Determined to regain Fort Sumter, President Abraham Lincoln called for an army of 75,000 volunteers. Thousands of men responded immediately to the president's call. To reach the South, these troops had to pass through Baltimore.
Four companies of the 25th Pennsylvania Volunteers arrived at Bolton Station on April 18, 1861. At that time, Baltimore prohibited locomotives from pulling trains through the city. To continue their journey south, the soldiers had to make their way on foot to the Camden Street Station. When they left the train cars, a mob assembled and hurled bricks and paving stones at them. Nicholas Biddle, a Union officer's black servant, was killed in the melee. He is often described as the first casualty of the Civil War.
Unfortunately, the events of April 18 were merely a warmup for what happened the next day. On April 19, the Massachusetts Militia arrived at the President Street Station, near Fells Point. They, too, had to go through the city to reach Camden Street Station, but unlike the Pennsylvania Volunteers, they were transported from one station to the other in railroad cars pulled by horses along Pratt Street. The soldiers were armed but had been told not to shoot unless they were fired upon.
The first seven units reached Camden Street Station safely, but a large mob attacked the Massachusetts companies at the end of the line, as well as an unarmed regimental band from New York and a unit of Pennsylvania Volunteers. The rioters dumped cartloads of sand on the tracks. They hauled anchors from nearby piers and threw them in front of the horses, blocking the train cars. Joining the melee, citizens pelted the soldiers with rocks, bricks, bottles, and anything else they could throw.
Soon the riot on Pratt Street turned into a battle. Civilians fired on the soldiers, and the soldiers fired back.
At that point, Mayor George W. Brown placed himself at the head of the soldiers' column and marched beside their commanding officer. Marshal George P. Kane and a squad of Baltimore police formed a line in the rear of troops.
When the battle ended—the first of the Civil War, some say—four soldiers had been killed and thirty-six wounded. Twelve Baltimore citizens were killed and an unknown number wounded.
To prevent further incidents, General Benjamin Franklin Butler made a decision. On the night of May 13, 1861, he led five hundred men from the 6th Massachusetts, veterans of the Pratt Street Riot, into Baltimore under cover of a thunderstorm. The troops occupied Federal Hill above the harbor. While the city slept, Butler's men set up guns and aimed them down Charles Street, straight at the Washington Monument in Mount Vernon Place. Any more trouble and the good folks of Baltimore would find their city under fire.
Butler acted on his own initiative and, for that reason, was later relieved of his command. However, Baltimore remained under martial law for the duration of the war, and Maryland remained in the Union, a state of strategic importance despite its small size.
Many Marylanders continued to be sympathetic to the South. Numbers of young men fled to Virginia and joined the Confederate army, later fighting against their fellow Marylanders at Front Royal and Gettysburg. Some of their fathers were jailed at Fort McHenry for treason against the Union. Like Uncle Philemon, most of them claimed to be opposed to the federal government's encroachment on states' rights.
Other young men heeded Lincoln's call in even greater numbers, forming the Maryland Volunteer Infantry in May 1861.
Although the Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves in Confederate states, it did not free the slaves in Maryland, a Union state. As late as July 1863, three weeks after the Battle of Gettysburg, Union officers liberated the inmates of a slave trader's jail near the Baltimore harbor.
This is the Baltimore in which Jesse and Perry find themselves when they arrive on April 19, 1861. "Mob Town" it was called then—and for good reason. With the exception of their encounter with Colonel Abednego Botfield, the events the boys experience really happened in pretty much the way Jesse describes them.
Later in the story, when Jesse witnesses a "Baltimore Belle" mocking a Union soldier, he is actually seeing my great-grandparents on the day they met—one for the South and one for the North, like so many Baltimoreans.
Mary Downing Hahn, Promises to the Dead
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