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By Root 6348 0

Regiment reached Baltimore by rail en route to defend Washington, the men were attacked by a secessionist mob. “The scene while the troops were changing cars was indescribably fearful,” the Baltimore Sun reported. The enraged crowd, branding the troops “nigger thieves,” assaulted them with knives and revolvers. Four soldiers and nine civilians were killed. As George Templeton Strong noted in his diary: “It’s a notable coincidence that the first blood in this great struggle is drawn by Massachusetts men on the anniversary” of the battles of Lexington and Concord that touched off the Revolutionary War.

The president immediately summoned the mayor of Baltimore and the governor of Maryland to the White House. Still hoping to keep Maryland in the Union, Lincoln agreed to “make no point of bringing [further troops] through Baltimore” where strident secessionists were concentrated, but insisted that the troops must be allowed to go “around Baltimore.” Shortly after midnight, an angry committee of delegates from Baltimore arrived at the White House to confront Lincoln. John Hay took them to see Cameron, but kept them from the president until morning. The delegation demanded that troops be kept not only out of Baltimore but out of the entire state of Maryland. Lincoln adamantly refused to comply. “I must have troops to defend this Capital,” he replied. “Geographically it lies surrounded by the soil of Maryland…. Our men are not moles, and can’t dig under the earth; they are not birds, and can’t fly through the air. There is no way but to march across, and that they must do.”

The day the war claimed its first casualties was also the day when “the censorship of the press was exercised for the first time at the telegraph office,” a veteran journalist recalled. “When correspondents wished to telegraph the lists of the dead and wounded of the Massachusetts Sixth they found a squad of the National Rifles in possession of the office, with orders to permit the transmission of no messages.” Infuriated, the correspondents rode to Seward’s house to complain. The secretary of state argued that if they sent “accounts of the killed and wounded,” they “would only influence public sentiment, and be an obstacle in the path of reconciliation.” The issue became moot when reporters learned that secessionists had cut all the telegraph wires in Baltimore and demolished all the railroad bridges surrounding the city. Washington was isolated from all communication with the North.

For the next week, with wires cut and mails stopped, the residents of Washington lived in a state of constant fear. Visitors abandoned the great hotels. Stores closed. Windows and doors were barricaded. “Literally,” Villard noted, “it was as though the government of a great nation had been suddenly removed to an island in mid-ocean in a state of entire isolation.” Anxious citizens crowded the train station every day, hopeful to greet an influx of the Northern troops needed to protect the vulnerable city. Rumors spread quickly. Across the Potomac, the campfires of the Confederate soldiers were visible. It appeared they were ready to lay siege to Washington. Waiting for the attack, War Secretary Cameron slept in his office. “Here we were in this city,” Nicolay wrote his fiancée, “in charge of all the public buildings, property and archives, with only about 2000 reliable men to defend it.”

Elsewhere in the North, anxiety was nearly as great. “No despatches from Washington,” Strong reported from New York. “People talked darkly of its being attacked before our reinforcements come to the rescue, and everyone said we must not be surprised by news that Lincoln and Seward and all the Administration are prisoners.” Kate and Nettie Chase were in New York visiting Chase’s wealthy friend Hiram Barney, who had received the powerful post of collector of customs in New York. Reflecting a general fear that the “rebels are at Washington or near it,” Barney insisted that the girls stay in New York until the capital was out of danger. For Kate, so passionately attached to her father, these were