Existing comment:
City Hall
Former Frederick County Courthouse
-- Antietam Campaign 1862 --
Connections with the Civil War abound around this Courthouse Square, where the first official act of defiance against the British crown - the 1765 Stamp Act Repudiation - occurred almost a century earlier. In 1857, Roger Brooke Taney, Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court and a former resident who is buried in Frederick, wrote in the Dread Scott Decision that the Constitution's freedoms did not extend to African-Americans, one of the steps on the road to war. Taney and his brother-in-law, Francis Scott Key, both practiced law here. A bust here honors the Chief Justice who administered the Oath of Office to seven presidents, including Abraham Lincoln in 1861.
Governor Thomas Hicks called a special session of the Maryland Legislature in 1861 to address the question of secession. Because of the large number of US troops in the capital city of Annapolis, the legislature met here at the site of the former Frederick County courthouse. Finding the space inadequate, the lawmakers convened a block away in Kemp Hall. Under orders from President Lincoln, legislators likely to favor the South were detained in route. With no quorum, Maryland's legislature could not vote to secede. The courthouse burned during the session, and the legislature promptly authorized financing to construct the present building, now City Hall.
Both Confederate Gen. Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson and President Lincoln were visitors to this neighborhood in 1862.
The reconstructed home of Barbara Fritchie, poet John Greenleaf Whittier's Civil War heroine, is reached by traveling one block south on Court Street, then one block west on Patrick Street.
Map:
A. Kemp Hall
B. Old City Hall
C. Trinity Chapel (Barbara Fritchie was baptized here)
D. Evangelical Reformed Church (Stonewall Jackson reportedly slept here during a pro-Lincoln September 1862 sermon)
E. Taney Bust
F. All Saints Episcopal Church (C.S. Gen. William Pendleton, a noted Confederate artillery commander, was formerly the rector here)
G. City Hall (1862 County Courthouse)
H. Ramsey House (President Lincoln visited here in October 1862, calling on U.S. Gen. George Hartsuff who was recuperating from wounds suffered at Antietam) |