During the Civil War, Maryland did not secede from the Union, however many Marylanders were sympathetic to the Confederate cause. Among the 85,000 Marylanders who fought in the Civil War, approximately 25,000 were Confederate soldiers. In fact, some Baltimoreans felt so passionate about preserving the institution of slavery that one of the first instances of bloodshed over the issue of slavery occurred on April 19, 1861 during the “Pratt Street Riot” in which Confederate sympathizers attacked Union soldiers from the 6th Massachusetts Militia and the Washington Brigade of Philadelphia who were on their way to Washington, D.C.
After the Civil War, Baltimore’s population continued to grow, but its population never again ranked among the top three most populous cities in the country as it once did during the early nineteenth century. According to the U.S. Federal Census, from 1880 to 1980, Baltimore ranked among the top ten most populous cities in the country when its population, despite many ebbs and flows over the decades, rose from 332,313 to 786,741. Additionally, Baltimore’s Black population increased from 16.2% to 54.8% in the span of a century.Although the city gradually became more racially diverse over time, it remained culturally exclusive in its historical narrative. From as early as 1887, city officials chose to adorn Baltimore’s physical landscape with four monuments honoring the Confederacy, including a statue of Judge Roger Brooke Taney, in a covert effort to celebrate those who sought to protect the institution of slavery. A native Marylander, Taney was infamous for his Supreme Court opinion in the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford case in which he declared that enslaved people were not American citizens and could not declare their freedom from slavery if they ever reached the soil of a free state. Taney’s statue was unveiled in Baltimore approximately a decade after the Dred Scott Decision was reversed with the passage of the 14th Amendment which gave formerly-enslaved African Americans citizenship and equal protection of civil rights under the law.
By 1948, three more Confederate monuments were erected in Baltimore during the Great Migration: the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument; the Confederate Women of Maryland; and the Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee Monument. Monuments remind future generations of a city’s history and legacy. Baltimore’s Confederate monuments were physical representations of how slavery was central to the city’s cultural identity.