Biography
George William Brown was Mayor of Baltimore (1860-1861) at the outbreak of the Civil War. He is most associated with the Pratt Street Riot of April 19, 1861, when secessionist crowds attacked the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment passing through Baltimore toward Washington — the war's first bloodshed — after which city authorities ordered railroad bridges north of Baltimore burned to halt the movement of further Union troops. With habeas corpus suspended, Brown was arrested at his home on September 12, 1861 as part of a wider roundup of Maryland officials suspected of Southern sympathies, and was held without any formal charge or trial. He was imprisoned briefly at Fort McHenry, then at Fort Monroe in Virginia for about two weeks, and finally at Fort Warren in Boston Harbor, where he was held for roughly fourteen months. He was released on November 27, 1862, never having been tried, and returned to Baltimore, where he later became a respected judge and a trustee of Johns Hopkins University.
