Hagerstown was a pro-North town. Following a Maryland Confederate victory over Maryland Federals at Front Royal, Virginia, in 1862, pro-Union citizens sacked the Hagerstown Mail’s newspaper office and those business’s whose owners had sons in the Rebel army. The Mail’s editor, Daniel Dechert, had been imprisoned for his pro-South editorials until he took the Union Oath of Allegiance, which did little to alter his later writings.