. The boats would circumvent Baltimore and land the soldiers at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, where they could board trains for the short ride to the capital. The president wanted to avoid provoking Baltimoreans, according to his aide John Hay, because “if quiet was kept in Baltimore a little longer, Maryland might be considered the first of the redeemed” for the Union.⁴⁴

OCCUPIED CITY

Among the first units to arrive in Annapolis by the water route was the Eighth Massachusetts under the command of Brigadier General Benjamin Butler. Instead of proceeding to Washington, Butler’s soldiers occupied Annapolis, over the protests of Governor Hicks. The presence of federal troops made the capital an inappropriate venue for the upcoming special session of the General Assembly; Hicks shifted the location to Frederick. In the days before the meeting of the legislature, the Union’s military presence in Maryland grew rapidly. In Baltimore, however, secessionists were openly recruiting troops for the Confederacy. General Butler reported that the recruits were being marched south within a few miles of his position, and he asked whether he should try to stop them. He was ordered to intercept provisions headed for the South, but to let the men pass. An unknown number of secessionists of military age—the very men who might mount a violent resistance to the Union presence in Baltimore—were thus subtracted from the city’s population.

Union troops on Federal Hill, their cannon trained on Baltimore. The city’s residents were regarded as unreliable supporters of the Union. Courtesy Maryland Historical Society, Item CC969

By the time Hicks met with the General Assembly at Frederick on April 26, the legislators must have recognized that an ordinance of secession would be unenforceable. Maryland was occupied territory. The Union troops flowing through the state to Washington would not permit Maryland to leave the Union peacefully, and they had the strength to prevent it. The Sun reported that all of the railroad lines linking Baltimore to the rest of the country were controlled by federal troops.⁴⁵ It was now Baltimore’s turn to face the possibility of isolation in enemy territory. The legislators who convened in Frederick had no choices to make. Hicks opened the session with a somber speech that set out no clear course for Maryland. The General Assembly as a whole was no more forthright. Both houses denied that they had authority to pass an act of secession.⁴⁶

The General Assembly’s inability to shape the course of events did not dampen the legislators’ secessionist sympathies, but they found expression in largely symbolic resolutions complaining of the state’s treatment by the federal government and its military forces. In Baltimore, a decided shift in the political climate was under way. In cutting the railroads that brought northern troops to Baltimore, the city had also damaged its own commerce, and there were second thoughts about the course that the city’s leaders had chosen. The surge of southern spirit that followed the hostilities on Pratt Street only briefly obscured a base of support for the Union. Before the riot, a petition signed by 1,300 residents and business firms expressed support for Governor Hicks’s refusal to convene the legislative session that Maryland’s secessionists demanded, and another memorial signed by 5,000 citizens expressed the same view. Unionist sentiment resurfaced after the impact of the riot faded. Colonel Trimble dissolved the companies that had mobilized for defense of the city. The US flag flew once again over the customhouse. And, on the day the legislature adjourned, Hicks authorized the enlistment of volunteers to meet Maryland’s quota of troops to defend Washington.⁴⁷

The governor tried to salvage some vestige of neutrality by stipulating that Maryland’s soldiers were not to serve outside Maryland and the District of Columbia. But Hicks must have found it difficult to sustain even this gesture of detachment from sectional discord as Union troops extended their occupation of his state. They made Maryland a part of the Union—willing or unwilling. On the same day that Hicks called up the state’s volunteers for service in Washington, Baltimoreans woke to find Union guns atop Federal Hill and trained on the city.

General Butler, now commanding the Department of Annapolis, had taken control of the rail lines from the state capital toward Washington and those that led north to Baltimore. Not long before dusk on the night of May 13, Butler boarded a train with 1,000 infantry and half a dozen cannons, bound for Camden Station. The Sixth Massachusetts Regiment, with its Pratt Street veterans, was part of the detachment. At nightfall and under cover of a thunderstorm, they occupied Federal Hill. Butler gave orders that, if attacked, the artillery pieces on the hill and at Fort McHenry should target Monument Square, the traditional assembly point for Baltimore’s mobs and mass meetings. He then issued a proclamation insisting that “rebellious acts must cease” and forbidding assemblies of armed men except for the city police and militia. But there was no trouble—except for Butler, who had occupied the city without explicit orders. General Scott removed him the day after his “hazardous occupation” of Baltimore and transferred him to the command of Fortress Monroe in Virginia.⁴⁸

General Scott and his staff were not opposed to the occupation of Baltimore, but they were wary about leaving the operation to the discretion of a local commander. Instead of ordering federal troops to leave the city, Scott ordered Brevet Brigadier General George Cadwalader, in command of four Pennsylvania regiments, to replace Butler. Cadwalader’s base was Fort McHenry, but his men occupied the rest of Locust Point, and their camps extended to Federal Hill, reaching the emplacement begun there by General Butler.⁴⁹

Butler’s departure marked a shift in the federal government’s treatment of Baltimore’s residents. President Lincoln had suspended the writ of habeas corpus in Maryland. Military commanders were empowered to place civilians under arrest without warrants and without specifying the charges against them, and to hold them in custody without regard to the demands of their attorneys or orders of courts. Butler had exercised this authority to arrest only one Baltimorean—wealthy industrialist Ross Winans, who manufactured locomotives and other equipment for the B&O but had recently turned to the production of munitions. Winans was also a staunch states’ rights secessionist who had been a member of Baltimore’s delegation to the special session of the General Assembly in Frederick. He was arrested on the train while returning to Baltimore. Acting on instructions from Washington, Cadwalader freed Winans from confinement at Fort McHenry after the prisoner signed an oath of loyalty.⁵⁰

Baltimore residents view General Butler’s emplacement on Federal Hill. Courtesy Enoch Pratt Free Library

MILITARY GOVERNMENT

General Cadwalader arrested John Merryman on the same authority that Butler had used to imprison Winans. Merryman was a militia officer who had participated in the destruction of railroad bridges after the Pratt Street riot. He was also suspected of communicating with the enemy and belonging to an underground secessionist cell possessing weapons belonging to the United States. Merryman was arrested without a warrant at his home near Cockeysville at 2 a.m. This time, however, Roger B. Taney, chief justice of the US Supreme Court (and a prominent Marylander), traveled to Baltimore to deliver, in person, a writ of habeas corpus to secure Merryman’s release. Cadwalader refused to honor the writ and maintained that he was authorized to do so by President Lincoln. Taney then sent US Marshal Washington Bonifant to take Cadwalader into custody to face a charge of contempt. On arriving at Fort McHenry, the general’s headquarters, Bonifant found that no one would let him in. The case made its way to the US Supreme Court, where Chief Justice Taney wrote the opinion in Ex Parte Merryman, denying that Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus was lawful. Among other things, the Constitution provides that only Congress, not the president, can suspend habeas corpus. But Taney, like Marshal Bonifant, who stood helpless outside the gates of Fort McHenry, had no means to enforce the law. He could only send a copy of his opinion to President Lincoln.⁵¹

Merryman was eventually brought to court, charged with treason, released on bond, and never tried. Long before that time, Cadwalader had left Baltimore. He was replaced by General Nathaniel Banks, commander of the new Department of Maryland. In June, General Scott ordered Banks to arrest Marshal Kane. Banks sent a force of 1,000 men to Kane’s home on St. Paul Street. Every Baltimore police officer encountered on the way was taken into custody (and released after Kane’s arrest). Kane answered the door himself, observed the size of the force that had come for him, and said that he would have complied just as promptly to a note from General Banks.⁵²

By midsummer, Major General John Dix had replaced Banks. Dix knew Baltimore by reputation. “There is no city in the Union,” he wrote, “in which domestic disturbances have been more frequent or carried to more fatal extremes, from 1812 to the present day.”⁵³ He arrived just before the news that Confederate forces had decisively defeated Union troops at the battle of Manassas, or Bull Run. Dix and his staff were concerned that the victory might reignite secessionist spirit in the city. Though the general had 17 regiments and a battery of artillery to deal with such contingencies, he nevertheless ordered the arrest of elected officials suspected of holding southern sympathies. Mayor Brown was taken into custody along with 10 members of the state legislature and a congressman, all from Baltimore. (Ross Winans added a second arrest to his record.) At least 18 legislators from other parts of Maryland, including the Speaker of the house of delegates, were also arrested. Many were released after they signed a loyalty oath to the US government. Few legislators were paroled, however, until after the state election in November 1861.⁵⁴

Mayor Brown, Marshal Kane, and the police commissioners were not so fortunate. Their confinement lasted a year longer. In the meantime, they appealed to Congress to protest their imprisonment. The House passed a resolution asking President Lincoln to explain why the police officials had been arrested. He responded that “it is judged to be incompatible with the public interest at this time to furnish the information called for in the resolution.”⁵⁵

Perhaps the “information” was just too complicated. Shortly after General Banks had Kane arrested, he dismissed the police commissioners. An army provost marshal would assume authority over the police. The commissioners ignored their dismissal and continued to meet and issue orders to their officers. The full board of commissioners, including the mayor, “put the officers and men off duty for the present, leaving them subject, however, to the rules and regulations of the service . . . and to the orders which the Board might see fit thereafter to issue, when the present illegal suspension of their functions should be removed.”⁵⁶ General Banks charged that the commissioners had furloughed the police “intending to leave the city without any police protection whatsoever.” The commissioners, as Banks saw it, still held “subject to their orders, a large body of armed men, for some purpose not known to the government.”⁵⁷ For Banks that was sufficient to justify the commissioners’ arrest.

The status of the idle officers was unresolved. It was a subject on which Mayor Brown and General Dix exchanged sharp words. Brown, without consulting Dix, had ordered the city register to pay the off-duty police officers for two weeks’ “arrearages” in salary. In fact, the “old police” apparently received their wages from the time they went on leave until at least January 1862, in spite of Dix’s prohibition of further payments. Dix had written to Brown ordering a halt to these disbursements, adding that “the continued compensation of a body of men who have been suspended in their functions by the order of the Government, is calculated to bring its authority into disrespect.” Brown claimed that he had been unaware of Dix’s instructions because the general’s letter had arrived at his city office when Brown was at his country house, but he expressed his determination to make the payments to the policemen: “I feel it to be my duty to enter my protest against this interference, by military authority, with the powers lawfully committed by the State of Maryland to the officers of the city corporation.” He would inform the police officers that they could expect no further payments from the city, but he would grant them their back pay “unless prohibited by your further order.”⁵⁸

General Dix launched another letter: “I cannot, without acquiescing in a principle, assent to the payment of an arrearage to the old city police.” This time, Brown responded that the letter had been forwarded to his country house while he was in the city, and he had not seen it until he had already approved, and the off-duty officers had received, their two weeks’ pay. He added that he saw no “violation of principle” in making this payment. “I recognize in the action of the Government of the United States nothing but the assertion of superior force.”⁵⁹ Brown was arrested three days later. The city continued to pay his salary during his “absence from the city” for at least five months. Brown was succeeded, after a brief interval, by the Constitutional Unionist president of the council’s first branch, John Lee Chapman, who would later be elected mayor in his own right.⁶⁰

Baltimore surely harbored southern sympathizers and even traitors. The city, after all, had welcomed Union troops with a riot. Many of the town’s sons and husbands had enlisted with Confederate forces, and the families and friends they left behind cannot have been reliably devoted to the Union cause. But the conflicts that flared up between Union authorities and local officials probably reflected something more than the enmity between North and South. Mayor Brown’s inaugural assertion that “national politics should be entirely disregarded in the administration of municipal affairs” was not entirely obliterated by military occupation, and it continued to generate friction between the military and civilian governments. Parochialism was Baltimore’s strategy for sealing itself off from the nation’s Armageddon, which had made Maryland the geographic center of a civil war and threatened to transform the state into a battleground.

Union authorities made at least one concession to the town’s uneasiness about dealing with national authorities and issues. After Marshal Kane’s arrest, a native Baltimorean was appointed provost marshal to take command of the police—Colonel John Kenly, a respected local attorney, a veteran of the Mexican War, and the popular commanding officer of the First Maryland Volunteers. When Kenly assumed control of the police department, he indicated that current members of the force could continue to serve, but they would take their orders from him, not from Kane or the board of police commissioners. The commissioners challenged his usurpation as an “arbitrary exercise of military power at variance with the laws of Maryland.” When they placed the police force on “temporary leave,” Kenly immediately recruited 400 new police officers—the “federal police”—who would serve under military authority. Congress appropriated $100,000 to cover their pay, an expense that would soon be transferred to the City of Baltimore.⁶¹

Kenly seems to have found his duties difficult and awkward. After three weeks, he asked to be relieved as provost marshal so that he could resume command of the First Maryland Volunteers. Mediating between the demands of the federal military authorities and the placebound sensibilities of his fellow Baltimoreans had evidently proven too much to bear.⁶²