Benjamnin F. Butler, Butler's Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin Butler

[210] an interference with the laws of the State. I, therefore, am ready to co-operate with your excellency in suppressing most promptly and efficiently any insurrection against the laws of the State of Maryland. I beg, therefore, that you announce publicly, that any portion of the forces under my command is at your excellency's disposal, to act immediately for the preservation of the peace of this community.

The effect of that offer was extremely beneficial. It brought back all the inhabitants who had fled. It allayed the fears that we were undertaking a servile war. It brought me at once into personal, friendly relations with Governor Hicks, who was not at heart a secessionist, but only a very timid and cautious man.

I informed him in a private, friendly conversation, that he must not recommend, in his message to the legislature, any discussion of the question of secession, and that if he did I should certainly proceed against him. He assured me that nothing was further from his wish or thought than secession, and that he would never permit the great seal of Maryland to be affixed to any such ordinance or give force and validity to it, if it were passed; and as a guarantee of his good faith in that regard, he placed the seal for safe keeping in my hands, and I so held it during the session of that legislature.

I also told him that if the legislature undertook with or without his recommendation to discuss an ordinance of secession, I should hold that to be an act of hostility to the United States, and should disperse that legislature, or, more properly speaking, would shut them up together where they might discuss it all the time, but without any correspondence or reporting to the outer world.

I had no one fitted to advise with upon this question until the late lamented General Devens came as its major with the Worcester (Mass.) battalion. I had sent to Washington all my Massachusetts troops, and very glad was I to see the major and his stalwart loyal Worcester men. Fearing the legislature would meet at Annapolis on Friday, I consulted with General Devens upon the question whether his men could be relied upon to carry out my orders faithfully in regard to the legislature. He assured me that while he had not examined into the question of the propriety or legality of any such action as dispersing or arresting the members of the legislature in the contingency mentioned, he had reported to me for orders, and he should obey any order that I gave, and his men would obey