Maryland Getaway
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Maryland’s Heritage
Introduction:
This is being written in response to something an anonymous commenter included regarding my story titled ‘Wife Gets What She wants’. He said he had friends who all referred to Maryland as a ‘Yankee State’. I wanted to address that remark.
Well I am a Yankee in the ‘American’ sense, but I’m not precisely a Yankee, and neither are most Marylanders, at least in the more historic use of the word. I doubt if the anonymous commenter ever reads this, but like so many penmen on Literotica say, I’ve written this strictly for my pleasure so you can take it for what it’s worth. Hey, it’s free isn’t it?
First, I am a Marylander born and bred. I was raised on the Eastern Shore, have relatives in southern Maryland, and I now live in western Maryland. In fact almost all my stories are rooted in Maryland in some way.
Maryland was begun in 1634, and was very much a part of the ‘Terrible Transformation’ that was institutionalized with ‘Bacon’s Rebellion’ in Virginia in the last half of the 1600’s. It was that event that triggered the awful shift from generalized forced labor to African slavery.
Southern culture is very much a by-product of climate. The South has a humid-subtropical climate, long hot humid summers and relatively short wet winters. That climate line runs right through Maryland, it literally runs through the city of Baltimore.
The HST traditional money crops have been tobacco, rice, sugarcane, and cotton. North of Baltimore money crops are more associated with the humid-continental climate. Beginning in the mid 1700’s corn and wheat started to replace tobacco as the staple crops north of Baltimore.
Now those southern crops were labor intensive, they needed large numbers of unskilled workers, whereas the northern crops like corn and wheat, being labor extensive, did not need a large reliable supply of ‘regulated’ laborers. Points south and east of Baltimore were tobacco country.
Southern Maryland is still a major tobacco grower. Most of their tobacco I’m told is shipped to Europe. Southern Maryland is where our state began.
Prior to the 1840’s Maryland was overwhelmingly Scottish and Anglo-Saxon, but the famine in Ireland and the political discord in Germany led to massive immigration. Those new settlers moved to the more northerly sections of Maryland. Whether those new settlers had any affection for black people I don’t know, but they had a profound dislike of slavery. North-central Maryland became one of the core areas of the Methodist church, one of the key engines of the abolitionist movement, yet strong southern sympathies remained, sympathies strong enough to produce several CSA brigades. So much for ethnic change.
In one northern Maryland town they found an old ‘sub-station’, a hideout, for the ‘underground railroad’. A few blocks away when they tore down an old log cabin they found an old Confederate uniform stuffed in one of the walls. Was the owner of the ‘hide out a Yankee? Probably. Was the wearer of the uniform a Rebel? Probably. They lived together in the same town, talk about a ‘Brothers’ War’.
On an economic level, as the tobacco industry withered north of Maryland the need for ‘regulated’ labor declined. The surplus population was often sold south. Remember Scarlett O’Hara, ‘I’ll sell you south. I swear I will.’
With the near complete end of the ‘African trade’ a new industry emerged. Numerous Maryland farms became ‘breeding’ stations. The custom was if a woman could produce ten live babies in ten years she was set free. This was one of the more unpleasant aspects of the nation’s ‘peculiar institution’, and it almost that never makes it to the textbooks. It was considered an economic mainstay in parts of Maryland. I guess it’s something we’d all like to forget.
Maryland has been blessed, and cursed, by its willingness to donate territory for the creation of the national capital. In April 1861 one of the very first acts of Lincoln’s administration was to declare martial law in Maryland and Delaware. Annapolis, Maryland’s capital, was immediately occupied by Federal troops. The Maryland state government was suspended, hence Maryland never voted on secession. The mayor of Baltimore, the nation’s second largest city in 1861, and the governor of the state were arrested and taken to a prison in Massachusetts. Roger P. Taney, then chief justice of the Supreme Court apparently slipped through Lincoln’s grasp.
Though everyone looks to Charleston, South Carolina and the bombardment of Fort Sumter as the place where the war began, and the place where the first fatality occurred, that is a misnomer. In late April 1861 there were five railways in and out of Baltimore, but no line connected Washington D.C. directly with points north. The city fathers of Baltimore, being ever environmentally conscious, had passed an ordinance forbidding the use of steam engines, railway engines, in the central city. Soldiers coming south had to move into Baltimore, detrain, march through the city, and retrain at a site further west. That’s what happened in April 1861.
In that month Massachusetts soldiers had to pass through Baltimore to get to Washington to garrison that city. The citizens of Baltimore tried to prevent their movement through town. The Massachusetts men fired on Baltimore’s citizens inflicting the first ‘combat’ fatalities of the war right in, that’s right, Maryland.
In Louisiana a Maryland school teacher read of the incident and wrote a song decrying the assault. Throughout the South the shots fired in Baltimore were called the ‘Baltimore Massacre’ in the North it was the ‘Baltimore Riot’. Regardless, James Ryder Randall’s tune is now Maryland’s state song. The opening line is ‘The despots’ heel is on thy shore…’ The despot referred to is the Massachusetts men who fired on the people of Baltimore. Look it up. Southerners compared those first shots to the 1775 shots fired at Lexington and Concord- the first shots for freedom, southern freedom in this sense. The first combat fatalities of the ‘War Between the States’ occurred when northern soldiers shot Baltimore citizens.
During the war nine, though only eight ever have been officially recognized, Maryland brigades were raised to fight for the CSA, eleven were raised for the North. The one unrecognized Maryland brigade was sent to Florida where the casualties from disease were so high the brigade was disbanded and its manpower shifted to other units. Eight or nine, it’s not a bad number considering they were in a state under martial law and raised right under the noses of the Union army.
Maryland was a proprietary colony begun by the Calvert family. Though George Calvert never lived to see Maryland established, his coat of arms bore an insignia for a barricade he assaulted and captured on behalf of King James I, the insignia looks something like a checkerboard. His mother had her own noble insignia, a buttoned, or buttony cross, sometimes it’s called the Graceland Cross. Southern brigades stitched the Graceland Cross to their battle flags, northerners used the barricade insignia. Marylanders who served in Virginia or North Carolina brigades, and there were several hundred, would stitch a Graceland Cross on the sleeves of their jackets.
In 1867, after the war, southern and northern veterans tried to reconcile. One of the things they did was create the current Maryland flag. If you look at Maryland’s flag you’ll see the Graceland Cross and the symbol of the barricade, the barricade is in the upper left and lower right, the cross is in the lower left and upper right. Originally the cross was in the upper left, but in 1881 the barricade took its place, the assumption being since the North won the war they should get the place of most high honor on the flag. If however any Marylander can show they have an ancestor who fought for the South they can still fly the flag with the cross in the upper left hand. The Maryland flag is a relic of the C
ivil War. We look at the flags of some southern states and see the ‘Stars and Bars’ as proof of their respect for their history. Maryland’s state flag does the same. Regrettably no one seems to remember.
Baltimore has an interesting place in civil war history. If anyone were to visit Baltimore today they might take note of the cannons in the inner harbor atop Federal Hill. They point in the direction of the city. The army of occupation in 1861 was commanded by Benjamin Butler, and he had his ideas. Of course, the cannons were aimed at the city to help insure ‘domestic tranquility’. Even so the women of the city weren’t as accommodating as Butler wanted so he decreed in 1861 that any woman in Baltimore not suitably polite to union soldiers would be treated as a ‘woman of the town’. A year later he decreed the same in New Orleans. Of course the decree in New Orleans was greeted with howls of protest, it was as though the same protests in Baltimore a year earlier had been, and continue to be either forgotten or overlooked, yet the edict for New Orleans makes the textbooks.
Beginning in 1861 and continuing up until 1864 when Grant assumed overall military command in the North Baltimore was a major collection point and delivery center for supplies to the Army of Northern Virginia. Whole wagon trains of foodstuffs and munitions were transported from Baltimore almost directly to Lee’s troops up until 1864. This was often accomplished right in front of the Union army. The wagon masters used an ingenious trick, they lied to the Union officials.
Baltimore’s Fort McHenry was a Union prison camp during the war, albeit more a resort when compared to the camp in Elmira, New York or the camp at Point Lookout in southern Maryland. As late as the middle 1960’s Johns Hopkins Hospital, today considered the premier medical institute in the world, had segregated facilities. General Joseph Johnston is buried in Baltimore Cemetery, and John Wilkes Booth, though in an unmarked but well identified grave, is in Greenmount Cemetery. No one else would take Booth’s body. One of Baltimore’s most beautiful parks is name ‘Robert E, Lee Park’.
Let’s skip ahead one hundred years to 1961. In the late 1950’s several dozen African nations gained their independence. In 1960 they were all welcomed into the United Nations. At that time young President Kennedy decided to invite them to Washington, they agreed to visit. Interstate 95 was not yet constructed so the delegates traveled down Maryland’s Pulaski Highway, at the time a state of the art dual highway. The delegates decided to stop for lunch in Maryland. What happened is a matter of historical record, of course no one got fed, not in Maryland they didn’t. It made international news, and it was used by the USSR to point up America’s racial past. Of course, while the nation was attuned to Alabama and Mississippi during those tumultuous years the FBI was just as busy in Maryland. After all, the country couldn’t permit the shame of racism to exist on the very doorstep of the capital.
Maryland has a thirty percent minority population. There are more people of African ancestry in Maryland, as a percent of population, than in any other state. That plus the ready availability of so many excellent Federal jobs makes most of central Maryland profoundly Democratic.
I suppose I could go on, but I think my anonymous critic gets the message. Maryland is a little more complicated than his frothy US History textbook or his somewhat less well informed friends described.
One last note, being from the Eastern Shore I have numerous stories I could retell, but one story comes to mind. The ‘old people’, my old relatives used to complain how our family was cheated after ‘the war’. It seemed that Lincoln, presumably to keep the lid on, promised Maryland’s slave-owners full compensation for slaves if slavery were to ever end. When the war ended the US Congress quietly let that little tidbit slide under the table. The old people in my family never forgot. If they were alive today, I’m sure they’d want reparations.
Was and is Maryland a southern state. It’s really a matter of conjecture, was or is Missouri or even the neutral claiming Kentucky? For a lot of people in Maryland it’s a matter of history. By the way I fly my Maryland flag the ‘old way’.
In conclusion:
What I’ve written here is definitely bankable. Do I care if you like my stories? Sure I care. I prefer favorable comments to the unfavorable. Mostly I like honest remarks, remarks I can use. Just do me one favor. Don’t shit on my state. I mean does a soldier shit in another soldier’s foxhole?
Eisley
- 03.05.2020
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