Maryland in the American Civil War

During the American Civil War, Maryland, a slave state, was one of the border states, straddling
the South and North. Because of its strategic location, bordering the national capital city
of Washington D.C. with its District of Columbia since 1790, and the strong desire of the opposing
factions within the state to sway public opinion towards their respective causes, Maryland played an
important role in the American Civil War (1861-1865). New President Abraham
Lincoln suspended habeas corpus in Maryland; and he dismissed the U.S. Supreme Court's "Ex
parte Merryman" decision concerning John Merryman, a prominent Southern sympathizer
from Baltimore County held in Fort McHenry (then nicknamed "Baltimore Bastille"). The Chief
Justice, but not in a decision with the other justices, had held that the suspension was
unconstitutional and would leave lasting civil and legal scars.[1] The decision was filed in US Circuit
Court for Maryland by Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, a Marylander from Frederick and
sometimes in Baltimore and protege of seventh President Andrew Jackson who had appointed him
two decades earlier.
The first fatalities of the war happened during the Baltimore Civil War Riots of Thursday/Friday, April
18 - 19th, 1861, and a year and a half later with 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, Maryland, (Washington County) at
the Battle of Antietam, on 17 September 1862. Preceded by the pivotal skirmishes at three mountain
passes to the east in the Battle of South Mountain, Antietam (also known in the South as the Battle
of Sharpsburg), though tactically a draw, was strategically enough of a Union victory in the second
year of the war to give 16th President Abraham Lincoln the opportunity to issue the Emancipation
Proclamation, which declared slaves in the rebelling states of the Confederacy (but not those in the
areas already occupied by the Union Army or in semi-loyal border slave states
like Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri) to be free.
Later, in July 1864, the Battle of Monocacy near Frederick, Maryland in the third and last major
Southern invasion, was also fought on Maryland soil. Monocacy was a tactical victory for
the Confederate States Army but a strategic defeat, as the one-day delay inflicted on the
Confederates by Federal General Lew Wallace hastily sent west on the Baltimore and Ohio
Railroad with reinforcements from Baltimore with their stout resistance cost rebel General Jubal
Early his chance to capture the Union capital of Washington, D.C. during the attack on the outlying
northwestern fortifications near Fort Stevens, witnessed by President Lincoln himself in the only time
that a Chief Executive came under hostile fire.
Across the state, nearly 85,000 citizens signed up for the military, with most joining the Union Army.
Approximately one third as many enlisted to "go South" and fight for the Confederacy. The most
prominent Maryland leaders and officers during the Civil War included Governor Thomas H.
Hickswho, despite his early sympathies for the South, helped prevent the state from seceding, and
Confederate Brigadier General George H. Steuart, who was a noted brigade commander
under Robert E. Lee in the Army of Northern Virginia.
Before the end of the war would bring the abolition of slavery in the State of Maryland, with a new
third constitution voted approval in 1864 by a small majority of Radical Republican Unionists then
controlling the nominally Democratic state. Animosity against Lincoln would remain, and
Marylander John Wilkes Booth would assassinate President Lincoln on April 14, 1865, crying "sic
semper tyrannis" the Virginia state motto as he did so in Washington's Ford's Theater, then fleeing
and hiding in southern Maryland for a week hunted by Federal troops before slipping across the
Potomac and later shot in a northern Virginia barn.