<Tr> <Td> <Ul> <Li> </Li> <Li> </Li> <Li> </Li> </Ul> </Td> </Tr> <Ul> <Li> </Li> <Li> </Li> <Li> </Li> </Ul> <P> During the American Civil War, Maryland, a slave state, was one of the border states, straddling the South and North . Because of its strategic location, bordering the national capital city of Washington D.C. with its District of Columbia since 1790, and the strong desire of the opposing factions within the state to sway public opinion towards their respective causes, Maryland would play an important role in the American Civil War (1861 - 1865). New sixteenth President Abraham Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus in Maryland, and his dismissal of the U.S. Supreme Court's "Ex parte Merryman" decision concerning John Merryman, a prominent Southern sympathizer from Baltimore County held in Fort McHenry, now nicknamed "Baltimore Bastille". The Chief Justice supported by the Court had held that the suspension was unconstitutional, would leave lasting civil and legal scars . The court was led by Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, a Marylander from Frederick and sometimes in Baltimore and protege of seventh President Andrew Jackson who had appointed him two decades earlier . </P> <P> The first fatalities of the war happened during the Baltimore Civil War Riots of Thursday / Friday, April 18 - 19th, 1861, and a year and a half later with the single bloodiest day of combat in American military history occurred during the first major Confederate invasion of the North in the Maryland Campaign, just north above the Potomac River, near Sharpsburg, Maryland, (Washington County) at the Battle of Antietam, on 17th September, 1862 . Preceded by the pivotal skirmishes at three mountain passes to the east in the Battle of South Mountain, Antietam (also known in the South as the Battle of Sharpsburg), though tactically a draw, was strategically enough of a Union victory in the second year of the war to give 16th President Abraham Lincoln the opportunity to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared slaves in the rebelling states of the Confederacy (but not those in the areas already occupied by the Union Army or in semi-loyal border slave states like Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri) to be free . </P>

Was maryland a free state during the civil war