Maryland in the Civil War - Cottom

Torn between North and South, Maryland experienced the Civil War in ways that were at once unique and a reflection of the state's reputation as "America in miniature". Robert Cottom and Mary Ellen Hayward offer a vivid and engaging history of Maryland's role in the war, illustrated with engravings, reproductions of rare documents and photographs, and supplemented with passages from contemporary news accounts, diaries and personal letters.;The authors begin with a look at slavery in the state, including profiles of former Maryland slaves Frederick Douglas and Harriet Tubman. They describe the secession crisis and Maryland's part in the conflict's first bloodshed in April 1861, when a Baltimore mob attacked Northern troops on their way from President Street station to Camden yards. In text and images - many never previously published - they show how the war affected Marylanders in all walks of life, women and men, black and white, both in the military and at home.;"Maryland in the Civil War" offers a detailed account. General Benjamin F. Butler moves his federal troops into Baltimore after a favourable intelligence report from a Union officer who roamed the city disguised as an organ grinder. Clad in a blue jacket and a coarse woollen dress, Harriet Tubman leads a Union raid into the Combahee River region in June 1863, freeing 750 slaves. In a dramatic case of "brother against brother", Captain Franklin Buchanan of Talbot County commands the Confederate ironclad "Virginia" in an attack on Hampton Roads on the Union blockade ship "Congress", on which his older brother McKean serves as paymaster. Both survived, but Franklin's wounds cost him his command on the eve of the famous Battle of the Ironclads. And in a city where Southern sympathies ran high even after four years of war, Baltimoreans could buy portraits of John Wilkes Booth for 25 cents each - Lincoln's for a dime.;From the "patriotic gore" on Baltimore's Pratt Street to Antietnam's Bloody Lane, from Harry Gilmor's gallant Confederate irregulars to the black Marylanders who gave their "full measure of devotion" for half-pay, from the notorious Point Lookout prison to the war's aftermath in monuments and memory - the people and places of "Maryland in the Civil War" speak of events at once distant and close to home.