Jefferson Davis on Maryland and the War of Northern Aggression

The first and only president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, a flawed Southern hero it could be said, published his memoirs in 1881. Born in Kentucky (as was his nemesis Abraham Lincoln) and once married to a woman with Maryland roots (his first wife), Davis has been criticized for not listening to generals in the field when he should have listened and for other shortcomings.
A more lackluster historical figure than Lee and Jackson, Davis nevertheless possessed a towering intellect and commanded respect even if grudging at times. His two -volume work entitled the Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government is a first hand report on the events of the War Between the States. His prose, unlike the flowery, melodramatic stuff of some Victorian writers of memoirs, is clear and unsentimental.
For students of Maryland history, Davis writes at length about the invasion and occupation of the Old Line State by Yankee troops. Davis has much to say about Maryland’s spineless Governor Hicks who was neither a Union man nor a secessionist but an oily opportunist who watched which way the wind blew before he acted or spoke.
In Volume 1, Chapter 5 of his memoirs, Davis talks about Maryland’s attempt to broker peace in the early months of the secession crisis:
“The border state of Maryland was the outpost of the South on the frontier first to be approached by Northern invasion. The first demonstration against southern sovereignty was to be made there and in her fate were the other slave holding states of the border to have warning of what they were to expect. She had chosen to be, for the time at least, neutral in the impending war and had denied to the United States troops the right of way across her domain in their march to invade the southern states. But Governor Hicks avowed the desire not only that the state should avoid war but that she should be a means for pacifying those more disposed to engage in combat.
But Hicks seemed in these early days to feel no allegiance to the North:
“...Judge handy a distinguished citizen of Mississippi who was born in Maryland, had in December 1860 been sent as a commissioner from the state of his adoption to that of his birth and presented his views and the object of his mission to Governor Hicks who, in his response December 19, 1860, declared his purpose to act in full concert with the other border states adding, ‘I do not doubt the people of Maryland are ready to go with the people of those states for weal or woe.’”
Indeed Hicks might have been mistaken for a Rebel firebrand. Davis writes:
“Subsequently in answer to appeals for and against a proclamation assembling the legislature in order to have a call for a state convention Governor Hicks issued an address in which arguing that there was no necessity to define the position of Maryland he wrote ‘ if the action of the legislature would be simply to declare that Maryland was with the south in sympathy and feeling, that she demands from the North the repeal of offensive unconstitutional statutes and appeals to it for new guarantees, that she will wait a reasonable time for the North to purge her statute books to do justice to her southern brethren and, if her appeals are in vain, will make common cause with her sister border states in resistance to tyranny if need be, it would only be saying what the whole country knows well.’”
This Governor Hicks was saying that Maryland and her sister Border States would secede if the Yankees didn’t end their attempts to oppress the Southern people through the levying of exorbitant tariffs and other unconstitutional actions. This Governor Hicks vowed “to make common cause” with other states to resist tyranny, in other words, to secede from the Union if the Yankees did not capitulate to demands for a return to Constitutional government.
But when the Yankees stopped a vote on secession by the Maryland legislature in Frederick, Maryland in 1861, Hicks changed his tune. Davis writes:
“For no better reason so far as the public was informed than a vote in favor of certain resolutions General Banks (USA) sent his provost marshal to Frederick, Maryland where the legislature was in session. A cordon of pickets was placed around the town to prevent anyone from leaving it without a written permission from a member of General Banks’s staff. Police detectives from Baltimore then went into the town and arrested 12 or 13 members and several officers of legislature which thereby left them without a quorum which prevented from organizing and it performing the only act which it was competent to do, that is it adjourned.”
After the Yankees arrested the state legislators, the chameleon Hicks conveniently changed his southern sympathies to Unionist sympathies.
It was no longer to his advantage to cast his lot with the South, to stand up for his besieged little Maryland. Instead, on December 3, 1861 Hicks, referring to what he now perceived as misdeeds on the part of the Maryland legislators in the sessions held prior to the one the Yankees broke up, wrote, “this continued until the general government (Yankees) had ample reason to believe it (Maryland’s legislature) was about to go through the farce of enacting an ordinance of secession when the treason was summarily stopped by the dispersion of the traitors.” Hicks stated, “the people have declared in the most emphatic tones which I have never doubted that Maryland has no sympathy with the rebellion and desires to do her fullshare in the duty of suppressing it.”
This suppliant and compliant Hicks is a far cry from the earlier almost heroic Hicks who was ready to secede rather than live in chains. Concerning the governor’s metamorphosis into a Yankee lover, Davis writes : “ It would be more easy than gracious to point out the inconsistency between his first statements and this his last. The conclusion is inevitable that he kept himself in equipoise and fell at last as men without conviction usually do upon the stronger side.”
Hicks could have been a Southern hero rather than the almost forgotten figure he became. Maryland was of great importance to the North. That is why the Yankees moved quickly to conquer the state. Hicks might have thwarted their invasion had he been a real leader —as he initially appeared to be —and would have secured for himself a measure of immortality.