Arresting Civilians

Early Sunday morning, June 28, 1863, Confederate cavalrymen arrived at merchant John Higgins' house to arrest him, but he had already left for Christ Episcopal Church. Instead they captured Eblen, a 17 year-old Union soldier recuperating here. When troopers told Dora Higgins to open the doors to their store, she refused, appealing to General J.E.B. Stuart for aid. Stuart replied that she was to stay in front of the store and "let one of them dare resist you." For the next six hours, Dora kept the Confederates at bay.

George Peter, a secessionist and neighbor of the Higgins, demanded that arrested citizens receive fair treatment. Dora Higgins wrote "had it not been for their endeavors, every Union man would have been taken and every store laid open,... for they said to carry out such an order would be their (Secessionists') entire ruin." Stuart could not afford to antagonize Southern sympathizers, and a captured Union wagon train answered his men's needs.

(Inset, lower right): Matthew Fields, secessionist owner, editor, and publisher of the Montgomery County Sentinel, was arrested twice without formal charges when many civil rights were suspended under martial law. Levin Hoskinson, his apprentice printer who joined the 7th Virginia Infantry, was killed at the First Battle of Manassas on July 21, 1861. He was the first Rockville man lost in the war.

(Caption of pictures in lower left): Merchant John Higgins, Courtesy of the Montgomery County Historical Society. · George Peter became a state senator after the war. Courtesy of the Montgomery County Historical Society.

(Caption of picture in upper right): Oldest photograph of Rockville's main thoroughfare, ca. 1870, with hay scale in the public triangle. The 1840 courthouse is out of the picture to the right. The Female Seminary and John Higgins' store are out of the picture to the lower left. Stuart's prisoners were taken from the courthouse down the road toward Brookeville.
- Courtesy of Peerless Rockville

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