Civil War Maryland: Stories from the Old Line State

INTRODUCTION

I have always been fascinated with the Civil War. I grew up in the Midwest and always wanted to see and walk the places where Americans wearing blue and gray fought each other generations before I was born. When I moved to Maryland in 1993, I was delighted to find that all the major battlefields and sites in the eastern theatre of the war that I had read about were a couple of hours’ drive away. I spent as many weekends as I could immersed in the war.

One of my first forays was to the Gettysburg battlefield. As I went through the National Cemetery with tourists from all over the country, the guide pointed out how the Union dead had been interred according to their state of origin. Someone in the group, probably from the Old Line State, asked why there were so few Marylanders’ graves. The guide asked how many in our group were from Maryland. About ten hands shot up. What side did Maryland fight on in the war? he asked. For a moment there were blank stares, and then someone blurted out, Both!

I knew this, of course, from my reading, but it was only after many more years of learning about the state’s role in the war and talking to native Marylanders that I came to realize what that meant. Fighting on both sides of our great national conflict; with communities, even families, split down the middle; questions about whether Maryland is a Northern or a Southern state; and disagreements about the war that can still be heard 140 years after the fact—that’s the part of living in Maryland I find most intriguing.

How did this statewide trauma come about? One common explanation is economics and Maryland’s unique geographical position. Maryland was founded as a planter colony, and tobacco became the principal cash crop. In this, Maryland resembled Virginia more than any other colony, and strong economic and social ties grew between them as trade developed and families intermarried. Another economic factor was slavery, which entered Maryland in its earliest days. From its founding until well into the nineteenth century, Maryland was dominated by a Tidewater plantation economy based on ownership of land and slaves. Besides their land, slaves were the planters’ main form of capital, amounting to millions of dollars.

Even though Maryland was below the Mason-Dixon line, and therefore in the eyes of many was part of the upper South, the term that best describes Maryland is the middle. Whether as one of the middle colonies or as a mid-Atlantic state, Maryland’s proximity to the North meant that it would be influenced from that direction as well. And that influence would gather force as industry expanded, the railroads came and Baltimore became a major port, sending its clipper ships around the world. Newer European immigrants settled vast portions of the western part of the state and didn’t grow tobacco, but grew wheat, oats and corn instead on smaller landholdings. These new Marylanders didn’t want or need slaves, and they felt no kinship with the Tidewater slaveholders.

Southern Maryland and the Eastern Shore were dominated by the planter culture and were Southern in their economic, social and political leanings. The western portion of the state contained mostly small farmers, with economic and family ties closer to Pennsylvania and other parts of the North. Baltimore was a commercial city, with important connections to Northern commerce, but with many economic and social ties to the South. The city’s loyalties were split. In short, Maryland on the brink of the Civil War was the middle ground, looking both North and South.

Then came the 1860 election and the secession crisis that followed. There were four candidates for president that year. The Democrats had split into two separate factions along North-South lines and each faction ran its own candidate. The popular vote in Maryland went heavily for John Breckinridge, the Southern Democratic candidate. Abraham Lincoln received the fewest votes among the four candidates—in some Maryland counties, Lincoln received less than five votes; and in one county (Worcester), he received none.¹

It is difficult to gauge just how strong secession feelings were in the state, since no referendum was ever held, as there had been in Virginia. Far more Marylanders ultimately fought for the North than for the South, but whether this was an expression of the sentiments of the silent majority or dictated by later events is hard to determine. The runner-up in the 1860 presidential popular vote in Maryland was John Bell of the Constitutional Union Party, a new party that stood for little more than the status quo. Perhaps it is fair to say that the status quo was exactly what Marylanders preferred.

But events soon moved in an ominous direction, and the status quo didn’t hold. South Carolina seceded in December 1860, and the Deep South followed. Maryland, with its strong ties to Virginia, more or less waited to see what its sister state across the Potomac would do. If Virginia hadn’t left the Union, secession sentiment in Maryland might have died out fairly quickly.

Soon shots were fired at Fort Sumter and Virginia seceded. The war came, causing Marylanders to take sides or attempt to remain neutral. For the duration of the war, the state would be occupied by Federal troops, sent by a government that deeply distrusted the loyalty of many Marylanders.

There is one other geographical piece of the puzzle that was probably the deciding element sealing Maryland’s fate during the sectional crisis—Washington, D.C. If the nation’s capital and Maryland had not been positioned between the seceding states and the North, perhaps the state’s fate would have been different. But the Federal government was determined to defend Washington, whatever the cost.

And so, if one accepts the proposition that geography ultimately determined Maryland’s fate, then the people most responsible for it are none other than George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Their dinner meeting in New York in June 1790, at which Jefferson and Madison agreed to Hamilton’s plan for the federal government to assume the debts of the states in exchange for moving the federal capital to the banks of the Potomac, was the determining event.²

CASUALTIES

The despot’s heal is on thy shore,

Maryland!

His torch is at thy temple door,

Maryland!

Avenge the patriotic gore

That flecked the streets of Baltimore

And be the battle queen of yore,

Maryland, My Maryland!

—James Ryder Randall, 1861

Civil wars are notoriously bloody affairs. It has been estimated that between six hundred thousand and seven hundred thousand soldiers and sailors died in America’s Civil War, more than in all of its other conflicts from the War of Independence to Vietnam combined.¹ In addition, well over four hundred thousand combatants were wounded but survived. It is unlikely that we will ever know how many civilians were killed or wounded in the war.

In our own time, daily images of terrorism and all-too-familiar terms such as collateral damage and body counts have perhaps inured us to some of the horrors of war. But nineteenth-century military precepts dictated that civilian casualties should be a rarity and were not a part of civilized warfare. That was to change in 1861, as it had in previous internecine conflicts such as the English Civil War and the Thirty Years’ War in Germany.

It has been stated so often that it is now accepted truth that the first casualties of the Civil War occurred in Maryland a few days after the fall of Fort Sumter. Common wisdom has it that the Fort Sumter bombardment produced no casualties. Yet according to the National Park Service, there were in fact casualties at Sumter. Though no one was killed or wounded during the actual bombardment on April 12–13, 1861, one Federal soldier was killed and three were wounded when a cannon exploded while firing a salute during the evacuation of the fort on April 14.² And there are unconfirmed reports of at least one Confederate death. Surely these casualties must be counted as a direct result of the bombardment, and therefore were Civil War casualties predating the events in Maryland.

But could a Marylander have been one of the casualties at Sumter? There is no evidence that anyone from Maryland was among the killed or wounded, but there were plenty of Marylanders in Charleston during the bombardment. After South Carolina seceded in December 1860, the state sent recruiting officers to Baltimore. They enlisted five hundred men and sent them by ship to Charleston, where they were assigned to Lucas’s (Infantry) Battalion of South Carolina and Rhett’s First South Carolina Artillery in Charleston Harbor. Thus, the odds are that some of those Marylanders took part in the bombardment. In addition, there were many Maryland soldiers in the Fort Sumter Federal garrison.³

In any event, it is an undeniable fact that the first civilian casualties of the war occurred in Maryland. And the events of April 18–19, 1861, in Baltimore would, in many ways, seal Maryland’s fate as the secession crisis unfolded and the country slipped into war.

After Fort Sumter surrendered, Lincoln issued a Proclamation of Insurrection and called on the states’ governors to raise seventy-five thousand ninety-day volunteer troops to reinforce Washington and assist with putting down the rebellion. This action did much to inflame anti-Union sentiment in the upper South, particularly in Virginia and Maryland, but did the president have any choice?

In 1861, the standing army of the United States consisted of only about sixteen thousand men, most of whom were stationed at faraway frontier posts west of the Mississippi or working on engineering projects around the country. The War Department knew it would take considerable time to redeploy and concentrate the regular army from hundreds of stations in the states and territories. The navy was even more scattered. Many ships and sailors were posted on land or sea duty thousands of miles away. And it was unknown how many soldiers and sailors of Southern origin were prepared to fight for the Union.⁴

The Lincoln administration also knew that if the states of the upper South (again, primarily Virginia and Maryland) seceded, the Union was in serious trouble. How would it be possible to maintain the government and rally the country to counter the rebellion if the nation’s capital were completely surrounded by seceding states? There were few soldiers in Washington itself. Congress had adjourned and was not scheduled to reconvene until the fall. How could congressmen get to the capital if it were cut off from the rest of the country? And if either Virginia or Maryland—or both—left the Union, what would prevent a secessionist army from marching into Washington?

Adding to the sense of urgency was another stark reality—it would take time to mobilize the requisitioned volunteer regiments, equip them and send them on their way to the capital. And if those regiments were to arrive quickly to support the government, they would have to travel by rail. All of the railroads entering Washington from the North passed through Maryland, and all but one passed through Baltimore.

And then the other shoe dropped. On April 17, Virginia adopted an ordinance of secession. One of the commonwealth’s first acts was to send militia to Harper’s Ferry to seize the Federal armory with its cache of weapons and the machinery for making more. Harper’s Ferry was also the point where the Baltimore and Ohio (B&O) Railroad entered Maryland from the West. Virginia’s troops temporarily stopped the B&O’s trains from reaching Washington.⁵ Maryland secessionists had been waiting to see what action Virginia would take. Once secession became a reality in Virginia, pro-secessionist Marylanders began organizing to follow suit.

The first state to offer troops to the Lincoln administration was Minnesota, for the serendipitous reason that the state’s governor happened to be in Washington when Lincoln announced his call for volunteers.⁶ But Minnesota was over a thousand miles away. Clearly, if the Federal government were to survive, immediate help would have to come from loyal states closer to the capital.

On April 18, a troop of Pennsylvania volunteers entered Maryland. Approximately 550 soldiers, including the Washington Artillerists and National Light Infantry from Pottsville, had left Harrisburg and arrived in Baltimore at the