Holding the Line in Maryland

On Oct. 21, 1863, an indignant delegation of slaveholders from St. Mary’s County, Md., on the western shore of Chesapeake Bay just across the Potomac River from Virginia, confronted President Abraham Lincoln at the White House. They demanded that he suspend recruiting efforts aimed at their slaves. The presence of “armed colored troops” was “frightening quiet people, and producing great confusion,” they told him. Lincoln listened sympathetically to the grievances voiced by these alleged Union supporters; he did not, he told them, want the Army behaving in “any rude or ungentlemanly manner.”

After the meeting, Lincoln telegraphed Maj. Gen. Robert C. Schenck, a once and future Ohio politician, to find out why his visitors were so upset. Schenck commanded the Eighth Corps of the Union Army, which had military jurisdiction in Maryland.

The delegation from St. Mary’s County had “grossly misrepresented matters,” Schenck insisted. He took pains to defend Col. William Birney, whose regiment of black soldiers had shown “good discipline” and “harmed no one.” In fact, Schenck reported, the only “disorder or violence” occurred when John A. Sothoron and his son, both “rabid secessionists,” shot and killed Lt. Eben White, an officer in the Seventh United States Colored Infantry. The catalyst for this tragedy was the fear among slaveholders “that their slaves might leave them.”

Schenck had initiated black recruitment under orders from the War Department, which requisitioned more manpower after Robert E. Lee’s summertime invasion of Pennsylvania showed Baltimore’s and Washington’s potential vulnerability to Confederate attack. Schenck appointed Birney, son of the abolitionist James G. Birney, to lead the recruiting drive in Maryland.

Colonel Birney found Maryland slaveholders willfully blind: “Nine owners out of ten will insist upon it that their slaves are much attached to them and would not leave unless enticed or forced away,” he noted. “My conviction is that this is a delusion. I have yet to see a slave of this kind. If their families could be cared for or taken with them, the whole slave population of Maryland would make its exodus to Washington.”

Maryland, the only state to share a land border with the nation’s capital, ostensibly had a pro-Union majority, but Confederate sympathies ran strong along the lower Chesapeake. There especially, whites clung to slavery and vehemently opposed black recruitment.

So Lincoln faced a quandary. The Emancipation Proclamation, issued in January, specified that black soldiers would be welcomed into the Union Army. Many did indeed enlist and fight, and the president had commended them in his widely circulated letter to James C. Conkling, issued in late August.

Still, Lincoln faulted Birney. According to Lincoln’s secretary John Hay, the president lamented that Birney would “take a squad of soldiers into a neighborhood, & carry off into the army all the able-bodied darkies they can find without asking master or slave to consent.” Schenck, he complained, “loves a fight for its own sake, better than I do.” The killing of Lieutenant White, Lincoln coldly wrote to Schenck, “is a specimen of what I would avoid. It seems to me we could send white men to recruit better than to send negroes, and thus inaugerate homicides on punctillio.”

Lincoln’s position was less callous than it may appear. Maryland was exempt from the Emancipation Proclamation. Instead, the president eagerly hoped that the state might voluntarily emancipate its slaves. So he tried to cultivate Maryland’s governor, Augustus Bradford, a “Conservative Unionist” who pretended to favor gradual emancipation with compensation to slaveholders, but who had long been pro-slavery. Lincoln also had to take into account the politically powerful Francis Preston Blair family – one of whom, Montgomery Blair, was a member of Lincoln’s cabinet who wanted freed blacks colonized overseas. Making Maryland a free state, Lincoln judged, meant keeping Bradford and the Blairs happy.

Bradford was keen to stop black recruitment in his still somewhat-enslaved state. Through letters and personal interviews, he kept the pressure on Lincoln to stop Birney’s enlistment of slaves along Chesapeake Bay’s many rivers and estuaries. “No policy adopted by the Government since the Commencement of the Rebellion,” he huffed in one letter to the president, “has ever awakened such unequivocal condemnation.” Enlistment of free blacks already had “left our community almost destitute of agricultural labor” — and slave recruitment was “fast stripping us of the little that is left.”

Bradford claimed that most of the state’s white residents were “entirely loyal,” and that slaveholders were “among the most loyal.” The governor insisted that the St. Michaels District in Talbot County, where Frederick Douglass lived as a youngster, was famous “for its early and inflexible loyalty.”

But Birney’s recruiter in Talbot County told a different story. He had enlisted 400 slaves and free blacks, and he expected that continued efforts would yield as many as 300 more. “The loyal almost universally approve their enlistment,” he noted, but “rebel sympathisers” tried to obstruct the process. Other Birney recruiters reported that slaves were “anxious to fight for the country,” but that slave masters attempted to prevent them from doing so.

Birney’s Fourth United States Colored Infantry had paraded through the streets of Baltimore in late September. Nothing of the sort had ever before occurred. Preceded by a regimental band and attired in crisp blue uniforms with shining brass buttons, the newly minted soldiers thrilled black onlookers. But Maryland slaveholders were appalled at this seeming defiance of racial protocol. And Governor Bradford vented his distress to Lincoln.

Lincoln tried to mollify Bradford. In early October he suspended the recruitment in Maryland of slaves with “loyal” owners for 30 days. And following a suggestion from Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, Lincoln authorized a system in which loyal owners who allowed their slaves to enlist might receive “just compensation.” But both overtures were shrouded with ambiguity. It would be difficult to identify “loyal” owners, assuming that they existed. And there was scant likelihood that Congress would compensate these presumed loyalists.

Bradford held out for more. If Lincoln would suspend all enlistments “without the owner’s consent,” the governor promised, “the good will of our people toward the Government would be vastly promoted and the success of state constitutional emancipation secured.” In other words, white Marylanders might end slavery in their state if the federal recruitment campaign were closed down. They expected to control and limit the effects of emancipation so long as they could manage it their own way. But they dreaded an abolitionist like Birney.

Lincoln always viewed situations through a political prism. He gave priority to Maryland’s upcoming November election for members of Congress and the state assembly, which he hoped might open the door to state-sponsored emancipation. He feared that “forcible negro enlistments” would hurt the candidacies of those who wanted to rid the state of slavery.

A week before the election, Schenck announced that he would assign federal soldiers to the polls, with orders to arrest any “evil disposed persons” who might disrupt the voting. Schenck also specified that election judges must require all would-be voters to swear an oath of allegiance to the United States. Bradford denounced Schenck’s “extraordinary order” and demanded that Lincoln countermand any such “offensive discrimination against our State.”

But this time Lincoln pushed back. The president seconded Schenck’s efforts “to secure peace and good order at the polls” and protect Union supporters in places where they might not otherwise consider it safe to vote. Lincoln also defended the loyalty oath. Lincoln said nothing about those “loyal men” in Maryland who were barred from voting by racial barriers — many of whom still were enslaved. That matter would not arise until the postwar era.

In the run up to the election “Unconditional Unionists,” led by the flamboyant former congressman Henry Winter Davis, launched the most withering political campaign against slavery ever to take place in a slave state. They blamed slaveholding rebels for having made the reckless and suicidal decision to go to war. And they urged Maryland’s nonslaveholders to embrace “the policy of lightening the burden of the white man by allowing the negro to fight for his own Emancipation.” Bradford’s “Conservative Unionists” pinned their hopes on support from proslavery Democrats and outright secessionists, Davis charged, and he likewise depicted the Blairs as false friends of emancipation.

Aided by Schenck’s vigilance at the polls, which sharply curtailed voting among pro-Confederate bitter-enders, Unconditional Unionists won 57 of the 96 seats in the assembly, and four of the five congressional contests. The increasingly radical Davis won back his House seat from Baltimore. Hay, who reported having been “very anxious” as he awaited the election results at the White House, was relieved to note in his diary: “Maryland all right.”

During the year to come, Maryland finally did abolish slavery. The new legislature called a state constitutional convention, which was elected in April 1864 and met from then until September. Its proceedings were disrupted in July by a Confederate invasion across the Potomac, led by Jubal Early. But the convention finally rewrote the state constitution so as to end slavery immediately, without compensation. The required popular referendum, held in October 1864, approved the new constitution by the narrowest of margins, 375 votes out of 60,000 cast. Continued military oversight of the voting process gave supporters of emancipation a chance, and votes from Maryland’s soldiers put the referendum over the top.

Maryland’s action appeared to vindicate Lincoln’s approach. But Colonel Birney and General Schenck did much to shape the result, whether or not Lincoln appreciated their efforts. Birney ultimately raised seven black regiments in Maryland and led them into battle. In the judgment of historian Barbara Fields, “full-scale recruitment put an end to slavery in Maryland.” By enabling slaves to reject the unlimited authority that slaveholders exercised over them, the Army made it impossible to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. In October 1864, a bare majority of white Marylanders bowed to that new reality.

Follow Disunion at twitter.com/NYTcivilwar or join us on Facebook.

---

Sources: William C. Harris, “Lincoln and the Border States: Preserving the Union”; Edward G. Longacre, “A Regiment of Slaves: The 4th United States Colored Infantry, 1863-1865”; Ira Berlin, ed., “Free At Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War”; United States War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series 3, Vol. 3; Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger, “Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay”; Barbara Jeanne Fields, “Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland During the Nineteenth Century”; Baltimore American, Sept. 21, Oct. 29 and Nov. 5, 1863; Julie Sears, “Birney’s Crusade: The Struggle for Emancipation Through Enlistment in Maryland” (senior essay, History Department, The College of New Jersey, 2012).

---

Daniel W. Crofts is the author of the forthcoming “Lincoln’s Plea for Peace: The Would-Be Thirteenth Amendment and the Coming of the Civil War.”