Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 29.djvu/269

 April 19th, 1861. 253

as long as they were orderly. The crowd then left them and went up Baltimore street cheenng for the Stars and Stripes.

These incidents serve to indicate the condition of the public mind upon the eve of April 19. The fever heat had not been reached suddenly. The news of the attack on Fort Sumter and its surren- der had produced a high state of excitement. Men gathered in great numbers around the newspaper offices, and almost continuously the sidewalks of Baltimore street, between Calvert and Holliday, were impassable. The appearance of a man in public and such things were not infrequent with Confederate or Union colors would be the signal for the assembling of a mob. Politicians and intemp- erate advocates of the North or of the South would harangue the crowds on the street and add fuel to the flame.

THE PRESIDENT'S PROCLAMATION.

On April i6the news that Lincoln had called for 75,000 volunteers " to redress wrongs already long enough endured" was published to the country, and the effect of that momentus news it is hard now to understand. In the North it was received with wild enthusiasm; in the South with sullen anger or with derision; and it was said that when the troops came they would "be welcomed with bloody hands to hospitable graves."

In Baltimore the people were wild with excitement and indigna- tion. It is difficult for men of this generation, who have grown up under different political conditions, to understand how the men of that generation viewed the prospect of coercing the Southern States to remain in the Union. The idea of permitting Northern troops to march through Maryland to make war on the South was regarded pretty much as we would now regard a proposal that troops from Canada should come through here for the same purpose, or that troops from Germany or England should be permitted to land at Locust Point. George William Brown, Mayor of Baltimore, who risked his life to protect th'e Massachusetts troops, telegraphed to the Governor of Massachusetts on April 20: "Our people viewed the passage of armed troops of another State through the streets as an invasion of our soil and could not be restrained." Governor Hicks, of Maryland, an ardent Union man, said in a public speech in Baltimore on the evening of April 19, after the riot and after the President's proclamation calling for troops had been made: "I am a Marylander. I love my State and I love the Union; but I will