Baltimore and the Nineteenth of April, 1861: A Study of the War

by George William Brown

Nearly all who approved of the war regarded these things as an inevitable military necessity; but those who disapproved deeply resented them as unwarrantable violations of sacred constitutional rights. The consequence was that friendships were dissolved, the ties of blood severed, and an invisible but well-understood line divided the people. The bitterness and even the common mention of these acts have long since ceased, but the tradition survives and still continues to be a factor, silent, but not without influence, in the politics of the State.

History repeats itself. There were deeds done on both sides which bring to mind the wars of England and Scotland and the border strife between those countries. There were flittings to and fro, and adventures and hairbreadth escapes innumerable. Soldiers returned to visit their homes at the risk of their necks. Contraband of every description, and letters and newspapers, found their way across the border. The military lines were long and tortuous, and vulnerable points were not hard to find, and trusty carriers were ready to go anywhere for the love of adventure or the love of gain.

The women were as deeply interested as the men, and were less apprehensive of personal consequences. In different parts of the city, not excepting its stateliest square, where stands the marble column from which the father of his country looked down, sadly as it were, on a divided people, there might have been found, by the initiated, groups of women who, with swift and skillful fingers, were fashioning and making garments strangely various in shape and kind—some for Northern prisons where captives were confined, some for destitute homes beyond the Southern border, in which only women and children were left, and some for Southern camps where ragged soldiers were waiting to be clad. The work was carried on not without its risks; but little cared the workers for that. Perhaps the sensation of danger itself, and a spirit of resistance to an authority which they refused to recognize, gave zest to their toil; nor did they always think it necessary to inform the good man of the house in which they were assembled either of their presence or of what was going on beneath his roof.

The women who stood by the cause of the Union were not compelled to hide their charitable deeds from the light of day. No need for them to feed and clothe the soldiers of the Union, whose wants were amply supplied by a bountiful Government; but with untiring zeal they visited the military hospitals on missions of mercy, and when the bloody fields of Antietam and Gettysburg were fought, both they and their Southern sisters hastened, though not with a common purpose, to the aid of the wounded and dying, the victims of civil strife and children of a common country.

CHAPTER VIII.

GENERAL BANKS IN COMMAND. — MARSHAL KANE ARRESTED. — POLICE COMMISSIONERS SUPERSEDED. — RESOLUTIONS PASSED BY THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY. — POLICE COMMISSIONERS ARRESTED. — MEMORIAL ADDRESSED BY THE MAYOR AND CITY COUNCIL TO CONGRESS. — GENERAL DIX IN COMMAND. — ARREST OF MEMBERS OF THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY, THE MAYOR AND OTHERS. — RELEASE OF PRISONERS. — COLONEL DIMICK.

On the 10th of June, 1861, Major-General Nathaniel P. Banks, of Massachusetts, was appointed in the place of General Cadwallader to the command of the Department of Annapolis, with headquarters at Baltimore. On the 27th of June, General Banks arrested Marshal Kane and confined him in Fort McHenry. He then issued a proclamation announcing that he had superseded Marshal Kane and the commissioners of police, and that he had appointed Colonel John R. Kenly, of the First Regiment of Maryland Volunteers, provost marshal, with the aid and assistance of the subordinate officers of the police department.

The police commissioners, including the mayor, offered no resistance, but adopted and published a resolution declaring that, in the opinion of the board, the forcible suspension of their functions suspended at the same time the active operation of the police law and put the officers and men off duty for the present, leaving them subject, however, to the rules and regulations of the service as to their personal conduct and deportment, and to the orders which the board might see fit thereafter to issue, when the present illegal suspension of their functions should be removed.

The Legislature of Maryland, at its adjourned session on the 22d of June, passed a series of resolutions declaring that the unconstitutional and arbitrary proceedings of the Federal Executive had not been confined to the violation of the personal rights and liberties of the citizens of Maryland, but had been so extended that the property of no man was safe, the sanctity of no dwelling was respected, and that the sacredness of private correspondence no longer existed; that the Senate and House of Delegates of Maryland felt it due to her dignity and independence that history should not record the overthrow of public freedom for an instant within her borders, without recording likewise the indignant expression of her resentment and remonstrance, and they accordingly protested against the oppressive and tyrannical assertion and exercise of military jurisdiction within the limits of Maryland over the persons and property of her citizens by the Government of the United States, and solemnly declared the same to be subversive of the most sacred guarantees of the Constitution, and in flagrant violation of the fundamental and most cherished principles of American free government.

On the first of July, the police commissioners were arrested and imprisoned by order of General Banks, on the ground, as he alleged in a proclamation, that the commissioners had refused to obey his decrees, or to recognize his appointees, and that they continued to hold the police force for some purpose not known to the Government.