The most serious cause of difference was not the question of slavery, for Baltimore was, it has been said, "the paradise of the free colored population." In 1789, Samuel Chase, Luther Martin, Dr. George Buchanan, and in fact most of the leading men of that day, formed one of the earliest of American abolition societies; and to the same cause, in later times, Charles Carroll of Carrollton lent his influence and William Pinkney his eloquence.
The most powerful stimulus to secession lay in the policy of Lincoln's administration. While the attack upon the Sixth Massachusetts was the work of the mob, the passage through Maryland of the Northern troops made sympathy with the South temporarily predominant. The excitement subsided; the city, like the State, was held for the Union, but the military policy of the national Government inaugurated a period of bitter oppression to those whose hearts were across the Potomac. Newspapers were suppressed, all exhibitions of sympathy with the Southern cause were rudely brought to an end, and the personal liberty of the individual was destroyed by the suspension of the habeas corpus—a suspension which henceforth estranged the executive and
