this route. There were calls for Maryland to declare secession in the wake of the riot. Governor Hicks called a special session of the state legislature to consider the situation. Since Annapolis, the capital, was occupied by Federal troops, and Baltimore was harboring many pro-Confederate mobs, Hicks directed the legislature to meet in Frederick, in the predominantly Unionist western part of the state. The legislature met on April 26; on April 29, it voted 53–13 against secession, though it also voted not to reopen rail links with the North, and requested that Lincoln remove the growing numbers of federal troops in Maryland. At this time the legislature seems to have wanted to maintain Maryland's neutrality in the conflict. Many more Union troops arrived. On May 13, Butler sent Union troops into Baltimore and declared martial law. He was replaced as commander of the Department of Annapolis by George Cadwalader, another Brigadier General in the United States Volunteers. Lincoln subsequently had the mayor, police chief, entire Board of Police, and city council of Baltimore imprisoned without charges, as well as one sitting U.S. Congressman from Baltimore. The Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, who was also a native of Maryland, ruled on June 4, 1861, in ex parte Merryman that Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus was unconstitutional, but Lincoln ignored the ruling, and in September when Baltimore newspaper editor Frank Key Howard, Francis Scott Key's grandson, criticized this in an editorial he too was imprisoned without trial. Federal troops imprisoned the young newspaper editor in Fort McHenry, which, as he noted, was the same fort where the Star Spangled Banner had been waving "o'er the land of the free" in his grandfather's song. In 1863 Howard wrote about his experience as a political prisoner at Fort McHenry in the book Fourteen Months in the American Bastille; two of the publishers selling the book were then arrested. A man supposed to be a Maryland State Militia soldier was detained in Fort McHenry, and Judge Giles, in Baltimore, issued a writ of habeas corpus, but Major W. W. Morris, commander of the fort, wrote back, "At the date of issuing your writ, and for two weeks previous, the city which you live, and where your court has been held, was entirely under the control of revolutionary authorities. Within that period United States soldiers, while committing no offense, had been perfidiously attacked and