Edward Alfred Pollard, The lost cause; a new Southern history of the War of the Confederates ... Drawn from official sources and approved by the most distinguished Confederate leaders.

The response of the people of Maryland to this appeal was not what Gen. Lee had been led to expect; it was equivocal, timid, inconsiderable. Instead of the twenty or thirty thousand recruits which he had believed he would obtain on the soil of Maryland, he found the people there content to gaze with wonder on his ragged and poorly-equipped army, but with little disposition to join its ranks. It is true that he had penetrated that part of the State which was not well affected towards the South, but in close neighbourhood and sympathy with Pennsylvania; and that whatever Southern sympathy there might be in Eastern Maryland, and in the noble city of Baltimore, it could scarcely reach him when it was held back at the point of the bayonet, and suppressed in the shadow of Federal forts. Frederick City, indeed, was not without some display of welcome. But expressions of confidence and joy appeared to have been lost in the one prevailing sentiment of wonder that the ragged men, stained with rain, and dust, and dirt, so devoid of all the pomp of war, so unlike what they had been accustomed to see of soldiers, could be the army which had defeated in so many engagements the apparently splendid troops of the North, and which had been heralded by imagination as a shining host, bearing aloft the emblem of victory, and kindling in the breast of the spectator the passion for glory.¹