MDMaryland History

In April 1649 the Maryland assembly passed an act promising that no one professing belief in Jesus Christ would be troubled in the province for the way he worshipped. It was the first law of its kind in English America. It lasted five years. A Puritan assembly repealed it in 1654 and outlawed Catholicism, the faith of the family that had founded the colony and written the act. Maryland's first sixty years were an experiment in Catholic proprietorship inside a Protestant empire, and the experiment lost.

Piscataway, Nanticoke and Susquehannock country

The Piscataway, an Algonquian chiefdom whose paramount leader was called the tayac, held the western shore along the Potomac. The Nanticoke, Choptank, Assateague and Pocomoke lived across the bay on the Eastern Shore. The Susquehannock, Iroquoian speakers with palisaded towns on the river that carries their name, pressed down from the north and controlled much of the fur trade at the head of the Chesapeake. The Yaocomaco, squeezed by Susquehannock raiding, handed their village to the first English arrivals in 1634 and moved away. Within two generations disease, warfare and land pressure had broken all of these nations, and most Piscataway withdrew from the tidewater. Maryland extended state recognition to Piscataway groups only in 2012.

The Ark, the Dove, and a charter for a Catholic lord

Charles I granted the charter in 1632 to Cecilius Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, whose father George had died a few weeks before the seal went on it. The colony was named for the queen, Henrietta Maria. The charter gave the Calverts powers close to a king's, and their purpose was a place where English Catholics could hold office and worship without penalty. The ships Ark and Dove landed at St. Clement's Island on March 25, 1634, still observed as Maryland Day, and St. Mary's City served as capital for the next 61 years. Tobacco became the currency almost immediately, and with it came indentured servants and then chattel slavery.

The Calverts lost control twice. Puritan settlers defeated the proprietary forces at the Battle of the Severn in March 1655, and the Protestant Revolution of 1689 removed the family for good. The Church of England was established in 1692, the capital moved to Annapolis in 1695, and Catholics were barred from public office and public worship until the Revolution. A fourth Lord Baltimore recovered the proprietorship in 1715, after converting. The northern boundary stayed in dispute with the Penns for decades and produced armed skirmishing in the 1730s, until Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon surveyed it between 1763 and 1767. Their line became shorthand for the division between free and slave states.

The Old Line, the last signature, and the land given away

• Brooklyn, August 27, 1776. Roughly four hundred men of the Maryland regiment charged a far larger British force again and again near the Old Stone House so Washington's army could escape across the East River. Most were killed or captured, and the nickname Old Line State comes from them.
• March 1, 1781. Maryland was the last state to ratify the Articles of Confederation, refusing until states with western land claims agreed to surrender them to the new nation. Virginia gave way and the Articles took effect.
• December 23, 1783. Washington resigned his commission as commander in chief in the Maryland State House at Annapolis, then serving as the national capital. Congress ratified the Treaty of Paris in the same room on January 14, 1784.
• April 28, 1788. Maryland ratified the Constitution as the seventh state. Three years later it ceded land on the Potomac for the federal district. Virginia's share of that district was returned in 1846, so every acre of Washington today was once Maryland.

British troops scattered the American line at Bladensburg on August 24, 1814 and burned the public buildings in Washington, then turned on Baltimore. The fleet bombarded Fort McHenry through the night of September 13, and Francis Scott Key, held on a truce vessel in the harbor, wrote the verses that Congress adopted as the national anthem in 1931.

A slave state that did not leave

By 1860 Maryland held about 87,000 enslaved people and nearly 84,000 free Black residents, the largest free Black population of any state. Frederick Douglass was born in Talbot County in 1818 and escaped from Baltimore by train in 1838. Harriet Tubman was born in Dorchester County around 1822, escaped in 1849, and came back again and again for others.

Maryland never seceded, partly because Washington could not be allowed to sit inside a Confederate ring. When the 6th Massachusetts marched between rail stations in Baltimore on April 19, 1861, a crowd attacked it; four soldiers and twelve civilians died in the first bloodshed of the war. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus along the rail line and had a Baltimore officer arrested, prompting Chief Justice Roger Taney's opinion in Ex parte Merryman that the president had no such power. Lee crossed the Potomac in September 1862 and was stopped along Antietam Creek near Sharpsburg on the 17th, the bloodiest single day in American history with about 22,700 killed, wounded and missing. Lincoln used the outcome to issue the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation five days later. That proclamation did not touch loyal Maryland; the state ended slavery on its own, in a new constitution that took effect on November 1, 1864.

Steel, science, and a song repealed

The Baltimore and Ohio, chartered in 1827, was the first common carrier railroad in the country, and the first telegraph message travelled from the Capitol to Baltimore on May 24, 1844. The Great Baltimore Fire of February 7 and 8, 1904 destroyed roughly 1,500 buildings downtown. Bethlehem Steel's works at Sparrows Point grew into the largest steel mill in the world, employing around 30,000 people in the 1950s, and it shut down for good in 2012.

Federal money changed the state more than steel did. Johns Hopkins opened its university in 1876 and its hospital in 1889, the National Institutes of Health moved to Bethesda in 1938, the National Security Agency was established at Fort Meade in 1952, and NASA opened Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt in 1959. The Chesapeake Bay Bridge opened in 1952 and put the Eastern Shore within a weekend of Washington and Baltimore. The bay itself struggled: oyster harvests fell to a small fraction of their 19th century volume, and Maryland closed the striped bass fishery entirely from 1985 to 1990 to let the stock recover. In 2021 the General Assembly repealed Maryland, My Maryland as the state song, ending a long argument over lyrics written in 1861 that called Lincoln a despot and urged the state to join the Confederacy.

More Maryland, and history across the line