Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 2.djvu/110

96 his court house at Easton in Talbot county, knocked senseless with a revolver on the very seat of justice, incarcerated in the negro jail in Baltimore, and thence sent to Fort Lafayette and there held. Hon. James L. Bartol, of the court of appeals, was imprisoned in Fort McHenry. As General Lee said in his proclamation to the people of Maryland: "Words have been declared offenses, by an arbitrary decree of the Federal executive, and citizens ordered to be tried by a military commission for what they may dare to speak." Lord Lyons, therefore, well said, "that the violent measures which have been resorted to have gone far to establish the fact that Maryland is retained in the Union only by military force."

The legislature was convened by Hicks on December 3, 1861, and promptly passed resolutions of thanks to Col. John R. Kenly, of the First Maryland regiment, "for his early, prompt and distinguished services in the cause of his country."

But the lot of the Maryland Unionists was not a happy one. They had harnessed themselves to the car of the radical revolution, and they began to see, when too late, whither they were being driven. In March, 1862, the legislature passed a resolution that "The general assembly of Maryland have seen with concern, certain indications at the seat of the general government, of an interference with the institution of slavery in the slaveholding States and cannot hesitate to express their sentiments, and those of the people they represent, in regard to a policy so unwise and mischievous. This war is prosecuted by the nation with one object, that, namely, of a restoration of the Union, just as it was before the rebellion broke out. The rebellious States are to be brought back to their places in the Union without change or diminution of their constitutional rights, etc., etc."

They further resolved frequently and copiously against the secessionists and in favor of the Union. Neverthe-