Maryland may revise anti-Union state song

ANNAPOLIS, Md. — Maryland lawmakers who support changing the official state song think the time is right to finally wipe away “Northern scum” and other sensitive pre-Civil War phrases.

“Maryland, My Maryland,” set to the traditional seasonal tune of “O, Tannenbaum,” was written in 1861 by James Ryder Randall and adopted as the state song in 1939.

Previous attempts to change it have stalled, partly because lawmakers were reluctant to tinker with history. Now, some say that recent efforts to remove Confederate statues might help to change the language in what was originally a poem that doubled as a call to arms against the Union.

In August, several days after violent protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, Maryland officials removed from the State House grounds a statue of Roger Taney. Taney was the U.S. Supreme Court justice who wrote the 1857 Dred Scott decision that upheld slavery and denied citizenship to African-Americans.

Also in August, the University of Maryland marching band announced it would no longer play “Maryland, My Maryland” before football games.

Randall’s poem calls for Maryland to secede from the Union at a time before the Civil War when many Maryland residents sympathized with the Confederacy. He wrote it while distraught about a friend shot during a melee when Union troops marching through Baltimore on their way to Washington.

The song begins with a hostile reference to new President Abraham Lincoln: “The despot’s heel is on thy shore, Maryland! His torch is at thy temple door, Maryland!” It ends with a call for the state to stand up to the Union: “She is not dead, nor deaf, or dumb — Huzza! She spurns the Northern scum!”

A House bill would revise the state song to be the poem “Maryland, My Maryland,” written by Sean Tully last year and derived from Randall’s poem. A measure in the Senate would replace Randall’s words with ones penned by John T. White in 1894 describing the state’s natural beauty.