The rulers were impotent to check the storm, or control the whirlwind. The people were for the time masters—the authorities helpless.
On this memorable 19th of April, the writer of these pages was on her way from Washington to New York. The train in which she travelled was loaded down with persons going northward, for Washington was not considered a safe place to sojourn in that week, especially for ladies.
About ten miles from Baltimore we met the train which bore the Sixth Massachusetts regiment from the scene of its late encounter. Both trains slackened speed, and instantly it flew like wildfire along the cars that there had been riot and bloodshed in Baltimore, and the brave fellows we had passed had been attacked in their passage through the town. The news was received with great excitement, that grew more and more intense until our engine thundered into the depot. The fighting was over, but a mob of morose and cruel-looking men, with a few black women and children, still hung around the building, and we passed out through a lane of scowling faces.
The horse railroad had been torn up and so blockaded that there was no hopes of reaching the Philadelphia cars by that way. With difficulty we procured a carriage and were drawn over the scene of conflict. The railroad was almost obliterated; piles of lumber, fifteen feet high, were heaped upon it. Immense anchors lay across it, forming an iron barricade. Every window along the line was crowded with eager, scared faces, mostly black, and those that were white, evidently of the lowest order.
It became impossible to pass along the railroad, for it was completely blocked up. We turned into a side street, and at last took our places in the Philadelphia train. Here two or three men in uniform entered the cars, and after the train started they were seen talking earnestly with the conductor near our seat. It seemed that the Pennsylvania regiment had been scattered, and while a train had returned toward Philadelphia with the larger portion of the men, some twenty-five or thirty were grouped on the wayside, some miles from the city, hoping that our train would take them in.
The conductor was inexorable. His orders were to proceed direct—besides, he had no room, every seat was crowded. This was true; but all the gentlemen, among whom was Senator Wilkinson, of Minnesota, and several ladies that sat within hearing, pleaded that the men should be taken in, and all offered to surrender their own seats. But it was of no avail—the conductor had his orders.
A few minutes after the officers had retreated we passed a platform on the wayside on which these unlucky soldiers were grouped, in anxious expectation that the train would stop, but it went steadily by, leaving the most disappointed and gloomy faces behind that one often looks upon.
We afterwards learned that these poor fellows wandered around the country for three days, and many of them came back to Philadelphia on foot.
If they were sad at being left, those in the cars were both sorrowful and indignant that they had not been taken up. It seemed to them an act of wanton cruelty; and one of the company, at least, has not yet been able to change her opinion on the subject.
At Wilmington we passed the town in which were the companions of these deserted men. Their train had paused in the town, which we found one blaze of excitement. As the news spread, cheer after cheer arose for the stars and stripes, the soldiers, the government, and everything else around which a patriotic cry could centre, rang up from the streets. The people were fairly wild when they saw that the soldiers were driven back.