City Hall

City Hall. Former Frederick County Courthouse. , Connections with the Civil War abound around this Courthouse Square, where the first official act of defiance against the British Crown, the 1765 Stamp Act Repudiation, occurred almost a century earlier. In 1857, Roger Brooke Taney, Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, wrote in the Dred Scott Decision that the Constitution's freedoms did not extend to African-Americans, one of the steps on the road to war. Taney and his brother-in-law, Francis Scott Key, both practiced law here. The Chief Justice administered the Oath of Office to seven presidents, including Abraham Lincoln in 1861., Governor Thomas Hicks called a special session of the Maryland Legislature in 1861 to address the question of secession. Because of the large number of US troops in the capital city of Annapolis, the legislature met here at the site of the former Frederic County courthouse. Finding the space inadequate, the lawmakers convened a block away in Kemp Hall. Under orders from President Lincoln, legislators likely to favor the South were detained en route. With no quorum, Maryland's legislature could not vote to secede. The courthouse burned during the session, and the legislature promptly authorized financing to construct the present building, now City Hall., Both Confederate Gen. Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson and President Lincoln were visitors to this neighborhood in 1862., The reconstructed home of Barbara Fritchie, poet John Greenleaf Whittier's Civil War heroine, is reached by traveling one block south on Court Street, then one block west on Patrick Sweet.