Free This Great Struggle by Steven Woodworth

scores of towns, and men flocked to enlist. Recruiting quotas were exceeded almost overnight, and several state governors begged Lincoln to accept additional regiments and in some cases kept those regiments on hand as state troops until the federal government, in due time, was more than happy to receive them. The first seventy-five thousand militia were limited by constitutional restraints to a maximum term of ninety days’ service.
    Reaction in the slave states that had not previously declared themselves out of the Union was quite different and proved the truth of Pryor’s advice that the South Carolinians “strike a blow.” Once it became clear that they would have to fight either for a slave republic or for a republic in which slavery might be limited, Upper South residents, especially those who held political power, had no doubts as to which side they would take. On April 17 the Virginia state convention voted for secession. Theoretically the vote was subject to ratification in a state referendum to be held the following month, but by that time Virginia’s secessionist governor had already all but incorporated the state into the Confederacy. Within a few weeks, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas had followed suit.
    The part of the Upper South known as the border states—Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri—was divided internally. Kentucky and Missouri had secessionist governors with moderately Unionist legislatures. In Maryland, those relationships were reversed. Baltimore and the eastern counties of Maryland, with the highest slave population, were the hotbed of secessionism in that state. When on April 19 the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment, the first of the northern regiments responding to Lincoln’s call, passed through Baltimore on its way to Washington, trouble broke out. Rail connections through Baltimore were discontinuous, and troops traveling to Washington from the North had to detrain at one station and march through the streets of Baltimore to another station where they could entrain for the national capital. As the Massachusetts men did so, an angry secessionist mob attacked them, throwing stones and firing pistols. The soldiers shot back, and when the fray had ended, four soldiers and twelve civilians were dead.
    The mayor of Baltimore and the governor of Maryland demanded that Lincoln allow no further Union troops to pass through the city and inflame the citizens and, when Lincoln refused, had the railroad bridge burned so that none could. Secessionist Marylanders cut the telegraph wires leading north from Washington. This made for some very tense days in the capital, cut off as it was from communication with the North or from the arrival of any additional troops. Benjamin F. Butler, general of the Massachusetts militia (and peacetime lawyer and politician), found a way around Baltimore, commandeering a steamer and using it to carry his troops down Chesapeake Bay to Annapolis, Maryland, whence a railroad led to Washington. Maryland secessionists had damaged both engines and tracks, but Butler’s troops, among whom were men who had worked in the shop that made the locomotive, repaired both and got the line running. Other Union troops followed in a steady stream along the same route until, on May 13, Butler and his troops took control of Baltimore.
    Semirebellious Maryland continued to be a problem. Near the end of the month, Union troops there arrested a man named John Merryman for recruiting for the Confederacy. Merryman’s lawyer filed for a writ of habeas corpus in federal circuit court. In those days U.S. Supreme Court justices doubled as circuit court judges, and this circuit belonged to Chief Justice Roger B. Taney of Maryland, who had already shown his proslavery colors in the 1857 case of Dred Scott v. Sandford , in which he had said that “no black man had any rights that a white man need respect.” 3
    True to form, Taney on May 27 ordered Merryman released, claiming that only Congress,