Baltimore: Of Riots, Martial Law and the Preakness

In Burning Rage, my new Civil War mystery, smuggler Nathaniel Tilghman arranges to meet Confederative operatives at the Cathedral of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Baltimore.

Construction of the Benjamin Latrobe designed edifice began in 1806, under the leadership of Archbishop John Carroll, the founder of Georgetown University, and his cousin Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence. It was America’s first cathedral and today is designated both a national shrine and a basilica. It is the seat of the Archdiocese of Baltimore.

A 19th Century engraving of the old Baltimore Cathedral.

 In Burning Rage, Confederate raider Raphael Semmes wants Tilghman to sneak a shipment of Confederate gold into Baltimore. Why Baltimore? Of course the sea captain is originally from Tilghman Island, and knows the city well. Of more practical importance is the mid-Atlantic port’s proximity to Richmond, the Confederate capital. But perhaps most important is the presence in Baltimore of a network of Southern operatives that goes back to the attempt on Abraham Lincoln’s life as he passed through the city to assume his duties as president in February 1861.

The Pinkerton detectives who uncovered the plot to kill the new president believed it was orchestrated by George Procter Kane, Baltimore’s marshal of police, and the city’s Democratic mayor, George William Brown. Baltimore, run by the Democratic Party as it still is today, simmered with Southern sympathies. Indeed Lincoln garnered only 1,100 of the 30,000 votes Baltimore cast for president.

By April, riots erupted, targeting Union troops passing through Baltimore heading for Washington. When a Massachusetts regiment was set upon by a mob, four soldiers were killed and another thirty-six were wounded. The troops killed twelve civilians. To restore order Lincoln and his generals declared martial law, suspended the Writ of Habeas Corpus and arrested Kane, Brown and anyone else who opposed the Republican administration. The arrestees included newspaper editor Francis Key Howard, the grandson of Francis Scott Key, who wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Ironically Howard was imprisoned at Fort McHenry where Key had witnessed “bombs bursting in air” and “the twilight’s last gleaming” during the British bombardment of Baltimore in the War of 1812.

The outrages of the riots, martial law and unconstitutional arrests did not sit well with the city’s Democrats. James Randall Ryder, a Baltimore native who lost a friend in the riots, was inspired to pen “Maryland, My Maryland,” a staunchly Confederate poem, which will be sung by the revelers at the Preakness horse race this weekend. It is still Maryland’s state song.

Sisters of Charity in Civil War camp. Note the winged cornettes.

In Burning Rage, historic Baltimore is the backdrop where certain priests and nuns connected with the cathedral collaborate with Confederate agents and a fictionalized Marshal Kane to help Tilghman hide the gold from Union forces. These religious, including “butterfly nuns,” so-called after the winged cornettes that some orders wore then, help the Confederates out of personal allegiance rather than church policy.

Though the Catholic Church took no official stand in the war, it accepted slavery where it existed and even owned slaves where it was legal. Northern bishops supported the North and Southern bishops like Richmond’s John McGill and Charleston’s Patrick Lynch, supported the South. The pontiff, Pope Pius IX, voiced sympathy for the Confederacy, sending Jefferson Davis (who had attended Catholic school as a youth) a symbolic crown of thorns in 1864.

In Burning Rage, the Southerners in the cathedral end up fighting their way out after Union forces charge the altar looking for the gold. Eventually the Rebels escape into the building’s unfinished crypt, two levels below the sanctuary, hidden one level below the undercroft.

A modern photo of the Baltimore Basilica's crypt.

There is no more historic place for Catholics in America than the Baltimore Basilica. From the beginning of English settlement, Maryland was granted to Lord Calvert as a refuge colony for British Catholics. Mother Elizabeth Ann Seton, America’s first saint, founded the Sisters of Charity in Emmitsburg. The Venerable Father Michael J. McGivney, the founder of the Knights of Columbus, was ordained in the basilica. Both Saint John Paul II and Blessed Mother Teresa graced its aisles.

In 1866 President Andrew Johnson attended a church council there calling for the evangelization of newly freed slaves and the Indian people. It was from Baltimore in 1808 that the Church created four new dioceses in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Bardstown, Kentucky. And it was from Baltimore that the American Church began its Catholic schools program guided by the Baltimore Catechism.

For more on Catholics in the Civil War and especially in the Confederacy, read my non-fiction book, Clear the Confederate Way! The Irish in the Army of Northern Virginia. To enjoy a good mystery that includes the charm of old Baltimore, read Burning Rage: A Ced Buckley Civil War Mystery, available at Amazon.com.