On April 19 Baltimore was disrupted by riots, during which Southern sympathizers attacked Union troops passing through the city by rail, causing what were arguably the first casualties of the Civil War. Major General George H. Steuart, commander of the Maryland Militia ordered his militia to assemble, armed and uniformed, to repel the Federal soldiers, as Steuart himself was strongly sympathetic to the Confederacy, along with most of his senior officers. Perhaps knowing this, and no doubt aware that public opinion in Baltimore was divided, Governor Thomas Holliday Hicks did not order out the militia.