1860: Maryland, A Border State
Despite the abolitionist’s efforts, Baltimore reported 87,189 enslaved persons out of a total state population of 687,049 when the U.S. Census was taken in 1860. This was about 12.7 percent of Maryland’s total population. While not as high as some southern plantation states, Maryland’s enslaved Black population far outnumbered its Northern neighbor, Pennsylvania, which reported no slaves in their census records (Census.gov).
The Pratt Street Riot
As represented by their census numbers, Maryland had long existed, as The Baltimore Patriot put it, in “the Middle ground” – the space where “wage-labor and slave-labor met” (Harrold, 2010, p. 2). A combination of the large free Black population in Maryland, the state’s geographic location just south of the Mason-Dixon Line, and the mix of agricultural and emerging import-export economy through Baltimore, created an environment filled with mixed allegiances and “debatable ground” (Miller, 2015, p. 257). Historian Richard F. Miller argued
Maryland was often debatable ground, a corridor for combatant armies spearheading or opposing invasions; marauders seeking political advantage, money, revenge, or supplies; smugglers spiriting arms, personnel, and intelligence across de facto national borders—a slave state that was, even without regard to the war, divided into sections that were subject to divergent and often opposing centrifugal forces. (p. 257)
This border identity led to its divided response to the Civil War, which began in 1861 at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. The first fatalities of the war, however, occurred during the Baltimore Civil War Riots on Pratt Street when Confederate sympathizers attacked Union troops from Pennsylvania and Massachusetts traveling south to protect Washington, D.C. (Ezratty, 2010).