Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 2.djvu/47

Rh legislature and they promptly dispatched T. Parkin Scott, member from Baltimore City, to Johnson, then on the Maryland Heights with the Maryland battalion, demanding that he cease his enterprises and let them alone. He obeyed them and they went to prison; while he went into the field.

The battalion at Harper's Ferry was helpless. Company A was the only company that pretended to be armed, and it carried Hall's carbines, which had been procured in Baltimore by its captain. This arm was the original breechloader manufactured at Harper's Ferry for the United States army, and was so inefficient that it was promptly condemned and discarded. Hence it was sold cheap to innocent militiamen. But the others didn't have even these worthless carbines. They had rushed off from home, fired by the enthusiasm of those days in Baltimore, had stolen rides on the cars or had walked to Point of Rocks and to Harper's Ferry where they were fed. Provisions were plenty, but they had no clothes, blankets, tents, cooking utensils—nothing that soldiers need and must have to be of any service. They had no government to appeal to for arms. In fact, they were outlaws from their own State government. They were too proud to go back home; stay and fight they would and must. All around them were warm-hearted comrades who shared their blankets with them at night and their rations by day. Unless something could be done to keep them together, unless they could be armed, equipped and legally organized, they must inevitably dissolve, be absorbed in surrounding commands, and thus Maryland lose her main hope and best chance to be represented by her own sons, bearing her flag in the army of the Confederate States.

At this crisis Mrs. Bradley T. Johnson came forward and offered to go to North Carolina and apply there for arms and equipment. She was the daughter of the Hon. Romulus M. Saunders, for a generation a