Jan 30, 2007

The Crooked Road to Civil War, 1861 by Nelson D. Lankford



"If Gov. Thomas Hicks had given in to the demands of Democrats and recalled the general assembly in April, after Lincoln issued a proclamation calling for the states to raise militias for war against the South, Maryland would probably have voted to secede from the Union.
Perhaps just as fateful were the unintended consequences of Hicks's decision to burn railroad bridges on the two lines that would carry northern militias south to Washington. By making a wide circle around Baltimore, the troops avoided inflaming a city already on the brink of revolt and kept Maryland, however tenuously, in the Union." Read on.

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