Counter-Thrust: From the Peninsula to the Antietam

6. Maryland, My Maryland

6( Maryland, My Maryland d. h. hill’s men led the vanguard of Robert E. Lee’s army across the Potomac River near Leesburg, Virginia, in column of fours, “well closed up, shouting, laughing, singing,” with a brass band in front playing “Maryland, My Maryland.” The early September move was unopposed; the Union army was still roughly twenty miles distant at Washington. “An inspiriting scene,” declared Stonewall Jackson’s young aide, Henry Kyd Douglas, himself a native Marylander. Other loyal sons in the ranks were “especially wild with enthusiasm,” and Capt. E. V. “Lige” White, who lived near the crossing, embraced a covey of female relatives and friends as he emerged dripping from the stream. One old local watched the troops crossing at White’s ford and remarked, “Goodness gracious, look at the Seceshes.” Worried for his family, he added, “I’ve been to shows and circuses and theaters and all them things, but I never seen such a sight’n all my life.” Eventually he hosted a meal for some dozen Rebels, reluctantly charging them twenty-five cents apiece in Confederate money. Noted Douglas, there was a “surfeit of enthusiasm all about us, except for enlisting.”1 Other omens portended ill. When one “patriotic citizen” presented Jackson with a strong sinewy gray mare to replace his temporarily misplaced Little Sorrel, the new steed displayed an innate skepticism about strangers. Old Jack applied spurs to her and she reared “with distended nostrils and flashing eyes,” throwing her rider senseless to 166 | maryland, my maryland the ground. Jackson lay there stunned for a full half-hour before he could be moved. He declared himself unwilling to mount the gray horse ever again. As Douglas wrote years later, Lee and Jackson both entered Maryland in ambulances. Other Confederates met similar disappointment. J. B. Polley of Hood’s Texas brigade recalled that a colleague exclaimed, “Darned if I don’t believe all the ice houses in western Maryland were emptied into this river last night.” Polley later added that the water’s coldness was more than equaled by the “frigidity of welcome extended” by Marylanders. Not even “the dulcet strains” of the state anthem “aroused the enthusiasm of the people; no arms opened to receive, no fires blazed to warm, and no feast waited to feed us, as wet, shivering and hungry” they set foot on the soil of the Old Line State. In many ways, the first fortnight told the tale.2 Yet Capt. Greenlee Davidson of Virginia wrote his father on September 8 from near Frederick, Maryland, “The people seemed rejoiced to see us.” Capt. William G. Morris of the Thirty-seventh North Carolina agreed, claiming, “We find More & better friends heare than in Va.” Nonetheless, many civilians seemed afraid of Union retaliation since they anticipated only “a raid of Jackson’s” and that the Confederates would soon withdraw back to Virginia. Frederick, a small city of seven or eight thousand residents founded by German settlers a century before, provided a hospital center for Federal wounded from Shenandoah Valley operations and now displayed mixed feelings toward the invaders. It had hosted the state legislature the previous spring and summer in spacious Kemp Hall, rented from the Evangelical Reformed Church. Politicians, carefully monitored by Union bayonets, had deliberated secession until the Lincoln government unceremoniously arrested many of them in blatant violation of their civil liberties. The nagging question to local Frederick historians Paul and Rita Gordon remains whether Maryland would have seceded if the legislative session had not been interrupted by force.3 In September 1862, a few merchants kept their stores open and received Confederate money without hesitation. Davidson at least was confident that once convinced that “we intend to occupy the state permanently,” Marylanders would “come out openly and go heart and hand for the South.” Certainly voters among her 687,049 residents in 1860, which also counted 83,942 free and 87,189 enslaved blacks, had roundly thumped Lincoln Republicanism and implied abolition- maryland, my maryland | 167 ism in the national election. They had preferred Kentuckian John C. Breckinridge and other Democratic contenders as the former vice president, subsequently a Confederate major general, took a razorthin 0.6 percent of the popular vote to garner the state’s electoral count. In fact, Maryland’s subsequent flirtation with secession cockades had been strong in the winter and spring of 1860–61. The feeling had passed by the...