Maryland Women in the Civil War: Unionists, Rebels, Slaves & Spies

By Claudia Floyd

This lively Civil War history chronicles the harrowing and heroic lives of Maryland women caught in the bloody conflict.
 
On July 9, 1864, young Mamie Tyler crouched in a cellar as Union sharpshooters above traded volleys with Confederate forces. After six excruciating hours, she emerged to nurse the wounded from the Battle of Monocacy. This was life in a border state, and the terrifying reality for the women of Maryland, during the Civil War. Drawing on letters and memoirs, author Claudia Floyd relates how Mamie and so many other women survived the war and contributed to the cause of their chosen side.
 
Western Maryland experienced some of the worst carnage of the war, and women turned their homes into hospitals for the wounded of Antietam, South Mountain and Gettysburg. In Baltimore, secessionists such as Hetty Carry fled arrest by Union troops. The Eastern Shore's Anna Ella Carroll plotted military strategy for the Union, and Harriet Tubman led hundreds of slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad. These and other stories present a fascinating and nuanced portrait of Maryland women in the Civil War.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9781625840196

Claudia Floyd

Claudia Floyd is the author of "Maryland Women in the Civil War: Unionists, Rebels, Slaves & Spies" (The History Press, 2013). She is a recently retired professor of history at Stevenson University. Currently she volunteers at Monocacy National Battlefield and is an active member of the Society of Women and the Civil War. Floyd earned an MLA from Johns Hopkins University, and a PhD from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She is a resident of Baltimore, Maryland.

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Introduction

We are caged birds it is true, yet we can chirp a little and sing too. I use to think such birds were foolish and ought to beat themselves against the bars of their cage and not sing to please their captors, but I find now it was for their own pleasure and comfort that they did—and so do we for ours.

—Elizabeth Phoebe Key Howard, January 1862¹

Charles Howard, son of Baltimore’s Revolutionary War hero, facing an interminable sentence as a political prisoner in Boston’s Fort Warren, searched for consolation in the passage that his wife Elizabeth penned (above) in her most recent letter. Doubtless he pondered the similarities between their two conditions—he deprived of freedom without the benefit of due process and she trapped in Union-occupied Baltimore as an infamous secessionist, subject to midnight searches, arbitrary arrest and frequent harassment from the military authorities. The stakes could hardly have been higher for Elizabeth; two of her immediate family members were locked away in a Northern federal prison while five of her sons were fighting for the Confederacy. It is little wonder that she joined Baltimore’s underground community of Southern sympathizers, an activist minority known for intense dedication to the cause and behavior that was considered treasonous and subversive to the Union efforts. While many Maryland women became participants on both sides of the conflict, the risks and consequences of Confederate resistance induced some females to react only when they, their families or their friends were directly threatened. For other women, the war was just a backdrop for their busy lives. They paid little attention and had scant information on a cruel and savage conflict they considered beyond their control and out of the sphere that nature intended for those of their gender.

But for most of Maryland’s females, the war could not be ignored. Civilians had to adapt to four years of continuous Union occupation, three major Confederate invasions and the increasingly destructive and intrusive tactics employed by the belligerents. Both armies used the land corridor between Baltimore and Cumberland to transport troops, supplies and POWs through the farms, small towns and cities. Women at home endured the agonizing wait as sons, husbands, brothers and fathers marched off to battle, some heading south to Virginia while others enlisted in the burgeoning ranks of the Union army. Civilians responded with horror and shame to the Pratt Street Riot in Baltimore in April 1861 and to the assassination of the president four years later, bemoaning the state’s connection to the appalling violence of these bookends of the war. While the conflict raged around them, Maryland women saw their existing social structure unravel as slavery was first threatened and then abolished. They witnessed and participated in the raging debates over ideology, the intentions of the Founding Fathers and the identity of a state that was rapidly modernizing but still dependent on compulsory labor. The physical and psychological toll of the Civil War was exacerbated by the additional burden of maintaining some semblance of normalcy for their children while chaos and danger swirled around them.

Maryland’s females responded to the conflict through their involvement in a variety of activities, including joining the Sanitary and Christian Commissions to aid the Union army. The volunteers for the U.S. Sanitary Commission were concerned with the health and medical needs of the soldiers, while the Christian Commission sought to promote their material and spiritual welfare. Many women staffed fairs to raise money and visited political prisoners or POWs. The more adventurous engaged in smuggling contraband across the Potomac and down the Chesapeake Bay, harboring fugitives, becoming spies or nursing the wounded from the cornfields of Sharpsburg, the passes of South Mountain and the banks of the Monocacy River. Confederate-sympathizing women were incarcerated for offenses of all sorts, some genuine and others trumped up, but all regarded as some form of treason. They found themselves thrown into the Baltimore jail, Fort McHenry, the Old Capitol Prison and other penal institutions, treated as common criminals. The Union occupiers who were seeking active secessionists did not discriminate on the basis of race, class or religious affiliation. Nuns in Baltimore and the Sisters of Charity in Emmitsburg were spied upon for their actions, the state’s social elite contained a disproportionate share of the Confederate sympathizers (a number of whom were jailed) and both sides in the conflict at times threatened the rights and safety of the state’s African-Americans, both free and enslaved.

Fort McHenry served as temporary quarters for arrested secessionists. Library of Congress.

Women who made the decision to leave the relative security of home and join the fight were influenced by both personal considerations and the environment in which they operated. When the conflict began, it was apparent to state residents that they were vulnerable to invasion from the north over the Mason-Dixon line that separated them from Pennsylvania and from the south over the Potomac River. As a border state, Maryland was a highly coveted prize, courted by both the newly formed Confederacy and the Lincoln administration. Because it surrounded the District of Columbia on three sides (with Virginia on the fourth), the Union authorities—both civilian and military—knew they could not afford to allow Maryland to slip out of their grasp. The state’s pivotal position on the Chesapeake Bay made it a lifeline between the nation and international trade and between the two sections of the war. As headquarters of the B&O Railroad and the C&O Canal, it connected east with west in commercial traffic important to the economies of the states involved in the Civil War and to the logistics of the movement of troops and supplies. Baltimore, as the third most populous city in the nation and the largest manufacturing center in the South, was an invaluable asset. Maryland’s strategic position and its resources, coupled with the existence of a ferocious secessionist minority in its midst, led to a Union seizure of the state, beginning with Annapolis in April 1861.²

1861 Schaus map showing the Eastern Theater of the war. Note the Chesapeake Bay and the Appalachian Mountains. Geographicus, PD-US.

Due to its border location and its proximity to the nation’s capital, Maryland was ground zero for a series of ever more pervasive abridgments of civil liberties, originating with the suspension of habeas corpus in 1861, an action without precedent by a sitting president of the United States. Civilians on both sides watched the extensive construction of camps, fortifications and batteries in the state; the buildup of a strong military presence on the land and in the waters of the bay; and the installation within the first year of the war of a commander of the Middle Department of the U.S. Army, encompassing several states and headquartered in Baltimore. The Union occupation accentuated the polarization of the population, creating an us versus them mentality and dividing families and neighbors based on their partisan affiliations. Women who chose to defy the authorities and contribute to the Confederate cause lived in an atmosphere pervaded by fear as they risked searches and seizures, exile to the South and even imprisonment. Such apprehension was no illusion; nearly one third of civilian arrests by military authorities in 1861 were in Maryland, with women adding to the total.³

Many female residents sensed that the uncertainty and instability engendered by the Civil War would inevitably lead to the downfall of a unique social system. The status of slavery in Maryland at the beginning of the conflict was starkly different from that found elsewhere. No other border state approached Maryland in either the absolute or the relative size of its free black population. There were nearly as many free blacks as there were slaves at the onset of the war, a very unusual circumstance in comparison with other border states such as Missouri, Kentucky and Tennessee, all of which recorded slave percentages of over 95 percent of the total black population.⁴ The coexistence of two fundamentally incompatible systems of labor, both involving the same race, complicated the picture for all involved. The very existence of large and productive free black communities, particularly in Baltimore City and County, undermined the ideological underpinnings of slavery and led to further efforts to restrict the lives of those emancipated. The presence of slaves in one’s household or on one’s farm did not necessarily distinguish unionists from secessionists. Governors Thomas Hicks and Augustus Bradford, both Union Party members during the war, along with many of the state’s prominent politicians, believed or hoped that Lincoln would not interfere with their domestic institutions. Despite the fact that slavery had been in decline in Maryland for over half a century, many residents clung ever more fiercely and stubbornly to their unpaid labor force as the threats to the practice accelerated in the first half of the war.

The journals, memoirs and letters of Maryland’s women during the Civil War and its aftermath provide important clues to understanding how race relations, the state’s geography and the Union occupation influenced their lives and shaped their responses to the conflict. These primary sources reveal a great deal about how both personal considerations and the context in which these females operated determined who got involved, in what manner and with what consequences. For many of the state’s women, the war preoccupied their thoughts, compounded fears for their menfolk and children and led to difficult choices about how to cope with the unpredictability of their lives. The center of Maryland had become, as Major General Lew Wallace later put it, a playground for the game of war, with armies, slaves, refugees, POWs and partisans in transit through a once peaceful countryside.⁵ Even women who stayed within the confines of their homes were not spared the horror or cruelty of these years. Mrs. Ann Schaeffer, writing from Frederick on September 14, 1862, noted in her diary: We have heard fire all day and know that many souls are appearing before their Maker while many more are suffering excruciating bodily pain unseen and unpitied by the human eye.⁶ As Schaeffer listened to the sounds of battle from nearby South Mountain, she could hardly have guessed that this was but the first of three major Confederate offensive operations in the state. Finally, the war had come home to Maryland women. This book tells their story, drawn from the historical record of those times and, more importantly, from their own words.

Harriet Tubman (far left) with rescued ex-slaves. New York Times.

Mrs. Tynan and sons of Frederick, a town occupied by both sides during the war. Library of Congress.

Chapter 1

Geography and Destiny

Our town and surrounding neighborhood resemble a vast military camp. Soldiers are seen in every street and guards on almost every corner.⁷

—Hagerstown newspaper, June 19, 1861

Maryland is often called America in miniature, not only because its culture mingles elements of both North and South but also because of its diverse geographical features. Although it is one of the smaller states (forty-second in size), it encompasses