By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews | An Independence Day Feature | July 4, 2026
There is a version of American history where Maryland is a footnote — a mid-Atlantic state wedged between Virginia and Pennsylvania, famous for crabs and congressional dysfunction. That version is wrong.
On the occasion of America’s 250th birthday, it is worth accounting for what this state has actually given the country: the national anthem, the capital’s land, the first act of religious tolerance in the New World, the soldiers Washington himself called irreplaceable, the railroad that opened the West, the highway that preceded it, the Naval Academy that has commissioned American officers for 180 years, the test pilots who certified every plane that flies off a carrier deck, the medical institution that invented modern American medicine, the research campus that fights disease for the entire planet, the astronauts’ lifeline in space, and some of the most consequential men and women in the entire arc of American civilization.
Maryland did not merely participate in this republic. It stitched several of its most essential threads.
This is that accounting.
I. The Song That Named the Nation
Let’s start where everyone starts, because it earns the honor.
On the night of September 13–14, 1814, a Georgetown lawyer named Francis Scott Key sat aboard a British truce ship in the Patapsco River, watching the Royal Navy bombard Fort McHenry. He had sailed out to negotiate the release of an American prisoner and found himself detained as the British opened their assault on Baltimore — the city they intended to break after burning Washington.
For 25 hours, some 1,800 rockets and mortar shells rained down on the fort. Key could not see the flag through the bombardment’s smoke. At dawn, an oversized American banner — 30 by 42 feet, ordered by Major George Armistead to be “so large that the British will have no difficulty in seeing it from a distance” — flew over Fort McHenry.
The defense held. Key wrote four stanzas on the back of a letter. Within days, the poem was published in Baltimore newspapers as “The Defence of Fort M’Henry.” Within weeks, it was being sung to the tune of a British drinking song. Within a generation, it was the country’s unofficial anthem. In 1931, Congress made it official.
Every time an American sports event opens. Every medal ceremony. Every moment of national solemnity punctuated by music. That’s Maryland — Francis Scott Key, Frederick County native and Georgetown lawyer, who happened to be on a British ship at exactly the right moment to witness a fort that didn’t fall.
The flag that inspired him is preserved at the Smithsonian. The fort still stands in Baltimore’s harbor. Both should be on every American’s list.
II. The Ground the Capital Stands On
The nation’s capital sits where it does because Maryland donated the land.
In 1791, Maryland ceded portions of Montgomery and Prince George’s Counties to form the District of Columbia. Virginia contributed land on the other side of the Potomac; Congress selected the location as a political compromise between northern and southern states. But the practical reality is that the seat of American government — the White House, the Capitol, the Supreme Court, the Mall — exists on Maryland soil that Maryland gave to the republic.
Benjamin Banneker, a free Black mathematician and astronomer born in Baltimore County in 1731, was part of the survey team that laid out those boundaries alongside Pierre Charles L’Enfant. The man who helped draw the lines of American power was a self-taught son of a former Maryland slave who had purchased his own freedom. That story deserves to be told every time someone visits the capital.
Maryland didn’t have to donate that land. The state chose to make it possible.
III. The Soldiers Washington Wouldn’t Trade
Before there was a flag, there were the men who earned one.
When the Continental Army was getting hammered at the Battle of Long Island in August 1776, the Maryland Line — about 400 soldiers from the First Maryland Regiment — held off a British force multiple times their size in a desperate rear-guard action to allow George Washington’s army to escape across the East River. They charged the British position six times. Most of them died doing it. Washington, watching from the heights of Brooklyn, reportedly said: “Good God! What brave fellows I must this day lose.”
The Delaware and Maryland troops bought the time that kept the Continental Army alive. Without that action, the Revolution might have ended before it truly began.
Maryland’s soldiers carried this reputation throughout the war. Their disciplined formation and straight battle lines in some of the war’s most chaotic engagements earned them a distinction that stuck. It is from this era that Maryland earned its state nickname: “The Old Line State.” That name did not come from geography. It came from the courage of Maryland men who held a line when it needed holding.
Maryland also sent Samuel Chase and Charles Carroll of Carrollton to the Continental Congress, both of whom signed the Declaration of Independence.
IV. The First Act of Religious Freedom in America
Before the First Amendment. Before the Bill of Rights. Before the constitutional convention had ever been imagined.
Maryland.
In 1649, the Maryland colonial assembly passed the Act Concerning Religion — known to history as the Maryland Toleration Act. It was the first law in the New World to mandate tolerance for all Christians. It was imperfect by modern standards, and it would be revoked and reinstated through colonial politics, but it established a principle that eventually became the bedrock of American constitutional order: the government shall not dictate the terms of a man’s faith.
The colony itself had been founded on a version of that idea. The Calvert family, Catholic aristocrats who obtained a royal charter in 1632 from King Charles I, envisioned Maryland as a refuge where Catholics persecuted in Protestant England could worship freely. But they were also shrewd enough to understand that their colony couldn’t survive as a purely Catholic enclave in Protestant-majority colonial America. So they built religious tolerance into its founding structure.
The concept Maryland pioneered in 1649 — a government deliberately stepping back from religious enforcement — is the direct ancestor of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. America’s fundamental commitment to religious liberty has roots in a Maryland colonial document older than the country itself.
The proof is in who came. In 1656, a Portuguese physician named Jacob Lumbrozo arrived in Maryland and became the first Jewish person to permanently settle in the New World. He came to Maryland specifically because its legal framework made it possible. No other colony offered what Maryland did. The first Jewish settler in American history chose Maryland because Maryland had, seven years earlier, written tolerance into law. That is not a coincidence. That is cause and effect.
V. Charles Carroll of Carrollton: The Last Living Signer
Of the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence, Charles Carroll of Carrollton was the last to survive. He died in 1832 at age 95.
He was also, when he signed, the wealthiest man in the colonies — and the only Roman Catholic to sign. In an era when Catholics faced significant legal and social discrimination across much of the British Empire, Carroll signed his name to a document that could have gotten him hanged, staking both his fortune and his faith on the idea of American independence.
Carroll’s full signature — “Charles Carroll of Carrollton” — was deliberately distinctive. When someone suggested that the signers were risking their lives and should perhaps sign anonymously, Carroll reportedly said there would be no difficulty in finding him, and he wanted there to be none. He wrote his full name and his estate to tell the British exactly who he was and where to find him.
His life became a kind of living bridge across the entire founding era. On July 4, 1828 — America’s 52nd birthday, and Carroll’s 90th year — he turned the first shovel of earth for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. He reportedly said it was the most important act of his long life. The last man alive who had signed the Declaration was the first man to break ground on the railroad that would open the American continent. One foot in the founding, one foot in the industrial future. There has never been a more American moment.
VI. The Mason-Dixon Line and the Definition of America
The most famous boundary in American history was surveyed by two Englishmen hired jointly by Maryland and Pennsylvania to settle a property dispute.
The border between the two colonies had been contested for decades, with overlapping land grants creating genuine legal chaos. The Calvert family, which controlled Maryland, and the Penn family, which controlled Pennsylvania, finally agreed in 1750 to commission a definitive survey. Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon completed the work between 1763 and 1767.
The line they drew — at approximately 39°43′ north latitude — resolved the colonial dispute. But it did something larger: it became the symbolic and then literal dividing line between the American North and South. By the Civil War era, “crossing the Mason-Dixon Line” meant crossing from one cultural and economic world into another. The phrase passed into common language as shorthand for the American divide itself.
That divide was drawn because two Maryland neighbors needed a property line.
VII. The Roads and Rails That Built the West
Maryland didn’t just produce the ideas that founded America. It built the infrastructure that connected it.
The National Road — the first highway constructed with federal funds — began in Cumberland, Maryland. Authorized by Congress in 1806 and completed westward in stages through the early 19th century, it was the first great American thoroughfare, carrying settlers, commerce, and the post across the Appalachians into the Ohio Valley. Before the railroads, Cumberland was where the eastern seaboard ended and the American interior began.
Then came the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad — the B&O — the first common carrier railroad in the United States, chartered in 1827 by Baltimore merchants watching the Erie Canal drain commerce north through New York. They built their own route west instead.
The B&O opened America’s interior. It pioneered the technologies, operating systems, and corporate organizational structures that every subsequent railroad would use. It connected Baltimore’s port to the Ohio River Valley and eventually to Chicago, creating the commercial infrastructure that made American industrial capitalism possible. The locomotive designs, the scheduling systems, the freight accounting — all of it spread from Baltimore across the continent.
When Americans think of the transcontinental railroad and the opening of the West, they think of California and Utah. But the business model, the capital formation, and much of the engineering knowledge that built those western lines originated in Baltimore.
VIII. The Battle That Saved Washington
Maryland contains the site of what may be the most consequential small battle of the Civil War that nobody talks about.
On July 9, 1864 — less than a year before the war ended — Confederate General Jubal Early was marching a force of approximately 15,000 men toward Washington, D.C. The Union capital was thinly defended. Lincoln himself would later watch the fighting from the parapets of Fort Stevens, the only sitting president to come under enemy fire in American history.
At a creek called the Monocacy River, just south of Frederick, a Union force under General Lew Wallace — outnumbered roughly three to one — held Early’s army for a full day. Wallace’s men lost the battle. But they made Early pay for every hour of it.
That day’s delay was enough. By the time Early’s army reached the Washington defenses, Union reinforcements had arrived. The Confederate force that might have captured the capital, potentially altering the entire course of the war, turned back instead.
The Battle of Monocacy is known as “The Battle That Saved Washington.” It happened in Maryland. A monument to Wallace’s men stands there still, outside Frederick.
IX. The Naval Academy and the Officers Who Command the Fleet
Since 1845, the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis has commissioned the officers who command America’s fleet, lead its Marines, and fly its carrier-based aircraft. Founded on the banks of the Severn River by Secretary of the Navy George Bancroft, it is one of the oldest and most storied military institutions in the world.
The list of men shaped by Annapolis reads like a roll call of American military history: Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander of the Pacific Fleet in World War II. Jimmy Carter, the only graduate to become president. John McCain, naval aviator and prisoner of war whose five and a half years in a Hanoi prison defined what American character looks like under maximum pressure.
But the Academy’s contribution goes beyond the famous names. Every generation of American naval officers — the men and women who have maintained U.S. sea power as the foundational guarantee of global commerce and free navigation for 180 years — has included a cohort of Annapolis graduates. The Naval Academy is not just a Maryland institution. It is the source code of American sea power, sitting on Maryland soil, on the Chesapeake Bay, 180 years running.
X. Naval Air Station Patuxent River: Where American Airpower Is Born
If Annapolis commissions the officers, Patuxent River certifies the weapons.
Naval Air Station Patuxent River — “Pax River” — on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay in St. Mary’s County is where virtually every aircraft in the United States Navy’s inventory has been tested, evaluated, and cleared for carrier operations. It is the home of the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division, the Navy Test Pilot School, and the operational testing programs for systems that define American airpower.
The F/A-18 Hornet. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The V-22 Osprey. The E-2 Hawkeye. The systems that fly off carrier decks and project American power across every ocean on earth were tested and certified at Pax River. The test pilots who flew those aircraft include men who went on to walk on the moon.
In an era when American military advantage is increasingly defined by technology, Pax River is where that technology meets the hardest possible test: a human being, in a cockpit, at the edge of what physics allows. That happens in Maryland, in a county most of the country has never heard of, every working day of the year.
XII. The Space Program’s Maryland Backbone
Every satellite image you’ve ever seen of Earth. Every Hubble photograph of a galaxy ten billion light-years away. Every James Webb Space Telescope image of the universe’s first stars. All of it runs through Maryland.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, founded in 1959, is the largest organization of scientists, engineers, and technologists in the federal government dedicated to building spacecraft. It is the operational home of both the Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescopes. It has built and operated more Earth science research satellites than any other institution on the planet.
When American astronauts went to the moon, Goddard managed the tracking networks that kept them connected to Earth. When NASA sends a probe to Jupiter or an orbiter to Mars, the command and data infrastructure runs through Greenbelt, Maryland.
Fort Meade — also in Maryland — is home to the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command, the two institutions most responsible for American signals intelligence and cyber operations. The digital defense of the United States is managed, in significant part, from Anne Arundel County.
Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda is one of the nation’s largest and most advanced military medical facilities, caring for the wounded and the senior leadership of the American armed forces. Maryland’s concentration of federal defense and intelligence infrastructure is unmatched outside the Pentagon itself.
XII. Medicine, Science, and the Institutions That Keep America Alive
Maryland’s contributions to American medicine and science are not incidental. They are structural.
Johns Hopkins University, founded in Baltimore in 1876, essentially invented the American research university. Before Hopkins, American higher education was largely modeled on the English undergraduate college — teaching students what was already known. Hopkins imported the German research model: professors who generated new knowledge, graduate programs, and a medical school that demanded clinical training alongside science. Every major American research university that followed was built on the Hopkins blueprint.
The Johns Hopkins Hospital, opened in 1889, set the standard for what a modern American hospital looks like. Its medical school — which was the first in the country to admit women on equal terms with men — produced a generation of physicians who built American medicine into the most sophisticated healthcare system the world had ever seen.
The National Institutes of Health, headquartered in Bethesda, is the largest biomedical research institution on earth. Its 27 institutes and centers fund and conduct the research that underlies virtually every major advance in American medicine. Cancer treatments, infectious disease responses, neurological research, drug development pipelines — the NIH’s footprint in American health outcomes is incalculable. It employs more than 18,000 people and funds research at universities across all 50 states. It sits in Maryland.
Maryland’s biotech corridor — concentrated along the I-270 corridor between Bethesda and Frederick, and around Baltimore — is one of the densest concentrations of life sciences companies and research institutions in the world. The proximity of NIH, Johns Hopkins, the University of Maryland medical system, and federal regulatory agencies like the FDA (headquartered in Silver Spring) creates an ecosystem that has produced some of the most important medical breakthroughs of the last half century.
Ben Carson — born in Detroit but shaped by Baltimore and by Johns Hopkins — performed his most revolutionary work at Hopkins, where he served as director of pediatric neurosurgery. In 1987, he led the first successful separation of craniopagus twins — conjoined at the back of the head — in medical history. The 70-member surgical team he assembled and the 22-hour procedure they executed established techniques that have been used to save children around the world ever since. Carson’s work at Hopkins placed Baltimore at the center of the world’s medical consciousness, and his subsequent career in public life brought that Hopkins credibility into national policy.
Clara Barton, though born in Massachusetts, founded the American Red Cross in Glen Echo, Maryland, in 1881. The organization she built there has delivered disaster relief across every catastrophe the country has faced for 145 years. The Red Cross was born on Maryland soil.
XIII. The Chesapeake Bay: America’s Working Estuary
It would be incomplete to catalog Maryland’s contributions without acknowledging the geography that made so many of them possible.
The Chesapeake Bay — the largest estuary in North America, stretching 200 miles from the Susquehanna River’s mouth to the Atlantic — has fed, connected, and defined Maryland and the surrounding region for 400 years. The Bay’s blue crabs, oysters, striped bass, and waterfowl have sustained Native American communities, colonial settlers, and generations of working watermen. Its deep-water channels made Baltimore one of the great port cities of the Atlantic world.
The Bay is the reason Maryland existed where it did, grew how it did, and contributed what it did. Annapolis sits on it. Baltimore sits at its head. The Naval Academy trains on it. The test pilots at Pax River fly over it. The founding of the colony, the War of 1812, the Civil War — all shaped by the geography of the Chesapeake.
It is also one of the great ongoing American conservation challenges, which Maryland has led more seriously than perhaps any other state in the region. The Bay is not just Maryland’s asset. It is America’s estuary, and Maryland is its steward.
XIV. The Preakness and the Sporting Soul of Maryland
Since 1873, the Preakness Stakes has been run at Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore — the middle jewel of thoroughbred racing’s Triple Crown, sandwiched between the Kentucky Derby and the Belmont Stakes.
For a few weeks every May, the eyes of American racing turn to Baltimore. The infield at Pimlico fills. The black-eyed Susans — Maryland’s state flower — are painted onto the winner’s garland. And whatever the state of Baltimore’s neighborhoods on either side of the track, the Preakness reminds the country that Maryland has a sporting tradition older than most living Americans can remember.
Horse racing has deep roots in Maryland, going back to the colonial era, when the Chesapeake gentry made it a central feature of social life. That tradition produced the Preakness, which produced the Triple Crown, which became one of the signature sporting events in American life. The greatest racehorses in history — Secretariat, Citation, Affirmed — ran through Baltimore on their way to immortality.
XV. The People
Any honest accounting of Maryland’s contribution to America has to include the individuals — the ones the nation produced, shaped, or was changed by.
Benjamin Banneker — Born free in Baltimore County in 1731, the son of a former slave, Banneker taught himself astronomy and mathematics and produced a series of almanacs that were among the most widely distributed scientific publications in early America. Thomas Jefferson corresponded with him on questions of race and intellect. He surveyed the boundaries of Washington, D.C. He is one of the most remarkable self-made intellectuals in American history.
Harriet Tubman — Born into slavery on the Eastern Shore of Maryland around 1822, in Dorchester County. She escaped north in 1849 and then returned south, again and again, conducting at least 13 missions that freed approximately 70 enslaved people through the Underground Railroad. She served as a Union spy and scout during the Civil War, and led the Combahee River Raid in 1863, freeing more than 700 enslaved people in a single night. She was not merely a symbol. She was a functioning military intelligence asset and one of the most operationally effective people in the history of American freedom. Maryland made her.
Frederick Douglass — Born into slavery in Talbot County on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, 1818. He taught himself to read, escaped to freedom, and became the most influential African American voice in 19th-century America — author, orator, newspaper publisher, diplomat, and the moral conscience of a nation that had to be argued into living up to its founding documents. His autobiography, begun in Baltimore, is one of the foundational texts of American literature.
Thurgood Marshall — Born in Baltimore in 1908. Graduated from Frederick Douglass High School, was denied admission to the University of Maryland School of Law because of his race, attended Howard Law School instead, and spent the next two decades systematically dismantling the legal architecture of American segregation. He argued Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court in 1954. He was appointed as the first African American Justice of the Supreme Court in 1967. He grew up in Baltimore. He won his cases in a courtroom while the city that shaped him was still legally segregated.
Ben Carson — See Section XI. His surgical career at Johns Hopkins belongs in any catalog of Maryland’s contributions to American medicine and public life.
Babe Ruth — Born in Baltimore in 1895. The greatest baseball player in American history grew up in the rowhouses of Pigtown and the reform schools of Baltimore. When Americans invented baseball mythology, they did it around a kid from Baltimore. His home — 216 Emory Street — still stands and operates as a museum in the shadow of Camden Yards.
Cal Ripken Jr. — Born in Havre de Grace, raised in Aberdeen, built his legend in Baltimore. Ripken played 2,632 consecutive games for the Baltimore Orioles between 1982 and 1998 — the longest streak in major league baseball history, breaking Lou Gehrig’s record that had stood for 56 years. The Iron Man streak is one of the most purely American sports stories ever told: not a flash of brilliance but the sustained, unglamorous commitment to showing up, every day, regardless. He did it during the era when baseball nearly destroyed itself in the 1994 strike. Ripken’s pursuit of the record — and the national celebration when he broke it — reminded a country that had been fighting with its national pastime why it had loved it in the first place.
Sargent Shriver — Born in Westminster, Carroll County, in 1915. Whatever one thinks of the Great Society’s ultimate outcomes, the organizational architecture Shriver built touched more American lives than almost any non-elected official of the 20th century. He founded the Peace Corps in 1961 at President Kennedy’s direction and built it from a concept into a functioning institution in less than a year. He then ran the Office of Economic Opportunity, where he launched Head Start, Job Corps, VISTA, Legal Services Corporation, and Community Health Centers — programs that, regardless of ideology, represent one of the most ambitious attempts at domestic institution-building in American history. He was the 1972 Democratic vice-presidential nominee. He was a Marylander, and the footprint of what he built is still operating.
Billie Holiday — Born in Philadelphia but raised in Baltimore, shaped on its streets and in its clubs. Holiday’s voice is one of the most distinctive sounds in American musical history, and her influence on jazz, soul, and popular music is impossible to overstate. Her 1939 recording of “Strange Fruit” — a protest against the lynching of Black Americans — is one of the most consequential pieces of recorded music in the history of the country. Time magazine named it the song of the century. Baltimore raised her.
Frank Zappa — Born in Baltimore in 1940, raised in Maryland before his family moved west. Zappa became one of the most innovative and eclectic composers and musicians in American history, and his 1985 testimony before the Senate Commerce Committee — delivered alongside Dee Snider and John Denver in opposition to mandatory music labeling — stands as one of the most memorable First Amendment defenses ever spoken into a congressional microphone. He called the proposed warning labels “a trade tax on creativity” and a symptom of government exceeding its proper reach. He was right, and he said so with characteristic bluntness. A Baltimore kid defending American liberty in the United States Senate.
Spiro Agnew — The former Governor of Maryland and 39th Vice President of the United States is a complicated figure, and his resignation in 1973 amid corruption charges is not something history should paper over. But his rhetorical legacy — particularly his frontal assault on media elites as “nattering nabobs of negativism” and his articulation of a “silent majority” cultural conservatism — laid significant groundwork for the populist-right political tradition that has defined American conservatism for the half century since. He was Maryland’s governor, and his fingerprints are on the vocabulary of American political argument to this day.
Edgar Allan Poe — Born in Boston, but claimed by Baltimore, where he lived, wrote much of his most important work, and died in 1849 under circumstances that remain unsolved. The Raven, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Murders in the Rue Morgue — America’s darkest literary voice belongs, in burial and in legacy, to Baltimore.
H.L. Mencken — The “Sage of Baltimore,” born 1880, remains the most irreverent and influential American journalist of the 20th century. His coverage of the Scopes Trial, his withering dissections of American political culture, and his foundational work on The American Language — the study of how American English diverged from British English and became its own distinct thing — shaped American intellectual life for decades. He was a conservative in the old sense: contemptuous of government expansion, suspicious of mass movements, devoted to individual liberty and plain language. He would have hated being polished into a plaque. Baltimore produced him anyway.
Johnny Unitas — Born in Pittsburgh, but built his legend in Baltimore, where he quarterbacked the Colts from 1956 to 1972 and became the defining figure of the modern NFL. The 1958 NFL Championship Game — Colts over the Giants in sudden-death overtime, played at Yankee Stadium and watched by millions on national television — is still called “The Greatest Game Ever Played.” It is widely credited with launching professional football into the American mainstream, transforming the NFL from a regional curiosity into the dominant American sports institution it remains today. Unitas threw a touchdown pass in 47 consecutive games, a record that stood for decades. He played in high-top black cleats and a crew cut and changed American sports culture from a Baltimore sideline. When the Colts were moved to Indianapolis in the dead of night in 1984 — Mayflower moving trucks, March darkness, one of the more ignominious exits in American sports history — Unitas stayed. He retired to Baltimore, became a fixture of the city’s civic life, and actively lobbied for years to bring another NFL franchise back to the city that had given him everything. He was still fighting for it when the Ravens arrived in 1996. The game America watches every Sunday owes a substantial debt to a man who loved Baltimore enough to stay after the league left it.
Michael Phelps — The most decorated Olympian in the history of the Games. 23 gold medals. 28 total. Born in Baltimore, trained at the North Baltimore Aquatic Club under coach Bob Bowman. No argument necessary.
This is only a few of the many Marylanders who have left their mark on American history.
XVI. The State That Held the Union Together
The Civil War section of Maryland’s history is complicated, contested, and worth facing squarely.
Maryland was a slave state. The Eastern Shore in particular had deep Southern sympathies. In April 1861, as Union troops moved through Baltimore to defend Washington, a mob attacked the soldiers — the first bloodshed of the Civil War. There were Confederate sympathizers in every county. There were Marylanders who wore gray.
But Maryland did not secede. And that decision — made in part under federal military pressure, but also reflecting genuine Unionist sentiment across much of the state, particularly in western Maryland and Baltimore’s working class — may have been the most consequential single decision of the war.
If Maryland had seceded, Washington would have been surrounded on three sides by Confederate territory. The Union capital would have been indefensible. Lincoln’s government would have faced an immediate and possibly fatal crisis in the first weeks of the war.
Maryland stayed. Washington survived. The Union survived.
The Battle of Antietam — September 17, 1862, fought near Sharpsburg in Washington County — was the bloodiest single day in American military history. More than 22,000 men were killed, wounded, or missing. Lee’s first invasion of the North was turned back. Lincoln used the Union’s tactical victory to issue the Emancipation Proclamation five days later, changing the war’s moral character and blocking European recognition of the Confederacy. All of that happened in Maryland.
XVII. What Maryland Is
There is a reason Maryland has always been described as “America in miniature.” Its geography runs from the Atlantic beaches of Ocean City to the Appalachian ridges of Garrett County, from the Chesapeake’s tidal marshes to the Piedmont’s rolling farmland. It has a major port city, an agricultural interior, a mountain west, and a suburban corridor connecting it to the beating heart of the federal government.
It has given America its anthem and its capital. Its soldiers held the line when lines had to be held. Its colonial founders wrote religious liberty into law before the country was born. Its roads and railroads opened the continent. Its Naval Academy has commissioned American officers for 180 years. Its test pilots have certified every aircraft that flies off a carrier deck. Its hospitals and research campuses have extended the lives of Americans in every state. Its sons and daughters — Black and white, enslaved and free, brilliant and brave and sometimes deeply flawed — have threaded themselves into the deepest fabric of what this country is.
On America’s 250th birthday, that accounting deserves more than a footnote.
O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave?
It does. And a Marylander wrote the question.
Sources: Historical narrative and biographical detail in this article draw from the following: Maryland State Archives and the Maryland Secretary of State’s historical records (sos.maryland.gov); the National Park Service’s Fort McHenry National Monument and Historic Shrine documentation; the Smithsonian National Museum of American History’s Star-Spangled Banner collection; the Maryland Historical Society’s Francis Scott Key papers; History.com’s Maryland state history profile; the Enoch Pratt Free Library’s early Maryland history research guides; the Bill of Rights Institute’s essay on the founding of Maryland and the Act Concerning Religion (1649); the Encyclopedia Britannica’s Maryland colonial history entries; the Wikipedia article on the History of Maryland; the U.S. Army Center of Military History’s documentation of the Maryland Line in the Revolutionary War; the National Park Service’s Battle of Monocacy documentation (“The Battle That Saved Washington”); NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s official history (nasa.gov/goddard); the Maryland Military Department’s official histories of the Maryland National Guard and Naval Air Station Patuxent River; the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site (NPS); the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park (NPS); the Johns Hopkins Medicine historical archives; the National Institutes of Health official history (nih.gov); the U.S. Naval Academy Museum and official history (usna.edu); the Baseball Reference record for Cal Ripken Jr.’s consecutive games streak; the Peace Corps official history (peacecorps.gov); the Sargent Shriver Peace Institute biographical materials; and the Library of Congress’s online Benjamin Banneker collection. Ben Carson biographical and surgical career detail draws from Johns Hopkins Medicine’s neurosurgery department records and Carson’s memoir Gifted Hands (1990).
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