Union to resign his commission in the Federal army, and to take service with his native State. He declined to receive a commission from the government at Montgomery, and was appointed by the governor of Virginia to the chief command of the “Virginia forces."

Meanwhile the republican journals of the North rang with ridicule of the anile and impotent commonwealth which had assumed to clothe secession with the faded terrors of her countenance. It was satisfactorily shown by the returns of the census that the "Mother of States and of Presidents" was decidedly in her dotage, that her financial condition was hopelessly involved, and her military strength contemptible. The vision of a victorious invasion, sweeping over the graves of Washington, of Jefferson, of Henry, and of Madison, to plant again the banner of the Union above the humbled standard of Virginia, was contemplated, not as men contemplate a stern and painful necessity, but with a certain riotous and exuberant levity, the sole and poor excuse of which is to be sought in the unhappy inability of the people fully to comprehend the realities upon which they were rushing.

By the secession of Virginia, the slaveholding States of the West and the State of North Carolina may be said to have been taken in the flank and rear. If that secession was to be maintained in arms against an assault in arms, it was clearly impossible that North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas and Missouri could hope to escape from the necessity of acting with one or the other of the contending parties. The position of Maryland excepted that State from this double pressure, at once political and military, while it exposed her to analogous pressure from the power of the North and West. Although the institution of slavery had long been decaying in Maryland, the habits and feelings of the people were still deeply tinged with its influences, and by a thousand ties of association, tradition, and political opinion, the most influential classes of Maryland were inclined to sympathize with the

States beyond the Potomac. A powerful party existed in Maryland bent upon effecting the secession of the State. This party was particularly strong in the city of Baltimore; and there is reason to believe that upon the strength of promises of assistance in the way of men and of arms, made to them by the eager and headlong secessionists of Virginia, the leaders of this party had made no inconsiderable progress towards preparing a revolutionary movement in Baltimore, when all their plans were disconcerted, and all their hopes dashed to the ground, by the discovery that Virginia, once in secession, had neither men nor arms to spare. Simultaneously with this discovery, events occurred in Baltimore which at once precipitated the full power of the Federal government upon that city, and fixed it as in a vice.

On the 19th of April, a regiment of volunteers from Massachusetts, passing through Baltimore, on their way to the defence of the national capital, were compelled to leave the train in which they were travelling, by a barricade of stones and rubbish hastily thrown up on the track, and to march through the streets of the city. Their appearance was the signal for a popular demonstration. An angry crowd, chiefly made up of the dregs of the Baltimore populace, thronged about them with taunts and cries, waving the flag of the Confederates, and assailing their columns with missiles of all descriptions. The march soon became a mêlée, and when the troops finally reached the station at which they were to reëmbark for Washington, a desperate attempt was made to block up the track and convert the mêlée into a massacre. The troops, however, finally moved off, firing from the windows of the cars, and killing, by one of their last volleys, a gentleman who had taken no part in the riot save as a spectator. Other citizens, the number was never definitely ascertained, and two of the soldiers, had been slain in this affray. Upon whom the original responsibility for this most unhappy collision ought to rest, it is not easy nor is it at this time important to decide. That

the real leaders of the secession movement in Maryland should have deliberately planned it, is altogether improbable. Those leaders were perfectly well aware that they were destitute of the means of arming even a small proportion of their own party, and it would have been sheer madness in them thus to invite the establishment of the Federal power by force in Baltimore, and thus to impress upon their projected enterprise, at its outset, a character of lawlessness and mob violence. To them and to their plans, indeed, the riot of April 19th was a fatal blow. Once again the telegraph, which had already played so tragical a part in the grand catastrophe of the nation, by concentrating and condensing the passions of the most widely separated communities, drew the natural excitement and just indignation of the whole North into a single thunderburst. Years before, Mr. Jefferson, writing to Destutt de Tracy,* had congratulated his country on the hope of permanence for its institutions afforded by "its great extent, and the small portion, comparatively, which could ever be convulsed at one time by local passion."

"When frenzy and delusion," he had said, "like an epidemic, gain certain parts, the residue remain sound and untouched, and hold on till their brethren can recover from the temporary delusion." But the steam-engine and the telegraph, the boasted ministers of peace and good-will, harmony and mutual understanding, among mankind, now lent themselves to the service of the passions most fatal to peace and goodwill, to harmony and to mutual understanding. They had annihilated the wholesome action of time and deliberation in this supreme crisis of national affairs.

The smoke had hardly lifted from the streets of Baltimore, when a cry for vengeance-blind, immediate, and overwhelming-went up from all the North. The press, which had long since ceased to lead the public mind and contented itself with giving voice to the extremest passions of the hour, rang with

* Jefferson's Works, vol. v., p 570.

appeals to arms. "Through Baltimore or over it," was the unreflecting response of the North to the madness of a mob as unreflecting.

For the moment, the government of Maryland, and the municipal authorities of Baltimore, were entirely paralyzed. All travel southward through Baltimore was for some time suspended, and the volunteers, who from all parts of the North hurried forward at the summons of the "Capital in danger," were forced to make their way to Washington by a circuitous route through Annapolis.

Measures, however, of a summary and despotic character were soon adopted by the Federal authorities for reducing Baltimore. The success which attended those measures, and the indifference with which the contest for the possession of Maryland was abandoned by the Confederates, must be attributed, in part, to the rapid development of the Northern determination to uphold the policy of the president, and assert the supremacy of the laws of the Union; in part to the chaotic and uncertain condition of affairs at the South; and in part, also, to an aversion then general throughout the South, from the prospect of seeing Maryland introduced into the Southern Confederacy.

This aversion had its origin in a variety of considerations. Those among the Southern leaders who, like President Davis and a majority of his cabinet, regarded secession as a grand political expedient to result "in a suitable political and civil union, adequate to the security of both sections at home and abroad,”* hoped that Maryland, remaining in the Union, might exert upon the policy of the Federal government an influence favorable to peace, forbearance, and compromise. The chiefs of the party which aimed at a permanent separation, and the foundation of a great Southern Confederacy, felt

* Judge Campbell, of Alabama, in "A Statement and Vindication of Certain Political Opinions." (By the Hon. Wm. B. Reed, of Philadelphia.) Philadelphia, 1863.

that Maryland was rather in name than in fact a slave State; nor had they any desire to see so prosperous a commercial city as Baltimore embraced within the borders of their new Republic, there to compete with the less powerfully developed mercantile interest of the further South, for the control of that magnificent commerce which they believed must rapidly flow in from every quarter of the globe upon the seaboard towns of the Confederacy.

Visions, plans, theories, and schemes of all sorts, however, were destined now to disappear on both sides, under the swiftly advancing realities of war. On the 9th of May the Confederate president issued a proclamation declaring that war existed between the United and Confederate States, and notifying mankind of his intention to issue letters of marque and reprisal in response to the blockade of the Southern ports.

Before the end of the month Tennessee, Arkansas, and North Carolina, with Virginia, had joined the Confederacy of the South, and accepted in its provisional character the provisional government established at Montgomery, which had already raised, without difficulty, a loan of five millions of dollars, and was distributing military commissions, and pushing forward military organizations throughout the Southern States.

Partly as a military measure, and partly, no doubt, for the purpose of controlling the conflicting political elements which threatened to paralyze the movement of secession in its inception, the government of Jefferson Davis was suddenly transferred, on the 21st of May, to Richmond, in Virginia, a point at which the main lines of communication running through the South and Southwest converged, and affording an excellent base of operations, whether offensive or defensive, in the face of the Federal forces now rapidly assembling at Washington and in the State of Maryland.

The reception which the Confederate president met with in Richmond was very far from being satisfactory. He found the Virginian authorities neither friendly to himself personally,