Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 2.djvu/54

44 barrier of bayonets sought to keep back the current of sympathy that day and night flowed to the South. All over the State, the women, irrepressible as ever in times of excitement, flaunted the Confederate red and white in the faces of the army of occupation. The babies wore red and white socks, the girls red and white ribbons—with red and white bouquets at their girdles and on their hearts, the young lads red and white cravats. The larger boys were sent South by their mothers, sisters and sweethearts. Regular lines of communication were established, with stations and pass words and signs for the "underground," as it was called. They made their way by steamer down to the Patuxent—on to the eastern shore. They bought, "borrowed" or "captured" small boats, sail or with oars, and they put out in the darkness over the waters to find the way to Dixie. The gun boats searched bay and inlet with their strong lights and their small boats. Sometimes they caught the emigre's and more frequently they did not. When they did the Old Capitol and Point Lookout military prisons were the swift doom of the unfortunates, where they languished for months, half clad and nearly starved. This blockade running went on over the Potomac from the Chesapeake to the District of Columbia, right under the surveillance of the Federal authorities. When the watch became too vigilant and the pickets too close along the rivers, the Marylanders made their way up through the western part of the State, where the sentiment was generally Union, and forded the river from Hancock up to the mountains. Working through the mountains of West Virginia, through the perils of the bushwhackers and Union men, ten thousand times worse than from Union pickets, they made their way, ragged, barefoot, starving, down to some camp in the valley of Virginia, where they were welcomed with warm hearts and open hands. During all that time the condition of the Southern people of Maryland was like that of the Cavaliers during the Puritan domination in