Baltimore riot of 1861

• 1. Introduction

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  On Friday, the 19th of April 1861, horses dragged railroad cars along Pratt Street in Baltimore, Maryland, because city law forbade steam locomotives from crossing the heart of town. That ordinance is why the 6th Massachusetts Militia had to disembark and march. President Street Station and Camden Station sat ten blocks apart, with no direct rail link between them, so soldiers bound for Washington had to cross the city on foot or by horse-drawn car. What happened on those ten blocks produced the first deaths of Union volunteers by hostile action in the American Civil War, though the killing was done by civilians. Some of the attackers died too. The event carries three names: the Baltimore riot of 1861, the Pratt Street Riots, and the Pratt Street Massacre. How did a transfer between two train stations turn into bloodshed? Why did a German-language newspaper office get wrecked the same afternoon? And why would this single day push Lincoln to imprison a mayor, a police chief, and a sitting congressman without charges?

• 2. A Divided City

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  Historian David J. Eicher called Baltimore in 1861 a "largely pro-Southern city". The numbers from the previous year's presidential election back him up. Abraham Lincoln had received only 1,100 of more than 30,000 votes cast in the city. Yet Baltimore was no simple Confederate stronghold. The city held the country's largest population of free African Americans, some 25,000 people, alongside many white abolitionists and Union supporters. As war approached, these split loyalties hardened into rival camps. Supporters of secession and slavery organized into a force called the National Volunteers. Unionists and abolitionists answered by calling themselves the Minute Men. The president-elect himself had already insulted local secessionists. Fearing a rumored assassination plot, Lincoln traveled secretly through Baltimore in the middle of the night on a different railroad, guarded by a few aides and detectives, among them the soon-to-be famous Allan Pinkerton. He passed through in February, bound for an inauguration then constitutionally set for March 4. Into this charged city marched the first of the Northern troops, the men of Pennsylvania who would arrive the day before the riot.

• 3. The March Across Pratt Street

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  On the 17th of April 1861, the 6th Massachusetts Militia departed Boston, reached New York the next morning, and arrived in Philadelphia by nightfall. The unit's colonel, Edward F. Jones, learned somewhere after Philadelphia that passage through Baltimore "would be resisted". Jones walked through the railroad cars and delivered a chilling order to his men. They were to march with faces to the front and ignore stones, bricks, and insults. But if fired upon and hit, he told them, "select any man whom you may see aiming at you, and be sure you drop him." When horse-drawn cars could no longer move over the connecting track, four companies, about 240 soldiers, climbed out and formed up to march. The mob followed, throwing up obstructions, then attacked the rear companies with bricks, paving stones, and pistols. Several soldiers fired back, and the street erupted into a brawl among soldiers, the mob, and the Baltimore police. The regiment reached Camden Station, but left behind much of its equipment, including its marching band's instruments. Five soldiers were killed or mortally wounded: Corporal Sumner Henry Needham, privates Luther C. Ladd, Charles Taylor, and Addison Whitney, and Sergeant John Ames. About 36 men of the regiment were wounded. At least 12 civilians were killed. Luther C. Ladd is often called the first Union soldier killed in action during the war.

• 4. The Wrecker And The Refugees

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  The same afternoon as the attack, the mob turned on a building and reduced it to ruin: the office of the Baltimore Wecker, a German-language newspaper. The Wecker's people were exiles. Its founder, Carl Heinrich Schnauffer, and its prominent employees had fled Germany after the failed revolution of 1848-49. Now their lives were threatened again. The publisher, William Schnauffer, and the editor, Wilhelm Rapp, were forced to leave town. The publisher later returned and resumed printing the Wecker, which stayed loyal to the Union cause throughout the war. The editor took up work at another paper in Illinois. The day's hostility reached beyond the newspaper. The Baltimore Steam Packet Company, citing the riot and the city's pro-Southern sympathies, refused a Federal request that very day to carry Union forces meant to relieve the naval yard at Portsmouth, Virginia.

• 5. First Blood And Full War

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  Mayor George William Brown later judged that the riot itself pushed both sides over the edge into full-scale war. "Because then was shed the first blood in a conflict between the North and the South," he wrote, "then a step was taken which made compromise or retreat almost impossible." The bloodshed sat against a backdrop of states still deciding. The Battle of Fort Sumter had fallen on April 12-13, just one week earlier. When the fort fell, Lincoln telegrammed the governors of every state that had not seceded, calling for 75,000 troops to repossess U.S. property in the South. Virginia's path shows how fast loyalties shifted. On the 4th of April 1861, its secession delegation had voted to stand with the Union, 90 to 45. But after Lincoln's call for troops, the delegation met again, and on April 17 voted 85 to 55 to secede, pending a popular referendum. Maryland sympathizers, some of whom had favored secession ever since John C. Calhoun spoke of nullification, pressed to follow Virginia out. On the 10th of July 1861, a federal grand jury indicted six men for their part in the riot: Samuel Mactier, Lewis Bitter, James McCartney, Philip Casmire, Michael Hooper, and Richard H. Mitchell.

• 6. The Money And The Men

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  Baltimore's banks and its wealthiest citizens recognized the danger and met quickly. Among them were Johns Hopkins, John Clark, and Colonel Columbus O'Donnell. In their meeting, the Union supporters appropriated a sum of $500,000 to be spent under the mayor's directions, aiding the city in keeping order and defense. Johns Hopkins, born in 1795, was a Quaker and businessman whose belief in equality and social reform grew from his upbringing and the experiences of the war. He gave financial support to Union soldiers and their families and worked to relieve suffering in Baltimore. Thomas Scharf, in his book History of Maryland, recorded the committee's work as an example of leadership and collaboration. Scharf noted that several local newspapers backed these efforts, including the American Exchange, the German Correspondent, and the Clipper. Even as money moved to steady the city, generals were already routing troops around it.

• 7. Routing Around Baltimore

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  Major General Robert Patterson, commander of the Department of Washington, gave an order on the day of the riot. He directed Brigadier General Benjamin Butler, with the 8th Massachusetts, to open a route from Annapolis through Annapolis Junction to Washington. The 8th Massachusetts arrived by ship at Annapolis on April 20. Governor Hicks and the Mayor of Annapolis protested, but Butler, a clever politician, bullied them into letting his troops land. "I must land, for my troops are hungry," he said, and when told no one in Annapolis would sell them anything, he hinted that hungry armed men do not always need to buy their food. The 8th Massachusetts and the 7th New York Infantry Regiment pushed on to Annapolis Junction, halfway between Baltimore and Washington. The 7th New York continued to the capital, and on the afternoon of April 25 became the first troops to reach Washington by this new route. Mayor Brown and Governor Hicks begged Lincoln to send no more troops through Maryland. Lincoln replied to a peace delegation from the YMCA that Union soldiers were "neither birds to fly over Maryland, nor moles to burrow under it."

• 8. Martial Law And The Bastille

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  On May 13, Butler marched Union troops into Baltimore and declared martial law. Lincoln then had the mayor, the police chief, the entire Board of Police, the city council, and one sitting U.S. Congressman from Baltimore imprisoned without charges. The legal reckoning followed fast. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, himself a native of Maryland, ruled on the 4th of June 1861, in Ex parte Merryman, that Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus was unconstitutional. Lincoln ignored the ruling. That same suspension reached the family of a famous song. When the Baltimore newspaper editor Frank Key Howard, grandson of Francis Scott Key, criticized Lincoln in an editorial that September, he too was jailed without trial. Federal troops held him in Fort McHenry, the very fort where the Star Spangled Banner had waved in his grandfather's song. In 1863 Howard described his imprisonment in a book titled Fourteen Months in the American Bastille; two of the publishers selling it were then arrested. The riot also gave the South a poem. James Ryder Randall, a Maryland native teaching in Louisiana who lost a friend in the violence, wrote "Maryland, My Maryland," with the line "Avenge the patriotic gore / That flecked the streets of Baltimore." Set to the tune of O Tannenbaum, it did not become Maryland's state song until 1939, and was removed from that role in 2021.