Troops from Philadelphia sail into Annapolis and take control. Lincoln suspends the writ of habeas corpus and Maryland becomes, essentially, an occupied land. Officials with Southern sympathies are arrested, the municipal police disbanded. Henry May, who represents Maryland in Washington, denounces the occupation—his people are in chains, he says, meaning, with no sense of irony, his white people. He is himself arrested on suspicion of treason, only to be released some months later without charges.

The first line of the first verse of the Maryland state song references Lincoln:

The despot’s heel is on thy shore,

Maryland!

His torch is at thy temple door,

Maryland!

Avenge the patriotic gore

That flecked the streets of Baltimore

And be the battle queen of yore,

Maryland! My Maryland!

And here is how the song ends:

Maryland!

She is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumb—

Huzza! she spurns the Northern scum!

She breathes! she burns! she’ll come! she’ll come!

Maryland! My Maryland!

The song was written in 1861 by a friend of one of the dead rioters. Attempts to rewrite or replace it as the official state song were made in 1974, 1980, 1984, 2001, 2002, 2009, 2016, 2018, 2019, and 2020. To date, all have failed.

In 1861, June is still in California. Now a widower with a young child, his finances are increasingly precarious. His sympathies lie with the South, but he’s loyal to the Union. The war is far away.

Mother, Rosalie, and Asia remain in Philadelphia. Asia’s had a little boy and, at Sleeper’s insistence, as an olive branch, named him Edwin. She has two children now under the age of two. She calls them her trotters. Between the nursing and the feeding and the diapers and the need to sleep whenever any brief window presents itself, she doesn’t have time for the war.

The sons of Philadelphia are leaving in great numbers for the battlefields. None of the Booth men enlist on either side. The women of Philadelphia are organizing donation drives and working with the wounded at the Satterlee or Mower hospitals. None of the Booth women participate. Rosalie or Mother could do so—they have the time—but they don’t know how they’d explain it to John.

John’s transforming into a secessionist. He spends days, weeks—writing comes so hard to him—working on a speech for a Northern audience. He has no venue nor occasion for this speech. He will never finish nor give it, but in it he lays out his thoughts concerning the wrongs being done by the North to the South. He quotes Shakespeare. The North is robbing the South of her good name. And for what? he asks his imaginary audience.

“Why, nothing but the slavery question!”

Slavery is not a sin, he insists. And if it is a sin, it is not your sin, so why do you care?