Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/485

isei] Bloodshed at Baltimore. 453 killed or wounded, and 1882 engagements in which at least one regiment participated. Probably half a million lives on each side were lost in campaign, battle, hospital or prison. Since it would be im- possible to follow in detail this multitude of incidents, it is proposed here to take note only of the leading and decisive campaigns, battles and events that wrought out the grand results of the mighty conflict. Prior to the fall of Sumter, only the seven Cotton and Gulf States, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Louisiana, and Texas, had united to form the Confederacy. In the other eight Slave States most of the executives and many of the leading politicians were from the beginning resolved on secession, though there was still such a division of sentiment among the people as to render their eventual course uncertain. The governors of each of the States of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Missouri sent insulting refusals to the President's call for troops, and immediately threw all their official authority in favour of secession. Four of them, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas, lying in the interior, became practically from that time a part of the Confederate States. The States of Kentucky, Missouri, Delaware, and Maryland, bordering on the Free States, though undergoing severe local struggles, were eventually saved to the Union, partly by the presence of decisive Federal forces, partly by the stubborn loyalty of a majority of their people. Delaware, because of her small remaining number of slaves, but more especially because of her geographical position, inevitably went with the North ; though local sentiment was so far divided that Governor Burton made no official reply to the President's call, especially as there existed no organised State militia. Nevertheless he issued a proclamation authorising the formation of volunteer companies, and giving them the option of offering their services to the general government. Under this authority Union regiments were organised by the loyal people and sent to Washington. In Maryland Governor Hicks long maintained an apparently neutral attitude, until events rather than official leadership brought on the crisis and its solution. When the 6th Massachusetts, the first fully- armed and equipped regiment to reach Washington under the President's call, passed through the city of Baltimore, the cars containing the last four companies were stopped, and as the men attempted to march through the streets to the Washington railroad station, they were set upon by a Secessionist mob, through which they had to fight their way, their assailants using paving-stones and firearms, and the soldiers reply- ing with their rifles. The soldiers lost four men killed and thirty-six wounded, the citizens perhaps two or three times that number. That afternoon a huge mass meeting was held, in which the whole current of speech-making, the governor's declarations included, was in OH. XIV.