The “Rancor of Secession” in Frederick, Maryland: The Case of John Baughman

ECW welcomes guest author Shannon Doherty.

On July 12, 1861, federal authorities arrested John W. Baughman in Sandy Hook, Maryland, on the banks of the Potomac River. Baughman, a native of Frederick, Maryland, edited the pro-secessionist newspaper The Republican Citizen. He was charged with engaging in pro-secession activities. Ironically, Baughman’s story can be pieced together by examining Frederick County newspapers – Baughman’s own, fellow pro-Confederate Frederick Herald, and the pro-Lincoln Frederick Examiner.

Baughman’s arrest was one of many in the first months of the Civil War, when it was unclear whether Maryland would secede or remain in the Union. President Abraham Lincoln saw it prudent to suspend the writ of habeas corpus to make such arrests. The writ of habeas corpus, from the Latin “show me the body” and dubbed “the Great Writ,” requires the arresting official to bring the petitioner to court for a judge to determine the legality of the arrest; without such a writ, people can be arrested and held indefinitely.

Three months prior to Baughman’s arrest, federal authorities apprehended a prominent Marylander named John Merryman, in the wake of the April 1861 Pratt Street Riot where residents of Baltimore attacked the 6th Massachusetts Militia with stones and bricks as the regiment shifted trains for Washington. Merryman’s imprisonment at Fort McHenry in Baltimore set off a chain of events that led to a confrontation between Lincoln and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Roger Taney, in which Taney condemned what he deemed as Lincoln’s unconstitutional suspension of the writ while acting as a district judge.

Yet Lincoln paid no regard to Taney’s rebuke, and the arrests continued across Maryland. On July 4, in an address to Congress, Lincoln justified his suspension of the Great Writ, citing the case of the rebellion and arguing that public safety now called for such a measure. Always an astute politician, Lincoln then argued that the Constitution did not clearly state to whom the power is vested, one of the document’s many intended ambiguities. He further argued that in times of crisis, the Framers would not have wanted “the danger to run its course until Congress could be called together.” Thus, the executive could act swiftly in times of pressing national emergency. He urged his critics to consider the big picture and summed up his stance concisely: “Are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?”^[1]

In the midst of this ‘big picture” John Baughman was arrested by “abolition soldiers.” A pro-Confederate newspaper charged that Baughman was arrested only because “he [was] an able advocate of the constitutional rights of the South,” who also opposed “the aggressive war waged by Lincoln … against the institutions of the Slave States.” However, Baughman was allegedly in possession of letters addressed to Bradley T. Johnson, a Frederick-born Confederate officer. He was also suspected of crossing the Potomac River, under the pretense of delivering copies of the Citizen, to relay pertinent information to rebels in Virginia.^[2]

Authorities imprisoned Baughman at the Old Capitol Prison in Washington, and despite the charges of treason against him they released him soon after, due to political maneuvering by friends Henry May and Robert Brent of Baltimore. And like other citizens accused of disloyalty, Union officials required him to take an oath of allegiance.

Yet it was clear that Baughman only did this as a measure to escape prison, and he continued printing his paper with the same pro-secessionist sympathies. His time in prison changed neither his actions nor opinions. It is probable to assume that his denunciations of the Lincoln administration only grew more vitriolic after the president’s authorities had him placed in a federal prison. He was further incensed by Postmaster General Montgomery Blair’s order to stop distributing the paper via the postal service.^[3]

Oppressive actions did not seem to change any pro-secession or anti-Union citizens’ minds regarding Lincoln, his administration’s actions, or the conduct or legality of the war. An editorial in the pro-Union Frederick Examiner astutely warned its readers “to beware of wolves in sheep’s clothing; the rancor of Secession is not lessened here, it only works underhanded, and becomes more and more unprincipled.”^[4]

Baughman’s paper scathingly criticized Lincoln’s arrest of three Frederick County legislators, among twenty-seven who were arrested to prevent “the passage of any act of secession” that may have been voted upon when the legislature met on September 17, 1861. These “arbitrary” arrests were a danger to democracy, not as vital to support the war effort as to preserve democracy. Baughman then questioned the constitutionality of such acts and feared that disagreeing with the president’s actions would subject him to “the severest penalties of some law we have never read or to the punishment prescribed in some provision of the Constitution, the true intent and meaning of which we have entirely misapprehended.” Baughman, indeed, would know.^[5]

Thus, it was no surprise that he was arrested again, this time in 1864, by Maj. Gen. David Hunter. By this time Union authorities had moved away from simply imprisoning dissidents. Baughman had his property and paper seized, and he and his family were exiled from the Union. They ended up in Richmond, where he was given a job in the Confederate government by none other than Secretary of War John Breckinridge, former vice president of the United States.^[6]

The cases of Baughman and of John Merryman were similar in many regards: A prominent pro-secession Marylander was arrested by federal authorities under charges of treason and was subsequently held in a prison without the right to petition for a writ of habeas corpus. However, the cases diverge there. Merryman was an active militiaman who took military measures to prevent Union troops from passing through the state, destroying private property in the process. His arrest led to one of the most famous civil liberties cases in American history and a climactic confrontation between two leading figures of the age, Lincoln and Taney. It set precedents in the American constitutional tradition that reverberate into the present day. Numerous volumes have been written about Merryman, his trial, and its consequences.^[7]

Conversely, Baughman is relatively unknown, overlooked except by local scholars of the mid-Maryland region. He was merely one of many Southern sympathizers in the North arrested throughout the course of the war. Unlike Merryman, Baughman was no militiaman and did not commit actions of overt treason against the American government. Further, he was imprisoned for a much shorter duration – albeit without the ability to petition for a writ – and no legal struggle ensued. His time in prison changed neither his actions nor opinions.

Baughman’s case reflects the uncertain, changing nature of the war on the ground in Frederick County, even before the war itself reached its doorstep. This incident brings cause for us to ponder even heavier questions that reverberate into the modern era: What is the power of the press during war time? What defines treason and unpatriotic behavior? What rights, if any, can be suspended in the name of national security?

Shannon Doherty is a native of Orange County, New York. She graduated from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 2021 with a degree in history. Since then, she has been immersed in the public history world, including the Journey Through Hallowed Ground, American Battlefield Trust, Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, and Fort Pulaski National Monument. She currently works as the Education Manager of Historic Germanna, a public history site in Locust Grove, Virginia, and resides in Fredericksburg with her cat Spotsy.

Endnotes

^[1] Abraham Lincoln, Message to Congress, July 4, 1861, Second Printed Draft, with Changes in Lincoln’s Hand. Abraham Lincoln papers: Series 1. General Correspondence. Manuscript/Mixed Material. https://www.loc.gov/item/mal1057200/.

^[2] Valley Register, July 19, 1861; Frederick Herald, July 16, 1861.

^[3] Republican Citizen, February 21, 1862.

^[4] Frederick Examiner, December 11, 1861.

^[5] Republican Citizen, September 20, 1861.

^[6] Williams, Thomas John Chew. History of Frederick County, Maryland: From the Earliest Settlements to the Beginning of the War Between the States. Frederick County: Higginson Book Company, 1910, 252.

^[7] See Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War: The Trials of John Merryman by Jonathan W. White, The Body of John Merryman: Abraham Lincoln and the Suspension of Habeas Corpus by Brian McGinty, and The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties by Mark Neely.