April 19, 1861 – Mob Sympathetic to Confederacy Attacked U.S Army Soldiers in Baltimore

In 1861, when the Civil War broke out on April 12, President Lincoln issued a call for troops from the northern states to come defend the U.S. Capital. To reach Washington, troops initially sought to come by train through Baltimore. At that time, Baltimore was the rail center of Maryland and the North’s gateway to the South. Three railroads terminated there – the Baltimore and Ohio, the Northern Central, and the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore – and connections to two others were just outside the city. Because locomotives were banned from the city’s streets, passengers either walked or rode in horse-drawn cars between connecting stations.

Maryland, a border state, had a large secessionist element that posed a danger to the Union Army as well as to the nearby capital in Washington, D.C. In the previous year’s presidential election, Abraham Lincoln had received only 1,100 of more than 30,000 votes cast in the city.

Upon learning troops would be traveling from the north through Baltimore, several hundred “National Volunteers” of southern sympathizers went to the station on this day in history to confront the troops. The “secesh” mob attacked the U.S. Army soldiers when they were marching through the streets to change from one train station to another. Angry crowds threw bricks and stones at the soldiers, who opened (or possibly returned) fire.

Four soldiers and twelve civilians were killed in the riot. Over 35 from the regiment were wounded and left behind. It is unknown how many additional civilians were injured.

First Blood.—The Sixth Massachusetts Regiment Fighting Their Way Through Baltimore, April 19, 1861, from “Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War” (1866)

These were the first casualties of the war, aside from an accidental death during the bombardment of Ft. Sumter a week earlier. After Federal control was reasserted, Baltimore’s railroads became part of the network supplying the U.S. Army for the rest of the war.

The incident was memorialized in a poem that eventually became the Maryland state song, “Maryland My Maryland.” The song – set to the tune of “O Tannenbaum” – has been Maryland’s official state anthem for more than 75 years. The nine-stanza poem was written by Confederate sympathizer James Ryder Randall on April 26, 1861. Randall, a native Marylander, lost a friend in the riot. The poem expressed his outrage, and served as a plea to his home state of Maryland to secede from the Union and join the Confederacy.

James Ryder Randall (detail from postcard, Jack Kelbaugh Collection of Civil War Photographs, MSA SC4325-52, Maryland State Archives)

The state’s general assembly adopted “Maryland, My Maryland” as the state song on April 29, 1939. The lyrics include:

The despot’s heel is on thy shore, Maryland My Maryland!
His torch is at thy temple door, Maryland My Maryland!
Avenge the patriotic gore
That flecked the streets of Baltimore
And be the battle queen of yore, Maryland My Maryland!

The “despot” is Lincoln, who in other verses appears as “the tyrant” and “the Vandal.” The Union is referred to as “Northern scum.” The song is also notable for referencing the phrase “Sic semper tyrannis”, which was the slogan later shouted by Marylander John Wilkes Booth when he assassinated Lincoln.

Unsuccessful efforts to revise the lyrics to the song or to repeal or replace the song altogether were attempted by the Maryland General Assembly in 1974, 1980, 1984, 2001, 2002, 2009, 2016, 2018, and 2019. You can read more about the controversy here.