Mr. Lincoln Goes to War by William Marvel

Author:William Marvel [Marvel, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, Civil War Period (1850-1877)
ISBN: 9780618872411
Google: lM6xvPMymsQC
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2006-01-15T22:14:39+00:00

The Maryland legislature held an extra session in July, again repairing westward to Frederick, where members would not have to deliberate under the glint of bayonets. There, the persistently Unionist body fulminated against the federal government that it still found cause to support. The legislators passed resolutions denouncing the government’s unconstitutional repression in a loyal state, where soldiers were quartered and homes were searched in direct violation of the Third and Fourth Amendments. They excoriated the executive branch for “the oppressive and tyrannical assertion and exercise of military jurisdiction within the limits of Maryland,” where legitimate civil authorities were unseated, jailed, and replaced by uniformed minions of the federal government. Despite these grievances, though, they refused to take their state out of the Union.30

After all the indignities the federal government had heaped on the Old Line State, and all the resentment Maryland legislators had so plainly expressed, their obstinate refusal to raise the subject of secession offered abundant evidence that the state did not have to be held by brute force. Lincoln and his principal cabinet officers failed to see it that way. Instead, their fear of backlash from earlier repression only appeared to drive them to more: they could not have failed to recognize that employment of the iron fist had created enemies for them, and overt public animosity convinced them that they had to exercise that fist even more vigorously. Now that the vital state of Kentucky had committed itself to the Union, Lincoln felt free to infringe even further on Maryland’s sovereignty.

Forgery, intrigue, and obsessive anxiety combined to magnify the extent of dissidence in Maryland. A document of dubious origin circulated in Washington through August, purportedly outlining a two-pronged attack on the national capital by Confederate columns crossing the Potomac above and below the city. The letter alleged a Southern force of more than three hundred thousand in Virginia (an exaggeration wild enough to herald its fraudulence), and it insinuated that the attack would begin as soon as the Maryland legislature passed an ordinance of secession. The legislature would reconvene on September 17.31

The letter came into Union hands through pickets under Nathaniel Banks, who had taken over Robert Patterson’s command at Harper’s Ferry. A Confederate invasion from the upper Potomac had been anticipated since the week after Bull Run, and as early as August 6 Banks had been forwarding intelligence reports of Joe Johnston gathering a powerful army at Leesburg. At first the spectral Southern legions were thought to be aiming for the little army that George McClellan had left in the mountains of western Virginia, but the letter seemed to delineate a plan to capture Washington. Banks sent it to McClellan, who swallowed the tale whole. McClellan credited Johnston with an army three or four times the size of his own, and believed that the only thing saving him from complete destruction was the weather, for heavy rains had transformed the Potomac into a raging torrent. The intercepted document conjured disproportionate alarm, as it seemed to corroborate a popular paranoia.

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