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maintenance of the Union. They earnestly desired that some compromise should he proposed hy Congress, which would restore peace between the two sections, and they believed that such a settlement could readily be effected. When Congress refused to make any effort in that direction, they looked to what was called the "Peace Conference" to recommend some plan by which all dissensions might be healed. When all these hopes were disappointed by the action of Northern men, and especially when Mr. Lincoln, on his accession to office, appointed some of the most extreme partisans to high office at home, and selected others to represent the country abroad, and gave ample evidence of his incapacity to understand the questions at issue, and of his determination neither to conciliate the Southern people, nor to deal with what he called the "rebellion" according to the mode provided by the Constitution and laws, then a large proportion of the people of Maryland expressed their sympathy for the South, and their conviction of the justice of its cause. They then asserted that the conquest of the South was an impossibility, that the Union was in point of fact dissolved, and they insisted that in such case the people of the State had the right to decide their own destiny for themselves. These views I also entertained and expressed, as one of the editors of a Baltimore journal "The Daily Exchange." But neither I, nor those who were afterwards my fellow prisoners, ever violated in any way, the Constitution or the laws. We defended the rights of our State, and criticized the policy of the Administration at Washington. We advanced our views with perfect freedom, as we had the right to do, and we did no more. But Mr. Lincoln had determined to suppress everything like free speech, not only in Maryland, but throughout the North. He had made up his mind that he would carry out his own projects irrespectively of the laws, or his constitutional obligations. Having therefore introduced Northern troops into the city of Baltimore and various parts of the State, and having fortified numerous points so far as to render resistance unavailing, he proceeded to execute his schemes. The Commissioners and Marshal of Police were arrested in Baltimore, and
