Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/101

 the control of Mr. Lincoln. The Congressman from Harford County, Maryland (I think his name was Howard), came to his help, and Richard Yates, the Governor of Illinois, who was under obligations to my grandfather, used his influence. On the day of the Battle of Bull Run, I was again at Mount Pleasant to go with my Uncle Joseph, grandfather and great-uncle, George P. Whitaker, to Washington to meet the President. The time was most inopportune for the purpose we had in view, but rich in the opportunities it gave for reminiscences. In Havre de Grace I saw a soldier shot and killed. A regiment of Maine lumbermen on their way to the South halted in the town and threw out their guards. One of the men tried to force his way across the line, and the guard, on the point of being overcome, fired his musket. The ball did not touch the offender, but passed through the lungs of another member of the regiment, through two sides of a car and buried itself in a stone wall. The stricken man bled to death. Hardly had this occurrence ended when great excitement arose through the efforts of the soldiers to hang a German baker in the town accused of having sold them cakes filled with ground glass. With difficulty he escaped, getting over a fence in the rear of his garden and being hidden by some of the townsmen. The charge was probably entirely unfounded.

In Washington we stopped at Willard's Hotel and found the city in a state of the utmost excitement and confusion expecting the approach of the rebels. The army were scattered about the streets of the city, the men of different regiments mingling together just as they happened to meet. Aides and messengers in uniform were galloping hither and yon and indicating by their acts and manner the tense state of their nerves. I saw one who, in his haste and excitement, ran his horse directly upon the tongue of an artillery carriage coming the other way, and the horse, with penetrated breast, fell dead. Upon the floors of Willard's lay a number of the New York Fire Zouaves who told us rather Rh