Strange and Obscure Stories of the Civil War

by Tim Rowland

  Although Doubleday’s name litters the pages of Civil War history through 1863, little of it has stuck. Other names, even those of men with fewer battlefield accomplishments, have become familiar parts of the Civil War lexicon, but we seldom hear about the man who “invented” baseball. From his writings, Doubleday comes across as a man of humor; there is every chance he would have enjoyed the joke.

  CHAPTER 3

  Happiness is Throwing Senators in Jail

  In Thomas Scharf’s History of Western Maryland, Vol. I, he notes the following dispatch from aide-de-camp R. Morris Copeland to Maj. Gen. Nataniel Banks, dated Sept. 17, 1861:

  To Maj.-Gen N.P. Banks:

  It is now 5 p.m. We have arrested 12 of the worst men and are progressing very well. We shall get the whole 18 I think, and if any come in on the train to-night we will bag them too …

  Respectfully,

  RMC

  And who were these eighteen lawless men who were being hunted down like dogs in mid-September, 1861? Desperadoes? Thugs? Common bandits? Perhaps. But more to the point of the matter, they were members of the Maryland legislature.

  Morris got to live the dream, in a manner of speaking, by taking elected lawmakers into custody, and seemed to enjoy the task as much as many of us would today. Needless to say he had some powerful friends. Abraham Lincoln himself was seeing to it that these duly and legally elected members of the General Assembly were not only deprived of office, but thrown behind bars, where, as far as the president of the United States was concerned, they could rot.

  The new president had earlier quipped that he would like to have the Lord on his side, but that he had to have Kentucky. He needed Maryland more. With Virginia and Maryland in the Confederacy, Washington would have been surrounded and the Union would have been in a terribly precarious place before the war had even begun. The South was drooling at the thought of controlling not only the nation’s capital, but the strategically crucial Chesapeake Bay as well. So Lincoln was not about to give Maryland’s pro-South lawmakers a chance to vote in favor of leaving the Union, especially after his own army had failed so miserably two months earlier at First Bull Run. Things were not good.

  How, even Lincoln might have wondered as he ordered the arrests, did we ever get here? The answer was embedded in events of the past nine months, and beyond.

  By the dawn of 1861, the idea of secession was not new, nor was it confined to the South, nor was it particularly frowned upon through vast reaches of the young nation.

  America’s Constitution, at that point, was just three years older than the Soviet Union was when it crumbled. Historically speaking, there was not a lot of time under its belt. In 1861, Gen. Winfield Scott had served under all but two of the country’s presidents. As nations go, we might have been seen as a teenager, with all the typical wisdom and restraint inherent in the breed. It would have been no particular skin off many sets of antebellum teeth had Franklin’s republic, as he had hinted seventy years prior, proved impossible to keep.

  More than ten years before the war, many Southern governors were itching for an excuse to bolt from the Union. They carefully eyed lands to the south, seeing the potential of Mexico and Latin America as great partners in commercial and agricultural enterprises built on the backs of slaves. Land was a way for the South to counterbalance the North’s growing industrialism. It was not lost on the South that it produced raw materials, particularly cotton, but that the North performed all the value-added tasks of milling and sewing. Some were figuring out that the South just might have to build its own factories and jettison its Northern brethren altogether, since they always seemed intent on spoiling the Southerners’ fun. This would not have bothered more than a few influential Northerners, who viewed the South as a grande dame might have seen a particularly ill-mannered son-in-law.

  It was in between these two sentiments that Maryland found herself in the spring of 1861, as Union soldiers were being run out of Fort Sumter and Lincoln was calling for the new conscripts that would soon be run out of Northern Virginia. Maryland’s thoughts on secession were divided and complex, and as was true elsewhere throughout the nation, the noisiest factions were not necessarily the most representative. Newspaper editors and fear-mongering lawmakers on both sides breathed fire not universally felt by average people attending to their daily life, who, often as not, just wanted to be left alone. In Baltimore, well-heeled secessionists and state lawmakers agitated for siding with the South; the South wanted to believe that these bellowing voices spoke for the public at large, a leap of faith that was to lead to disappointment. But its hopes were understandable.

  Confederate states pulled out all the stops in their courtship. Down on one knee, Virginia called up to Maryland on the balcony, wooing her with stories of their mutual traditions and vision and heaping praise on her noble citizens and leaders. Other Southern states sent envoys to Baltimore, lobbying for Maryland’s secession. When candy and flowers didn’t work, the South turned to taunts and abuse. To stay in the Union, an Alabama commissioner said, was to “accept inferiority” and become an impotent tool of Union arrogance.

  Following the election of Lincoln, Maryland lawmakers had petitioned Gov. Thomas Hicks to call a special session in which the state would go throw her lot in with the South. Hicks was a slaveholder and by all standards a Southerner through and through, but he would not see the Union disintegrate under his watch. That winter and spring he refused to give lawmakers a chance to replicate the choices of lawmakers throughout the South. (For his allegiance, Hicks would later be offered a generalship in the war, but he declined and enlisted as a private for the plausible reason that he didn’t know anything about the military; this detail did not deter most men in similar circumstances.)

  Even so, Maryland’s allegiance at this point was very much up in the air, and the South continued to hold out hope, cheered on by the first fatal clash of the war, in which some residents of Baltimore indeed rose up against “Northern aggression.”

  The term “wrong side of the tracks” pertained to the region of the community that was downwind of the locomotives’ house-blackening and lung-choking smoke. Baltimore at the time solved the problem by prohibiting engines downtown altogether, and the city’s northern train station was ten blocks from the road that headed south. Cars had to be pulled from station to station by horse, leaving travelers headed from, say, Philadelphia to Washington, vulnerable to angry mobs. A regiment from Massachusetts was taking this route on April 19, when a throng of brick-throwing Southern sympathizers blocked their path. Citizens, troops, and police ended up in a brawl that left four soldiers and twelve civilians dead.

  The action enraged Baltimore native James Ryder Randall, who lost a friend in the hostilities, but, being a New Orleans poet (and not a good one, even by most poets’ standards) and professor of literature, didn’t have much going for him in the way of talents in the military arts. His small but lasting contribution to the era came about when, in a fit of pique, he penned a lengthy poem imploring Maryland to join the Southern cause.

  His work has the tone of a jockey whipping a particularly reluctant nag for all he’s worth, complaining mildly that Maryland “wast ever bravely meek,” and “thy dalliance does thee wrong,” but voicing hope that she will realize that “Better the blade, the shot, the bowl/Than crucifixion of the soul.” Taking heart in the Baltimore riots, he proceeds to call Lincoln some nasty names and in celebration of Baltimore’s riots, happily concludes “Huzza! She spurns the Northern scum!”1

  A Maryland glee club with Southern sympathies had set the words—which had been printed in a New Orleans paper—to the tune of “O Tannenbaum” and stood around the piano sweetly singing of “Howard’s warlike thrust.” State theory holds that some eighty years after the war, no one much remembered the lyrics beyond “Maryland, My Maryland,” and today most state residents are shocked to read the seamy underbelly of their state song. Every so often the Maryland General Assembly tries to change the state song to o
ne that’s a little less scumlike, but the effort always comes to naught. The revenge of the jailed legislators, perhaps.

  James Randall wasn’t the only person inspired by the Baltimore riots. Civil War soldier-turned-historian Ezra Carman, in a work recently edited by Thomas G. Clemens, noted that the Richmond Examiner was equally jubilant:

  The glorious conduct of Maryland decides the contest at hand. With a generous bravery worthy of her ancient renown, she has thrown herself into the pathway of the enemy, and made of her body a shield for the South. The heart of all Maryland responds to the action of Baltimore, and that nursery of fine regiments, rather than becoming the camping ground of the enemy, preparing to rush on the South, will speedily become the camping ground of the South, preparing to cross the line of Mason and Dixon. It is impossible to estimate the moral effect of the action of Maryland.

  The paper simply, and correctly, as it turned out, concluded that the South had no chance without Maryland on its side. It was essential to have “Her territory, her waters, her slaves, her people, her soldiers, her ship builders, her machinists, her wealth, enterprise and bravery.”

  What the Richmond Examiner and many others with Southern sympathies didn’t know was that the relative handful of rioters spoke for themselves, not the state as a whole. Indeed, the South’s hearty commendations of the riots served as applause the bravely meek state didn’t want.

  All this left the state government in a tight spot. It did not want to appear sympathetic to the North by allowing Federal troops to pass through its territory to Washington, but it was not ready to leave the Union. If anything, it wished it could be the Switzerland of the Mid-Atlantic.

  No one could say for sure where Maryland stood. It was home to nearly 120,000 slaves but had strong populations of European descent whose religions and cultures had no use for the institution. Maryland’s past was tied to the South, true enough, but its economy was increasingly of the industrial North. Many of Maryland’s elected representatives were for secession, but the people they represented were not.

  Maryland wanted states to its north and south to just settle down, even as its own citizens were taking up weapons and lambasting Northern tyrants or Southern traitors, as the case might be. Maryland, while trying to hold up under tremendous pressure from both sides, was in a standoff with Maryland. Some in the Mid-Atlantic states were ready to declare a pox on both their houses and agitate for a “middle confederacy” that would have left New England abolitionists and the cotton states of the Deep South to stew in their own juices, while a great alliance of reason stretching from coast to coast would be a buffer between the two. But at this point, events were moving too fast for any sort of third rail to keep up.

  Pro-South lawmakers continued to demand that they be called into session, and Hicks finally agreed to do so in the spring of 1861, after wisely moving the seat of government from Baltimore (on the theory that it was too volatile) to the strongly pro-Union western town of Frederick. Hicks’ strategy worked. Having gotten their wish, fire-eating lawmakers couldn’t get the body as a whole to pull the trigger. Bills drawn up calling for secession failed to win a majority.

  The legislature as a whole, of course, had an inkling that the majority of the people were not on its side. On June 22, the legislature asked the governor to require all local militias to return weapons they had been issued from state armories. In rural Maryland, this demand that people give up their guns went over about as well then as it would today. Home guards passed their own resolutions literally telling the legislature that it could have their guns when it pried them from their cold dead hands.

  Seeing the handwriting on the wall, perhaps, Southern sympathizers grew desperate. All manner of rumors, plots, and intrigue supplied tavern-goers with plenty to talk about. Maybe there would be a commando raid on Washington. Maybe some goons could be talked into kidnapping Hicks and dragging him back to Virginia, allowing Maryland’s lawmakers free to vote themselves out of the Union without undue gubernatorial influence. In the end, the South didn’t act fast enough and the North was not about to take any chances.

  In April, Lincoln had written to Gen. Scott, expressing deep reservations about the legalities and the productivity of arresting lawmakers—they had the right to assemble, and further, there was no certainty that this whimsical brood would do the wrong thing. But by the end of the summer, and after the disaster of Bull Run, the luxury of wait-and-see tactics could no longer be afforded. Gen. Stonewall Jackson, for one, was itching to invade Maryland. Across the state, Union authorities got their marching orders. On September 13, Pinkerton detectives arrested a handful of problematic residents of Baltimore and sent them by carriage to Fort McHenry.

  As Maryland bickered back and forth over whether or not to secede, Gen. Thomas Jackson, sporting the freshly minted nickname “Stonewall,” and shown here as a young man, was out of patience and ready to invade. (Courtesy National Archives)

  In a colorful letter to Secretary of State Seward, Baltimore attorney Worthington G. Snethen congratulated the government on its action and urged the Union to do whatever it might take to prevent the Maryland legislature, which could not be trusted, from convening. He explained that some pro-Union lawmakers might show up anyway, just to collect the four-dollar-a-day salary. The rest of his derision was directed toward the pro-South newspaper editors in Baltimore, whose arrest caused him “intense satisfaction” and “infinite pleasure.” In the end, the Union’s martial action in the city, Snethen believed, would be enough to get those disposed toward neutrality off the fence: “The effect of these arrests must determine very rapidly the status of the floating population who are ever on the watch for the stronger side.”

  Southern sympathizers had been correct; the riots of Baltimore had been a turning point, but not in the manner the South had hoped. Instead, they provided the desperate times that kindled the North’s desperate measures. Pro-South lawmakers in Frederick noticed that the roads out of town were suddenly bristling with armed sentries. On September 17, a year to the day before the horrible Battle of Antietam, the rogue elements of the Maryland legislature who remained in Frederick were snapped up and jailed, ending any chance of secession.

  “Allow me to congratulate you,” Dr. Arthur Rich of Baltimore wrote Seward, “upon the government manifesting its strong arm in giving the quietus to our so-called Legislature. It has soothed down the temper of the disunionists prodigiously.”

  What they couldn’t do through politics, of course, secessionists hoped to do with arms. A year after the legislative cleansing, Lee was crossing the Potomac River into Maryland with hopes that the general public would consider him a great liberator. His officers in Frederick gave rousing stump speeches encouraging men of the town to join the ranks of the South. At last, they said, here was a chance for Marylanders to avenge the bloodshed of Baltimore and the tyrannical treatment of its elected lawmakers.

  A few joined up, but not many. For one thing, Lee’s own army—disheveled, shoeless, and half-starving—made a poor recruiting poster. Second, money talked, and all Lee could offer local merchants in payment was highly suspect Confederate scrip. But finally, it was the cumulative opinion of Maryland residents that had the final say. Sympathetic as some might have been for the Southern cause, their hearts, and hence their state, never left the Union.

  1 Somehow, this angry, traitorous work wound up as Maryland’s state song in 1939.

  CHAPTER 4

  Looks Could Be Deceiving

  Awounded Dutchman lay writhing in a makeshift Washington,  D.C., hospital following the Battle of Bull Run, a mission that, for the Union, had begun with frivolity and ended in bloody tatters. If the bullets had been brutal on the flesh, the hospital menu wasn’t much better in the way of promoting healing. Hard bread, greasy pork, and bitter coffee did not have the same medicinal qualities of chicken soup.

  The Dutchman firmly believed his life depended on getting a bite of the fish to which his stomach had been accustomed all h
is life. He grabbed a young nurse who was making the hurried rounds. “Zee feesh I must have,” he implored, as he broke down in tears. “Oh mine Gott, I must have some feesh.” Nurses in the Civil War provided both a physical and psychological backbone for the soldiers. They knew what mattered, and this particular nurse, at the first opportunity, scampered to Hunter’s Creek, baited a hook, and in a matter of minutes had pulled in … a very large eel. No matter, the Dutchman was overjoyed at his special supper and rested well that evening.

  He may or may not have thought it odd that the nurse who cared for him was in fact a young man named Frank Thompson who seemed to pay particular attention to comforts that most male attendants might have overlooked. He might have had even more trouble digesting his eel had he known that this man who did the job of a woman was not a man at all, but a woman who would later disguise herself as … a woman.