The first bloodshed of the Civil War occurred in Maryland. Īfter John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, many citizens began forming local militias, determined to prevent a future slave uprising. Other residents, and a majority of the legislature, wished to remain in the Union, but did not want to be involved in a war against their southern neighbors, and sought to prevent a military response by Lincoln to the South's secession. Maryland businessmen feared the likely loss of trade that would be caused by war and the strong possibility of a blockade of Baltimore's port by the Union Navy. Many Marylanders were simply pragmatic, recognizing that the state's long border with the Union state of Pennsylvania would be almost impossible to defend in the event of war. However, across the state, sympathies were mixed. The 1860 Federal Census showed there were nearly as many free blacks (83,942) as slaves (87,189) in Maryland, although the latter were much more dominant in southern counties. The areas of Southern and Eastern Shore Maryland, especially those on the Chesapeake Bay (which neighbored Virginia), which had prospered on the tobacco trade and slave labor, were generally sympathetic to the South, while the central and western areas of the state, especially Marylanders of German origin, had stronger economic ties to the North and thus were pro-Union. In seven counties, Lincoln received not a single vote. In the presidential election of 1860 Lincoln won just 2,294 votes out of a total of 92,421, only 2.5% of the votes cast, coming in at a distant fourth place with Southern Democrat (and later Confederate general) John C. There was much less appetite for secession than elsewhere in the Southern States ( South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, Alabama Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, Tennessee) or in the border states ( Kentucky and Missouri), but Maryland was equally unsympathetic towards the potentially abolitionist position of Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln. In the leadup to the American Civil War, it became clear that the state was bitterly divided in its sympathies. Culturally, geographically and economically, Maryland found herself neither one thing nor another, a unique blend of Southern agrarianism and Northern mercantilism. Maryland, as a slave-holding border state, was deeply divided over the antebellum arguments over states' rights and the future of slavery in the Union. The approach of War History of MarylandĨth Massachusetts regiment repairing railroad bridges from Annapolis to Washington. Abolition of slavery in Maryland came before the end of the war, with a new third constitution voted approval in 1864 by a small majority of Radical Republican Unionists then controlling the nominally Democratic state. Approximately a tenth as many enlisted to "go South" and fight for the Confederacy. Monocacy was a tactical victory for the Confederate States Army but a strategic defeat, as the one-day delay inflicted on the attacking Confederates cost rebel General Jubal Early his chance to capture the Union capital of Washington, D.C.Īcross the state, some 50,000 citizens signed up for the military, with most joining the United States Army. In July 1864 the Battle of Monocacy was fought near Frederick, Maryland as part of the Valley Campaigns of 1864. The battle of Antietam, though tactically a draw, was strategically enough of a Union victory to give Lincoln the opportunity to issue, in September 1862, the Emancipation Proclamation. The single bloodiest day of combat in American military history occurred during the first major Confederate invasion of the North in the Maryland Campaign, just north above the Potomac River near Sharpsburg in Washington County, at the Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862. The first fatalities of the war happened during the Baltimore Civil War Riots of Thursday/Friday, April 18–19, 1861. Taney in "Ex parte Merryman" decision in 1861 concerning freeing John Merryman, a prominent Southern sympathizer arrested by the military. Lincoln ignored the ruling of Chief Justice Roger B. The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln (1861–1865) suspended the constitutional right of habeas corpus from Washington to Philadelphia. Hicks, despite his early sympathies for the South, helped prevent the state from seceding.īecause the state bordered the District of Columbia and the opposing factions within the state strongly desired to sway public opinion towards their respective causes, Maryland played an important role in the war. Despite some popular support for the cause of the Confederate States of America, Maryland did not secede during the Civil War. During the American Civil War (1861–1865), Maryland, a slave state, was one of the border states, straddling the South and North.
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