Pictorial history of the war for the Union, volume 1 (of 2) : $b A complete and reliable history of the war from its commencement to its close ... together with a complete chronological analysis of the warStephens, Ann S. (Ann Sophia)
History
Pictorial history of the war for the Union, volume 1 (of 2) : $b A complete and reliable history of the war from its commencement to its close ... together with a complete chronological analysis of the war
Stephens, Ann S. (Ann Sophia)
United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865
About ten miles from Baltimore we met the train which bore the Sixth
Massachusetts regiment from the scene of its late encounter. Both trains
slackened speed, and instantly it flew like wildfire along the cars that
there had been riot and bloodshed in Baltimore, and the brave fellows we
had passed had been attacked in their passage through the town. The news
was received with great excitement, that grew more and more intense
until our engine thundered into the depot. The fighting was over, but a
mob of morose and cruel-looking men, with a few black women and
children, still hung around the building, and we passed out through a
lane of scowling faces.
The horse railroad had been torn up and so blockaded that there was no
hopes of reaching the Philadelphia cars by that way. With difficulty we
procured a carriage and were drawn over the scene of conflict. The
railroad was almost obliterated; piles of lumber, fifteen feet high,
were heaped upon it. Immense anchors lay across it, forming an iron
barricade. Every window along the line was crowded with eager, scared
faces, mostly black, and those that were white, evidently of the lowest
order.
It became impossible to pass along the railroad, for it was completely
blocked up. We turned into a side street, and at last took our places in
the Philadelphia train. Here two or three men in uniform entered the
cars, and after the train started they were seen talking earnestly with
the conductor near our seat. It seemed that the Pennsylvania regiment
had been scattered, and while a train had returned toward Philadelphia
with the larger portion of the men, some twenty-five or thirty were
grouped on the wayside, some miles from the city, hoping that our train
would take them in.
The conductor was inexorable. His orders were to proceed direct—besides,
he had no room, every seat was crowded. This was true; but all the
gentlemen, among whom was Senator Wilkinson, of Minnesota, and several
ladies that sat within hearing, pleaded that the men should be taken in,
and all offered to surrender their own seats. But it was of no avail—the
conductor had his orders.
A few minutes after the officers had retreated we passed a platform on
the wayside on which these unlucky soldiers were grouped, in anxious
expectation that the train would stop, but it went steadily by, leaving
the most disappointed and gloomy faces behind that one often looks upon.
We afterwards learned that these poor fellows wandered around the
country for three days, and many of them came back to Philadelphia on
foot.
If they were sad at being left, those in the cars were both sorrowful
and indignant that they had not been taken up. It seemed to them an act
of wanton cruelty; and one of the company, at least, has not yet been
able to change her opinion on the subject.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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