time the legislature seems to have wanted to avoid involvement in a war against its seceding neighbors. The contentious issue of troop transport through Maryland would lead one month later to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, also a Marylander, penning one of the United States' most controversial wartime rulings, Ex parte Merryman. One of the reported victims of these troop transport riots was Francis X. Ward, a friend of James Ryder Randall. Randall, a native Marylander, was teaching at Poydras College in Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana, at the time and, moved by the news of his friend's death, wrote the nine-stanza poem "Maryland, My Maryland". The poem was a plea to his home state of Maryland to secede from the Union and join the Confederacy. Randall later claimed the poem was written "almost involuntarily" in the middle of the night on April 26, 1861. Being unable to sleep after hearing the news, he claimed that "some powerful spirit appeared to possess me... the whole poem was dashed off rapidly... [under] what may be called a conflagration of the senses, if not an inspiration of the intellect". The poem contains many references to the Revolutionary War as well as to the Mexican–American War and Maryland figures in that war (many of whom have fallen into obscurity). It was first published in the New Orleans Sunday Delta. The poem was quickly turned into a song—put to the tune of "Lauriger Horatius"—by Baltimore resident Jennie Cary, sister of Hetty Cary. It became instantly popular in Maryland, aided by a series of unpopular federal actions there and throughout the South. It was sometimes called "the Marseillaise of the South". Confederate States Army bands played the song after they crossed into Maryland territory during the Maryland Campaign in 1862. By 1864, the Southern Punch noted that the song was "decidedly most popular" among the "claimants of a national song" for the Confederacy. According to some accounts, General Robert E. Lee ordered his troops to sing "Maryland, My Maryland" as they entered the town of Frederick, Maryland, but his troops received a cold response, as Frederick was located in the unionist western portion of the state. At least one Confederate regimental band also played the song as Lee's troops retreated across the Potomac after the bloody Battle of Antietam. During the War, a version of the song was written with lyrics that supported the