On the nineteenth, the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment, the first to respond to the President's call, arrived, by the Philadelphia and Baltimore Railroad. A crowd of two or three thousand persons had gathered at the depot early in the day, to witness their arrival. Soon after eleven o'clock in the morning twenty-nine cars arrived from Philadelphia, filled with soldiers. Horses were attached to the cars, which were driven along Pratt street to the Camden station. The multitude hooted and yelled after the first six cars, but did not otherwise molest them. The horses becoming frightened by the uproar, were detached from the seventh car, which moved without their aid nearly to Gay street, where a body of laborers were removing the cobblestones from the bed of the street, in order to repair it. Some thirty or forty men had followed the car to this point, cheering for President Davis and the Southern Confederacy, and applying contemptuous and insulting epithets to the troops. The latter received these taunts in perfect silence; and when the horses were again attached, and the car commenced moving off, a proposition was made to stone it. Almost instantly, acting on the suggestion, nearly every window was smashed by projectiles snatched from the street. The eighth car was treated in a like manner. The ninth car was suffered to pass unmolested, as it was apparently empty. When the tenth car approached, after an ineffectual attempt to tear up the track, it was heaped with paving stones, and a cartload of sand dumped upon them, and four or five large anchors, dragged from the sidewalk, completed the barricade. Progress was impossible, and the car returned to the President Street Depot.
Two-thirds of the cars still remained, filled with troops, besides others loaded with ammunition and baggage. Mayor Brown hastened to the depot, in order to prevent any disturbance. The troops were ordered to leave the cars and form into line. While forming they were surrounded by a dense mass of people, who impeded their march, threw great quantities of stones, and knocked down and severely injured two soldiers.
Marching through the city, from the President Street Depot to the Pratt Street Bridge, they were pursued by the excited crowd, who continued to throw stones, and even fired muskets at them. When they reached Gay street, where the track had been torn up, they were again violently assaulted by a fresh mob, and a number knocked down and wounded. At the corner of South and Pratt streets a man fired a pistol into the ranks of the military, when those in the rear ranks immediately wheeled and fired upon their assailants, wounding several. The guns of the wounded soldiers were seized, and fired upon the ranks, killing two soldiers. Reaching Calvert street, the troops succeeded in checking their pursuers by a rapid fire, and were not again seriously molested until they reached Howard street, where still another mob had assembled.
The police did their utmost to protect the troops from assault, but were pressed back by the excited crowd. The soldiers left the Camden station about half-past twelve o'clock, and a body of infantry, about one hundred and fifty strong, from one of the Northern States, which had arrived meantime, next attracted the malevolence of the crowd. The excitement was now intense. A man displayed the flag of the Confederate States, and a general panic ensued. As many as twenty shots were fired, happily without injury to any one, and cobblestones fell like hail. At last the soldiers gained refuge in the cars. Other troops, by order of Governor Hicks, were sent back to the borders of the State, and the military was called out and quiet restored, by evening. Nine citizens of Baltimore had been killed, and many wounded; while twenty-five wounded Massachusetts troops were sent to the Washington Hospital, and their dead numbered two.
Thus Baltimore shares with Charleston the doubtful honor of being first in the great civil war which devastated the country and sent desolation to many thousand homes, both north and south. Charleston fired the first gun, and Baltimore shed the first blood.
During the succeeding night, a report reaching the city that more Northern troops were on their way southward, the bridge at Canton, the two bridges between Cockeysville and Ashland, also the bridges over Little Gunpowder and Bush rivers were destroyed, by order of the authorities of Baltimore. Upon a representation of the matter to President Lincoln, he ordered that "no more troops should be brought through Baltimore, if, in a military point of view, and without interruption or opposition, they can be marched around Baltimore." The transmission of mails, and removal of provisions from the city, were suspended, by the order of the Mayor and Board of Police. Four car-loads of military stores and equipments, sufficient to furnish a thousand men, belonging to the Government, were thus detained. On the twenty-fourth of the month the city had the appearance of a military camp. Twenty-five thousand volunteers had enlisted, and four hundred picked men left the city for the Relay House, on the Baltimore and Ohio Road, for the purpose of seizing and protecting that point, in order to cut off communications with Washington by that route.
For a week an unparalleled excitement prevailed in Baltimore, which was succeeded by a counter-revolution, when the volunteer militia were dismissed, and a large number of troops landed at Fort McHenry and shipped for Washington, from Locust Point. On the fifth of May General Butler removed a portion of his troops to Baltimore, and they were permitted to enter and remain in the city without disturbance. As they proceeded on their way to Federal Hill, they were even greeted with cheers, while ladies at windows and doors waved their handkerchiefs and applauded. On the sixteenth of May the passenger trains between Baltimore and Washington resumed their regular trips. On the twenty-seventh of June, Marshal of Police Kane was arrested and escorted to Fort McHenry, on the charge of being at the head of an unlawful combination of men organized for resistance to the laws of the United States and the State of Maryland. On the first of July the Commissioners of Police were arrested, for having acted unlawfully. On the sixteenth of July General Dix was put in command of the troops stationed at Baltimore, and the city thenceforth remained tranquil. At the fall elections a full vote was cast, which resulted in the Union candidates receiving a very large majority. At the meeting of the Legislature, it appropriated seven thousand dollars for the relief of the families of the Massachusetts troops killed and wounded at Baltimore on April nineteenth.
On June thirtieth, 1863, Major General Schenck, in command at Baltimore, put that city and Maryland under martial law. The value of merchandise exported that year from Baltimore was $8,054,112, and her imports during the same time were $4,098,189, showing that although on the borderland of strife, her commerce was in an exceedingly healthy condition. During July a number of her citizens were arrested, on a charge of being disloyal to the government. On the Fourth of July all citizens were required by the Commander to show their colors, from ten o'clock A.M. to six o'clock, P.M.; an absence of the national flag being considered tantamount to a confession of disloyalty. In 1864 the State adopted a new Constitution, which conferred freedom upon the slaves within her borders, and in November a Freedman's Bureau was established by Major General Wallace, having its headquarters at Baltimore.
The following year saw the close of the war, and Baltimore, which had not suffered like her sister cities at the South, her port being free from blockade, but had rather witnessed increased prosperity arising from the demands of the war, continued her prosperous career. Although many violent disunionists had found their homes within the city, the popular sentiment had grown strongly in favor of the North, and Baltimore had come to see that she had little to lose and much to gain by the reestablishment of the Union.
The bitterness of the old war times has passed away, and, as if to emphasize this fact, the Grand Army of the Republic was invited to hold a reunion in Baltimore in September, 1882. Accepting the invitation, her citizens vied with each other in honoring the veterans of the war, and made their visit a regular ovation. Of the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment, who had passed through Baltimore on that fateful day in April, twenty-one years before, and who suffered from the fury of an ungoverned mob, only one member attended the reunion, Captain C. P. Lord, a resident of Vineland, New Jersey. He was lionized on every hand.
This Grand Army reunion had many pleasant and amusing features. Here men met each other again who had last parted on the battlefield or in a Southern prison. Here the dead seemed to come to life, and the lost were found. Many officers and soldiers of the Confederate army were also present, and it was as satisfactory as curious, as more than once happened during this occasion, to have two men meet and clasp hands in a cordial greeting, as one of them said to the other, "The last time we met I tried to put a bullet hole