VIII.

History

A.

Early Inhabitants

Pottery, axheads, and burial sites indicate that Native Americans lived on the upper Chesapeake Bay and its surrounding lands for many centuries. At the beginning of historic times in the early 17th century, various peoples were present who spoke languages of the Algonquian group: the Conoy and Patuxent lived on the Western Shore of the bay; and the Choptank, Nanticoke, Assateague, and Pocomoke maintained villages on the Eastern Shore. The Susquehannock, a people who spoke an Iroquoian language, lived near the mouth of the Susquehanna River. They hunted and raided to the south along Chesapeake Bay.

Eventually nearly all of these peoples moved away to escape the pressure of white settlement. Those who remained were scattered or much reduced in population, either as a result of conflicts with white settlers or with other Native Americans or as a result of European diseases, to which they had little resistance. By the end of the 18th century almost no Native Americans remained in Maryland.

B.

European Exploration and Settlement

Spanish explorers sailed along the Maryland coast in the 16th century. In the early 17th century, fur traders from Virginia colony traded with Native Americans in the area. Under a commercial license issued by Virginia, William Claiborne built the first white settlement in the area in 1631. It was a fur trading post on Kent Island, east of modern-day Annapolis.

In 1632, George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore, induced King Charles I of England to grant him the land north of the Potomac River, which had been part of the grant to Virginia colony. Calvert, a former high adviser to the king and recent convert to Roman Catholicism, wanted to establish a community where fellow Catholics, who were persecuted in England, could worship freely. In addition, he anticipated a financial profit from his colonial enterprise. Calvert died before Charles completed the charter, and the grant went to his son Cecilius Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore. It included the land from the south bank of the Potomac north to the 40th parallel, as well as all but the tip of the Delmarva Peninsula. Maryland’s western boundary ran from the “fountain” (source) of the Potomac northward until it met the 40th parallel. Cecilius Calvert proceeded to organize an expedition of about 200 settlers under the leadership of his younger brother Leonard Calvert, who was to serve as provincial governor. The settlers reached the province in March 1634, first setting foot on Maryland soil at Saint Clements Island. They established Saint Marys (later Saint Marys City) on the site of a former Native American village—which they bought from its inhabitants—near the mouth of the Saint George’s River (now Saint Marys River).

The settlers cultivated the land previously cleared by the Native Americans, planting corn and tobacco. Their first harvests were good, and they remained at peace with the Native Americans. But they had difficulties of other sorts. Claiborne refused to recognize Lord Baltimore’s jurisdiction over Kent Island, which he claimed was part of Virginia. As a result, petty warfare broke out in 1635 between Claiborne’s and Baltimore’s forces. In 1638 the English Commissioners for Foreign Plantations ruled that Kent Island came under the jurisdiction of Maryland.

Another early conflict occurred between Lord Baltimore and the provincial legislature. Under the terms of the charter, the legislature was restricted to approving legislation proposed by Baltimore. The legislature soon demanded the power to initiate legislation. After resisting its demand, Baltimore yielded on this important point in 1638, when he agreed that laws enacted by the legislature and approved by the governor should be temporarily valid pending his own approval.

B.1.

Civil Strife

During the 1640s, Maryland was shaken by a succession of conflicts related to the civil strife occurring in England. At that time the king was engaged in a struggle for power with Parliament, the English legislature. Lord Baltimore supported the king, while many Maryland colonists were sympathetic to Parliament, which was controlled by conservative Protestants known as Puritans. Even though complete religious freedom prevailed in the province, Baltimore’s adherence to Catholicism was a cause of unrest among the settlers, a majority of whom were Protestants. The differences between proprietor and settlers tended to make the proprietary authority unstable, and in 1644 Claiborne seized power and drove Governor Calvert into exile in Virginia. In 1646 Calvert reasserted proprietary authority with troops supplied by the governor of Virginia, Sir William Berkeley.

Governor Calvert died in June 1647. The struggle between the king and Parliament had become a civil war in England, and it was by that time apparent that the Parliamentarians would prevail. To gain favor with the strongly anti-Catholic Parliamentarians, as well as to placate the Protestant majority in Maryland, Lord Baltimore appointed a Protestant, William Stone, as governor and named other Protestants to important positions in the government. At the same time he sought to ensure that the religious freedom of the Catholic minority would not be compromised by the Protestant majority. Largely as a result of his prodding, the legislature passed the Act Concerning Religion in 1649, assuring freedom of worship to all who believed in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Although limited to Christians and repealed in 1692, this was one of the earliest statutes of religious liberty.

Lord Baltimore’s adroit political maneuvers were of no avail. Parliament appointed commissioners for Maryland, one of whom was his old enemy Claiborne. In 1654 the commission reorganized the provincial government, eliminating the proprietor’s political authority and removing Governor Stone. Subsequently, the Puritan-controlled legislature passed anti-Catholic legislation. Baltimore refused to accept the loss of his authority and doggedly worked in England for its restoration. In March 1655, Stone led a force of 130 soldiers to try to recapture the government, but was thoroughly beaten and most of his force captured. The Puritans executed four of Stone’s lieutenants. Baltimore meanwhile secured the assurance of Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, who ruled England in the name of Parliament, that he was still the proprietor of Maryland. Finally, in November 1657, he reached an agreement with the Puritan commissioners to restore his former authority over the colony.

During the 1660s and 1670s, proprietary authority was largely unchallenged. However, the Protestant farmers scattered along the shores of Chesapeake Bay resented the province’s Catholic leadership in Saint Marys City. In 1688 English King James II, a Catholic, was succeeded by the Protestant monarchs William and Mary. By an accident of fate the provincial governor delayed in proclaiming the new monarchs, giving new life to the suspicion, long held among Maryland Protestants, that insidious anti-Protestant plots were afoot in the province. The suspicion renewed old grievances. In 1689 Protestant rebels, led by John Coode, overthrew the proprietary government and asked King William to place the colony under royal control. This was accomplished with the arrival of the first royal governor in 1692. In the same year the Church of England was made the official church of the province. The change in regimes also resulted in the shifting of the provincial capital in 1694 from Catholic-dominated Saint Marys City to Protestant-dominated Anne Arundel Town (now Annapolis).

B.2.

Expanding Economy

By the late 17th century, settlers had spread over much of Maryland, primarily along the rivers and creeks that supplied oceanborne shipping. Tobacco prices encouraged further planting in both Maryland and Virginia. Some of the settlers had large plantations, but most worked smaller tobacco farms averaging 100 hectares (250 acres) in size, sometimes with the help of white indentured servants or black slaves from Africa or the Caribbean. In the 1690s, when slave prices fell and the supply of white servants shrank, planters began using slaves almost exclusively. Maryland and Virginia law at the same time defined black slavery as a lifetime condition.

C.

The 18th Century

Maryland remained a royal province until 1715. In that year it became a proprietary province again because Charles Calvert, 5th Baron Baltimore, had converted to Protestantism.

C.1.

Expanding Population

Throughout the 17th century newcomers to the Chesapeake area typically underwent a period of months or years during which they fell prey to malaria and other strange diseases. The death rate was extremely high and kept the population down. By the early 18th century, however, more and more Marylanders were native born and had resistance that allowed them to live longer and have larger families. Population grew accordingly, rising from about 25,000 in 1700 to about 130,000 in 1750. By the time of the American Revolution (1775-1783) the population was about 225,000.

Settlement continued to concentrate on the Atlantic Coastal Plain. However, beginning about 1700, English settlers moved west into the Piedmont. By the 1730s, Germans began to move south from Pennsylvania into Frederick County, which until the revolution embraced all of western Maryland. Farmers shipped their crops to Baltimore for sale, and Baltimore, which had been established in 1729, became the main outlet for Maryland’s farm produce.

In 1769 a long-term boundary dispute between Maryland and Pennsylvania was finally resolved when Great Britain (a union of three countries headed by England) officially recognized latitude 39°43’ north, named the Mason-Dixon Line after its British surveyors, as the boundary. Colonies north of the Mason-Dixon Line eventually came to be called the North, and those south of it were the South. Over the next 90 years the regional differences between the North and the South were to grow until they erupted into civil war.

C.2.

Independence From Britain

Although Marylanders had grievances against British rule, their grievances were fewer and less serious than those of other American colonies. Daniel Dulany the Younger, a Maryland lawyer, presented such powerful arguments against the Stamp Act, imposed on the colonies in 1765, that British statesman William Pitt was influenced to argue in Parliament for its repeal.

From 1715 to the mid-1770s, however, Maryland politics largely turned on conflicts between the lord proprietor and the antiproprietary forces protesting the fees and restrictions imposed by the lord’s regime. In 1770 a statute that established proprietary fees, and also set required contributions to the established Church of England, expired. For several years every attempt to reestablish the fees aroused as much or more resentment than the actions of the British government. Maryland’s movement toward independence from Great Britain thus began as a local dispute over provincial issues. The patriot Charles Carroll of Carrollton, who later became a leader in the American Revolution, first got into political dispute by publishing a series of articles in the Maryland Gazette under the pen name of First Citizen. Carroll used constitutional arguments to rebut the pro-fee position taken by Dulany, the chief proprietary spokesman.

Maryland became involved in continental issues in 1774 when the British blockaded the harbor of Boston, Massachusetts, where patriots had been protesting the tea tax and monopoly. Carroll and other popular leaders, such as Samuel Chase and William Paca, turned complaints about the proprietary regime into public resistance to British control. In October of that year a group of Marylanders staged their own tea tax incident by burning the brigantine Peggy Stewart, which had arrived in Annapolis harbor with 2,000 pounds of tax-paid tea in its cargo.

Of more permanent importance was the establishment in that year of the Maryland provincial convention, consisting of deputies elected from each of the counties. The convention and its executive arm, the council of safety, gradually took over government of the province. The convention sent delegates to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, beginning in 1774, to help coordinate resistance to British oppression.

Despite the increasing popular sentiment against Great Britain, the convention remained cautious and officially opposed independence until colonial troops had been fighting the British for more than a year. Finally, in May 1776, the convention asked Governor Eden to return to England. It then passed a resolution directing the province’s delegates to Congress to support independence. The delegates voted in favor of it in Congress in July 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was adopted. Charles Carroll, Samuel Chase, William Paca, and Thomas Stone signed the document for Maryland.

During the American Revolution, Marylanders distinguished themselves in battle in places far to the north and south. Maryland privateers, or merchant vessels converted to warships, harried British shipping along the coast.

C.3.

Early Statehood

A convention met in Annapolis in 1776 to draw up a state constitution. In February 1777 the legislature elected Thomas Johnson as the state’s first governor under the new constitution.

In February 1781 Maryland was the last state to authorize its delegates to sign the Articles of Confederation, setting forth a governmental system for the United States. Maryland had hesitated because of its contention that Virginia and other states that had vast land claims in the west should cede these to the federal government. Virginia, which had the largest claim, was the last to cede it and in the meantime tried to make a bargain by offering instead to give land to Revolutionary War veterans. Maryland was adamant, however, and Virginia finally gave up its claim on January 2, 1781.

In September 1786 Annapolis was host to a convention of states for the purpose of discussing uniform regulations for trade and commerce. The moving force behind the convention was patriot James Madison, a Virginia legislator who had experienced the frustration of trying to set navigation rules that Virginia, Maryland, and all other concerned states could agree on for the Potomac River. Madison, along with many others, believed that only the federal government could effectively enforce uniform trade regulations and that the Articles of Confederation were inadequate for that purpose.

Nine states accepted invitations to the convention, but only five—Virginia, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware—actually sent delegates. Despite the poor attendance, they agreed that not only commerce but other operations of government under the Articles needed revision. The convention drafted a resolution calling on the states to meet in Philadelphia the next spring to “render the constitution of the Federal Government adequate to the exigencies of the Union.” The proposal was approved by Congress, and the resulting Philadelphia convention of 1787 drew up the Constitution of the United States. Maryland became the seventh state to ratify the Constitution, on April 28, 1788.

In 1790 Maryland ceded a half-square of land along the Potomac River, amounting to 177 sq km (68 sq mi), for the site of a permanent federal capital. This was called the District of Columbia; the capital, when it became the seat of the federal government in 1800, was named Washington.

C.4.

Growth of Baltimore

By the late 18th century, wheat—which was grown on the upper Eastern Shore of Maryland, in the Susquehanna River basin in Pennsylvania, and in the lush Piedmont of western Maryland—was creating enormous wealth and encouraging the growth of cities, especially Baltimore and Philadelphia. The markets for wheat and flour, both domestic and foreign, seemed inexhaustible. To sell the vast amounts of wheat produced, Baltimore entrepreneurs built ships, docks, warehouses, and offices; they bought insurance, paid clerks, issued newspaper advertisements, and fought savagely for competitive advantage over merchants in Philadelphia. Baltimore grew swiftly. Millers built mills along the fast-running streams that fed into the harbor. Hotels, taverns, and churches went up. Construction of wagons, barrels, and houses joined ironmaking as basic Baltimore industries.

D.

The 19th Century

D.1.

War of 1812

The War of 1812 (1812-1815) broke out between the United States and Britain over the issues of free trade and impressment of seamen. British ships began attacking communities along Chesapeake Bay early in 1813, and in August 1814, a British squadron, joined by recently arrived transports carrying several thousand troops under Major General Robert Ross, set out to capture Washington and Baltimore. The fleet sailed up the Patuxent River and discharged Ross’s troops at Benedict. They proceeded unimpeded to Bladensburg, near Washington. There they routed a U.S. force led by General William H. Winder. They then entered Washington and burned several buildings, including the White House.

Following the burning of Washington, the British returned to their ships on the Patuxent. On September 12, Ross’s troops were landed at North Point, at the mouth of the Patapsco River below Baltimore. As they marched toward the city, the British engaged a smaller force of local militia, which inflicted severe casualties on them and killed General Ross. The militia then retreated toward the city and regrouped with 12,000 troops to face the British. However, the British retired to their ships on September 14 without firing a shot. Meanwhile, on September 13, British warships had attacked Fort McHenry, which guarded the entrance to Baltimore Harbor. Intense bombardment of the fort continued for 25 hours but failed to force it to surrender, and the British withdrew from the harbor on September 14. The entire engagement, observed by Maryland lawyer and poet Francis Scott Key from a flag-of-truce boat in the harbor, was the inspiration for his poem, “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Set to music, this became the U.S. national anthem in 1931.

D.2.

Transportation Revolution

Baltimore’s economic growth clearly depended on transportation links with the West. Thus in 1811 the federal government began construction of the National Road westward from Cumberland, Maryland, to Wheeling, Virginia (now in West Virginia), along the Ohio River. The road opened between those two points in 1818, and in 1821 turnpike companies completed links between Baltimore and Cumberland. In July 1828, business interests centered in the city of Washington broke ground for the projected Chesapeake and Ohio (C&O) Canal, starting on the Potomac, that was supposed to connect the nation’s capital with the Ohio River. In 1850 the C&O canal reached Cumberland and stopped there. It never reached Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, its original intended terminus, but it was a boon to commerce nevertheless because its western end linked up with the National Road.

At the same time, Baltimore investors began work on a long-distance railroad. This revolutionary approach to moving people and commodities proved to be a complete success despite the obstacle of the Allegheny Mountains in the west. The Baltimore and Ohio, or B&O, Railroad, completed track to Wheeling in 1852; it set an example for the nation and ensured Baltimore’s prominence as a center of trade. By 1860 the city had a population of 212,418, or nearly one-third of the state’s total population of 687,049. From the city’s harbor, vessels carried flour and other products to all parts of the world. Some were the renowned Baltimore clipper schooners, swift sailing vessels that first appeared toward the end of the revolution and were built chiefly in Eastern Shore and Baltimore shipyards. After 1850, Baltimore’s shipyards built fewer sailing ships and concentrated on construction of steam-powered vessels.

D.3.

The Civil War

Slavery was one of the most important issues in national politics in the first half of the 19th century. Politicians of the North pressed to end it, both because it was considered immoral and because white labor could not compete with unpaid black labor. Politicians of the South felt that slavery was necessary to their agricultural system and that the North was trying to dominate the country economically. By the 1850s, Southerners saw their power slipping in Congress, and the clamor by Northern abolitionists—those who wanted to end slavery totally and immediately—was at its peak. Many in the South came to believe that secession from the federal Union was the only way to protect “Southern rights,” including the right to own slaves.

In 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president as the candidate of the Republican Party, which opposed the spread of slavery. The state of South Carolina had threatened to secede if the Republicans won, and in December 1860 it did so. Other slavery states followed in quick succession, and in February 1861 they formed a confederacy, the Confederate States of America. The American Civil War began officially on April 12, 1861, when the Confederates bombarded a federal fort in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina.

Maryland had ties to both North and South. Some Marylanders, particularly the state’s 14,000 slaveholders, favored secession. Many more opposed it but also opposed the use of armed force to return seceded states to the Union. In Baltimore on April 19, 1861, a pro-Confederacy mob attacked Massachusetts troops as they made their way between rail stations, shedding the first blood of the war and causing outrage in the loyal states. President Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus, thus allowing him to detain Confederate sympathizers without a court hearing, and by mid-May Union Army soldiers occupied Federal Hill in Baltimore. Baltimore remained occupied throughout the war. Realizing the strategic importance of keeping Maryland in the Union, the Lincoln Administration employed force as necessary to discourage secessionism. In the 1861 election for governor, the military took measures, including the arrest of many pro-Confederacy politicians, to guarantee the election of a pro-Union candidate. A constitutional convention in 1864 abolished slavery, making Maryland the first state to do so on its own.

Eventually more than 50,000 Marylanders fought for the Union and about 22,000 volunteered for the Confederacy. Three major battles took place on Maryland soil. On September 14, 1862, at South Mountain, The Union Army under General George McClellan met Confederate troops led by General Robert E. Lee and drove them back several miles toward Sharpsburg. On September 17, these forces clashed again in the Battle of Antietam (Southerners call it the Battle of Sharpsburg), the war’s bloodiest single day. More than 18,000 soldiers were wounded, 4,700 killed, and 3,000 missing in action. The failure of this foray by Lee north of the Potomac forestalled European intervention on the South’s behalf. It also gave Lincoln the victory he needed to provide a favorable atmosphere for his Emancipation Proclamation, freeing all slaves in rebel-held areas, which he announced five days after the battle. It became effective on January 1, 1863. On July 9, 1864, an advance on Washington by Confederate troops was delayed by a small Union force at the Battle of the Monocacy, enabling Union forces to fortify the national capital.

D.4.

The Late 19th Century

After the Civil War, black Marylanders found the path toward equality obstructed and disappointing. In the countryside, whites vandalized some freedmen’s schools. Many former slaves moved to Baltimore in search of better lives. There they joined a vibrant community made up largely of blacks who had been free for generations. When the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granted black men the right to vote in 1870, Maryland was not one of the states that ratified the measure. Black Baltimoreans nonetheless paraded proudly through the city.

D.5.

The Economy and Politics

The state’s economy grew unevenly in the late 19th century. The B&O remained an important link to the Midwest, and C&O barges continued to bring large quantities of western Maryland coal to the Tidewater area. Baltimore lost its prominence in flour milling to places closer to the new Western wheat belt, but the city flourished as a center for clothing, canning, fertilizer, steel, banking, and coastal shipping. Women and children played important roles in some of this work, especially in canning and clothing. Agriculture on the Eastern Shore converted to vegetable and fruit growing (or truck farming) and eventually to poultry. On the Western Shore, farmers in the southern counties continued to rely on tobacco; in the Piedmont, farm families looked increasingly to the markets of Baltimore and Washington. Until the supply sharply dropped in the 1890s, oystering boomed in Chesapeake Bay. It also produced armed conflicts as Marylanders and Virginians fought over the remaining oyster beds. Violence on a larger scale erupted in 1877, when B&O workers attempted to strike against the railroad and were put down by militia.

Meanwhile railroad and shipping interests heavily influenced the state’s Democratic Party, which, under the leadership of U.S. Senator Arthur Pue Gorman and Baltimore political broker I. Freeman Rasin, dominated politics, welcomed former Confederates, and developed into a highly efficient political machine—an organization to control party offices and appointments to government jobs. In statewide elections Republicans, calling for reform, often ran a close second.

D.6.

Institutional Reforms and Improvements

As elsewhere in the United States, changing attitudes toward politics and the role of the state in daily affairs produced in Maryland an impulse toward reform and improvement as the 19th century ended. The University of Maryland Medical School pioneered in adopting the French clinical method of teaching and took special interest in the care of mothers and newborn infants. At the Johns Hopkins Hospital (opened in 1889) and School of Medicine (1893), researchers made strides in formulating the germ theory of disease and finding effective ways to treat tuberculosis. Such efforts led to improvements in obstetric care, new public health measures, and fresh attitudes toward housing and caring for the poor, the sick, and the disabled.

Johns Hopkins University, founded in 1876, led the way in graduate education. Its faculty members also campaigned for better management of the oyster beds in particular and for more rational public policies generally. Educators succeeded in strengthening and standardizing teacher training. In Baltimore, Henrietta Szold developed model programs for the care and education of immigrant children. Enoch Pratt, a Baltimore merchant, sponsored the first citywide system of free libraries, which opened in 1886.

In 1894 the legislature restricted child labor and set standards for pure milk; in 1896 it adopted the secret ballot; and in 1902 it passed the country’s first workers’ compensation law. The Maryland Bar Association formed in 1895 and called for revised laws and professionalism among judges. Women in favor of good government formed a state federation in 1899 and five years later organized a women’s suffrage association.

E.

The 20th Century

E.1.

World Wars and Depression

The entry of the United States into World War I in 1917 had immediate and far-reaching impact on Maryland. Increases in the government workforce in Washington, D.C., spurred suburban growth—housing, commercial development, and roadbuilding—in neighboring Montgomery and Prince George’s counties. The U.S. War Department and Navy Department took over large expanses of land for training camps and weapons testing grounds. Shipbuilding, munitions, uniforms, and other military production gave Baltimore’s economy a strong boost. During the war H.L. Mencken, the Baltimore journalist, literary critic, and magazine editor, stopped writing his weekly opinion column, so strong were his pro-German sympathies. After the war Mencken resumed his place as a critic at large, becoming a figure of national prominence.

During the unprecedented four administrations of Democratic Governor Albert C. Ritchie (1920-1935), Maryland made changes in the structure and budgeting of state government and spent large sums to improve the road system. Ritchie campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1924 and 1932. The Maryland economy largely continued strong during the 1920s. Its diversity helped somewhat to cushion the blows resulting from the stock market crash of October 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression, the economic hardtimes of the 1930s. Nonetheless, the depression made a deep mark on nearly everyone. A Peoples Unemployment League formed in Baltimore in 1933; three years later a labor strike in Cumberland led to riots.

Even before the United States entered World War II (1939-1945), the war purchases of Britain and some of the other Allied Powers meant increased business for Maryland industries like the Glenn L. Martin Company aircraft plant near Baltimore. After the United States joined the Allies, war mobilization moved the state’s economy into high gear. From April 1940 to November 1943 the labor force in Baltimore gained 215,000 jobs while losing 55,000 people to military service. Shipbuilding and repair workers, many of them newly arrived in Baltimore, labored around the clock. The time they took to build a Liberty ship fell from 244 to 30 days. The black percentage of the Maryland workforce climbed from 7 percent to 17 percent. Women worked in both light and heavy industry, drove buses, tested weapons, and made explosives. Doctors and nurses from University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins medical schools formed hospital units. A combined Maryland-Virginia National Guard force, the 29th Division of the U.S. Army, was in the bloody fighting at Omaha Beach when the Allies made their great amphibious assault on D-Day, June 6, 1944.

When the Allies won the war in the summer of 1945, most Marylanders wanted to return to normal life. Most women war workers returned to domestic life. Couples got married and started families. Easier home mortgage loans for veterans allowed many families in Baltimore row houses or Washington, D.C., apartments to buy houses outside the city. More families could afford automobiles. Politicians on the local level, in almost every community, scrambled to build new schools and roads.

A number of factors kept the Maryland economy robust for many years. First was the work of demobilization—the return of military personnel to civilian life—and the pent-up demand for consumer goods—which had been in short supply during the war. Then defense spending continued during the Cold War, a period of hostility between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

E.2.

The Civil Rights Movement

Maryland law established racial segregation in public accommodations in 1904 (which both whites and blacks often ignored), but citizens of the state three times rejected referendums that called for black voters to be disfranchised (denied voting rights). The second oldest chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which was long the country’s most prominent minority rights organization, was formed in Baltimore in 1913.

After World War II, black Marylanders were among those making renewed calls for racial justice. Lillie Carroll Jackson led the active Baltimore chapter of the NAACP. Attorney Thurgood Marshall, a Baltimorean who led the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, helped to mount a concerted legal challenge to racial segregation in schools. In 1954, in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education, he succeeded in getting the Supreme Court of the United States to decide that separate black schools were inherently unequal. Later, he sat on that same Court himself as its first black member.

Baltimore had begun to desegregate its high schools before the Brown decision required it to do so. Yet school integration did not move swiftly in eastern and southern Maryland, and it produced resistance among many whites. White emigration to the suburbs of Washington and Baltimore accelerated.

During the 1960s, Marylanders generally opened access to schools, public facilities, and housing to all citizens without regard to color. But uneven success, continuing poverty, and the growing militancy of the civil rights movement also polarized some communities. Race riots broke out in Cambridge in 1963 and 1964, and the National Guard was called in to restore order. In April 1968, after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., rioting occurred in parts of Baltimore. In the short run, the Baltimore riots offered Governor Spiro T. Agnew an excuse to attack the city’s black leadership. In the long run, the discord brought moderates of both races together to find ways to expand opportunities in the private sector of the economy and strengthen institutions that could work out grievances and foster stability.

E.3.

Late 20th Century Economy

Maryland grew in population rapidly in the Cold War years, particularly around Washington and Baltimore, from almost 2 million in 1950 to almost 5 million in 1980. Land in farming dropped from about two-thirds of total land area in 1950 to far less than one-half thirty years later. Columbia, the planned (and deliberately integrated) community that opened between Baltimore and Washington in the mid-1960s, was the work of developer James W. Rouse, who throughout his career promoted public housing for the poor and designed unusual, people-oriented shopping centers. Rouse received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, in 1995 for his contributions to the field of urban planning.

The state’s economy in the 1960s and 1970s gradually began to shift in response to global trends and changing patterns of transportation. The port of Baltimore faced strong competition from Newport News, Virginia. The demand for western Maryland’s bituminous coal fell because it produced more air pollution than other types of coal. Gradually the state’s economy shifted from heavy to light industry—from shipbuilding and steelmaking in Baltimore to the “smokeless” high-technology firms that first congregated along the Interstate 270 corridor in Montgomery County. Jobs in service industries that offered low wages increased. So did tourism, notably in Baltimore’s refurbished downtown.

E.4.

Political Trends

Although the majority of the state’s voters were registered as Democrats, the state nonetheless put Republicans in office in the 1960s and 1970s. Maryland politics was broad based. In the late 1970s, the Maryland congressional delegation had a higher proportion of women than that of any other state, and the legislature had one of the highest ratios of black and female membership in the nation.

The openness of Maryland politics helped the state weather the occasional embarrassing scandals. Governor Agnew, later twice elected vice president under President Richard M. Nixon, pleaded no contest to corruption charges and resigned in disgrace in October 1973. Four years later a sitting governor, Marvin Mandel, was sentenced to federal prison for mail fraud. Following these events, anticorruption measures were passed under the reform administration of Governor Harry R. Hughes.

In the early 1990s taxation and government expense were among the major political issues. Marylanders were split about evenly by geographic region. Liberals and moderates prevailed in three localities: heavily black, financially strapped Baltimore; Prince George’s County, containing many federal workers and black suburbanites; and well-to-do Montgomery County, with its own federal employees. Conservative-to-moderate voters prevailed in other parts of the state, which are predominantly white, suspicious of government, and culturally conservative. Democrat Parris Glendening was elected governor in 1994 on the strength of the Baltimore black vote and Prince George’s federal worker vote; his Republican opponent carried 19 of the state’s 23 counties. He was reelected in 1998.

F.

The 21st Century

At the beginning of the 21st century, Maryland voters were becoming increasingly conservative. In 2002 voters elected the state’s first Republican governor since 1966 when United States representative Robert L. Ehrlich, Jr., defeated two-term Lieutenant Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. As governor, Ehrlich proposed legalizing slot machines to help offset the state’s budget shortfall. But the controversial initiative failed in the state legislature. Voters elected a Democrat, Baltimore mayor Martin O’Malley, as governor in 2006.

The history section of this article was contributed by Robert J. Brugger. The remainder of the article was contributed by James E. DiLisio.