FIRST MARYLAND INFANTRY.

CHAPTER I.

DURING all these days of dread, excitement and anxiety, men went about
their daily occupations half-heartedly, and with their thoughts always
bent on the possible disasters of the near future. The first act of a drama
that had a continent for its stage had opened. The pageant of military array was
unfolding itself all over the country ; "the trumpet to the cannon spoke, the
cannon to the heavens, the heavens to earth," and while the hosts of the North
were being marshaled, those of the South, too, were gathering, and her people
were being roused to a sublime enthusiasm of self-devotion. Hundreds of young
men, firm in a spirit of resistance to what they conceived to be the exercise of
arbitrary power, and with an unconquerable faith in the future, left the State
to cast in their fortunes with their brethren in the South. Every day it became
more difficult and hazardous to pass through the cordon of troops that had been
drawn around the City of Baltimore ; but this did not daunt them, and by the
middle of May the greater part of those who were afterward to compose the
First Maryland infantry and the other organizations early in the field, stood
safely upon Virginia soil. During the ravages of the four years' struggle
thousands of others also made their way through the Union lines, and either
filled up the gaps which war had left in the ranks of the earlier organizations,
or helped in the formation of other commands.

The late gallant old Confederate, General Isaac R. Trimblc, for years before
his death endeavored by every means possible to ascertain the number of Mary-
landers in organized commands and those scattered throughout the various regi-
ments in all the armies of the Confederacy. He even went so far as to employ a
clerk to search the Confederate archives in the War and Navy Departments at
Washington, and to his surprise he discovered that there were twenty-two
thousand of them in the army, besides those in the Confederate navy.

At the time referred to (April 19,1861) there was only a comparatively small
body of uniformed militia in Baltimore, but it was composed of excellent and
soldierly material. The Maryland Guards and the Baltimore City Guards were
the two largest organizations, and then came the Independent Grays and the
Law Grays. From each of these bodies the First Maryland drew largely.

Three companies were formed in Richmond principally of this material —
those of Captains J. Lyle Clark, E. R. Dorsey and William H. Murray. These
companies were mustered into the service of the State of Virginia for one year,
and subsequently transferred to the Confederate Government with the other