Marylanders in the Civil War

As the largest slave-owning border state, deeply divided between its slave and free economies, Maryland passed through a secession crisis in 1861 but ultimately remained in the Union. Slave-owning, Southern-sympathizing, but ultimately pro-Union men were a feature of Maryland politics (they had a lot to lose) and their influence helped prevent secession. Once the fighting started, they mostly tried to stay out of it but their sons and younger brothers did not necessarily agree.

As the war began, thousands of Confederate volunteers ran the Union blockade to reach Virginia and enlist. The thousands of Union volunteers had a shorter trip to a recruiting office. On the Union side, perhaps as many as 60,000 served in a total of forty-two Maryland units of various sizes. Others served in the U.S. Army, the Regulars. On the Confederate side there was no direct enlistment from Maryland and relatively few men served in Maryland-identified units. This makes identification difficult but estimates run around 25,000 in Confederate uniform.

If you have been told that Maryland was really, at the heart, a Confederate state, pause for a moment and consider those numbers. It was easy for white Marylanders to stay safely north of the Potomac while running their mouths (or their printing presses) about Southern rights and Lincoln-the-tyrant. Men who actually fought for the Confederacy were not fond of that kind of Marylander. After the war, many stay-at-homes were magically transformed into Rebels—including a few Magruders.

Magruders in the Civil War

Magruders began emigrating out of Maryland in the 18^th century. By 1861, their descendants, of various surnames and scores of family lines, were sprawled across the country, mostly in the south. It is impossible to estimate their numbers, let alone their Civil War service. Searching only for those named Magruder or McGruder provides a cross-section of their allegiances and choices. Ancestry’s database of “U.S., Civil War Soldiers 1861-1865,” for example, yields 275 Magruder and McGruder men, of whom 150 were Confederates. An impressive sixty-eight served in regiments of the U.S. Colored Troops (USCT), leaving just fifty-seven white Magruder soldiers for the Union.

Most accounts of war service focus on officers, but the “contrasting dye” of Magruder descent cuts through that bias to uncover the lives of at least a few enlisted men. Here are two of them.

Edward W. Magruder & Arthur Robinson

Among Maryland Magruders who served as privates in the Confederate army was Edward Walter Magruder (1840-1886), son of Caleb Clark Magruder (1808-1884), a prominent Prince George’s County attorney who would raise his voice in defense of Maryland slaveowners throughout the war. In 1860, C. C. Magruder owned $50,000 in real estate and $40,000 in personal property, including thirty slaves.

Edward, a graduate of Georgetown College, served first as a bugler in the 1st Maryland Artillery. In March 1863, still a bugler, he transferred to Company E of the 1st Maryland Cavalry. Two months later, on 12 June, as the Army of Northern Virginia was advancing toward Maryland on its way to Pennsylvania for what became the Gettysburg campaign, his detachment was surprised by Union troops near Winchester. Of ninety-two men, the Baltimore Sun estimated that twenty-five were killed or wounded and twenty-nine taken prisoner, Edward among them. Two days later the prisoners reached Baltimore where they were confined at Fort McHenry until the twenty-sixth, when they were sent to Fortress Monroe—the Union toehold in Virginia at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay—for a prisoner exchange.

POW records describe Edward W. Magruder as a musician, twenty-two years old, five-foot-four, with dark eyes, hair, and complexion. Though exchanged, he was not quickly back in the saddle. In August he wrote to a friend requesting help getting reimbursement for the horse, sixty-dollar saddle, and hundred-dollar brace of Navy repeaters lost to the Union at Winchester. These valuable possessions (more than $4,000 in 2026 dollars, plus the horse) highlight the fact that Confederate cavalrymen, even privates, had to supply their own horses and weapons. Poor men didn’t ride for the South. “I am entirely dismounted,” Edward wrote, “and unless you can do something…why my cavalry days will have ended.” Edward W. Magruder survived the war, married twice, and died in 1886.

When the war broke out, Edward’s brother, Caleb Clark Magruder Jr. (1839-1922) was just completing his law degree. He would stay in Maryland to follow in his father’s footsteps. When the Federal draft was instituted, in March 1863, he signed an oath of allegiance to the Union, registered as required, and in 1864 found himself drafted. No worries for Caleb though—he would quickly take advantage of one of the Lincoln policies so hated by his father: the inclusion of African Americans in the pool of eligible recruits.

The most common way to escape the Union draft was to find a substitute. You could pay someone directly to take your place or cough up a $300 bounty for a substitute to be found. This led to a popular belief among Southerners that a majority of Union soldiers were cynical “bounty men” with no interest in the issues at stake in the war. Scholarship debunks that, but can’t stop Lost Cause adherents from passing it around the internet as fact.

In Confederate states, draftees had no such option. By the end of the war, all men from eighteen to fifty were subject to the draft. Money and class still counted but the bar was well above $300. The hated “twenty n____ rule” exempted men who owned or were overseers over twenty or more enslaved workers. Benjamin Henry Magruder, a Virginian whose parents had left Maryland in the 18^th century, was among those who pushed the bill through the Confederate legislature.

In Maryland, meanwhile, no man of means would ever need fight unless he chose to. C. C. Magruder Jr. chose not to. In his place went another Marylander, thirty-seven-year-old Arthur Robinson. Records I have seen do not specify whether Robinson was free or enslaved. Maryland enslavers who were drafted sometimes sent one of their own captive laborers to fight in their place but we don’t know if C. C. Magruder was one of them.

Enrolled on 27 August 1864, Arthur Robinson would have just fifteen days to get used to army life before joining his unit, Company H of the 19th Regiment, U.S. Colored Troops, in the trenches at Petersburg. He was fortunate to join after General Grant’s bloody Overland Campaign, when the 19th endured six battles in two months, and after the disastrous Battle of the Crater, at Petersburg, where black troops were mercilessly slaughtered. Though twice hospitalized he also evaded death by disease.

Like many black soldiers Robinson would serve well beyond the surrenders of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox and Joseph E. Johnston in Georgia. In Texas, where a few die-hard leaders hoped to pull Mexico into the rebellion’s death-throes, fighting simmered on. With a three-year enlistment commencing in 1864, Robinson—like thousands of other black soldiers—would serve longer in Texas than anywhere else, at last mustered out with his regiment on 15 January 1867.

If you are a descendant of any of these men, or know more about them than I do, I would very much appreciate hearing from you.

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Sources

1860 Census, Maryland, Prince George’s, Marlboro, p. 484 (no stamp), line 30, dw 999, fam 1022, C.C. Magruder. https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/7667/records/53991592 : 13 Jan 26.

1860 Slave Schedule, Maryland, Prince George’s, District 9, page 452 (stamped) , C. C. Magruder https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/7668/records/91870149?tid=&pid=&queryId=0c9ca8ca-cc64-4b3e-8328-b00f50e3fbe9&_phsrc=RJs39&_phstart=successSource : 13 Jan 26.

Civil War Service Records (CMSR), Confederate, Maryland, 1861-1865, pub. M321, NARA, RG 109, Company Muster Rolls, First Maryland Cavalry, Edward W. Magruder, Fold3, https://www.fold3.com/file/113328025 : 25 May 25

CMSR, Prisoners of War record, 26 Jun 63, Edward W. Magruder, Fold3, https://www.fold3.com/image/113328031/magruder-edward-w-page-7-us-civil-war-service-records-cmsr-confederate-maryland-1861-1865 : 27 May 25.

Edward W. Magruder to Waller S. Taylor, 25 Aug 1863, Fold3, https://www.fold3.com/image/113328036/magruder-edward-w-page-12-us-civil-war-service-records-cmsr-confederate-maryland-1861-1865 : 27 May 25.

Robert  J. Driver Jr., First and Second Maryland Cavalry, C.S.A. (Charlottesville: Howell Press, 1999), 257.

“Local Matters: Confederate Marylanders Killed, Wounded and Captured,” Baltimore Sun, 15 Jun 1863, 1, Newspapers.com.

“Benjamin Henry Magruder, by His Children,” ACGS Yearbook, Gathering of 1921, edited by Egbert Watson Magruder (Charlottesville, Mitchie Co., 1922), 55.

Robert Summers, Maryland’s Black Civil War Soldiers: 19th Regiment, U.S. Colored Troops, Kindle edition (N.p.: self-published, 2020), 9-11, 933.

19th US Colored Infantry, Misc. Cards, D-Y, CMSR-Union-Colored Troops 14th-19th Infantry, 1861-1865, NARA, RG 94, Arthur Robinson, Fold3.com (https://www.fold3.com/image/264866247/robinson-arthur-page-1-us-civil-war-service-records-cmsr-union-colored-troops-14th-19th-infantry-186 : 12 Jun 25).