On the 19th of April, 1861, some of the enthusiastic Southern
sympathizers of Baltimore, driven frantic by the passage of
Northern troops through the city for the invasion of the South,
attacked the Sixth Regiment of Massachusetts volunteers with
bricks and stones as they marched along Pratt Street to take the
train at Camden Station for Washington. The soldiers, who were
fully armed with Springfield rifles, fired upon the citizens,
killing several and wounding many others, some of whom had taken
no part in the affray, but were merely distant spectators.
When this news was flashed around the land, it reached a young
Baltimorean, a professor in Poydras College at Pointe Coupée,
one hundred and twenty miles above New Orleans. His heart fired
with patriotic enthusiasm and the great thoughts that surged
through his mind kept him awake all night. At dawn he sat down
at his desk and wrote “Maryland, My Maryland.” It was first
published in the New Orleans _Delta_. In a few weeks it was
copied by all the leading newspapers of the South, and James R.
Randall, like Byron, awoke one morning and found himself famous.
(1637)