At Chaptico's wharf, blockade runners carried medicine and other supplies at night down Chaptico Run and across the Potomac River past Union gunships to Confederate Virginia despite Federal forces stationed there. Local merchant Charles Clement Spalding, who supplied them, was arrested and confined in the Old Capitol Prison in Washington, D.C. The Chaptico Post Office allegedly had a two-slot mailbox, one for letters going south to Richmond and one for letters going north to Washington; a postal inspector confiscated the box, but mail delivery continued in both directions. William Charles Love, a Chaptico resident, was the only man in St. Mary's County to vote for Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 presidential election, while other residents joined the Confederate army, including George Hayden, who was mortally wounded in the Battle of Gettysburg and buried in Christ Church Cemetery, and James Waring, who was captured at Gettysburg and imprisoned at Point Lookout before escaping by hiding beneath cadavers piled on a buckboard and slipping away to Virginia. Long before the war, John Coode, a vestryman at Christ Church, planned the 1689 Protestant Rebellion against Lord Baltimore there, and the rebellion ended with Charles Calvert's loss of the colony and the end of religious freedom until the mid-18th century. During the Revolutionary War, smugglers carried supplies from Chaptico's port to the American army past British vessels in the Potomac River, and in the War of 1812 the British looted the town, despoiled the church, and desecrated graves. Chaptico's Richard Thomas, later known as Zarvona and famed as the French Lady, lost a French lover named Zarvona, adopted her surname, and early in the war led an attempt to capture the U.S. sloop Pawnee for the Confederate Navy by boarding the Baltimore steamer St. Nicholas disguised as a French maid with weapons hidden in milliner's trunks; when Pawnee failed to appear, he and his accomplices instead took three cargo ships and delivered them to Fredericksburg.