2022-01 Raynors HCA Auction
This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 1/28/2022
This Letter is Written To A Political Prison By A Released Prisoner MAY, Henry (1816-1866) Democrat. U.S. Representative from Maryland 4th District, 1853-55, 1861-63. Autograph Letter Signed, "H. May" 3p. octavo, January 16, 1862, Washington, with franked cover addressed to a political prisoner Severn Teackle Wallis, in the "Care of Col. Dimick Fort Warren near Boston, Mass." with Congress cds, it reads in part: "...I have just recd yr note & will at once send the documents you mention. The only copy I could obtain of the Message & accompanying documents I sent to one of our friends around you (Warfield I. Hewitt)... You must know that I was notified not to correspond with any of you & soon after Congress met I applied at War Dept for leave to send papers or documents receiving no answer I got a friend to see Genl. McClellan who hesitated...but as he did not refuse but thought it right...I beg to be most kindly remembered to all...." More. VG. J.T. Wallis was a member of the Maryland Legislature and was arrested September 13, 1861 and interred at Fort Warren until July, 1862. Severn Teackle Wallis was a very important Baltimore politician. In April 1861, Wallis was elected to the lower House of Delegates of Maryland in the General Assembly of Maryland, and took an active part in the special proceedings of the Maryland Legislature, called into special session that Spring by Gov. Thomas H. Hicks, (1798-1865), as the authority of the Governor of Maryland at Frederick instead of the state capital at Annapolis which was then occupied by Massachusetts and New York militia under the command of Gen. Benjamin F. Butler, (1818-1893), deciding on the issue of secession and the state's relationship to the pending crisis and the forming war policies of President Abraham Lincoln. He was chairman of the committee on Federal relations, and made himself obnoxious to the Federal authorities by his reports, which were adopted by the Legislature, and which took strong ground against the possibilities of Civil War, as well as against the then prevailing "doctrine of military necessity". In September 12 of that year, four months after Butler's occupation of the state's major city, Wallis was arrested with many other members of the Maryland Legislature and other citizens of the city and state (including the new police marshal George Proctor Kane, (1820-1878), and newly elected reform mayor George William Brown), and imprisoned for more than fourteen months in Fort McHenry, Fort Lafayette, and Fort Warren for not citing a Union Oath before a succession vote. He was finally released by November, 1862, without conditions and without being informed of the official cause of his arrest. Henry May sat in the special session of Congress held in summer 1861 after the outbreak of the Civil War.[4] In September 1861 May was arrested without charges or recourse to habeas corpus on suspicion of treason and held in Fort Lafayette.[5][6] (Lincoln had unilaterally suspended habeas in Maryland in spring 1861, a move ruled unconstitutional without Congressional authorization in June 1861 by Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney in ex parte Merryman, a disputed ruling which Lincoln disregarded.) May was eventually released-no charges were ever brought or evidence produced-and returned to his seat in Congress in December 1861.
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