1812-1865: Rebuilding

From 1812 to 1865, war, slavery, and civil conflict reshaped Maryland's Eastern Shore. The War of 1812 raged between the US and Britain, partly over the impacts of British restrictions on US maritime trade, and British troops occupied Tilghman's, Poplar, and Sharp's Islands; in 1814 they burned Washington and bombed Fort McHenry, and Francis Scott Key wrote the "Star-Spangled Banner." In 1818 Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in Cordova, Talbot County, and the first annual slave auction was held in Easton. In 1820 Araminta Ross, later Harriet Tubman, was born into slavery in Cambridge, Dorchester County. In 1849 General Tench Tilghman, grandson of Colonel Tilghman, opened the Maryland Military Academy in Oxford, where the officers lived in the Academy House on Morris Street while 33 cadets lived in a nearby wood-frame dormitory, but the dormitory burned in 1855 and the school was forced to close. In 1850 the Oxford census listed 17 dwellings and 102 persons in the village, including children and free Blacks, while Talbot County's population was 7084 White, 2593 free Black, and 4134 enslaved Blacks. In 1860 eleven pro-slavery states seceded from the Union, triggering civil war; Maryland did not secede, but loyalties in Oxford and across the state were deeply divided, and in August the last public slave auction was held in Easton. In 1861 the first bloodshed of the Civil War occurred in Baltimore. In September 1863, more than 200 enslaved Africans shipped out from Oxford to Baltimore on the Steamer Champion to voluntarily join Union troops in the war effort, while President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation declaring slaves in Confederate states to be free. Maryland abolished slavery in 1864. In 1865 the Confederate States surrendered, slavery in America was abolished under the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, and President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.

Oxford, Maryland · United States