Carmichael, Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett Carmichael was a northern educated, slave owning Maryland aristocrat with an abiding attachment to the Constitution. He was born to an old Queen Anne County family of wealth and influence; his father had roomed with Roger Brooke Taney when law students together. The young Carmichael entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania as a member of the class of 1827 but later transferred to Princeton where he graduated in 1828. Just four years later he was elected to Congress as a Jacksonian Democrat, serving one term before returning to his law practice. He was then named as associate justice on the 10th Judicial Circuit that covered the Eastern Shore of Maryland. When the Civil War broke out and Washington asserted its authority in divided Maryland, Carmichael began a concerted judicial campaign in his courts to have grand juries indict federal officials who had made arbitrary arrests without proper authority. The military governor in the area soon lost patience with this activity and ordered Carmichael’s own arbitrary arrest. On a rainy afternoon in May 1862, the diminutive judge was manhandled from his courtroom and delivered to federal prison. He spent six months in prison without trial before being released. He resigned from the bench in 1864 but took up Democratic politics again after the war and was the president of the Maryland constitutional convention of 1867. Carmichael died at his estate on the Wye River in October 1884 and was buried in the family plot there. (By John Osborne)
Life Span
to
Dickinson Connection
Class of 1827
    Full name
    Richard Bennett Carmichael
    Place of Birth
    Birth Date Certainty
    Exact
    Death Date Certainty
    Exact
    Gender
    Male
    Race
    White
    Sectional choice
    North
    Origins
    Slave State
    No. of Siblings
    0
    No. of Spouses
    1
    No. of Children
    7
    Family
    William Carmichael (father), Sarah Downes Carmichael (mother), Elizabeth Margaret Hollyday (wife, 1835)
    Education
    Dickinson (Carlisle College)
    Princeton (College of New Jersey)
    Occupation
    Politician
    Attorney or Judge
    Relation to Slavery
    Slaveholder

    Richard B. Carmichael (Dickinson Chronicles)

    Scholarship
    Richard Bennett Carmichael was born the only son of William and Sarah Downes Carmichael to an old and wealthy Maryland family in Centreville, Queen Anne County on December 25, 1807. His father had shared rooms in Annapolis with future chief justice Roger Brooke Taney and the two men remained friends till William died in 1853. Richard was schooled locally and then entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania with the class of 1827. While at the College he was elected to the Union Philosophical Society in 1825 but withdrew later to attend Princeton, where he graduated in 1828. He subsequently studied law and opened a practice in his home town in 1830.

    Almost immediately after starting his legal career, he was elected to the Maryland house of delegates and two years later, at the age of twenty five, was elected to the United States Congress as a Jacksonian Democrat. He served one term, returned to Centreville, and later, in 1841, went again to the state house, where he served multiple terms over more than two decades. He remained very active in Democratic politics, acting as a delegate to the party's national convention. in 1856. In 1858 he was appointed an associate justice on the 10th Judicial Circuit that encompassed four local counties on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, including his own.

    In 1855 Carmichael, a slaveholder, had been at the center of a celebrated runaway slave case when Phoebe Myers, a free African-American woman in Queen Anne County, was sentenced to more than forty years in prison for harboring two of Carmichael's slave families who had fled bondage. Carmichael, who could afford to be magnanimous and who was a devout Episcopalian, helped petition the Maryland governor for clemency and Myers was pardoned in May 1856, having served less than five months.

    In an even more celebrated case, Carmichael himself was to experience life behind bars when in on May 27, 1862, federal officials dragged him from his bench in the Talbot County circuit courtroom, according to some reports, pistol-whipped and bloody, and threw him into a military prison as a subversive and Confederate sympathizer. Carmichael, a strict constructionist following very publicly Chief Justice Taney's opinions on arbitrary arrest, had long resisted President Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus often directing grand juries to indict the officials who carried out arrests without warrant. General John Dix, military governor in the area, lost patience after some months of this and ordered his arrest and incarceration without trial. Held at Fort McHenry, then Forts Lafayette and Delaware, Carmichael constantly demanded release or trial, even writing Lincoln personally, but got neither. When he was set free after more than five months, he attempted again to direct grand juries as he had before but by this time the state was under solid Union control and citizens serving on these juries returned no indictment. Disheartened, Carmichael eventually resigned from the court in 1864. Following the Civil War, he again involved himself with Democratic politics. He continued to serve as elector at the national conventions of 1864, 1868, and 1876, and was the president of the Maryland constitutional convention of 1867.

    He had married his eighteen year old cousin Elizabeth Margaret Hollyday in 1835 and the couple had seven children. Elizabeth died in January 1883, ending almost forty-eight years of marriage. On October 21, 1884, Richard Bennett Carmichael died at his home "Belle Vue" on the Wye River and was buried in the family plot there. He was seventy six years old.
    John Osborne and James W. Gerencser, eds., “Richard Bennett Carmichael,” Dickinson Chronicles, http://chronicles.dickinson.edu/encyclo/c/ed_carmichaelRB.htm.
    How to Cite This Page: "Carmichael, Richard Bennett," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/5321.