Much ink has recently been spilled because of America’s statues of Confederate generals; in Charlottesville, wicked men flying Nazi flags caused blood to be spilled as well. In hopes of avoiding further violence, the city of Baltimore, Maryland, recently removed its Confederate statues in the middle of the night (and, for good measure, one of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, author of the Dred Scott decision). Activists have also set their sights on the quasi-Confederate quarters of Maryland’s state flag. Still, Maryland’s most prominent Confederate memorial remains, despite efforts to remove or change it: the official state song, a pro-Confederate anthem that has been called “America’s most martial poem.”
Maryland remained in the Union during the Civil War, but it was a slave state and tens of thousands of its citizens fled to fight for the Confederacy—though perhaps only half the number who fought for the Union. It was a Marylander, John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated President Lincoln just after the war’s end. Booth’s shout of “Sic semper tyrannis!” echoed a phrase from the poem that went on to be Maryland’s state song.
That poem, “Maryland, My Maryland,” was composed in a rage-filled, candlelit night by poet and journalist James Ryder Randall after a friend of his died in the Baltimore riot of April 1861 (a conflict in which a federal militia was attacked by, and then fired back on, a pro-Confederate mob). A Baltimore native then residing in the Deep South, Randall urged his fellow Marylanders to “hark to an exiled son’s appeal” and secede from the United States to “avenge the patriotic gore / that flecked the streets of Baltimore.” When set to the old German folk tune “Lauriger Horatius”—the melody better known today as “O Tannenbaum” or “O Christmas Tree”—the poem became a favorite of Confederate soldiers and earned Randall the unofficial honorific “poet laureate of the Lost Cause.”
In 1939, the centenary of Randall’s birth, the song was officially adopted as Maryland’s state song, even as the last of the Civil War veterans who sang it on the march were passing away. None of the song’s anti-Union lyrics—not even a line referring to “Northern scum”—was altered.
There have been at least eight legislative attempts since the 1970s to replace or edit the song, according to Maryland delegate Karen Lewis Young. The most recent of these efforts, which would have substituted lines extolling Maryland’s natural beauty for the song’s pro-Confederate lyrics, was stifled in committee last year.
I used “Maryland, My Maryland” as an opening number for a production of Julius Caesar I directed earlier this summer (with the lyrics modified to “Roman land, my Roman land”). It seemed to fit the impetuous idealism of Caesar’s killers and the pride of those reactionary aristocrats in their homeland. Some members of my cast were surprised when I explained the song’s real history. They had assumed from its lyrics it was a song of the American Revolution. Weren’t the first lines (“The despot’s heel is on thy shore, / Maryland! / His torch is at thy temple door, / Maryland!”) about King George III? No, in fact the “despot” is Lincoln. And the line “Dear Mother, burst the tyrant’s chain” refers not to abolishing slavery but to defying the supposed tyranny of Lincoln over the rights of the Southern states. Although the song does contain references to other episodes in and figures from Maryland history, including from the revolutionary period, it is very much a Civil War song.
I was born in Charlottesville but raised in Philadelphia and never considered myself a Southerner; the mythology of the Confederacy as a noble lost cause has no appeal to me. Yet I still find the song’s martial lyrics stirring. The nine image-rich stanzas build up a powerful momentum. “Thou wilt not cower in the dust. . . .Thy beaming sword shall never rust.” The poem conjures Maryland as a glorious goddess of war, “the battle queen of yore” who has girt her “beauteous limbs with steel”—a compelling figure for loyal sons to follow into battle.
But the honors of this song are stolen; they belong not to Maryland but to Mary. Mary is the Mother of the Church whom Catholics see in the biblical praise of a bride “comely as Jerusalem, terrible as an army with banners.” But, as a priest recently reminded me, when Mary invades this vale of tears it is on behalf of the poor and marginalized—witness Lourdes, Fátima, and Guadalupe. The Magnificat—the great hymn of Mary, lifted from the Gospel of Luke—is a counter-song to Confederate anthems that laud strength of arms and ignore the suffering of the enslaved. Mary says of God, “He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, / and has lifted up the humble. / He has filled the hungry with good things, / and the rich he has sent away empty.”
Christians especially should be troubled by the song’s appropriation of imagery from church to state. Randall longs for a Confederate Maryland in the image of a pre-Christian goddess, a Minerva or a Bellona. Walker Percy, ambivalent Catholic son of the South, wrote of this pagan strain in his 1956 essay “Stoicism in the South”: “How curiously foreign to the South sound the Decalogue, the Beatitudes, the doctrine of the Mystical Body. The South’s virtues were the broadsword virtues of the clan, as were her vices too—the hubris of noblesse gone arrogant.”
The penultimate verse of “Maryland, My Maryland” makes explicit the song’s anti-Christian message:
Thou wilt not yield the Vandal toll,
Maryland!
Thou wilt not crook to his control,
Maryland!
Better the fire upon thee roll,
Better the blade, the shot, the bowl,
Than crucifixion of the soul,
Maryland! My Maryland!
Again, it all sounds stirring. But what is Maryland being exhorted to do? Kill and die for dominion rather than repent and submit to justice or mercy. The ethos here is a pagan pride in one’s defiant power.
Valor and a sense of honor are goods that have their place, but make them ends in themselves and you get the carnage of the Confederacy and its legions of terrible ghosts, from the “strange fruit” of lynching to the burning crosses of the Klan. The lesson we should take from “Maryland, My Maryland” is to run in the opposite direction: What America needs is more “crucifixion of the soul,” not less.
Alexi Sargeant is a theater director and culture critic who writes from New York.
