Benson J. Lossing, Pictorial Field Book of the Civil War. Volume 1.

“ [439] not to destroy; to obtain means of transportation, so that I can vacate the capital prior to the sitting of the Legislature, and not be under the necessity of encumbering your beautiful city while the Legislature is in session.” This logic and this irony were unanswerable, and the General was never again troubled with the protests of the Maryland Executive.

On the morning of the 24th, the combined regiments moved forward at the rate of about a mile an hour, laying the track anew and building bridges. Skirmishers went ahead and scouts on the flanks. The main column was led by a working party on the road, behind which followed a car with a howitzer loaded with grape-shot, in charge of Lieutenant Bunting. It was a hot April morning, and the men suffered much from heat and fatigue. They had a stretch of twenty-one miles to go over between Annapolis and the Junction. A shower in the afternoon, and balmy air and bright moonlight in the evening, with the freshness of early spring, gave them pleasure in the midst of their toil. All night long they moved forward, keeping very vigilant eyes upon the surrounding country, but falling in with none of those terrible Marylanders which the Governor and the Mayor of Annapolis had predicted would be upon them. These braves seemed to have a wholesome fear of the “Yankees,” and made their observations, if at all, at a safe distance. The country appeared to be depopulated. The inhabitants had fled or hidden, with the evident expectation of an invasion by almost savage men. “I know not,” said a member of the Seventh,¹ “if I can describe that night-march. I have a dim recollection of deep cuts through which we passed, gloomy and treacherous-looking, with the moon shining full on our muskets, while the banks were wrapped in shade, each moment expecting to see the flash and hear the crack of the rifle of the Southern guerrillas. . . . On all sides dark and lonely pine woods stretched away, and, as the night wore on, the monotony of the march became oppressive.”

The troops reached Annapolis Junction on the morning of the 25th, when the co-operation of the two regiments ceased, the Seventh New York going on to Washington, and the Eighth Massachusetts remaining to hold the road they had just opened. Before their departure from Annapolis, the Baltic, a large steam-ship transport, had arrived there with troops, and others speedily followed. General Scott ordered General Butler to remain there, hold the

Annapolis Junction in 1861.

town and the road, and superintend the forwarding of troops to the Capital. The “Department of Annapolis,” which embraced the country twenty miles on each side of the railway, as far as Bladensburg, was created, and General Butler was placed in