allad sheets were quick to capitalize on sensational news so it is unsuprising that reactions to the attack on Massachusetts troops marching through the City of Baltimore quickly appeared in this format. The event occurred on April 19, 1861; the words were written on the 23rd of that month: how quickly Auner managed to run out his sheets is unknown but it is likely to have been as soon as he secured a copy of the poem. The identification of its author, “C.S.S.”, has so far eluded me. Clayton Colman Hall, author of Baltimore: Its History and its People, clearly knew in 1912: it is from that source that the date of the poem’s composition is found. But he (in my opinion, correctly) describes it as popular in its own day but too mediocre to survive and—probably charitably in his view—omits to mention the author’s name. What the poem might lack in inspiration it more than makes up in vigor while cataloging of the virtues of the various Northern States and the vices of their seceded sisters.
This sheet was printed by A.W Auner of Philadelphia, one of the nation’s most prolific—and technically best—ballad printers. His sheets during the war period are immediately identifiable by their almost unvarying use of the same typographic border.
The principal use of ballad sheets was, of course, to learn and/or sing songs from; then as now, not everyone had a good memory. Ballad sheets allowed purchasers to either learn a song in the privacy of their own chambers (or tent) and then spring it on the rest of the crowd at an after-dinner social gathering, the oyster rooms, or around the camp-fire; or to just sing the song with sheet in hand to help a defective memory (in the Irish tradition, when a singer gets stuck in the middle of a song, we say "there's a hole in the ballad"!).
But these sheets also had an important secondary use: they were cheap decor. While especially true of illustrated ballads (like this one), even sheets with nothing but words were pasted or pinned up in public and private rooms as mirthful or improving decoration. Mr. M'Dermott has seen ballad sheets pasted inside trunk lids, books, instrument cases, portfolios and such; doubtless they were stuck up in winter quarters, and they might well have been pasted inside the odd knapsack. Other locations for this item, folded up, are in the corner of a knapsack, stuck into the sweatband of your cap or hat, or in the wallet. They have served as impromptu letter paper when nothing better was to hand, and can again. While these ballad sheets are quintessential ephemera—cheap when bought, and not likely to survive very long—Mr. M'Dermott has been lucky enough over the years to see two examples of what mid-19C purchasers did to keep their prized clutch of ballads handy: one sheaf was pinned with a straight pin along the long side; another had been sewn together with thread, like a side-sewn pamphlet: a  home-made "song book."