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Union troops and the mob

Maryland Historical Society

Baltimore by 1860 was building a mercantile economy that coexisted easily with its traditionally southern culture. Its 212,000-plus inhabitants ranked the city fourth largest in the United States. This number included the largest population of free blacks of any city (25,680), thanks to eroding tobacco production that for decades had been rendering slavery unprofitable. Most of Baltimore's 2,118 slaves were domestic servants. This city, forty miles south of the Mason-Dixon Line, was flourishing when the Civil War erupted. Police reform was reining in violent political gangs that had turned election days into open warfare. The nearly completed Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, begun in 1827, linked the city with western Maryland and beyond, making Baltimore a major trade center. City mills, powered by rivers and streams known as falls, produced flour and meal, while clothing, cotton goods, leather, machinery, footwear, canned oysters, pork, beef, cigars, lumber, furniture, and liquors flowed from its factories.

Pratt Street Riot
By Abraham Lincoln's inauguration in March, seven southern states had left the Union. Much of Maryland, a border slave state, was hostile to Lincoln's declaration that he would not interfere with slavery where it existed but would thwart its expansion-February had brought to national attention a shadowy plot by southern partisans to assassinate him as he passed though Baltimore en route to Washington. Through winter and spring, Baltimore's southern sympathizers pressed Governor Thomas H. Hicks, a Dorchester County slaveholder, to summon the legislature into special session to lay groundwork for secession or neutrality. The unionist Hicks refused, backed by city businessmen who feared the economic consequences of secession: a Union blockade of the port and a long, indefensible border with Pennsylvania.

Union troops firing on the mob

Maryland Historical Society

On April 12, 1861, Fort Sumter surrendered to the Confederacy. Three days later Lincoln called for 75,000 troops to suppress the rebellion, though his immediate objective was to procure soldiers to protect Washington, D.C., from a rebel assault he erroneously believed imminent. Northern governors sent their state militias by train to Washington, routes requiring travel to Baltimore, where they would transfer from one train depot to another.

On Friday, April 19, the 6th Massachusetts Regiment, marching from the President Street Station to the B&O's Camden Station, became targets of epithets and brickbats hurled by an angry crowd. Muskets exploded. The settled smoke revealed scores wounded and four soldiers and eleven citizens dead-the first fatalities of the Civil War.

Baltimoreans, determined to keep from their streets northern troops in whose mission they saw an assault upon southern states, galloped north to barricade turnpikes and burn railway bridges over the Gunpowder and Bush Rivers. Buildings of unionist newspapers were sacked; gun shops were looted. Mayor George W. Brown, unable to guarantee safe passage of troops through Baltimore, endorsed Lincoln's plan to move troops by water down the Susquehanna River and Chesapeake Bay to Annapolis, where they would entrain for Washington. Passions soon cooled. This quick restoration of order in Baltimore undermined any Maryland secession threat and precluded the likelihood of terrible carnage upon the soil of a Confederate Maryland.

Secession Rejected
In mid-May the General Assembly, meeting in union-friendly Frederick, refused to consider secession, another sign that even those who embraced the right to secede did not necessarily favor Maryland's doing so. On May 13, Union Gen. Benjamin Butler marched into Baltimore and threatened from his position on Federal Hill to blast the heart of the city at the first hint of disloyalty. Butler's unauthorized action incensed Lincoln and General-in-Chief Winfield Scott; it risked further unrest and undermined the president's intent to respect Maryland's sovereignty. Scott relieved Butler of command, but the myth that Lincoln himself ordered federal troops into Baltimore in spring 1861 endured.

On April 27 Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus in Maryland-the first such suspension in U.S. history. Though arrest and detention without charges were now sanctioned, this action was for military, not political, purposes, and restricted to railway lines to ensure uninterrupted movement of troop trains (Lincoln would later broaden the suspension of habeas corpus in the state and nationally).

May brought two arrests. Wealthy Baltimore industrialist Ross Winans was detained briefly on suspicion of manufacturing and distributing arms to southern sympathizers. Troops seized Winans's steam gun, a rapid-firing weapon the size of a wagon. The other arrest, of Baltimore County farmer John Merryman for allegedly destroying railroad bridges in the wake of the riot, ignited a constitutional furor.

The commander at Fort McHenry ignored a petition for a writ of habeas corpus signed by Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney to produce Merryman for charge and trial in a civilian court. Taney, in response, lectured the president in ex parte Merryman, arguing that the Constitution permitted only Congress to suspend the writ. With Congress not in session, Lincoln countered that he, as president, had to act.

Maryland for the Union
Military arrests in Baltimore accelerated in 1861. Newspaper editors and leading citizens, including Mayor Brown and Police Chief George P. Kane (both of whom gave authorities reason to suspect their loyalty), were taken to Fort McHenry and either released or sent north to prisons, where some remained for a year or more. Union authorities sought weapons caches in raids of the Maryland Club, which they considered a secessionist viper's nest. Business conditions suffered as wages dropped, interest rates rose, and properties became vacant. Unionists won several special elections in 1861, and in September Baltimorean Augustus W. Bradford, a unionist supporter of slaveholder rights, was elected governor.

The presence of Lee's army in western Maryland in 1862 (resulting in the battles of South Mountain and Antietam) and 1863 (en route to Gettysburg) sent terrified Baltimoreans to erect barricades on city streets should the rebel army turn east. Similar alarm ensued following the 1864 Battle of Monocacy, after which the Confederates passed close to Baltimore on their abortive strike toward Washington. By war's end, dozens of fortified sites encircled Baltimore.

Baltimore, headquarters of the Union army's Eighth Army Corps' military district, soon became a logistical and a hospital center. (U.S. General Hospitals: McKim's Mansion, Patterson Park, the Steuart Mansion, Jarvis U.S. Hospital, West's Buildings Hospital, Newton University, and Camden Street.) The ring of military camps encircling the city became a place to "break-in" raw recruits for the Union army.

In July 1863 the War Department authorized recruitment of black troops from Maryland for the United States Bureau of Colored Troops. Col. William Birney, given charge of the effort, liberated Baltimore slave jails and recruited widely to produce the first of 8,700 recruits for what would become six U.S.C.T. Maryland regiments.

Slaveholding planters who dominated the state legislature in 1863 confronted a coordinated push for emancipation, led by antislavery unionists from Baltimore who engineered a constitutional convention in the spring of 1864. Frederick Douglass spoke on behalf of a new Maryland constitution to Baltimore audiences of blacks and whites. Lincoln worked diligently for the measure. Their efforts aided passage of a new constitution that, beginning November 1, 1864, banned slavery in Maryland. Military authorities seized the Maryland Club, a citadel of pro-southern aristocrats, as temporary lodgings for newly freed slaves. Baltimore and Maryland, having rejected secession and slavery, would now confront the latter's postwar legacy.

—Charles W. Mitchell