Capital For A Summer

During the spring and summer of 1861, Kemp Hall in Frederick served as Maryland’s capitol as the state came perilously close to leaving the Union. Because secession would have placed the U.S. capital, Washington, D.C., between the Confederate states of Maryland and Virginia, President Abraham Lincoln could not allow it. Two weeks after the Confederate capture of Fort Sumter, Maryland Gov. Thomas H. Hicks called the General Assembly into special session in strongly Unionist Frederick to debate secession, since Annapolis was seething with resentment over recent Federal occupation. The Senate and House of Delegates began meeting on April 26, 1861, in the former Frederick County Courthouse, then moved the next day to the larger Kemp Hall, owned by the German Reformed Church. Beginning as early as June 20, under Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, Federal troops arrested suspected pro-secession legislators, starting with Delegate Ross Winans of Baltimore as he traveled home from the session, and several lawmakers were briefly confined under Lincoln’s orders. The legislature remained at Kemp Hall through the summer and finally adjourned in September, lacking a quorum chiefly because so many secession-leaning senators and delegates had been arrested, without ever considering a secession bill.

Frederick, Maryland · United States