Maryland in the American Civil War

• 1. Introduction

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  In seven Maryland counties during the presidential election of 1860, Abraham Lincoln received not a single vote. Statewide, he captured only 2,294 votes out of 92,421 cast, just 2.5 percent, finishing a distant fourth. Maryland in the American Civil War was a slave-holding border state pressed against the Union capital on one side and the seceding South on the other. Governor Thomas H. Hicks would play an outsized role in keeping Maryland from joining the Confederacy. But how did the federal government hold a deeply divided state in the Union? What methods did Lincoln use, and what did they cost ordinary Marylanders? The answers run through some of the bloodiest days in American military history. They also run through a constitutional crisis that would reach the Supreme Court itself.

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• 2. A Divided State

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  The 1860 Federal Census counted 87,189 enslaved people in Maryland alongside nearly as many free Black residents, 83,942. Those two numbers capture the state's antebellum contradiction. Southern and Eastern Shore counties that had prospered on the tobacco trade and slave labor leaned toward the Confederacy. Central and western Marylanders, many of German descent, had stronger economic ties to the North. Maryland businessmen feared that secession would destroy their trade and invite a Union naval blockade of Baltimore. The state legislature wanted to remain in the Union but wanted no part of a war against its southern neighbors. Many citizens were simply pragmatic. Maryland's long border with Pennsylvania would be nearly impossible to defend if the state broke away.

  After John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, many citizens began forming local militias. Their stated aim was to prevent a future slave uprising. Before long, the choice of which side to join would be forced upon them anyway.

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• 3. Blood on Pratt Street

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  The first fatalities of the Civil War happened in Baltimore, Maryland, on April 18-19, 1861. Soldiers from Massachusetts were being transferred between rail stations when a pro-Southern mob attacked, hurling cobblestones and bricks and blocking the route. Some soldiers fired back. Four soldiers and twelve civilians were killed.

  The riot inspired James Ryder Randall, a Marylander living in Louisiana at the time, to write a poem. His verses urged Maryland to "spurn the Northern scum" and "burst the tyrant's chain." Set to music, that poem became "Maryland, My Maryland," and in 1939 it was adopted as the state's official song. Confederate army bands would play it as their soldiers crossed into Maryland in 1862.

  Mayor George William Brown wrote to President Lincoln warning that further troops could not pass through Baltimore without fighting at every step. Hearing no immediate reply, Governor Hicks and Mayor Brown ordered the destruction of the railroad bridges north of the city that same evening. The bridges were demolished the following day. One of the men involved in that demolition was arrested in May without recourse to habeas corpus. His name was John Merryman.

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• 4. Lincoln and the Law

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  On the 13th of May 1861, General Benjamin F. Butler moved a thousand Federal soldiers into Baltimore by rail, under cover of a thunderstorm. He seized Federal Hill and trained his guns upon the city. His message to the commander of Fort McHenry offered to open mortar fire on Monument Square if attacked. Maryland had voted 53-13 against secession just two weeks earlier. Butler declared martial law regardless.

  The arrests were sweeping. Baltimore's mayor, city council, police commissioner, and the entire Board of Police were imprisoned at Fort McHenry without charges. Militia captain John Merryman was held without trial in defiance of a habeas corpus writ. The case came before Chief Justice Roger B. Taney just two days after Merryman's arrest. Taney, a native Marylander acting as a federal circuit court judge, ruled that the president lacked authority to suspend habeas corpus without Congressional approval. Lincoln simply ignored the ruling.

  When Baltimore newspaper editor Frank Key Howard criticized Lincoln's dismissal of Taney's ruling in print, Secretary of State Seward ordered Howard's arrest. Howard was Francis Scott Key's grandson. He was held without trial. Howard later described his imprisonment in his 1863 book Fourteen Months in American Bastiles. He noted that his prison was Fort McHenry, the same fort where his grandfather's song had celebrated the flag waving "o'er the land of the free." Two of the publishers who sold that book were then arrested. Nine newspapers were shut down across Maryland in all.

  On the 17th of September 1861, federal authorities arrested fully one third of the Maryland General Assembly. The arrest came at the opening of the legislature's new session. The government feared the Assembly would assist a rebel invasion and attempt to take the state out of the Union. In October 1861, a lawyer delivering a habeas corpus writ to General Andrew Porter was arrested on Porter's order. The United States Circuit Judge who had issued the writ was arrested alongside him. The following month, state circuit court Judge Richard Bennett Carmichael was beaten unconscious by federal troops in his own courtroom. He was then imprisoned without charge. Sitting U.S. Congressman Henry May of Maryland was also held without charge in Fort Lafayette.

  May was eventually released and returned to Congress. In March 1862 he introduced a bill requiring the government to either indict or release all political prisoners still held without habeas corpus. Its provisions were incorporated into the Habeas Corpus Act of March 1863, which finally gave Lincoln the Congressional authorization that Taney had ruled he never possessed. Even before that authorization came, Maryland soldiers were already fighting each other on battlefields far from Annapolis.

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• 5. Marylanders Against Marylanders

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  Captain Bradley T. Johnson refused to let Maryland's Confederate volunteers simply merge into Virginia regiments. He insisted that Maryland must be represented independently in the Confederate army. Arnold Elzey, a seasoned career officer from Maryland, was given command. The 1st Maryland Infantry Regiment was officially formed on the 16th of June 1861. Elzey's executive officer was George H. Steuart, who would earn the name "Maryland Steuart" to distinguish him from the celebrated cavalry commander J.E.B. Stuart. Estimates of the total Marylanders who fought for the Confederacy range from roughly 3,500 to just under 4,700. Maryland's 1860 population was 687,000.

  Official war records credit Maryland with 33,995 white enlistments in Union volunteer regiments. African American enlistments in the United States Colored Troops numbered 8,718. A further 3,925 Marylanders served as sailors or marines. Twice as many Black Marylanders served in the Colored Troops as white Marylanders served in the Confederate army.

  On the 23rd of May 1862, at the Battle of Front Royal, the Confederate 1st Maryland Infantry met the Union 1st Maryland Infantry Regiment in battle. It is the only time two regiments from the same state with the same numerical designation have fought each other in United States history. The Southerners won, despite being outnumbered and outequipped. When prisoners were taken, many men recognized former friends and relatives. Major William Goldsborough later wrote of the moment in his memoir on the Confederate Marylanders. He described the men having "greeted cordially, and divided with them the rations which had just changed hands." Among the prisoners Goldsborough helped capture was his own brother, Charles Goldsborough.

  Sergeant Major Christian Fleetwood of the 4th United States Colored Troops was among the most decorated Marylanders in Union service. He was awarded the Medal of Honor for rallying his regiment and saving its colors during the assault on New Market Heights. Another Maryland regiment, the 2nd Maryland Infantry, would fight on in the Union IX Corps until the war's end.

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• 6. Bloody Antietam

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  On the 14th of September, 1862, a Union soldier found a copy of Robert E. Lee's detailed battle orders, left behind by mistake. The order showed that Lee had divided his army and sent detachments to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, and to Hagerstown, Maryland. Each was now vulnerable to being isolated and defeated. Major General George B. McClellan's Army of the Potomac numbered 87,000 men against Lee's roughly 40,000. McClellan waited about 18 hours before acting on the intelligence, losing a chance to defeat Lee decisively.

  Three days later the two armies collided near Sharpsburg, along Antietam Creek. Union casualties totaled 12,401, including 2,108 dead. Confederate casualties reached 10,318, including 1,546 dead. Those figures represent 25 percent of the Federal force and 31 percent of the Confederate. Confederate General A. P. Hill described it as "the most terrible slaughter that this war has yet witnessed." More Americans died in battle on the 17th of September 1862, than on any other single day in the nation's military history.

  "What good would a proclamation from me do," Lincoln had said five days before the battle. He did not want to issue "a document the whole world will see must be inoperative, like the Pope's Bull against a comet." The battle at Antietam removed that obstacle. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862, declaring enslaved people in Confederate states free as of the 1st of January 1863. The battle may also have discouraged France and Great Britain from recognizing the Confederacy. Both governments were now doubting the South's ability to sustain the war.

  Because Maryland had not seceded, its enslaved residents were not covered by the Proclamation. That gap would not be filled until Maryland rewrote its constitution.

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• 7. Abolition and Its Limits

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  In April 1864, a constitutional convention met in Annapolis to replace the Maryland Constitution of 1851. The new document was championed by Unionists who had secured control of the state. Its central achievement was Article 24, which outlawed slavery. The constitution also imposed a strict oath of allegiance designed to keep Confederate sympathizers from holding any public office. It reapportioned the General Assembly based on the white population, deliberately reducing the political weight of the southern counties where most of Maryland's formerly enslaved people lived.

  The ratification vote on the 13th of October 1864, was among the closest in the state's history. Voters at their usual polling places rejected the constitution by 29,536 to 27,541. The outcome turned on the ballots of Union Army soldiers from Maryland, who supported it by 2,633 to 263. The final tally was 30,174 to 29,799, just over 50 percent in favor. The new constitution took effect on the 1st of November 1864, making Maryland the first Union slave state to abolish slavery during the war. Maryland ratified the Thirteenth Amendment on the 3rd of February 1865, within three days of it being submitted to the states. That amendment, which abolished slavery across the nation, did not itself take effect until the 6th of December 1865.

  The Fourteenth Amendment, which would have conferred citizenship on former slaves, was rejected by the Maryland legislature. The Fifteenth Amendment, which gave Black men the right to vote, was rejected as well. The Maryland Constitution of 1867 eventually extended voting rights to non-white males. That constitution remains in effect today.

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• 8. Booth's Flight and the Long Reckoning

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  On the 14th of April 1865, actor John Wilkes Booth shot President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. After firing, Booth leaped to the stage. What he shouted is disputed. Some witnesses heard "Sic semper tyrannis," Latin for "Thus always to tyrants." Others heard "The South is avenged." Some recalled no Latin at all. In a letter explaining his actions, Booth wrote that he had "ever held the South was right." He described slavery as "one of the greatest blessings... that God has ever bestowed upon a favored nation." After shooting the President, Booth rode south into Southern Maryland, where sympathetic residents sheltered him. A week later he was smuggled across the Potomac River into Virginia at night.

  Baltimore erected a Confederate Women's Monument and a Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument in the years after the war. A monument to Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson stood in Baltimore until the 16th of August 2017. It was taken down following the Unite the Right rally. The former state song, "Maryland, My Maryland," called Lincoln a "despot," a "vandal," and a "tyrant." It remained the official state anthem until March 2021. Maryland has three chapters of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. A home for retired Confederate soldiers opened in Pikesville in 1888. A brochure the home published in the 1890s called it "a haven of rest" for veterans who might otherwise feel diminished. It promised they could find refuge there while losing "none of their self-respect, nor suffer in the estimation of those whose experience in life is more fortunate." The home did not close until 1932.

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