The crowd stank of tobacco and urine. The reporter in their midst cursed his sensitive nose as he jotted notes. Beside him, shabbily cloaked and dusty, his face twisted in rage, a particularly malodorous fellow bellowed an oath and hurled a rock that smashed a window in one of the cars of the train pulling into the station.
The mob roared. Having missed their opportunity to stone the newly elected president a month earlier, they were panting to substitute the soldiers of the Sixth Massachusetts passing through Baltimore on their way to the capital. Though he shared their sympathy for the South, the reporter recoiled from the crowd’s malice. He was here to do his job. He was not a partisan. Or so he believed.
Edging closer to the first car, pen and notebook at the ready, he heard the instructions shouted by the officer inside as draymen uncoupled the cars from the engine.
“Ignore taunts, spittle and stones,” the blue-coated colonel shouted. “But if any man in the crowd shoots, take aim with your musket and be sure to drop him.”
He scribbled the line as the crowd surged forward, jostling him to get closer to the trains. His editor would be pleased if blood were spilled today. Not only was he a Democrat who referred to Lincoln as “the baboon,” but like editors of every political persuasion he gloried in mayhem and was overjoyed when rebel guns fired on Sumter. “Peace don’t sell papers,” he said, spitting.
The reporter stood back from the train as draymen hitched a team of horses to the cars to drag them to Camden Station some ten blocks west. He was close enough to see inside the car, close enough to see that some of the new soldiers responding to Lincoln’s call to defend Washington were little more than boys.
They had not yet been born when he was at West Point, wearing the same uniform, a lifetime ago. He had been a very poor soldier, but he doubted if these children were much better.
“Where do you hail from, lad,” he shouted at a red-headed youngster who stuck his head out the window to get a better look at the crowd.
“Lowell,” the boy shouted back before a rock crashed just next to his head, inciting another roar from the mob. The boy quickly ducked his head back inside.
Speak not to me of glory. I hate, I loathe the name. A line from an old poem teased him as the cars, dragged by horses, set off down Pratt Street. He limped after them, the crowd surging around him.
Twenty-five years ago, he would have been one of the young men slipping out of Baltimore’s fine townhouses at midnight, he mused, heading south with satchels stuffed with provisions. He would have been fired up with righteous fury, eager to answer Virginia’s call to secede.
He was a son of the South, after all, bred in Richmond, educated for one year at Mr. Jefferson’s university in Charlottesville until his foster father refused to pay his debts, forcing him to withdraw.
But he had been born in Boston and even if he would never love the North, he had spent most of his life in its cities. Still Baltimore was where he felt most at home. Like him it was Janus-faced, looking both North and South. Which meant that the city would be torn in two by this war. He saw it clearly, as clearly as those hellish visions that had once animated his art. They gradually disappeared after he stopped drinking and he couldn’t say he missed them.
But on this April afternoon life was reanimating those awful scenes, transforming them from dreams to reality. Dread fell upon him as he contemplated the perverse figures of his imagination coming to life around him—ordinary men maddened by an idea, their eyes staring wildly from their heads, veins pounding in their temples as they shouted and pushed ahead through the mob.

All that winter, as the arguments for and against secession grew more heated in the city’s clubs and assembly rooms, he had worked quietly in the house on Amity Street. It was no longer a country place, as it had been in 1833 when he first lived there with his aunt and her family. Now the rumble and clatter of the spreading city invaded the home he had reclaimed after he rose from the dead in 1849.
Resurrection was not too strong a word for it, he thought. He had been dead, spiritually dead, for a long time before he actually stood at the anteroom to hell. Ghastly were those last awful months of his wife’s dying, but the rudderless journey that followed, when he roamed from New York to Boston to Richmond seeking comfort in women, in drink, and in opium, were much worse.
Even now, twelve years later, certain bitter memories caused him to writhe in humiliation. His greatest struggle today was not to drink, but to forgive his younger self that abject, that frenzied plunge to the bottom of the abyss.
The march of folly had ended in this city, where days of drinking left him sodden and helpless, robbed of his clothes by scoundrels who mockingly recited his verse as they stripped him of his possessions. He lay nearly insensible in the gutter outside Ryan’s Tavern, mocked by passersby until some kind soul called his old friend and editor Snodgrass who blessedly came to his aid.
He had but a dim memory of the carriage ride to Washington College Hospital where, the doctors said, he came within a nick of expiring. He found that the idea of Death was rather more romantic than the reality. In the grip of delirium, he shat and pissed himself, fighting wraiths and demons in his dreams.
When he came to himself, they told him that he had repeatedly called for someone named Reynolds. Who was Reynolds, they asked. He couldn’t tell them.
After they released him, stiff and pale as a corpse, he traveled back to Fordham where faithful Muddy nursed him back to health and the Jesuits taught him surrender. To be a man for others ad majorem dei gloriam was the answer to the pain of existence, they said. Doubt still spiced his not quite Catholic faith but for the past twelve years, he had not touched a drop.
But now, surrounded by this stinking mob, he was for the first time in years seized by his monstrous imagination. In his mind’s eye, his beheld a great croaking black bird, circling a battlefield encrusted with gore. He groaned in mortal terror, not of this crowd, but of the cataclysm he knew would soon be unleashed upon them all.

Up ahead the first train in the line halted, and hastening forward he saw why—a roughly constructed barricade barred the way. The crowd surged forward around him. Where were the police, he wondered? Surely they must have known there would be trouble along this route. The town was full of copperheads, wearing pennies in their lapels to signify their allegiance to the South. Some hung the rebel flag of South Carolina from their windows.
He heard a bugle sound as the doors of the first car snapped open. Solders filed out of the car, gripping their muskets and trying to form a line parallel to the train, ducking as some in the crowd hurled bottles, bricks and other projectiles. The inhabitants of the other cars followed suit, and soon a line of blue-backed soldiers stretched alongside the stalled trains.
Beyond the ruffians that pressed against him on all sides, he suddenly noticed a group of fashionable onlookers. Ladies lifted colorful parasols over their head and clutched the hands of children who watched with round eyes as some in the crowd worked to dislodge paving stones.
The din rose as maddened horses neighed and whinnied and stomped their feet, the crowd shouted epithets and bugles sounded as with a hoarse “Forward March” the line of soldiers began moving forward through the jeering crowd.
Hideous faces, stubbled and rough, lined the path but he saw well-dressed men among that motley bunch, and more than one drab, shrilling her hatred. The acrid smell of fear mingled with the rank odor of the unwashed bodies pressing together. He breathed through his mouth and mumbled prayers for safe passage—his own.
Then a roar as a man carrying the blue and white palmetto of South Carolina moved to the front of the column. At that, a shout as another group led by a young lieutenant pushed forward, attempting to tear down the banner. A brawl broke out between the two groups and in the melee, he saw a black marching with the regiment struck by a paving stone. He fell and the crowd swarmed over him.
“Double quick step,” one of the captains shouted and as they stepped up their pace another posse of uniformed men—the late arriving Baltimore police—shouted orders for the crowd to disperse upon penalty of arrest.
Then, in the midst of chaos, the crack of a pistol. The newly minted soldiers froze but only for a second as more shots rang out from the crowd. A fellow just ahead of him in the column crumpled and he watched as a dark patch began to spread on the blue jacket.
“Drop and fire,” shouted a voice from the front of the column. He watched as the soldiers dropped together to their knees, reached into their cartridge boxes, pulled out plugs and tore them with their teeth. His fingers remembered the drill as with trembling fingers the soldiers inserted the plugs into the muzzles of their muskets.
Soldiers of the Republic fired on the citizens of Baltimore today, he thought, a reporter writing his lead—as his double, a son of the South, opened his mouth to shout a warning.
Too late. A musket roared beside him, and for a split second the discharge drowned out the screams and baying of the crowd which fell back before charging the soldiers with an inhuman howl.
“God help us,” he whispered as the crowd, with a roar, closed over him. A fierce-looking rogue lunged for the musket of the soldier beside him and the soldier ran him through with its blade.
Smoke stung his eyes and choked him. He stumbled and a second soldier caught him before he fell. Poe looked into his blue eyes for a split second and the man grimaced.
“Brother, if this is war, I don’t like it,” the soldier said, before they took to their heels together and flew like winged Mercury to the safety of Camden Station.