Historically Speaking: A Dangerous Time in a Perilous Place @ St Mary's College of Maryland

With St. Mary's County Historical Society, join Georgetown Professor Dr. Chandra Manning at Daugherty-Palmer Commons on the campus of St. Mary's College of Maryland to hear this compelling story of Uneasy Alliances in Civil War Era Southern Maryland.

By the end of the Civil War, half-a-million formerly enslaved people had taken refuge behind Union lines in what became known as “contraband camps.” There, they forged a wary alliance with the Union Army that won the war, ended slavery, and remade citizenship for all Americans. Maryland experienced and took part in this process, but with significant variations.

Because Maryland retained both slavery and its place within the Union, wartime measures that attacked slavery in seceded states did not apply in Maryland, which meant that the Union Army and U.S. authorities had to contend with state law protecting slavery until an amendment to the state constitution abolished slavery there in November 1864. Further, local opinion in southern Maryland favored the Confederacy and opposed emancipation even after the passage of the state constitutional amendment. For these reasons, the biracial alliance between formerly enslaved people and Union authorities in southern Maryland, and throughout the state, was especially fraught with fear and violence.