Maryland historical timeline

Maryland's coast was explored by Europeans in the 16th century, before which Algonquian peoples inhabited the region. George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore, petitioned King Charles I for a colonial charter; after his death in 1632 it passed to his son, Cecilius Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore, who named the colony for the queen. The first settlers arrived in March 1634, founding St. Mary's City as the colony's capital and primarily seeking a haven for England's persecuted Catholic minority. Religious strife followed quickly: Puritans seized control in the 1640s during "The Plundering Time," and though the 1649 Act Concerning Religion granted toleration to Trinitarian Christians, Catholicism was outlawed after England's Glorious Revolution in 1688. The colony's economy centered on tobacco, grown with the labor of indentured servants and, increasingly, enslaved Africans. A long-running border dispute with Pennsylvania was finally settled in 1760, fixing Maryland's modern boundaries along what became known as the Mason-Dixon line.

Maryland was a slave state that remained loyal to the United States through the Civil War. Baltimore saw early violence in the 1861 Pratt Street Riot, and in September 1862 the Battle of Antietam, fought near Sharpsburg, became the bloodiest single day in American history, with 22,726 casualties on both sides, and a turning point that gave Lincoln the opening to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Decades earlier, the Battle of Baltimore in September 1814 saw the British bombard Fort McHenry; the flag that survived the attack inspired Francis Scott Key to write the poem that became "The Star-Spangled Banner." Harriet Tubman, born into slavery in Dorchester County on the Eastern Shore, escaped in 1849 and returned repeatedly to guide dozens of others to freedom on the Underground Railroad before serving as a scout and spy for the Union Army during the Civil War.