Disunion: The Battle of Baltimore

(NYTimes) Baltimore had vexed Abraham Lincoln for months. The city was the secessionist heart of slaveholding, nativist Maryland, a state in which the new president had run fourth in the 1860 election, garnering fewer than 3,000 votes. Maryland’s population was one-quarter African-American, evenly divided between slaves and free blacks. And yet Lincoln desperately needed the state: without it in the Union, Washington would be completely within foreign — and, after April 12, enemy — territory. Continued

Photo: Nick Biddle of Pottsville, Pa., the first man wounded in the great American Rebellion, "Baltimore, April 18, 1861" (Library of Congress)