From Volume 88, Number 1 (November 2014)
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It was a dark time for the United States. Hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned, the federal troops at Fort Sumter surrendered to Confederate forces on April 13, 1861. Four days later, Virginia politicians voted to secede, and the Commonwealth militia mobilized to seize federal positions throughout the state. Terror swept through Washington, D.C., which suddenly found itself “on a military frontier.” Then things got worse. The Maryland state legislature announced a special session to decide whether to follow Virginia’s example. Riots by Confederate sympathizers exploded across Baltimore as word got out that the federal government was trying to bring in reinforcements by train. Mobs in Maryland blocked Massachusetts’s troops from reinforcing the pathetically under-defended capital. Authorities in Baltimore burned the city’s main railroad bridges—an act that “looked like plain treason” and left the government in Washington “defenseless and cut off from the rest of the North.”
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