I greatly enjoyed Jonathan Pitts' article on the role that Baltimore played during the early years of the Civil War, including its part in hatching several assassination plots against President Lincoln ("Road to Lincoln's end ran through Baltimore," April 8).
It is not often appreciated that it took tremendous personal courage on Lincoln's part to fight the war while completely encircled by sworn enemies — not only in Virginia, the capital of the Confederacy, but in Baltimore, an essentially Southern town north of Washington.
Unfortunately, the article's conclusion leaves the impression that Lincoln's death was widely mourned in Baltimore and Maryland.
In fact, the crowds that lined the streets in Baltimore to see the funeral train pass by on its way to Springfield were a fraction of those that came out in Philadelphia and other cities — in the hundreds rather than the thousands.
And street hawkers who sold commemorative portraits of Lincoln for a dime could charge a quarter for a picture of his assassin.
Michael Salcman, Baltimore