1st Maryland Infantry, CSA

1st Maryland Infantry, CSA
Camp Johnson, near Winchester, Virginia. This engraving shows the 1st Maryland Infantry Regiment "playing football before evening parade". Published in Harper's Weekly on August 31, 1861. The Marylanders wear uniforms received in May and June 1861
Active	April 1861 - August 1862
Country	Confederate States of America
Allegiance	Maryland Militia
Branch	Confederate States Army
Type	Infantry
Role	Regiment
Size	One regiment
Engagements	First Battle of Manassas Shenandoah Valley Campaign Peninsular Campaign.
Commanders
Ceremonial chief	President of the Confederate States of America
Colonel of the Regiment	Col. Francis J. Thomas (April 1861-June1861) Col. Arnold Elzey (June 1861- July 21, 1861).

Col. Francis J. Thomas (April 1861-June1861)

The 1st Maryland Infantry, CSA was a regiment of the Confederate army, formed shortly after the commencement of the American Civil War in April 1861. The unit was made up of volunteers from Maryland who, despite their home state remaining in the Union during the war, chose instead to fight for the Confederacy. The regiment saw action at the First Battle of Manassas, in the Shenandoah Valley Campaign, and in the Peninsular Campaign. It was mustered out of service in August 1862, its initial term of duty having expired. Many of its members, unable or unwilling to return to Union-occupied Maryland, went on to join a new regiment, the 2nd Maryland Infantry, CSA, which was formed in its place.

After the bombardment of Fort Sumter on April 12–14, 1861, President Lincoln called for the states to send troops to preserve the Union. On April 19, Southern sympathizers in Baltimore attacked Union troops passing through by rail, causing what were arguably the first casualties of the Civil War. Major General George H. Steuart, commander of the Maryland State Militia, and most of his senior officers were strongly sympathetic to the Confederacy. He ordered the militia to turn out, armed and uniformed, to repel Federal soldiers. Perhaps knowing of these sympathies, and that public opinion in Baltimore was divided, Governor Thomas Holliday Hicks did not order out the militia.

During the early summer of 1861, several thousand Marylanders crossed the Potomac river to join the Confederate Army. Most of the men enlisted into regiments from Virginia or the Carolinas, but six companies of Marylanders formed at Harpers Ferry into the Maryland Battalion. Among them were members of the former volunteer militia unit, the Maryland Guard Battalion, initially formed in Baltimore in 1859.