The Ransom of Hagerstown: Twenty Thousand Dollars in Four Hours

The Price-Miller House on Key Street in Hagerstown is a handsome Federal-style brick townhouse built in eighteen twenty-four for a prosperous attorney. But the building's most remarkable day came forty years after its construction, when the town it stood in was held at gunpoint and given four hours to raise a ransom.

It was July sixth, eighteen sixty-four, and General Jubal Early's Confederate Army was moving through Maryland in one of the war's last great offensive thrusts. Within days Early would scare the Lincoln administration badly enough that he reached the outer defenses of Washington before being turned back. Now he sent Brigadier General John McCausland into Hagerstown to squeeze the town.

McCausland arrived in the early morning hours and issued his demand: twenty thousand dollars in cash and a large quantity of clothing for his ragged cavalrymen, on a short deadline. If the town did not comply, he would burn it.

The citizens scrambled. Three local banks pooled their reserves. Hagerstown's citizens contributed whatever clothing they could pull from their wardrobes. By the deadline they had raised the money and assembled the clothes. McCausland took both and rode south.

The house's original owner, William Price, was a staunch Unionist who had been appointed United States Attorney for Maryland by Abraham Lincoln himself. Two of his sons fought on opposite sides of the war. The house now serves as the headquarters of the Washington County Historical Society, which tells this story and many others from the town that sat squarely on the road between north and south.