Abraham Lincoln and Treason in the Civil War: The Trials of John Merryman

2 “A COLLISION OF CIVIL AND MILITARY AUTHORITY": The Arrest and Incarceration of John Merryman

25 2 “A Collision of Civil and Military Authority” The Arrest and Incarceration of John Merryman T he Merryman family had been present in Baltimore County since the middle of the seventeenth century. The Merryman clan grew and spread throughout the county during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, owning several significant estates such as “Merryman’s Lot,” “Merryman’s Beginning,” “Merryman’s Addition,” “Merryman’s Pasture,” “Brotherly Fellowship,” “Merryman’s Delight,” “Merryman’s Inclosure Rectified ,” and “Merryman’s Discovery.” John Merryman of Hayfields, as he is now known, was born at Hereford Farm on August 9, 1824, just eleven months after his parents, Nicholas Rogers Merryman and Ann Maria Gott, were married. John’s mother died in 1829, when he was only four years old. In 1832, Nicholas remarried. John had one sister (who died in infancy) and two half brothers.1 In 1839, John Merryman took a job at a hardware store in Baltimore City. Two years later, he moved to Puerto Rico, where he worked in a counting house owned by one of his uncles. He returned to Maryland in July 1842 “to take charge” of his family’s farms in Baltimore County; soon thereafter he moved to Hayfields, the 560-acre estate owned by his relative Colonel Nicholas Merryman Bosley. In 1844, John married Ann Louisa Gittings, the nineteen-year-old daughter of Elijah Bosley Gittings and Ann Lux Cockey. Together, John and Ann would have eleven children, ten of whom survived to adulthood. In 1847, Merryman inherited Hayfields from Colonel Bosley, who happened to be not only Merryman’s close relative (sometimes called his uncle) but also his wife’s great uncle. Bosley had owned the estate since 1811 and had periodically purchased adjoining 26 | Abraham Lincoln and Treason in the Civil War lands to increase its size. Hayfields was known throughout the state for its beauty. Indeed, in November 1824, the Marquis de Lafayette stopped in Maryland—in between visits to Thomas Jefferson and John Adams—to present Colonel Bosley with “a handsome silver tankard” on behalf of the Maryland Agricultural Society “for the best cultivated farm.”2 Hayfields continued to flourish under John Merryman’s attentive eye. One Pennsylvania visitor to Cockeysville in 1861 noted that Hayfields was a “noble looking mansion, located on an eminence in full-view from the hotel, and but a short distance from Cockeysville.” He continued: “The grounds are extensive, and naturally beautiful—fine farm-land, with an inexhaustible supply of limestone. In fact we have never seen finer grain soil or finer looking crops of grain and grass than are to be seen on the whole route of the Central road from York to Cockeysville. Mr. Merryman is a man of considerable property—in fact of great real estate. He is said to be a very clever neighbor, an ambitious politician, but very liberal, and living up to his large income.”3 Merryman was proud of his agricultural pursuits. He was an active member of the Maryland State Agricultural Society , serving as its president from 1857 to 1861, and he served as a trustee of the Maryland Agricultural College—now the University of Maryland at College Park—for about ten years beginning in the 1850s.4 Merryman raised prize-winning Hereford cattle, the first of which he purchased in 1856 from William Sotham and Erastus Corning, whose name is largely remembered today as the recipient of an 1863 letter from Abraham Lincoln regarding the suspension of habeas corpus.5 When Merryman inherited Hayfields in 1847, the inventory of Colonel Bosley’s estate showed the “livestock” on his property as including 5 yoke of oxen, 10 cows, 40 hogs, 5 breed sows, 55 sheep, 17 lambs, 10 horses, 4 adult male slaves, 4 adult female slaves, and 2 slave children. Merryman family lore holds that Colonel Bosley drew out the plans for the Hayfields mansion in the ground with his cane and that the home was built by his slaves in the early nineteenth century.6 By 1860, slavery was on the decline in Baltimore County. Census records from that year indicate that John Merryman owned five slaves, signifying that he had a moderate financial interest in the peculiar institution. In 1860 most slave owners in Maryland owned only one slave; half of the slave owners owned fewer than three slaves; three-quarters of the slaveholders owned fewer than eight; The Arrest and Incarceration of John Merryman...