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Maryland is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern regions of the United States. It borders Virginia to its south, West Virginia to its west, Pennsylvania to its north, and Delaware to its east, as well as with the Atlantic Ocean to its east, and the national capital and federal district of Washington, D.C. to the southwest. With a total area of 12,407 square miles (32,130 km2), Maryland is the ninth-smallest state by land area, and its population of 6.1 million ranks it the 19th-most populous state and the fifth-most densely populated. Maryland's capital city is Annapolis, and the state's most populous city is Baltimore.
Maryland's coastline was first explored by Europeans in the 16th century. Prior to that, it was inhabited by several Native American tribes, mostly the Algonquian peoples. One of the original Thirteen Colonies, the charter for the Province of Maryland was petitioned and secured in 1632 by George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore and Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore, and the land first settled in 1634, primarily to provide a religious haven for Catholics persecuted in England. Religious strife was common in Maryland's early years, and Catholics remained a minority, albeit in greater numbers than in any other English colony. Its economy was heavily plantation-based and centered mostly on the cultivation of tobacco. Demand for cheap labor from Maryland colonists led to the importation of numerous indentured servants and enslaved Africans. In 1760, Maryland's current boundaries took form following the settlement of a long-running border dispute with Pennsylvania. Although it was a slave state, Maryland remained in the Union during the American Civil War due to Abraham Lincoln leaving the National Guard there. Its proximity to Washington D.C. and Virginia made it a significant strategic location. After the Civil War ended in 1865, Maryland took part in the Industrial Revolution, driven by its seaports, railroad networks, and mass immigration from Europe.
Since the 1940s, the state's population has grown rapidly, to approximately six million residents, and it is among the most densely populated U.S. states. As of 2015, Maryland had the highest median household income of any state, owing in large part to its proximity to Washington, D.C., and a highly diversified economy spanning manufacturing, retail services, public administration, real estate, higher education, information technology, defense contracting, health care, and biotechnology. Maryland is one of the most multicultural states in the country; it is one of the nine states where non-Whites compose a majority of the population, with the fifth-highest percentage of African Americans, and high numbers of residents born in Africa, Asia, Central America, and the Caribbean. The state's central role in U.S. history is reflected by its hosting of some of the highest numbers of historic landmarks per capita.
The western portion of the state contains stretches of the Appalachian Mountains, the central portion is primarily composed of the Piedmont, and the eastern side of the state makes up a significant portion of the Chesapeake Bay. Sixteen of Maryland's twenty-three counties, and the city of Baltimore, border the tidal waters of the Chesapeake Bay estuary and its many tributaries, which combined total more than 4,000 miles of shoreline. Although one of the smallest states in the U.S., it features a variety of climates and topographical features that have earned it the moniker of America in Miniature. Maryland's geography, culture, and history are diverse, including elements of the Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, and Southern regions of the country.
Present-day Maryland was originally inhabited by native tribes such as the Piscataway (including the Patuxent), the Nanticoke (including the Tocwogh, the Ozinie and other subdivisions), the Powhatan, the Lenape, the Susquehannock, the Shawnee, the Tutelo, the Saponi, the Pocomoke and the Massawomeck. George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore (1579–1632), sought a charter from King Charles I for the territory between Massachusetts to the north and Virginia to the immediate south. After Baltimore died in April 1632, the charter was granted to his son, Cecilius Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore (1605–1675), on June 20, 1632. Officially, the new "Maryland Colony" was named in honor of Henrietta Maria of France, wife of Charles I. Lord Baltimore initially proposed the name "Crescentia", the land of growth or increase, but "the King proposed Terra Mariae [Mary Land], which was concluded on and inserted in the bill."
The original capital of Maryland was St. Mary's City, on the north shore of the Potomac River, and the county surrounding it was the first erected and created in the province, first called Augusta Carolina, after the King, and later named St. Mary's County.
Lord Baltimore's first settlers arrived in the new colony in March 1634, with his younger brother, Leonard Calvert (1606–1647), as the first provincial Governor of Maryland. They made their first permanent settlement at St. Mary's City in what is now St. Mary's County. They purchased the site from the paramount chief of the region, who was eager to establish trade. St. Mary's became the first capital of Maryland, and remained so for 60 years until 1695. More settlers soon followed. Their tobacco crops were successful and quickly made the new colony profitable. However, given the incidence of malaria, yellow fever, and typhoid, life expectancy in Maryland was about 10 years less than in New England.
Maryland was founded to provide a haven for England's Roman Catholic minority. Although Maryland was the most heavily Catholic of the English mainland colonies, the religion was still in the minority, consisting of less than 10% of the total population.
In 1642, several Puritans left Virginia for Maryland and founded the city of Providence, now called Annapolis, on the western shore of the upper Chesapeake Bay. A dispute with traders from Virginia over Kent Island in the Chesapeake led to armed conflict. In 1644, William Claiborne, a Puritan, seized Kent Island while his associate, the pro-Parliament Puritan Richard Ingle, took over St. Mary's. Both used religion as a tool to gain popular support. The two years from 1644 to 1646 when Claiborne and his Puritan associates held sway were known as "The Plundering Time". They captured Jesuit priests, imprisoned them, and then sent them back to England.
In 1646, Leonard Calvert returned with troops, recaptured St. Mary's City, and restored order. The House of Delegates passed the "Act concerning Religion" in 1649, granting religious liberty to all Trinitarian Christians.
In 1650, the Puritans revolted against the proprietary government. "Protestants swept the Catholics out of the legislature ... and religious strife returned." The Puritans set up a new government prohibiting both Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism. The Puritan revolutionary government persecuted Maryland Catholics during its reign, known as the "plundering time". Mobs burned down all the original Catholic churches of southern Maryland. The Puritan rule lasted until 1658, when the Calvert family and Lord Baltimore regained proprietary control and re-enacted the Toleration Act.
After England's Glorious Revolution in 1688, Maryland outlawed Catholicism. In 1704, the Maryland General Assembly prohibited Catholics from operating schools, limited the corporate ownership of property to hamper religious orders from expanding or supporting themselves, and encouraged the conversion of Catholic children. The celebration of the Catholic sacraments was also officially restricted. This state of affairs lasted until after the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783). Wealthy Catholic planters built chapels on their land to practice their religion in relative secrecy.
Into the 18th century, individual priests and lay leaders claimed Maryland farms belonging to the Jesuits as personal property and bequeathed them to evade the legal restrictions on religious organizations' owning property.
The royal charter granted Maryland the land north of the Potomac River up to the 40th parallel. A problem arose when Charles II granted a charter for the Province of Pennsylvania, which defined Pennsylvania's southern border as the 40th parallel, identical to Maryland's northern border. But the grant indicated that Charles II and William Penn assumed the 40th parallel would pass close to New Castle, Delaware, when it in fact falls north of Philadelphia, which Penn already designated as Pennsylvania's capital city. Negotiations ensued after the problem was discovered in 1681.
A compromise proposed by Charles II in 1682 was undermined by Penn's receiving the additional grant of what is now Delaware. Penn successfully argued that the Maryland charter entitled Lord Baltimore only to unsettled lands, and Dutch settlement in Delaware predated his charter. The dispute remained unresolved for nearly a century, carried on by the descendants of William Penn and Lord Baltimore—the Calvert family, which controlled Maryland, and the Penn family, which controlled Pennsylvania.
The border dispute with Pennsylvania led to Cresap's War in the 1730s. Hostilities erupted in 1730 and escalated through the first half of the decade, culminating in the deployment of military forces by Maryland in 1736 and by Pennsylvania in 1737. The armed phase of the conflict ended in May 1738 with the intervention of King George II, who compelled the negotiation of a cease-fire. A provisional agreement had been established in 1732.
Negotiations continued until a final agreement was signed in 1760. The agreement defined the border between Maryland and Pennsylvania as the line of latitude now known as the Mason–Dixon line. Maryland's border with Delaware was based on the Transpeninsular Line and the Twelve-Mile Circle around New Castle.
Most of the English colonists arrived in Maryland as indentured servants, and had to serve a several-year term as laborers to pay for their passage. In the early years, the line between indentured servants and African slaves or laborers was fluid, and white and black laborers commonly lived and worked together, and formed unions. Mixed-race children born to white mothers were considered free by the principle of partus sequitur ventrem, by which children took the social status of their mothers, a principle of slave law that was adopted throughout the colonies, following Virginia in 1662.
Many of the free black families migrated to Delaware, where land was cheaper. As the flow of indentured laborers to the colony decreased with improving economic conditions in England, planters in Maryland imported thousands more slaves and racial caste lines hardened.
Maryland was one of the thirteen colonies that revolted against British rule in the American Revolution. Near the end of the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783), on February 2, 1781, Maryland became the last and 13th state to approve the ratification of the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, first proposed in 1776 and adopted by the Second Continental Congress in 1778, which brought into being the United States as a united, sovereign and national state. It also became the seventh state admitted to the Union after ratifying the new federal Constitution in 1788. In December 1790, prior to the move of the national capital from Philadelphia in 1800, Maryland donated land selected by first President George Washington to the federal government towards creation of the Washington, D.C. The land was provided along the north shore of the Potomac River from Montgomery and Prince George's counties, as well as from Fairfax County and Alexandria on the south shore of the Potomac in Virginia; however, the land donated by the Commonwealth of Virginia was later returned to that state by the District of Columbia retrocession in 1846.
Influenced by a changing economy, revolutionary ideals, and preaching by ministers, numerous planters in Maryland freed their slaves in the 20 years after the Revolutionary War. Across the Upper South the free black population increased from less than 1% before the war to 14% by 1810. Abolitionists Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass were born slaves during this time in Dorchester County and Talbot County, respectively.
During the War of 1812, the British military attempted to capture Baltimore, which was protected by Fort McHenry. During its bombardment, the song "The Star-Spangled Banner" was written by Francis Scott Key; it was later adopted as the national anthem. The Francis Scott Key Bridge (renamed after him in 1976) located across the Patapsco River in Baltimore metropolitan area was struck by a container ship Dali on March 26, 2024, causing it to collapse.
National Road, later renamed U.S. Route 40, was authorized in 1817 as the federal highway, and ran from Baltimore to St. Louis. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, the first chartered railroad in the United States, opened its first section of track for regular operation in 1830 between Baltimore and Ellicott City, and in 1852 it became the first rail line to reach the Ohio River from the eastern seaboard.
The state remained in the Union during the American Civil War, due in significant part to demographics and Federal intervention. The 1860 census, held shortly before the outbreak of the civil war, showed that 49% of Maryland's African Americans were free.
Governor Thomas Holliday Hicks suspended the state legislature, and to help ensure the election of a new pro-union governor and legislature, President Abraham Lincoln had a number of its pro-slavery politicians arrested, including the Mayor of Baltimore, George William Brown; suspended several civil liberties, including habeas corpus; and ordered artillery placed on Federal Hill overlooking Baltimore.
In April 1861, Federal units and state regiments were attacked as they marched through Baltimore, sparking the Baltimore riot of 1861, the first bloodshed in the Civil War. The largest and most significant battle in the state was the Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862, near Sharpsburg. Although a tactical draw, the battle was considered a strategic Union victory and a turning point of the war.
A new state constitution in 1864 abolished slavery and Maryland was first recognized as a "Free State" in that context. Following passage of constitutional amendments that granted voting rights to freedmen, in 1867 the state extended suffrage to non-white males.
The Democratic Party rapidly regained power in the state from Republicans. Democrats replaced the Constitution of 1864 with the Constitution of 1867. Following the end of Reconstruction in 1877, Democrats devised means of disenfranchising blacks, initially by physical intimidation and voter fraud, later by constitutional amendments and laws. Blacks and immigrants, however, resisted Democratic Party disfranchisement efforts in the state. Maryland blacks were part of a biracial Republican coalition elected to state government in 1896–1904 and comprised 20% of the electorate.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Maryland”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.