John Merryman (1824-1881)
MSA SC 3520-1543
Biography:
John Merryman was born at "Hereford Farm" in Baltimore County on August 9, 1824, to Nicholas Rogers and Ann Marie (Gott) Merryman. His education began in 1839 as an employee in Richard Norris' hardware store in Baltimore City. One year later he moved to Guayama, Puerto Rico, to work for his uncle, Samuel N. Gott, in his counting room. Merryman returned to Maryland in 1842 to manage a number of farms belonging to his uncle John Merryman on which Merryman began raising and breeding Hereford cattle with stock he imported from England.
In 1865 he branched out into the fertilizer business by establishing John Merryman & Co. of Baltimore City, fertilizer dealers. Merryman's interest in cattle and farming remained constant throughout his life. He was a lifetime member of the U.S. Agricultural Society and the National Agricultural Association. He exhibited his cattle at numerous national fairs and won countless prizes and a widespread reputation for his stock. He was also a member of the Maryland State Agricultural Society, serving as vice-president from 1852-1857 and president from 1857 to 1861. This organization later became the Maryland State Agricultural and Mechanical Association, and John Merryman served as president from 1877 to 1881.
Politically, Merryman identified as a Democrat. He served as president of the Board of County Commissioners for Baltimore County in 1857. He was State Treasurer from 1870 to 1872 and served in the House of Delegates from Baltimore County from 1874 to 1876.
The Pratt Street Riot and Rising Tensions in Civil War Maryland
Prior to the Civil War, John Merryman was a 3rd Lieutenant in the Baltimore County Troops. In the span of one week in April, the Civil War began in South Carolina and took shape in Baltimore. On April 12, 1861, treasonous Confederate troops fired upon Fort Sumter, an American military station guarding Charleston Harbor in South Carolina (South Carolina seceded from the United States of America on December 20, 1860). Three days later, President Abraham Lincoln called for 75,000 troops to be raised and transported to Washington, D.C. to protect the national capital. On April 17, Virginia officially seceded from the Union. And on April 19, 1861, as thousands of Federal troops moved southward through Maryland towards the capital, the violence of the Civil War reached Baltimore. [1]
Virginia’s secession from the United States meant that, after April 17, 1861, the only railroads able to transport the national capital with troops and supplies ran through Baltimore, Maryland: a city and a state with uneasy allegiances to the Union. [2] John Merryman was a 1st Lieutenant in the Baltimore County Horse Guards by the spring of 1861 and soon placed himself near the peak of Maryland’s rising tensions. [3]
On April 19, the 6th Massachusetts Infantry arrived in Baltimore headed for Washington, D.C., on President Lincoln’s orders. To continue on their journey, the military contingent needed to transfer from President Street Station to Camden Station via a horse-drawn procession westward down Pratt Street. Crowds soon gathered along Pratt Street to witness the change, many of whom either sympathized with the Confederacy or abhorred the presence of Federal troops in their city. The rail exchange was nearly finished when chaos began. Baltimoreans blocked the train tracks with timber and anchors. Some residents began picking up bricks near Gay Street and hurling them at the troops. Somewhere in the mayhem, a shot was fired. When the Pratt Street Riot was finally subdued by Baltimore police, 12 individuals were counted among the dead alongside 24 soldiers and an unknown number of civilians wounded. It is possible that John Merryman served on the Baltimore police force that quelled the Pratt Street Riot. If so, he would have witnessed the first casualties of the Civil War. [4]
Baltimore’s mayor George William Brown and Maryland Governor Thomas Holliday Hicks pleaded with President Lincoln to stop moving Federal troops through Maryland – but to no avail. As the following week unfolded, the Baltimore Sun intently covered the buildup of Federal troops from Pennsylvania outside of Baltimore. “CIVIL WAR,” the Sun’s headline proclaimed on April 22, “INTENSE EXCITEMENT IN BALTIMORE…RUMORED APPROACH OF NORTHERN TROOPS…A General Alarm…Rumors Concerning the Invaders…Government Orders Pennsylvania Troops to Return Home.” As tensions mounted, Mayor Brown and Governor Hicks took matters into their own hands. [5]
As Friday, April 19, gave way to Saturday, April 20, a militia and a contingent of Baltimore policemen ventured out to Cockeysville near the encampment of Federal troops. [6] There, the band destroyed six railway bridges leading to and from Baltimore, severed several telegraph lines, and sabotaged the movements of Federal troops southward into Washington, D.C. Comparing that evening’s events with the smoldering Pratt Street Riot, the American, and Commercial Advertiser reported, “the city during Friday night was a scene of wild excitement, equal almost to that which prevailed the previous day.” Among those accused of participating in the attack was John Merryman, a prominent resident of Cockeysville and member of the Baltimore police guard. [7]
Ex parte Merryman
On May 25, 1861, Federal troops arrested Merryman at his estate near Cockeysville, transported him into Baltimore by rail, then imprisoned him at Fort McHenry on the suspicion of treason. [8] Merryman’s detention and imprisonment all occurred without his being formally informed of the charges against him. When Merryman’s lawyer (and brother-in-law) George Williams pressed commanding officer General George Cadwalader to reveal the charges against Merryman, Cadwalader declined. Hours after his arrest, Merryman and his lawyer petitioned Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and fellow Marylander Roger B. Taney for a writ of habeas corpus. [9]
Chief Justice Taney obliged. One day after Merryman’s arrest, Taney issued a writ of habeas corpus – from the Latin, “you have the body” – to General Cadwalader ordering him to appear before the court in Baltimore by 11 o’clock in the morning the following day. But as Chief Justice Taney and district court Judge William F. Giles took their seats on the bench on May 27, Cadwalader was nowhere to be found. In his stead stood Cadwalader’s aid, Colonel R.M. Lee, who informed the judges that “engagements” had prevented his superior from appearing before them in person. In lieu of an in-person explanation, Colonel Lee handed Cadwalader’s written response to Taney and Giles. Cadwalader denied having any knowledge of the Merryman arrest, the order for which was issued by Major General William H. Keim of Pennsylvania and carried out by troops unassociated with Cadwalader. Merryman came to Cadwalader at Fort McHenry, the General attested, under the suspicion of having executed acts of treason against the United States and professing Confederate sympathies. Acting under the direction of President Lincoln – who suspended habeas corpus in a letter to Winfield Scott on April 27, 1861 – Cadwalader did not release Merryman from his imprisonment because of the seditious allegations made against him. [10]
Stymied by Cadwalader’s defiance of his writ of habeas corpus, Chief Justice Taney issued a writ of attachment. Penned in his shaky, 84-year old hand but with the aura of the United States Supreme Court behind him, Taney commanded a U.S. marshal to bring Cadwalader before the court “to answer for his contempt by him committed in refusing to produce the body of John Merryman.” Despite the writ’s admonishment for the marshal “not to fail at [his] peril,” the order never reached the general. A guard at Fort McHenry denied entry to the marshal carrying Taney’s writ of attachment. [11]
On May 28, Chief Justice Taney issued a lengthy oral opinion on Merryman’s arrest to a jam-packed Baltimore courtroom rife with “the greatest indignation” towards Cadwalader. Taney rejected the notion that a president has the constitutional authority to suspend habeas corpus. Only Congress, Taney argued, held that power according to Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution. While Taney disagreed with Merryman’s arrest, he also opined that General Cadwalader should have transferred Merryman over to the civil court system instead of keeping him within a military prison. Finishing his remarks, Taney decided to file his opinion and all papers related to the Merryman case with both the district court and with President Lincoln. Lincoln, Taney hoped, might then be forced to take a clearer stance on the legality of a president suspending habeas corpus. But like the writs of habeas corpus and attachment issued to General Cadwalader, Taney’s request of President Lincoln went unanswered. At the end of his opinion, Taney resigned himself to the fact that, even in his position as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, he could not render judgement in the Merryman case nor could he impart punishment upon Cadwalader. He did, however, leave the door open for the U.S. Marshal to “summon out the posse comitatus (meaning, “the power of the county”) to seize and bring into court the party named in the attachment,” though he thought this effort futile. [12]
Just as they had with the build-up of Federal troops near Cockeysville, the news media meticulously followed the case of John Merryman. The Baltimore Sun recounted every detail during Merryman’s earliest days of confinement. In the days following Chief Justice Taney’s opinion, the Ex parte Merryman had gained considerable national traction on Northern and Southern newspapers – each shaping the narrative of the case to fit their readership’s sentiments. Confederate-leaning newspapers, such as the Baltimore Sun, expressed support for Taney’s opinion against suspending habeas corpus. The Weekly Advertiser (Montgomery, Alabama) expressed their outrage more clearly. [13]
Recapping events for readers on June 6, 1861, the Confederate publication reported that “the Lincoln military authority” arrested John Merryman a few weeks prior and that General Cadwalader – a “vulgar officer in Lincoln’s army” – “insulted and spit upon” the authority of the Supreme Court. “It will be no difficult matter,” the Weekly Advertiser concluded, “to rivet upon [the citizens] firmly the chains of an absolute military despotism.” [14]
Two newspapers in New York City show that just because the city was geographically situated north of the Mason-Dixon Line, Confederate sympathies were not contained to the South. On June 6, 1861, the New York Weekly Journal of Commerce quipped, “It is marvellous that within the past two weeks the leading Administration papers have been filled with endeavors to justify the most illegal and unconstitutional proceedings, forgetting that they thus more than justify the entire course of the Southern rebellion!” One day later, the New York World published a different perspective on the Taney opinion. “In the midst of a rebellion which threatens the very existence of the government, its highest judicial officer volunteers the weight of his influence and of the influence of his high position in favor of the rebels,” the American newspaper declared. Taney’s actions “can be regarded…as nothing better than a gratuitous manifestation of hostility to the government and sympathy with the rebels.” [15]
Two weeks after his initial imprisonment, the case of John Merryman had become a national lightning rod as the storm of civil war rolled in. It prompted intense debates over questions minute and large. Who had the constitutional authority to suspend habeas corpus? Does what John Merryman (allegedly) did amount to treason? Was the Lincoln Administration leading the United States down the road to “absolute military despotism,” as Confederate sympathizers claimed? Was the nation’s highest judicial official siding with those in open rebellion against the United States of America, as Unionists claimed? These debates not only played out in newspapers around the country, but in the halls of the Maryland General Assembly and the United States Congress, too. In fact, on June 18, 1861, the Maryland General Assembly passed “An Act to make valid the qualifications of John Merryman, as First Lieutenant of the Baltimore County Horse Guards,” which declared Merryman’s destruction of bridges and telegraph lines the previous April “legal.” The act was repealed seven months later on January 4, 1862. [16]
While rhetoric over his case roared, John Merryman remained imprisoned at Fort McHenry. On July 10, 1861, a grand jury for the U.S. District Court for Maryland indicted John Merryman on charges of treason. The indictment alleged that Merryman, along with 500 other people, conspired to sabotage the federal government’s defense of the city of Washington by destroying six railroad bridges. The indictment also accused Merryman of severing telegraph lines to the same effect. After his indictment, Merryman’s case was transferred to the civil court system. Shortly thereafter, Merryman’s friends posted his $40,000 bond for his release.
Merryman’s case never made it to trial. Judge William F. Giles remitted the case to the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Maryland with the intention of a trial taking place in November of 1861. However, Chief Justice Taney continued all treason cases until April “in part because he empathized with the defendants’ southern sympathies,” historian Jonathan W. White writes, “and in part because he believed that it would be impossible to conduct fair and impartial trials while Maryland was under martial law.” However, by the spring of 1862, Taney was too ill to attend either judicial session. In May 1863, all pending indictments for treason were quashed at the request of the U.S. District Attorney for Maryland, William Price, who then authored new, more specific charges against John Merryman. On July 28, 1863, John Merryman was indicted again by the U.S. District Court for Maryland on charges of treason. While the 1863 indictment accused Merrymen of committing the same general acts, it detailed the specific six bridges he allegedly destroyed as well as decreasing the number of accomplices from 500 to 100 (both numbers are exaggerations). Attorney Price rooted Merryman’s treason in violating President Lincoln’s April 15, 1861, militia proclamation. This latest indictment constituted only one of many mounting problems for Merryman. [17]
As federal officials arrested individuals under suspicion of treason, those arrested sometimes sued the federal official for damages upon their release. John Merryman instituted proceedings against General George Cadawalader in the Harford County Circuit Court in February 1863. Merryman claimed Cadawalader owed him $50,000 worth of damages because of his arrest. And the Harford County sheriff seized Cadawalader’s property in the county as an assurance that a judgement against the general would be made. However, two weeks after Merryman filed proceedings, the United States Congress passed the Habeas Corpus Act which offered protection to Cadawalader and federal officials like him who had arrested civilians – like Merryman – while carrying out their official duties. The act also transferred all pending suits from state courts to federal courts. Likely seeing no path forward, or perhaps hoping to obtain a pardon from President Lincoln, Merryman dismissed his case against Cadawalader in August 1864. [18]
Meanwhile, in 1863, the Northern Central Railway Company filed their own suit for damages against John Merryman. Estimating that the April 1861 sabotage led by John Merryman cost their company $117,609.63, the Northern Central Railway Company sued Merryman and two other men for damages in May 1863. Fortunately for Merryman, the case against him was continued through several terms in the Baltimore County Circuit Court and later through the Baltimore City Superior Court until it was finally dropped sometime around the end of the Civil War. [19]
Unable to obtain a pardon, and not disillusioned by the Northern Central Railway case against him, Merryman filed another suit against General George Cadawalader in May 1864. As his first case against Cadawalader had been, Merryman’s new case was moved to the federal circuit court sitting in Baltimore. But this was not the same Taney-led circuit that Merryman engaged with during his confinement in 1861. Former abolitionist Salmon P. Chase now presided over the court. Even with former Baltimore mayor George William Brown as his counsel, Merryman’s case faltered and was removed from the docket in April 1865. [20]
Legally, Ex parte Merryman concluded six years to the day when John Merryman sabotaged railroads and telegraph lines in Maryland. President Andrew Johnson appointed Andrew Sterrett Ridgely, a prominent Baltimore lawyer, to the post of U.S. District Attorney for Maryland in March 1867. Fresh off of defending the doctor accused of helping John Wilkes Booth escape Washington, D.C., after the latter assassinated President Lincoln, Ridgely now seemed intent on achieving a dismissal for the treason case against John Merryman. On April 15, 1867, after querying his superiors for months, Ridgely finally suggested to the U.S. Attorney General that John Merryman’s case be dismissed “under a nolle prosequi” (from the Latin, “not to wish to prosecute.”). Ridgely received approval on April 22. On April 23, 1867, the case against John Merryman was dropped. [21]
The Legacy of Ex parte Merryman
John Merryman’s arrest for treason in the early hours of May 25, 1861, launched the Maryland native into the national spotlight as a symbol of civil liberty at the outbreak of the Civil War. Confederates and their sympathizers adopted his name and case to accuse the Lincoln administration of “absolute military despotism.” In addition to political diatribes, Merryman’s name also found its way into popular culture. The same context of civil strife that prompted James Ryder Randall to pen the pro-Confederate anthem, “Maryland, My Maryland,” also gave way to the ballad of John Merryman. Sung to the tune of the American folk song, “Old Dan Tucker” [22]:
You took him off from the heart of his family,
You locked him up in Fort McHenry,
Enjoying peace on his own plantation,
You forced him to vile degradation.
Get out of the way
Justice haters
No favors asked
Of Lincoln’s traitors
Justice with her sword will batter you,
Davis with his word will scatter you
Beauregard will beat you like a pan-cake,
The South will give you a touch of the heart-ache.
By 1863, however, John Merryman ceased to be a Confederate symbol. The suit brought against him by the Northern Central Railway Company (NCRC) – as well as his letter to Secretary of War Cameron, whose brother occupied a high post within the NCRC – showed that Merryman now participated in the politics of the Civil War more than its ideological battles. Merryman, historian Jonathan W. White writes, “had become a mere pawn in the hands of the leading power brokers of the nineteenth century.” [23]
Yet the legal significance of Ex parte Merryman lingers as arguably one of the landmark cases of the Civil War Era. Although the focus of the case sometimes strays away from John Merryman and towards other facets, such as the conflict between President Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney, Merryman’s habeas corpus case remains relevant in the 21st century due to its links to civil liberties during wartime. [24]
In 1874, as a member of the Maryland House of Delegates and as the Chairman of the Committee on Agriculture, John Merryman served on a Joint Special Committee charged with celebrating the erection of a statue of Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney on the State House lawn. In the committee’s report, Merryman and his colleagues lauded Taney’s “Judicial connexion especially with the Constitutional questions which arose, while he presided over the tribunal of ultimate resort…not only the relative promises and powers of the State and Federal Government as between themselves, but the Constitutional relation of Federal authority and its representatives to public freedom and the liberty of the citizens.” [25]
~
In 1844, John Merryman married Ann Louisa, daughter of Elijah Bosley Gittings. John and Ann Louisa had eleven children, ten of whom included: Nicholas Bosley; John Jr.; Elijah Gittings; David Buchanan; William Duvall; James McKenney; Ann Gott; Bettie M.; Louisa Gittings; and Laura Fendall.
On December 5, 1864, Ann Louisa Merryman delivered a son. John and Ann Louisa named their newborn Roger Brooke Taney Merryman, in honor of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court who so adamantly sided with John Merryman in 1861. R.B.T. Merryman died in infancy.
The family resided on their farm, "Hayfields," in Baltimore County. They attended Sherwood Protestant Episcopal Church where John Merryman served as register, treasurer, and vestryman. Merryman also owned a pew in St. Paul's Church, Baltimore City, at the time of his death on November 15, 1881.
*Note: Researchers at the Maryland State Archives updated this biography between December 2025 and January 2026, with particular focus on Ex parte Merryman. The sources used for that update can be found below:
Sources:
[1] “Proclamation 80—Calling Forth the Militia and Convening an Extra Session of Congress,” 15 April 1861, The American Presidency Project, University of California Santa Barbara.
[2] Newspapers reporting on John Merryman’s case are also covering Southern Rights conventions that are taking place in Maryland at the same time. For example, see this article about one in Baltimore, “Southern Rights and States Rights Convention,” Baltimore Sun (31 May 1861), and this article about one in Cambridge, “Maryland Political Affairs,” Baltimore Sun, (31 May 1861).
[3] Bruce A. Ragsdale, “Ex parte Merryman and Debates on Civil Liberties During the Civil War,” Federal Judicial Center (2007): 1.
[4] “The Pratt Street Riot,” Fort McHenry National Monument and Historic Shrine, National Park Service.
[5] “Civil War,” The Baltimore Sun (22 April 1861); “Our City: The Pennsylvanians Still at Cockeysville,” The Baltimore Sun (23 April 1861); “Excitement in the City,” The Baltimore Sun (24 April 1861); "Document G - Communication from the Mayor of Baltimore, with the Mayor and Board of Police of Baltimore City, May 10, 1861," in Public Documents, 1861 [Archives of Maryland Online, 758: 127-134]; John Merryman wrote a letter to President Lincoln’s Secretary of War Simon Cameron claiming that Governor Thomas H. Hicks ordered the attack on the Northern Central Railway Company after the Pratt Street Riot of April 1861. Historian Jonathan W. White offers more analysis into this claim throughout his 2011 book, Abraham Lincoln and Treason in the Civil War: The Trials of John Merryman.
[6] The exact dates on which Merryman was accused of committing treasonous acts have varied according to the attorney prosecuting the case. Merryman’s 1861 indictment places the acts as occurring between April 19 and April 23. The 1863 indictment places the treasonous acts as occurring squarely on April 23, 1861. Jonathan W. White, Abraham Lincoln and Treason in the Civil War: The Trials of John Merryman (Louisiana State University Press, 2011): 50-51.
[7] “Civil War,” The Baltimore Sun (22 April 1861); “The Civil War: Burning of Bridges,” American, and Commercial Daily Advertiser (22 April 1861); “Straddling Secession: Thomas Holliday Hicks and the Beginning of the Civil War in Maryland,” Maryland State Archives, accessed 30 December 2025.
[8] John Merryman’s was one of a series of arrests made on suspicion of treason during the summer of 1861 around Cockeysville. For example, see “More Arrests by the Military in Baltimore County,” Baltimore Sun (31 May 1861); “A Very Marvel of the Age,” Baltimore Sun (07 June 1861).
[9] For definitive accounts of Ex parte Merryman, see Brian McGinty, The Body of John Merryman: Abraham Lincoln and the Suspension of Habeas Corpus (Harvard University Press, 2011), and White, Abraham Lincoln and Treason in the Civil War: The Trials of John Merryman (Louisiana State University Press, 2011); Ragsdale, 22; “Arrest of John Merryman, Esq., by the Military,” Baltimore Sun (27 May 1861); “John Merryman (1824-1881): Ex Parte Merryman, original case papers borrowed from the Federal District Court,” Archives of Maryland (Biographical Series); "1861," Historic Documents, United States District Court: District of Maryland, accessed 13 January 2026.
[10] “United States Court, Important Proceedings, The Case of John Merryman, Esq.,” Baltimore Sun (28 May 1861); “27 May 1861, Letter from General Cadwalader to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney,” in “John Merryman (1824-1881): Ex Parte Merryman, original case papers borrowed from the Federal District Court,” Archives of Maryland Online (Biographical Series), [MSA SC3520-1543]; Ragsdale, “Ex parte Merryman and Debates on Civil Liberties During the Civil War,” Federal Judicial Center (2007); Abraham Lincoln to Winfield Scott, 27 April 1861 and 30 April 1861, in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Roy P. Blaster et al., eds. (Rutgers University Press, 1953), 4: 344, 347, 372; James A. Dueholm, “Lincoln’s Suspension of the Writ of Habeas Corpus: An Historical and Constitutional Analysis,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 29, no. 2 (2008).
[11] “27 May 1861, Attachment issued by Clerk, Thomas Spicer,” and “28 May 1861, Return of U.S. Marshal Washington Bonifant in “John Merryman (1824-1881): Ex Parte Merryman, original case papers borrowed from the Federal District Court,” Archives of Maryland Online (Biographical Series), [MSA SC3520-1543]; Ragsdale, 12-13.
[12] “Habeas Corpus Case in Baltimore,” Richmond Enquirer (04 June 1861); “IMPORTANT CASE: Arrest of John Merryman, Esq.,” Gettysburg Compiler (03 June 1861).
[13] See the coverage of The Baltimore Sun from 27 May to 17 July 1861.
[14] “Respect for the Constitution and Laws,” The Weekly Advertiser (Montgomery, Alabama: 05 June 1861).
[15] “Habeas Corpus,” New York Weekly Journal of Commerce (06 June 1861); “Taney vs. Taney,” New York World (07 June 1861). Each of the preceding newspaper articles were quoted from Ragsdale, 47-48; For a contemporary summary and critique of newspaper coverage of the Merryman case, see “The Suspension of the Writ of Habeas Corpus,” Buffalo Courier (03 June 1861).
[16] “The Message. – The Habeas Corpus Act,” Baltimore Sun (09 July 1861); “Letter from Frederick,” Baltimore Sun (14 June 1861); “An Act to make valid the qualifications of John Merryman, as First Lieutenant of the Baltimore County Horse Guards,” 18 June 1861, Session Laws, 1861, Chapter 5 (Archives of Maryland Online: 526: 40); “An Act to repeal an act making valid the qualification of John Merryman, as First Lieutenant of the Baltimore county Horse Guards,” 04 January 1862, Session Laws, 1862 (Archives of Maryland Online, 532: 18); “No. 14: Resolutions appertaining to the Federal Relations of the State of Maryland,” 22 June 1861, Session Laws, 1861 (Archives of Maryland Online, 526: 95); Ragsdale, 27.
[17] White, 47, 50-51.
[18] Historian Jonathan W. White contends that, in dropping his case in August 1864, John Merryman actually hoped to obtain a pardon from the federal government under Lincoln’s proclamation of amnesty from March 1864. White, Abraham Lincoln and Treason in the Civil War, 92-93.
[19] White, 94-95.
[20] White, 93-95.
[21] White, 32, 59-60.
[22] “John Merryman,” in the series “Songs - Civil War - Confederate,” 4 vols. Library of Congress: Rare Book and Special Collection Division; An image of this song can be found in Ragsdale, 49.
[23] White, 98-99.
[24] White, 116-118.
Return to John Merryman's Introductory Page
|
Tell Us What You Think About the Maryland State Archives Website!
|