After the bombardment of Fort Sumter on April 12–14, 1861, President Lincoln called for the states to send troops to preserve the Union. On April 19, Southern sympathizers in Baltimore attacked Union troops passing through by rail, causing what were arguably the first casualties of the Civil War. Major General George H. Steuart, commander of the Maryland State Militia, and most of his senior officers were strongly sympathetic to the Confederacy. He ordered the militia to turn out, armed and uniformed, to repel Federal soldiers. Perhaps knowing of these sympathies, and that public opinion in Baltimore was divided, Governor Thomas Holliday Hicks did not order out the militia.