Chaptico was home to many daring men, beginning with John Coode, who led Maryland's 1689 Protestant Rebellion. During the Civil War, Chaptico's blockade runners carried medicine and other supplies at night across the Potomac River past Union gunships to Confederate Virginia, and a Chaptico merchant who supplied them, Charles Clement Spalding, was confined at the Old Capitol Prison in Washington, D.C. Other residents joined the Confederate Army: George Hayden, mortally wounded in the Battle of Gettysburg, is buried in nearby Christ Church Cemetery, and James Waring, captured at Gettysburg and imprisoned at Point Lookout, was among the few who escaped by hiding beneath cadavers piled on a buckboard before fleeing to Virginia. William Charles Love, another Chaptico resident, was the only man in St. Mary's County to vote for Abraham Lincoln during the 1860 presidential campaign, and afterward he shot his way out of an ambush at Plank Bridge near Leonardtown as he started home. In Chaptico on May 13, 1865, William Blair signed an oath of allegiance to the Government of the United States; Confederate soldiers who surrendered were required to sign such oaths before they could return to their homes. Chaptico's Richard Thomas gained fame as "the French Lady" after adopting the name Zarvona while fighting with Garibaldi in Italy and leading an early-war attempt to capture the U.S. sloop Pawnee for the Confederate navy. Disguised as a French maid, with cutlasses and carbines hidden in milliner's trunks, he boarded the Baltimore steamer St. Nicholas, and at midnight he and 16 accomplices seized it, planning to range alongside Pawnee and capture her, but when she failed to appear he instead took three cargo ships and delivered them to Fredericksburg, Virginia.