Are we Northerners or Southerners? The big local question.

I was sitting at the bar the other evening and Dan the bartender asked me interesting question, “Do we live in the North or the South?” I offered my opinion, and then Dan asked everyone else the same question. Roughly a third of the patrons felt that we lived in the South. I of course said that we lived in the North. Admittedly, my opinion on the matter is only an opinion which is influenced as much by my political leanings and family history as it is by objective reasoning. My opinion is as wrong as it is right.

No other question will spark a more hotly contested debate between locals. We all have own cannon of statistics and facts to bend the argument in our favor. Whether we view ourselves as southerners or northerners, all Baltimoreans agree that the Civil War broke out, not at Fort Sumter, but rather at the corner of Pratt and Gay Street in the Inner Harbor when an armed mob of angry secessionists attacked federal troops before being counter attacked by an armed mob of angry Unionists. Gun battles between political factions were a common occurrence in the streets of nineteenth century Baltimore. It’s how we became known as Mobtown. Even then, nobody knew for sure if we were southerners or northerners. The mayor at the time was pro Union, the Chief of Police was pro secession, the immigrant groups were pro Union, and nativist groups were pro secession.

Everyone knows that Baltimore was occupied by the Union army during the war and that cannons on Federal Hill were directed towards the citizenry. But an often forgotten fact about the Civil War is that John Wilkes Booth, who yelled out in Latin “The South Shall Rise Again!” after shooting Abraham Lincoln, was actually a Baltimorean and is buried in Greenmount Cemetery.

Once, after a friend of mine who moved here from New Jersey smeared us by telling me that we were all a bunch of southerners, I was actually pissed off enough to go to the Maryland Room at the Enoch-Pratt library and do some statistical research of my own on the subject. I found two very interesting statistics; there were roughly 20 thousand Maryland Union veterans of the Civil War, and roughly 5 thousand Confederate veterans. Had Maryland seceded (it probably would have if Maryland had a choice) I suspect those numbers would have been reversed.

As a people, we posses as many southern cultural idiosyncrasies as we do northern ones. Amusingly, we’re reviled and dispossessed by both. As my friend John once observed, “Southerners call us Northerners, Northerners call us Southerners, and we tell them both to go f**k themselves.”

In my opinion, here are some indisputable facts about who we are as a people:

We are definitely northerners.
We are definitely not northerners.
We are definitely southerners.
We are definitely not southerners.
We are definitely both northern and southern.
We are definitely neither northern or southern.

If you disagree with me than you can go f**k yourself.