1858 Frederick City Militia

We invite you to don the red wool shirts and dark blue trousers and drill with the United Guard, the Junior Defenders, and the Independent Rifles at the 1858 Exhibition of the Frederick County Agricultural Society on September 12-14, 2025 and beyond! Together, we’ll relive the parades, flag presentations, and dramatic mobilizations that defined this spirited era.

United Guard

 The United Fire Company was organized in 1845. It took over the engine house of the former Washington Hose Company, which was located on East All Saints Street near Carroll Creek in the center of Frederick. (The Washington Hose Company was organized in 1837 but failed to maintain membership.)

Although the new company initially called itself the Mechanics Hose Company, a meeting of the company in November 1845 voted to change the name to the United Hose Company. Meetings for the United Hose Company were held at the East All Saints Street location until a new firehouse was built.

In 1846, the minutes of the United Hose Company (known as the United Fire Company by 1851) note that the fire company effected the exchange of the former Washington Hose Company building and petitioned the city of Frederick for funds to buy an engine, purchase a lot and erect a new engine house on Market Street. Within a year, the city provided $430 to purchase a lot. The fire company also provided $50 toward the new location.

The new building was built in 1848 in a rather swampy area of Frederick on South Market Street near East All Saints Street, less than a block from the old firehouse.

The fire company members were nicknamed “Swampers” even before the new firehouse was built. An entry on July 26, 1846, in the diary of Jacob Engelbrecht (which served as a first-party account of daily activities in Frederick) notes the response to a fire at Dr. William Bradley Tyler’s stable: “… the Swamp Rangers were there first with their hose and put it out.” The fact that the location of the new firehouse was even closer to the banks of Carroll Creek only served to enhance the nickname Swampers. The new fire station was dubbed by the locals as “Swamp Hall.”

The firehouse was a brick structure that was 60 feet deep off of the street. A cupola that included a large bell, which was nicknamed the “Swamp Bell,” was built on the top of the structure to enable the fire company to summon members for an alarm of fire.

Beyond firefighting

The United Fire Company as well as the other two fire companies in Frederick went above and beyond the call of duty when each one organized home guard militia units. The first militia unit was the United Guards, which was organized in 1858 by Capt. John Sinn of the United Fire Company. The unit was given permission to keep “army accoutrements” in the gallery of the fire hall.

The United Guards hosted a well attended picnic in the spring of 1848 – giving us a fascinating look at the social scene in pre-war Frederick.

The militiamen donned their summer uniforms and parade through town, together with the Frederick Cornet Band. They then boarded a train, together with several hundred others, bound for the “Junction.” The location is question was no doubt Frederick Junction – otherwise known as Monocacy Junction – just a few miles south of town. To me there’s a certain sense of eeriness to think that these happy picnic-goers were enjoying a beautiful, peaceful day on the very ground that would see so much bloodshed just four years later. What drives that point home even further is the idea of the Guards having a shooting competition on the west bank of the river that day. Some of those very same men would be there in July 1864, taking aim not at paper targets but at enemy soldiers.

The other two Frederick fire company militia units were the Independent Rifles (or Riflemen) of the Independent Hose Company and the Junior Defenders of the Junior Fire Company.

These three fire company militia units were called into action on Oct. 17, 1859.

(According to Engelbrecht’s diary, on Oct. 17, 1859, at 10 a.m., “The Independent Bell and the United, or Swamp, Bell are both now ringing (Swamp Bell first), calling together the military companies of our city.”

The three units responded to Harpers Ferry to help to quell an insurrection, John Brown’s raid. After the marines, who were led by Robert E. Lee, captured Brown and his men, Sinn and the United Guards were utilized to guard the engine house where the insurrectionists were held.

Frederick firehouses also were used for military purposes during the Civil War. The United Fire Company firehouse was used as an arsenal; the Junior Fire Company firehouse was used as part of General Hospital No. 6 during the Battle of Antietam as well as a stockade for Confederate prisoners.

Frederick City Militia and the John Brown Raid at Harper's Ferry

John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry created a national sensation, and the unseemly speed with which he and his cohorts were tried, convicted, and hanged further polarized the North and the South. The raid and its participants were minutely examined in the national press, and the details were officially fleshed out in the report of a special committee of the U.S. Senate. Of the eyewitness accounts, the most frequently cited is the report of Col. Robert E. Lee, who commanded the marines in the assault on the armory.

But Lee arrived at Harper’s Ferry long after Brown and his men had taken refuge in the engine house. The invaders had been forced to retreat to that building because local militia and armed citizens from Harper’s Ferry and the surrounding countryside had begun harassing insurrectionists at daybreak. Later that afternoon, the first militia from another state—three companies from Frederick, Maryland—arrived in Harper’s Ferry. They carried with them authority to restore the public peace signed by three Frederick County justices, as well as an acceptance of their services by the president of the United States, James Buchanan. The presence of these presidentially sanctioned companies from Frederick, Maryland, is mentioned in several of the reports of the Harper’s Ferry insurrection. But their contribution, as well as that of their Virginia militia counterparts, to the containment and eventual capture of Brown and his fellow raiders is overshadowed in both contemporary reports and later histories by the dramatic assault of the marines which ended the insurrection.

The document that follows is a heretofore unpublished report written by the commander of the three militia companies that left Frederick for Harper’s Ferry, a little more than twenty miles away, on the afternoon of Monday, October 17. Col. Edward Shriver, a Frederick lawyer and the commander of the 16th Regiment, detailed his men’s role in ending John Brown’s raid in a report written the following Saturday to Brig. Gen. James M. Coale, the commanding officer of all the Frederick infantry regiments. General Coale sent a copy of the report on to Gov. Thomas Holliday Hicks. It remained unnoticed among Hicks’s administrative files at the Maryland State Archives until it was recently discovered by Richard A. Blondo, at the time a member of the Archives’ staff. In part because of Mr. Blondo’s chance discovery of the Shriver report (he was searching for material for his M.A. thesis on Samuel Green, a free black from the Eastern Shore who was convicted for possessing a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin), interns in the Archives’ 1990 summer program began to process and describe the Archives’ extensive collection of executive department records from the 1850s and 1860s. When this descriptive project is completed, researchers will have ready access to an incomparable source of information for illuminating Maryland’s role in the Civil War. 

Shriver’s report provides a different perspective than other published contemporaneous sources, as well as some fascinating new details about Brown’s raid. Although he refers to “Captain Brown” and calls his band “insurrectionists,” the early part of Shriver’s report makes it clear that confusion and uncertainty reigned when word first reached the surrounding towns that something was amiss in Harper’s Ferry.

Initial reports out of Harper’s Ferry indicated that the town had been attacked, but it was not clear by whom. Some claimed the rebels were unpaid workers of a company that was building a dam in the area, while others reported that the problem stemmed from disgruntled workers at the federal arsenal itself, who were intent upon making off with the more than $17,000 that was then stored in the paymaster’s office About the only detail all of the fragmentary early reports agreed on was that several hundred whites and blacks were engaged in the insurrection.

Telegraph wires out of Harper’s Ferry had been cut by the attackers, so Colonel Shriver decided to check out the trouble first-hand before committing the troops under his command. He boarded a train and proceeded as far as Gibson’s Switch, at the east end of the Harper’s Ferry Bridge across the Potomac. What Shriver saw there (or more likely heard from people in the area) convinced him that the town was in the possession of “outlaws,” who, with the blacks they had armed, numbered “Several Hundred men.”

Returning quickly to Frederick, Shriver directed the three companies of militia onto the cars of a special train provided by the B & O Railroad. The train departed for Harper’s Ferry at 3:45 that afternoon. Three miles south of Frederick at the Monocacy Junction railroad station, Shriver learned that “apparently well authenticated reports” from Harper’s Ferry indicated that the insurgents “had been largely increased and then amounted to six hundred armed Slaves.” Shriver paused long enough to order the cannon from Frederick to be sent along by the first available train before ordering his own train to continue on toward Harper’s Ferry.

Darkness had fallen by the time Shriver and his men reached the bridge leading across the Potomac into Harper’s Ferry. It was crossed with considerable trepidation but without incident, and Colonel Shriver promptly offered the services of his men to Colonel R. W. Baylor, who commanded the Virginia militia and volunteers on hand. Shriver then learned that instead of hundreds of armed insurgents, the raiding party consisted of only “twenty two desperadoes from other sections of the Country, more than half of whom had already been killed, disabled or captured by the armed Citizens of the place and the Virginia Military.” Before the Frederick militia arrived, these citizen-soldiers had succeeded in driving the remnant of Brown’s raiders into the fire-engine house within the federal arsenal compound.

The Frederick militia was assigned the task of securing the perimeter of the armory, “guarding the Enclosure within which the remnant of the Insurgents had been driven and where they had strongly fortified themselves.” Despite being fired on repeatedly by the raiders holed up in the engine house, Shriver’s men sustained no injuries during their night of guard duty.

From their first arrival at the armory, Shriver’s men had “unanimously and warmly” favored storming the engine house, but Colonel Baylor objected because the raiders had with them several prominent local citizens as hostages. A night assault would pose too great a risk to the hostages, Baylor argued, so the Frederick troops settled in to their guard duties.

Shortly before midnight on Monday, October 17, one of the Frederick militia commanders, Captain J. T. Sinn, who was with some of his men on guard in front of the engine house, was hailed by one of the raiders and asked to approach the building “for the purpose of conference in regard to the terms on which the Insurgents proposed to surrender.” Sinn spoke with a person who identified himself as “Captain Brown.” Brown said that if he, his men, and their hostages were escorted to the Maryland shore, he would release the hostages unharmed and “the Insurgents would take their chance for their lives in an open fight.” Sinn relayed Brown’s proposal to Colonel Shriver, who promptly went to the engine house where he personally “held a parly with Captain Brown and the gentlemen whom he held as prisoners.”

Brown repeated his offer to Shriver, with one additional condition. He asked that after releasing the hostages he and his men should not be shot instantly, but rather be “allowed a brief period for preparing for fight.” Shriver told Brown that he was surrounded by an overwhelming force, and that his life was already “assuredly forfeited.”  The Maryland colonel urged Brown to release the “innocent unoffending gentlemen” he was holding as hostages, but Brown retorted that “he had secured them as hostages for his own safety and the safety of his men and he should use them accordingly.” Shriver concluded there were no further grounds for discussion, and terminated the conference with Brown. The Maryland and Virginia field commanders met and decided to storm the engine house at dawn, using bayonets instead of gunfire to “secure as far as possible the safety of the prisoners.”

The assault on the engine house did commence shortly after dawn, and it was carried out with fixed bayonets without firing a shot, just as the Maryland and Virginia militia commanders had planned. But the storming of the insurgent’s bastion was undertaken by U.S. Marines under the command of Robert E. Lee, not by the militia. Lee, a regular army officer, arrived with a contingent of marines at about 2:00 A.M. on Tuesday morning, October 18. According to Shriver, he and Colonel Baylor met with Colonel Lee shortly after his arrival, and Lee agreed to proceed with the assault plan they had devised. Furthermore, Shriver claimed, Lee “announced that he deemed it due to the volunteer militia present that it should have the privilege of conducting the operation.” Lee’s request that each militia company designate two men to form the storming party was “promptly done,” and this volunteer militia storming party assembled in front of the engine house before dawn.

But then, according to Shriver, “after the Batallion had been formed for some time and the men had been waiting to discharge the duty of making the assault,” Colonel Lee changed his mind. His marines alone would constitute the storming party. Lee summoned the Baltimore militia, which had arrived on the same train that morning with the marines, to bolster the perimeter defenses around the armory. Then he sent “an officer of the marines” (actually his second in command, army officer Lt. J.E.B. Stuart) to the engine house, who “waited on the Insurgents, demanded their surrender and explained to them the hopelessness of resistance.” Stuart, who had been stationed in Kansas in 1856, recognized “Osawatomie Brown.” While this may have been the first positive identification of the old man who served as leader and spokesman for the outlaw band, as Stuart later claimed, Brown’s identify and details of his plan had been revealed the preceding evening by one of his men who had been shot by the town’s defenders. 

Immediately after Brown “peremptorily refused to surrender,” Lee ordered the twelve members of the storming party forward. Three marines armed with sledge hammers failed to breach the engine house door, but some of their enterprising comrades spotted a stout ladder, which they employed as a battering ram with the desired effect. As the door flew open, one marine was instantly killed by hostile fire and another wounded. Brown and his men were quickly overwhelmed by the other marines, however, and in Shriver’s words, “in a very short time, all were killed, badly wounded or made prisoners.” Shriver noted that the surgeons of each of the three Frederick militia companies were “at hand to render any service which might be required,” commending especially Dr. William Tyler, Jr., of Captain Ritchie’s Company, who “obtained a position inside of the yard, followed the Marines to the charge and was the first to receive and attend to the Marine who was mortally wounded.”

After the engine house was secured, effectively ending John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, the Frederick militia were kept on guard duty inside the armory compound for a short time and then dismissed. They returned to Frederick that afternoon, Tuesday, October 18. Colonel Shriver concluded his report by commending the “soldierly bearing, discipline, and readiness to discharge every duty assigned, displayed by each officer and private of the companies which formed the Batallion under my command.”

Shriver’s report nowhere suggests that he and his men realized that they had played an important role in quenching the “fire of vengeance” old Osawatomie Brown expected to unleash on the “slave-cursed land.” Instead, Shriver reflected the understandable pride of a commander of citizen-soldiers, who was pleased to report that his men had answered the call to defend hearth and home from hostile forces, and that they had succeeded in their mission.

For the men of the Frederick militia, the Harper’s Ferry raid was a strange, anomalous threat to local public safety. In responding to it they did no more than what they would have expected good citizens anywhere to do if faced with a similar danger to the community. Within six months, however, the residents of Frederick, and the courageous veterans of John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, would face a far more difficult decision: to support the Union, and by implication the extremists and fanatics who had made John Brown’s raid possible, or to reject the sanctity of good citizenship and community, which had formed the rationale for their actions at Harper’s Ferry, by supporting the seceding states in the effort to tear the Union asunder.

AUTHENTICITY GUIDELINES COMING SOON!