Baltimore on the Border: First Blood

In the study of the Civil War, the violence between brothers, neighbors, and countrymen is most frequently explored through the eyes of great armies clashing on the field of battle. But in the American Civil War, as in any modern conflict and especially those dividing a people amongst themselves, a citizen did not have to wear blue or grey to feel passionately about the war. In Baltimore, Mayor George William Brown and paper merchant Samuel Epes Turner, took strikingly different stances on the war despite their geographical proximity to the fighting. Fort Sumter may have seen the first shots of the war, but the infamy of first blood belongs to the civilians of Baltimore and the Union soldiers they confronted. [excerpt