Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 2.djvu/46

36 in three hours, and the banks of the State would have supplied $5,000,000 for the defense of the State in a week. The plan of the projectors of the committee of safety was to arm the militia. They expected to equip forty thousand men as promptly as the Northern States had armed and equipped their volunteers, and they knew that Maryland volunteers would take arms as quickly as those of Massachusetts and Ohio. They did not propose to carry the State out of the Union, but they intended to arm their young men and command the peace in the State. When that failed, as fail they knew it would, the State would be represented by forty thousand armed and equipped volunteers who would carry her flag in the front line and would make her one of the Confederate States in fact, if not in name.

These were the intentions of Captain Johnson and men of his age in the legislature and in the State, and they were constant and ardent in pressing them in the general assembly. The Conservatives, however, preferred the processes of the law, and could not understand how force could decide questions of right. It would be better to bring trespass quare clausum against Butler at the Relay for digging trenches and piling up earthworks, to sue out injunctions against illegal arrests and a mandamus to make Cadwallader respect Taney's writ of habeas corpus!

The committee on Federal relations agreed on their report May 7th that it was inexpedient to take any steps toward the organization and arming of the militia, though it was not made until the loth. But on the 8th Johnson and his company marched to Virginia. At the Point of Rocks he arranged with Capt. James Ashby to ride into Frederick, seize the governor and carry him off to Virginia and thus break up the State government and throw it into the hands of the legislature, who would be obliged to take charge during the interregnum. A notice to this effect was sent to the leaders in the