Clashes in Baltimore, 1861

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Artist's impression from 1861

As clashes in Baltimore in 1861 ( English Baltimore riot of 1861 , according to the place of confrontation and Pratt Street Riots or Pratt Street Massacre called), the clashes between anti-war Copperheads and other sympathizers of the southern states on the one hand and by pulling unionist militia , designated primarily from Massachusetts and Pennsylvania , the other from Baltimore , Maryland on April 19, 1861, one week after the attack on Fort Sumter . The militia troops were on their way to the capital Washington, DC , to reinforce the garrison there. In addition to the attack on Fort Sumter, the unrest with several fatalities is a further step towards starting full fighting in the Civil War .

background

Before the Civil War began, most of Baltimore's citizens were opposed to war, with many supporting the Southern Cause. The Copperheads were the most popular party in Maryland, and the newly elected President Abraham Lincoln had in the election in November 1860 just received once about 1,100 of the approximately 30,000 votes in Baltimore. Many residents of the city were still troubled by the fact that Lincoln had traveled unannounced and under safety precautions through the city on his way to his inauguration planned for March 4 in Washington at the end of February 1861, motivated by an alleged assassination plot ( Baltimore plot ). Baltimore was also the city with the highest concentration of free Afro-Americans (around 25,000) in the USA and there were also many abolitionists and supporters of the Union among its residents . The different views of the inhabitants about the secession crisis of 1860/61 led to considerable tension in public opinion and there had already been several clashes between the two sides before the riots of April 19. Supporters of the right to secession and slavery had come together in an organization called "National Volunteers", while organized unionists and abolitionists called themselves "Minutemen".

The first shots of the Civil War came on April 12 at Fort Sumter , South Carolina , a week before the events in Baltimore. At that time, the states of Virginia , North Carolina , Tennessee, and Arkansas had not yet declared secession . The other slave states of Delaware and Maryland as well as Missouri and Kentucky (later referred to as "border states") were on the move. After Fort Sumter fell on April 13, the Virginia Secession Convention began to debate secession again (the move was passed on April 17 by 88 votes to 55). The question of Virginia's secession was particularly important because of its industrial capacity. Sympathetic citizens of Maryland, who had long sought secession in the spirit of John C. Calhoun's nullification doctrine, now increasingly advocated taking the same step in their state. Their discontent was also due to Lincoln's April 15 call to volunteer with the Union Forces for 90 days to address the evolving situation.

New volunteer organizations from several of the northern states began moving south, primarily with the aim of protecting the capital, Washington, from the new Virginia threat as they passed through Maryland. Baltimore's newly elected mayor, George William Brown, and the new chief of police, George Proctor Kane, looked forward to the days ahead with concern and tried to reassure the population.

Arrival of the first Union troops in Baltimore

On Thursday, April 18, 460 newly enlisted Pennsylvania State Militia volunteers (generally from the Pottsville area ) arrived at Bolton Street station on the Northern Central Railway from the Pennsylvanian capital Harrisburg . They were followed by several regiments of the regular United States Army under John C. Pemberton (later a Confederate general ) who returned from service on the " Frontier ". The latter split up in lines and marched east along the port area to Fort McHenry to report there for duty.

At the same time, about 700 National Volunteers gathered at the Washington Monument and began moving towards the railroad station to face the troops. These had, what the southern sympathizers were not aware of, orders to march with unloaded weapons. Kane's police units were usually successful in attempting to ensure the safe march through of the militia troops, but could not prevent stones from being thrown (along with numerous insults). Nicholas Biddle, a dark-skinned servant in the regiment, was hit in the head. The militia camped under the unfinished dome of the Capitol overnight .

On April 17, the driving 6th Massachusetts Militia in Boston from, came in the following morning New York and reached Philadelphia at nightfall. On April 19, she continued her route to Baltimore, where slow progress through the city was expected. With the city banning steam rail lines in the city, there was no direct link between the President Street station where the troops were arriving and Camden Station (ten blocks west) from where they were supposed to continue. The wagons that ensured transit were pulled by horses along Pratt Street.

Already after leaving Philadelphia the regimental commander Edward F. Jones had received a warning that the route through Baltimore could meet "resistance". According to his later report, he then went through the wagons and issued the following command:

"The regiment will march through Baltimore in column of sections, arms at will. You will undoubtedly be insulted, abused, and, perhaps, assaulted, to which you must pay no attention whatever, but march with your faces to the front, and pay no attention to the mob, even if they throw stones, bricks, or other missiles; but if you are fired upon and any one of you is hit, your officers will order you to fire. Do not fire into any promiscuous crowds, but select, any man whom you may see aiming at you, and be sure you drop him. "

Events of April 19th

Marching route through Baltimore according to Mayor Brown's records
The Lexington of 1861
lithograph

As feared, the transfer of Union troops between the two stops led to attacks and attempted blockades by southerners sympathizers. When it became clear that a transfer by horse-drawn wagon was no longer feasible, the four companies (around 240 soldiers) formed in columns to continue on foot. However, the mob continued their attacks and eventually brought the columns to a standstill. The back rows were attacked with "bricks, paving stones and pistols". In response, several soldiers opened fire on the rioters, after which a wild street battle began between them, the attackers and the police. This ended with the police dividing the crowd and clearing the way so that the soldiers could reach the station. However, the regiment lost a lot of its equipment, including the musical instruments of its marching band.

Four soldiers and twelve civilians were killed in the riot. Over 30 soldiers were wounded and some were left behind. The number of civilians injured is unknown. The four soldiers are considered the Union's first dead in the war, even though they were killed by civilians in a Union state.

The same mob that attacked the soldiers attacked and devastated the office of the Baltimore Wecker , a German-language newspaper , on the same day . The publisher William Schnauffer and the editor Wilhelm Georg Rapp left the city under death threats. Schnauffer later returned and resumed the work of the newspaper, which supported the Union cause throughout the war. Rapp went to Illinois and worked there in the same way for the local state newspaper.

The Baltimore Steam Packet Company rejected the same day a request from the federal government to provide transport capacities for strengthening endangered Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth from.

consequences

In Brown's later assessment, it was the events in Baltimore that brought the two warring parties over the threshold of civil war, as it was the first bloodshed, which undermined further negotiations or compromises and made the feelings of those involved so high that they could no longer be controlled.

On July 10, 1861, the responsible United States District Court appealed against six people involved in the mob.

Over the next few weeks there were several minor rioting by Baltimore citizens against the police, which subsided after about a month. Mayor Brown and Maryland Governor Thomas Holliday Hicks pleaded with President Lincoln not to send any more federal troops across Maryland to avoid repetition. Lincoln then told a YMCA peace delegation that the Union soldiers were not birds that could simply fly over Maryland, nor were moles to dig under. On the evening of April 20, Hicks also authorized Brown to use Maryland's militia units to block bridges on the railroad lines into the city, which he later denied. One of the leaders of the militia was John Merryman , whose arrest the Supreme Court later ruled on in the ex parte Merryman case .

On April 19, Major General Robert Patterson , Commander of the Washington Military District (States of Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland and District of Columbia), Brigadier General Benjamin Franklin Butler gave the order for his 8th Massachusetts Militia to route Annapolis via Annapolis Junction to Washington open and secure. The association arrived in Annapolis by ship on April 20th. Governor Hicks and the Mayor of Annapolis protested, but Butler (a clever politician) persuaded them to allow the landing. The 8th Massachusetts Regiment posted itself at Annapolis Junction and the 7th New York Regiment was the first to use this route to reach Washington on April 25th.

In Maryland, after the rioting, voices were raised calling for secession as well. Governor Hicks called a special session of the State Assembly to discuss this. Since federal troops were standing in the capital Annapolis and there was still unrest in Baltimore, Hicks chose the city of Frederick as the meeting place. The meeting opened on April 26th and decided on April 29th with 53 to 13 votes against secession, although it was also decided not to reopen the rail connections to the north and to call on the federal government to remove the increasingly arriving federal troops to remove the state again. As a result, the state assumed a kind of neutrality in the looming conflict at that time.

The decision did not prevent numerous other Union troops from arriving in Maryland. Butler sent Union troops to Baltimore on May 13 and declared martial law . Lincoln arranged for the mayor, the chief of police, the entire governing body of the police force, the city council, and a sitting representative of the House of Representatives, Henry May , to be arrested and held without charge. The Maryland-born chairman of the Supreme Court Roger B. Taney , announced in the case ex parte Merryman on June 4, 1861 the decision that Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus had violated the constitution, but Lincoln ignored the decision and later responded to criticism of the newspaper editor Frank Key Howard arrest him as well. Ironically, Howard was being held at Fort McHenry , the same place where his grandfather Francis Scott Key wrote the text of the later national anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner , which was about the American love of freedom. In 1863, Howard wrote Fourteen Months in the American Bastille about his captivity at Fort Henry, and two publishers of the book were also arrested.

Some southerners also reacted passionately to the events. For example, James Ryder Randall , a Maryland-born Louisiana teacher who lost a friend in the riot, wrote the poem Maryland, My Maryland , in which he co-opted events for the Southern cause. The poem later became a popular song in the southern states (with the melody of O Tannenbaum ) and has been Maryland's official state anthem since 1939. More recently there have been attempts to remove some lines referring to the events of 1861.

On September 17, 1861, the day the State Legislature convened for its new session to deliberate over the events of the past few months and Lincoln's potentially illegal actions, 27 MPs (one third of the General Assembly) were arrested and under by federal troops Regarding the suspension of habeas corpus imprisoned, another violation of the Supreme Court's decision. The meeting was then broken off and no further debate about a possible secession could take place.

The neighboring state of Delaware was also reinforced with federal troops, which prevented similar events there. Kentucky declared its neutrality on May 20 and only later joined the Union.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Baltimore: A House Divided & War on the Chesapeake Bay. In: CivilWarTraveler.com. January 13, 2008, archived from the original on June 27, 2012 ; Retrieved July 14, 2012 .
  2. ↑ Ezratty: Baltimore in the Civil War , 2010, p 31st
  3. ^ A b Gary L. Browne: Baltimore Riot (April 19, 1861) , in: Encyclopedia of the American Civil War , ed. by David Stephen Heidler, Jeanne T. Heidler, David J. Coles, Norton, New York 2000, p. 173.
  4. ↑ Ezratty: Baltimore in the Civil War , 2010, pp 43-45.
  5. ↑ Bruce Carton: The Coming Fury . Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1961, ISBN 0-671-43414-4 , pp. 340-341 .
  6. ↑ Ezratty: Baltimore in the Civil War , 2010, p 45th
  7. ↑ Ezratty: Baltimore in the Civil War , 2010, p 47th
  8. ↑ United States. War Department. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies . Series 1. Edited by John Sheldon Moody, et al. Vol. 2. Government Printing Office, Washington DC 1880, p. 7.
  9. ↑ James M. McPherson : Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era . Oxford University Press, 1988, ISBN 0-19-516895-X , pp. 40 .
  10. ^ Phillip Fazzini: Luther C. Ladd. In: Photos from the Past. Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War, archived from the original on February 10, 2008 ; Retrieved February 6, 2008 .
  11. ^ Phillip Fazzini: Charles A. Taylor (1836–1861). In: Find A Grave. October 23, 2009, accessed August 26, 2011 .
  12. ↑ James Ford Rhodes: History of the Civil War, 1861-1865 . The Macmillan Company, New York 1917, pp. 19 ( online ): "6th massachusetts regiment AND BALTIMORE rIOT"
  13. ^ J. Thomas Scharf: The chronicles of Baltimore . Turnbull Brothers, Baltimore 1874, p. 104 ( online ).
  14. ↑ Alexander Crosby Brown: Steam Packets on the Chesapeake . Cornell Maritime Press, Cambridge, Maryland 1961, LCCN  61-012580 , pp. 48-50 .
  15. ↑ "because then was shed the first blood in a conflict between the North and the South; then a step was taken which made compromise or retreat almost impossible; then passions on both sides were aroused which could not be controlled. ", quoted from Brown: Baltimore and the 19th of April 19, 1861 , 1887, p. 10
  16. ^ The New York Times. "The Baltimore Treason .; The Indictment Against John Merryman." July 12, 1861.
  17. ↑ Benson John Lossing (1866/1997), Pictorial Field Book of the Civil War , reprint, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, Vol I, Chapter XVII, "Events in or near the National Capital", pp 419-420..
  18. ^ Burning the Bridges. In: Straddling Secession: Thomas Holliday Hicks and the Beginning of the Civil War in Maryland. Maryland State Archives, accessed January 3, 2015 : "Merryman appealed to Roger B. Taney, ... who issued a landmark opinion saying that only Congress could suspend the right of habeas corpus."
  19. ↑ Benson John Lossing (1866/1997), Pictorial Field Book of the Civil War , reprint, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, Vol I, Chap.. XVIII, "The Capital Secured-Maryland Secessionists Subdued-Contributions by the People," pp. 434-436, [italics in reprint].
  20. ↑ Benson John Lossing (1866/1997), Pictorial Field Book of the Civil War , reprint, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, Vol I, Chap.. XVIII, "The Capital Secured-Maryland Secessionists Subdued-Contributions by the People," pp. 439-440.
  21. ↑ Mitchell, p. 87
  22. ↑ States Which Seceded. In: eHistory.com. Archived from the original on October 6, 2014 ; Retrieved April 19, 2016 .
  23. ↑ a b Nancy Bramucci Sheads: Teaching American History in Maryland - Documents for the Classroom: Arrest of the Maryland Legislature 1861 . In: Maryland State Archives. 2005, accessed April 3, 2016 .
  24. ^ A b Carl Schoettler: A time liberties weren't priority. In: The Baltimore Sun. November 27, 2001, accessed October 17, 2014 .
  25. ^ A b c Frank Key Howard: Fourteen Months in American Bastiles . HF Mackintosh, London 1863 ( online [accessed August 18, 2014]).
  26. ↑ Monty Phair: A Brief History of Randallstown. Baltimore County Public Libraries archived from the original on February 12, 2009 ; Retrieved July 27, 2009 .
  27. ^ Maryland State Archives (2004). Maryland State Song - "Maryland, My Maryland" , accessed December 27, 2004.
  28. ↑ By Ovetta Wiggins: Maryland's state song is way off-key, panel says. In: The Washington Post. December 27, 2015, accessed July 16, 2020 .
  29. ↑ Rosalind S. Helderman: O Controversy! In: The Washington Post. March 1, 2009, p. C01 , accessed January 3, 2015 .
  30. ^ William C. Harris, Lincoln and the Border States: Preserving the Union , University Press of Kansas, 2011, p. 71