v1.1.2 / chapter 3 of 93 / 01 oct 09 / greg goebel / public domain
* The slide towards war proved irresistible, and fighting finally broke out in the spring of 1861. The first actions were disorganized to the point of haphazard. It would take both sides time to realize they had taken a step that was both irreversible and deadly serious.
* The Union and the Confederacy were not well matched as opponents. The census of 1860 showed the North had a population of 20 million, while the South had a population of 9 million, and of that population 3.5 million were slaves. The number of white males between the ages of 15 and 40 was about 4 million in the North versus 1.1 million in the South.
As William Tecumseh Sherman had pointed out, the South had a weak industrial and economic infrastructure. When the war started, only 10% of American goods were manufactured in the South. The North had 22,000 miles (35,400 kilometers) of railroad track, the South had only 9,000 miles (14,500 kilometers), and these Southern lines tended to be local feeder routes, disconnected from one another and using different rail gauges. The Southern economy was based on cotton exports, which made the Confederacy vulnerable to naval blockade, and the South lacked the financial resources needed for funding a serious war. The North was, at heart, an entrepreneurial, capitalist society, devoted to getting things done; the South was a mostly agrarian society, with no great enthusiasm for commerce or a hurried lifestyle.
The South did have advantages. Many of the old US Army high command had been from the South, and the Southern clique had by accident or design driven promising Northern officers out of the prewar Army: the Confederacy began the war with superior military leadership. Furthermore, the South was fighting on the defensive, which would help even the odds against a more powerful attacker by forcing him to attack entrenchments and fortifications.
Being on the defense had other advantages. An attacker would be reliant on long supply lines that would stretch and become more vulnerable to a counterstrike the further the invader drove into Southern territory, with railroad bridges particularly vulnerable to destruction. The invaders would also have to set aside troops to ensure control over occupied territory, reducing the size of offensive armies. In contrast, the Confederates would be able to move troops and supplies on shorter and more easily protected interior lines of communications, and could generally assume a loyal populace.
There was also the more intangible asset of simple spirit: Southerners were more of a fighting people and would prove time and time again that they had an unmatched boldness, and a willingness to dish out and take punishment; they would also prove extremely ingenious in making the best use of scanty resources. The more enthusiastic secessionists thought that Southern spirit would carry the day in and of itself. After all, if Great Britain, the most powerful nation in the world in 1776, hadn't been able to subdue the ragtag Patriot forces of George Washington, how could the Yankees subdue the people of the South?
Sherman had recognized that fighting spirit, but added that all else was lacking. All the willingness to fight did not change the fact that the South was taking on a much more powerful adversary -- right next door, not an ocean away as Britain had been. The Confederacy also had serious inherent structural weaknesses, above and beyond the simple lack of material resources. In the first place, the Confederacy was based on the concept of State's Rights, which established a degree of disunity as a fundamental principle, ensuring by design a weak central government, and implicitly left the door unlocked to further secession and fragmentation in the future. State's Rights had already led the Southern leadership to take an extreme step, and in time it would become plain that there were some Southerners of influence who were willing to take the concept from the extreme to the ridiculous.
Another problem was that while Northern society could hardly be described as classless, Southern society looked downright medieval in comparison. There was the issue of slavery, of course: Southerners not only had to worry about the threat of Yankee aggression, they had to worry about the perpetual threat of a slave uprising. The first threat tended to magnify the second: if Southern whites were preoccupied with fighting the North, slaves might well see it as a perfect time to rise up themselves. There was also the fact that potential foreign backers were in principle anti-slavery, making recognition of the Confederacy politically tricky. Lincoln would exploit that particular weakness with great skill.
The social stratification went beyond simple slavery, however. The elite that led the Confederacy was only half a percent of the population, with the high-born forming an effective nobility woven together by intermarriage in their caste, and the South was riddled with class distinctions and snobbery. Only a minority of Southerners actually owned slaves -- no more than 37% of families even in the Deep South and about 20% of families in the Upper South. The poor farmers and hill people near the bottom of the Southern social order had no particular stake in slavery and no reason to love their "betters", who often looked down on them as white trash, hardly better than slaves.
Still, the white people on the bottom of the social order recognized that antislavery agitation opened the door to the dreaded possibility of "nigger equality", which would both eliminate the one class to which they were superior and introduce competition for their slender slice of the pie. This sentiment, not at all incidentally, was also widespread among poor whites in the North.
However, although secessionist agitators trumpeted the threat of black equality to rouse the citizenry, many of the poor Southern whites had a less cynical stake in the Confederacy. Most were sincerely not fighting for slaves or slavery, they were fighting out of a shared sense of proud Southern independence, against an aggressor who threatened their homes and families. After the war was well under way, a captive rebel private was asked what he was fighting for. He replied: "I'm fighting because ya'll are down here."
* Despite Lincoln's stated intent to hold Federal installations in the seceding states, nearly all of them had been taken over by secessionists without a fight. Besides Fort Sumter, two forts in the Florida Keys still remained in Federal hands, being too remote and isolated to be affected by the trouble, as well as Fort Pickens, outside the harbor of Tampa, Florida. Although the Confederates had their eye on Fort Pickens, it was easily resupplied and defended; after a little indecision, the fort was reinforced, and would remain in Union hands through the rest of the conflict.
Fort Sumter was the real issue. In the months leading up to Lincoln's inauguration, the Buchanan Administration had been considering different options and taking hesitant steps to relieve the fort when the time came to act. A steamer named the STAR OF THE WEST had in fact been sent with supplies for the besieged installation, but when it entered the harbor on 8 January 1861, the Confederates fired warning shots. On the ramparts of the fort, Major Anderson ordered his own men to hold their fire, and the steamer's captain decided to turn about and leave the way he had came.
The South Carolinans had been steadily building up the shore installations to bring more guns to bear on Sumter and prevent it from being resupplied. South Carolina Governor Francis W. Pickens, who had in the meantime replaced William Gist in that office, persistently nagged the new Confederate government for assistance. Pickens got more help than he bargained for. Jefferson Davis was no hothead, tending in fact more towards the frosty; he didn't think much of hotheads, either, and finally simply told Pickens that the Confederate government had taken control of the matter. Davis sent an officer of the new Confederate States Army, General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, to command the military effort to ring in Fort Sumter.
Beauregard was from Louisiana and his first tongue was French. He was a dapper fellow who brushed his hair forward at the temples and had aristocratic manners that pleased the Charlestonians. He also had a towering ego, but his polish kept it from being too great an irritant, and his military professionalism, particularly in artillery and engineering, was beyond dispute. On his arrival in Charleston in early March, he set about reinforcing and reorganizing the shore batteries to bring them up to combat readiness.
* Back in Washington, even General Scott was having second thoughts about making war on the states in secession, suggesting they might well be left to go their own way in peace. Others were making the same suggestion, claiming that secession was all a bluff to gain concessions for the South, and that once the bluff was called the South would come back into the fold of the Union again.
Lincoln's cabinet was against making hostile moves, with the reluctance aggravated by General Scott's doubts. On 29 March, Lincoln read a note from General Scott to the cabinet. The general suggested that both Fort Sumter and Fort Pickens be abandoned to placate the border states. The President was sounding out his people, and they gave him the response he wanted: after a shocked silence, the response was still overwhelmingly in favor of standing ground, though there was disagreement over the specifics.
Secretary of State Seward was in favor of giving up Fort Sumter, but wanted to hold Fort Pickens in strength. He had in fact been conducting quiet diplomacy with Confederate contacts and had assured them that this would happen, as Seward had few doubts that Lincoln would defer to him in terms of policy. On 1 April 1861 Seward sent Lincoln a letter, suggesting that Fort Sumter be abandoned, and that the country could be reunified by picking fights with England or some other European power.
It was April Fool's day, but Lincoln did not regard Seward's suggestions as a joke. He immediately wrote a reply which said the Federal government would "hold, occupy, and possess" Federal installations in Confederate lands, and this applied to both Fort Sumter and Fort Pickens. In response to the notions of starting wars with foreign powers, Lincoln stated that if this "is to be done, I must do it." -- and it would be done with the assent of the full cabinet. Seward, to his credit, did not take offense at having been put in his place. In fact, the response seemed to increase his respect for his boss. Seward wrote in a letter to his wife two months later: "The President is the best of us ... " -- though he felt compelled to add: " ... but he needs constant and assiduous cooperation."
Within a few days, Lincoln had made up his mind. Some of the plans for resupplying Fort Sumter involved quietly slipping a civilian transport into Charleston harbor at night so that it might reach Fort Sumter without being fired on. Lincoln, drawing on his lawyer's cleverness, decided that Fort Sumter would be resupplied -- and then informed the South Carolina authorities of this decision on 6 April. He made it clear that he had no intention of sending in more troops or initiating violence. This reversed the logic of the situation. The question was no longer what the Union would do, it was what the Confederacy was going to do. If the Confederates let the resupply effort pass, they would be conceding to Union authority; if they fired on it, they would be starting a war. Either way, Lincoln won.
* In hindsight, the Confederates might have let the supplies go through, stalled for time, and bored the crisis to death, but that wasn't Jefferson Davis's style. In his view, the Confederacy was an independent nation and would assert its rights as one: he would take action against Fort Sumter. Confederate Secretary of State Robert Toombs, who had been among the "fire-eaters", doubted the wisdom of this course of action, telling Davis: "Mr. President, at this time it is suicide, murder, and will lose us every friend at the North. You will wantonly strike a hornet's nest which extends from mountain to ocean, and legions now quiet will swarm out and sting us to death. It is unnecessary; it puts us in the wrong; it is fatal."
Davis was determined to go ahead. On 10 April, instructions were wired to General Beauregard to demand the evacuation of Fort Sumter, and to reduce it by force if the demand wasn't met. On the morning of 11 April, General Beauregard wrote Major Anderson a polite and formal letter, demanding that the Federals evacuate Fort Sumter. Major Anderson wrote an equally polite and formal reply, indicating that he could not comply. However, as the Confederate officers carrying the correspondence prepared to return to shore, Anderson blurted out: "If you do not batter us to pieces we will be starved out in a few days." This nervous remark led to a flurry of messages, but Anderson still did not intend to abandon the fort and the Confederate ultimatum was not withdrawn.
In the early hours of the next morning, Beauregard sent a letter to Anderson informing him that he would be fired on within the hour. At 4:30 on the morning of 12 April 1861, the first signal shot was fired from a mortar and exploded over Fort Sumter. The shot was fired by Edmund Ruffin, a die-hard long-time secessionist "fire-eater" from Virginia. Back in Charleston, Mary Boykin Chestnut, a prominent citizen who would keep a detailed diary through the coming years of struggle, wrote: "April 12 ... The heavy booming of cannon -- I sprang out of bed, and on my knees, I prayed as I have never prayed before."
The shelling went on all that day, went mostly silent that night, and resumed in the morning. The Federals were unable to offer more than token counter-fire. On the 13th, after 34 hours of bombardment, Anderson capitulated. The Sumter garrison formally surrendered on Sunday, 14 April 1861. Anderson's men were allowed safe passage out of South Carolina on a steamer, and took down the Stars & Stripes in a formal ceremony. Anderson kept it so that he could be buried in it. Beauregard obtained a walking stick made from part of the flagpole as a souvenir.
During the firing of a cannon salute at the surrender ceremony, a spark fell on powder and set off an explosion, killing one Union man outright, mortally injuring another, and wounding three more. These were the only casualties of the Fort Sumter bombardment. However, a conflict had been set in motion whose destructiveness could not then be imagined. The North would now take on the Confederacy and bring immense force to bear on it. Southerners would later brand this pure aggression, and a fair case can be made that it was, but Lincoln had played his cards well: there would never be any way to deny that, in the face of a confrontation on the edge of explosion, the Confederacy had shot first.
It is difficult to believe that there wouldn't have been war eventually. In states such as Kentucky and Missouri, where the populations were divided in their sympathies, secession was certain to lead to clashes, and clashes were likely to lead to escalation. The Confederacy also had ambitions for territorial expansion to the West, which would have meant a military confrontation with the Union.
All that amounts to is speculation, however, and the fact is that the conflict started with the bombardment of Fort Sumter. It is impossible to believe that those who gave the order to shoot were not intelligent enough to realize that it meant war. The only explanation for why they did so is that they thought, in defiance of all measures of material strength, that they would win.
* That Sunday, 14 April 1861, when the news reached Washington that Fort Sumter had surrendered, Lincoln met with his cabinet, and on Monday issued a proclamation requesting 75,000 militia to serve for 90 days to deal with "combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings."
Just as secession had been accompanied by a burst of stored-up energies in the South, the call for militia released an outpouring of patriotism in the North. Young men rushed to sign up with state militias, and upper-class citizens who had been in militias as little more than a social function prepared their kits for battle, though their choice of gear was sometimes a little too luxurious for practical use. Militia regiments were formed out of locales and communities, and in many cases the militiamen had grown up together, sometimes being brothers or even fathers and sons. There were Irish regiments, German regiments, and Italian regiments; in some cases, many enthusiastic Unionists rallying to the colors could barely speak English.
Lincoln and many others believed there was also substantial Unionist sympathy in the South, that the secessionists were simply a militant minority who had hijacked Southern state governments, and forcing the issue would bring these patriots to the surface. He was wrong. The bombardment of Fort Sumter had roused enthusiasm for secession in the Upper South, and the call for militia made the deepening split between North and South complete. On Wednesday, 17 April, Virginia's secession convention, which was still in session, passed an ordinance of secession. The next day, the Virginians gathered around the Federal armory at Harper's Ferry. That night, the Union commander had his men torch the arsenal and armory, and led them north into Pennsylvania; the rebels managed to save much of the machinery and haul it off to Richmond. The Union did retain control over Fortress Monroe, on the tip of the James River peninsula east of Richmond.
When Lincoln issued the militia proclamation on Monday, North Carolina militia seized Federal installations. The state would not formally join the Confederacy until 21 May, but that was no more than paperwork. Similarly, Tennessee took measures that by the first week of May had effectively removed it from the Union, and on 6 May Arkansas passed an ordnance of secession.
Many Southern-born US Army officers turned in their resignations and went home to become Confederate officers; one out of three left. The Army's Quartermaster General, Joseph E. Johnston, was from Virginia and felt he had to leave. He said graciously in his resignation: "I must go with the South, though the action is in the last degree ungrateful. I owe all that I am to the government of the United States. It had educated and clothed me with honor. To leave the service is a hard necessity, but I must go. Though I am resigning my position, I trust I may never draw my sword against the old flag."
Johnston's resignation was a loss to the US Army. He was a neat, small man, bald with a trim goatee, given to a certain liveliness, military competence, and a marvelous kindliness to those in his command. The loyalty of another Virginian officer, the highly regarded Robert E. Lee, was a matter of greater concern to the US War Department. Winfield Scott regarded Lee as the best officer in the Army, and on 17 April Lee received an offer passed down from President Lincoln for command of the entire Union Army. Lee believed in the Union and cared little for talk of secession, but after Virginia joined the Confederacy, he felt he had no choice but to go South. He could not take military action against his home state, and on 23 April Lee accepted high rank in the army of Virginia.
Southerners signed up to fight the Yankees with enthusiasm that mirrored that shown in the North. Southerners wanted to protect their homes against invasion, and felt they could easily whip the soft and cowardly merchants and factory workers of the North. Mary Chestnut wrote of the soldiers crowding into Charleston: "They fear the war will be over before they get a sight of the fun. Every man from every little county precinct wants a place in the picture." Both sides thought they would win easily. The war would be over in less than 90 days.
* The notion of secession was less than simple in states where the citizens were of strongly divided opinions on the idea. After the second wave of secession, four states remained in the balance. Delaware was a slave state, but not a great problem, since there were few slaves there and no general interest in leaving the Union. Missouri was much more polarized, but thinly populated and not of immediate strategic importance. Kentucky was a greater fear, since a Confederate Kentucky would almost cut the Union in half; Lincoln was to say a little later that to lose Kentucky was essentially to lose the whole game.
The biggest immediate worry was Maryland. Washington DC was bordered by Confederate Virginia to the south and an unstable Maryland on the other three sides, as well as infested with secessionist sympathy from within. If Maryland joined the Confederacy, the city would be certainly lost.
Military forces with enough strength to hold Washington were slow to arrive. After the request for militia on Monday, 15 April 1861, a company of regulars from Minnesota and a few hundred Pennsylvanians came into town on the train on 18 April. They had been harassed and stoned by a secessionist mob while passing through Baltimore.
The next day, 19 April, the 6th Massachusetts Regiment marched through Baltimore to make the connection to Washington and ended up having a shootout with the mob. Four soldiers were killed and 31 wounded; 12 citizens of Baltimore were dead and an unknown number of wounded. Many of the civilians who were shot were innocent bystanders who had been caught in the open when the shooting began. The injured Union soldiers were met by a group of women, led by a Patent Office clerk from Massachusetts, Miss Clara Barton. She was a quiet spinster, but her sympathy with the men from her home state overcame her timidity. The others were barracked in the unfinished Capitol building, where they made good use of congressional franking privileges to write free letters home.
Maryland Governor Hicks expressed his fears over the provocation of funneling Union soldiers through Baltimore to the President, who responded that he understood and would try to avoid trouble. However, when a Baltimore delegation protested the movement of soldiers across any part of Maryland, Lincoln bluntly replied: "Our men are not moles, and cannot dig under the earth. They are not birds, and cannot fly through the air. There is no way but to march across, and that they must do." Lincoln then pointedly added: "Keep your rowdies in Baltimore, and there will be no bloodshed. Go home and tell your people that if they do not attack us we will not attack them; but if they do attack us, we will return it, and that severely!"
Baltimore secessionists took him up on his challenge, burning the railroad bridges connecting the city to Washington, and then cutting the telegraph lines. Panic started to run through the streets of Washington as rumors of large Confederate forces gathering outside the city ran wild. The days passed and the regiments of troops that Lincoln had been promised didn't materialize. He paced his office, muttering: "Why don't they come? Why don't they come?" On reviewing some of the men of the 6th Massachusetts who had been wounded in the fight in Baltimore, he told them: "I don't believe there is a North ... you are the only northern realities."
* Despite the insecurity, Lincoln continued to lay out his military strategy. On 19 April, he had proclaimed a blockade of the Confederate coast. This was an oddly aggressive declaration for a president who seemed in imminent risk of being chased out of his own capitol.
That wasn't the only oddity. By international law, a blockade was an action taken against a belligerent nation. However, Lincoln absolutely refused to recognize that the Confederacy had any legal standing at all. The President was a lawyer and of course understood this contradiction. Navy Secretary Gideon Welles had encouraged Lincoln to simply close the ports by executive order, but the British Ambassador, Lord Richard Lyons, made it clear that the British government would not feel bound by such a measure, since that would imply tacit British cooperation in Federal war measures against the Confederacy. The Union would have to declare a blockade before the British would accept the legality of restrictions on their shipping.
The final oddity was that the Federal government was in no position to impose a blockade at the moment. The Navy had only 90 warships and 9,000 men, and over half the Navy's vessels were out of commission. Of the remainder, many were obsolete sailing vessels, and in any case the fleet was scattered over foreign ports. Even these feeble resources proved to be at risk. On 23 April, two Union vessels steamed up the Potomac to Washington, but instead of desperately-needed reinforcements, they carried only bad news. The Gosport Navy Yard, a major Federal naval base in Virginia near the mouth of the James River, had been lost to the Confederates.
The commander at Gosport had been 68-year-old Commodore Charles S. McCauley, with 800 sailors and marines under his command. The vessels under his control were mostly antiques, with one major exception: the powerful steam frigate MERRIMAC, which was laid up there for engine repairs. On 11 April, Secretary Welles had sent an officer down to Gosport to take command of the MERRIMAC and get her up to Philadelphia, out of harm's way. McCauley, in fear, possibly aggravated by liquor, that this would push Virginia into secession, refused to let the warship leave.
When Virginia seceded anyway on the 17th, the people of Norfolk clumsily tried to block the outlet of the navy yard with old hulks. On the evening of 19 April, the same day as the bloody fiasco in Baltimore, McCauley decided that Confederate forces were preparing to seize his installation. He panicked, ordering his ships scuttled and the installation destroyed. The fires were impressive and the Federals pulled out the next day, leaving behind ruins and secessionists indignant at having been inconvenienced, who called the destruction of the Navy yard "a cowardly and disgraceful act". The rebels grew happier when they found that almost 1,200 cannon had been left behind that could be easily restored to service, and that not only had a mine left to destroy the yard's dry dock failed to go off, but the MERRIMAC could be refloated and rebuilt.
* Finally, reinforcements started to trickle in to Washington. On Saturday, 20 April 1861, a steamer carrying the 8th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment had anchored at Annapolis, directly to the south of Baltimore. Maryland secessionists had sabotaged the rail lines out of Annapolis to block the movement of Union troops, but they had not reckoned on the commander of the 8th Massachusetts, Brigadier General Benjamin Franklin Butler.
Butler's commission as a brigadier general was from the state of Massachusetts, not the US Army. The states had the right to appoint officers to the militia without regular army approval or any military qualifications on the part of the appointee. The appointments were often for political reasons, and some of the officers had no real military background. Ben Butler had been a prominent Democratic politician before the war, and it was useful for a Republican administration to have him on their side. In other ways, he was an uncertain asset. Butler was trusted by few, often described as "fat", "cross-eyed", "bandy-legged", and "shifty". He had an instinct for theatrics and tyranny, and almost no instinct for military matters. He was also a shrewd and energetic politician who was not burdened by much in the way of high principles. One grudging admirer described him as an "only too successful cross between a fox and a hog."
Though Governor Hicks threw the same objections at Butler that Hicks had thrown at Lincoln, Butler blustered right over Hicks and had the 8th Massachusetts ashore by Monday, 22 April. The 7th New York Regiment arrived the same day, and Butler assumed command of it as well, though the regiment's officers protested loudly.
The 8th Massachusetts was full of mechanics, and Butler quickly put them to work repairing the damaged rail line. Since the only locomotive available was out of commission, they repaired that as well. One Massachusetts soldier had actually helped build that particular engine. They were also assisted in their work on the railroads by a crew from the Pennsylvania Railroad that included an enterprising young Scotsman named Andrew Carnegie, who was to drive the repaired train on its first run. Butler deployed two companies of infantry to discourage further sabotage, and on Thursday, 25 April, ten agonizing days after the call for militia, the 7th New York rolled into Washington on the train, followed by 1,200 Rhode Island militia and an equal number of volunteers from Massachusetts. By the end of April, there would be 10,000 troops in Washington, and the immediate threat would be over.
* With troops now arriving in Washington, the next steps were to ensure that Maryland didn't join the Confederacy, and to put Maryland secessionists firmly in their place. Governor Hicks, faced with an outcry for a special assembly of the Maryland legislature, ordered such an assembly on 26 April. It was to be held in Frederick, 40 miles (64 kilometers) west of Baltimore and in strongly pro-Union territory. The legislature met and did little more than posture and declare Maryland a neutral state. Lincoln was relieved, since he had considered arresting the lot of them, but had concluded doing so would be counterproductive.
The secessionist troublemakers in Baltimore were the next item on the agenda. Lincoln had promised them he would deal with them severely; he was as good as his word. On 27 April, Lincoln informed General Scott that the general had the authority to suspend the writ of habeas corpus along the military supply line between Philadelphia and Washington. Military officers could now arrest and imprison anyone without regard for due process. Ben Butler couldn't have been happier. In early May he marched troops from Annapolis to occupy Baltimore, declared martial law, had his men search out and seize arms caches, and threw anyone he regarded as subversive into jail. Butler strutted around in his grand militia uniform, playing tyrant and enjoying himself immensely.
Butler's imperial reign was short-lived. General Scott had not authorized the military occupation of Baltimore, and like almost all regulars he disliked militiamen. Scott irritably relieved Butler of his command on 15 May and sent him down to command Fort Monroe. Butler was replaced by Major General George Cadwalader, but it became quickly obvious that the Army high command's distaste for Butler did not mean disapproval for the measures he had taken. A man named John Merryman was in Baltimore at the time, enlisting recruits for the Confederacy. When Cadwalader's people found out about Merryman, they immediately threw him into jail at Fort McHenry in Baltimore.
Chief Justice Taney, famous for the Dred Scott decision, was in Baltimore, and Merryman's lawyers appealed to him. The judge issued a writ of habeas corpus and sent a US marshal to serve it. The marshal was thwarted by soldiers, and returned to Taney with a message from General Cadwalader informing the judge that Merryman was a traitor and so, by authority of the President, the general was not bound by the writ. Judge Taney cited the general for contempt. The marshal was sent to serve papers on him, and sent packing as before. Taney protested, but the President replied a few weeks later in a speech: "Are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one go unexecuted?"
Since Lincoln had the soldiers and most of the members of Congress who would have had any sympathy for Confederate agitators had left, the chief justice was powerless to do anything about the President's defiance. In fact, the next month the army would even arrest the Baltimore chief of police and several police commissioners, on suspicion of collusion in the 19 April riot and other secessionist actions. Governor Hicks later approved of the measures: "I believe that arrests and arrests alone saved the State of Maryland not only from greater degradation than she suffered, but from everlasting destruction. I approved them then, and I approve them now; and the only thing for which I condemn the Administration in regard to that matter is that they let some of them out."
Maryland was the first state in the Union to feel the heavy hand of Federal authority. Such extralegal measures would be quickly extended throughout the Union, and secessionists and others judged subversive would find themselves in jail without the slightest pretense of due process.
