BALTIMORE — The statue of Captain John O’Donnell, an 18th century merchant who enslaved dozens of Black people on his Maryland plantation, won’t be returning to its former perch in Baltimore’s Canton Square, despite an executive order last month from President Donald Trump.
Neither will the four Confederate monuments removed from their pedestals in the dead of night in 2017 and later shipped to California to become part of a museum exhibit. Nor will the plaque formerly attached to a wall in the capitol rotunda honoring combatants on both sides of the Civil War.
“Whether or not the plaque qualifies under the president’s executive order, it will not be returning to the State House,” Carter Elliott, senior press spokesperson for Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, wrote in a one-sentence email to The Baltimore Sun.
Trump issued an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” on March 27 requiring the reinstallation of many Confederate monuments that were removed following the nationwide protests sparked by the 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minnesota while in police custody.
Trump’s directive has raised questions about the fate of more than a dozen statues, plaques and grave markers spread throughout Maryland that honored people once perceived as heroes but now viewed by many as oppressors.
But the executive order is limited only to monuments taken down after Jan. 1, 2020, and only to those under the control of the federal government.
A Sun reporter inquired about the status of 13 monuments previously located in the Free State; a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of the Interior confirmed that all were removed from state, municipal or private property.
The statues and grave markers “are not NPS [National Park Service] or federally-managed lands,” J. Elizabeth Peace, a senior public affairs specialist for the department, wrote in an email.
The first four monuments were taken down by former Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh on June 16, 2017 — or 30 months before the start date specified by Trump’s order — after a “Unite the Right” rally in Virginia turned violent, causing the deaths of three people and injuring dozens.
For the next six years, the monuments were held in an unsecured lot managed by the city Department of Transportation, where they were vandalized, according to an investigation conducted by the city’s Office of the Inspector General. A police report was not filed until six months after the damage was discovered, and the city did not pursue an insurance claim to recoup the loss.
The statues were later shipped to Los Angeles, where they are expected to be part of an exhibit opening in October in that city’s Museum of Contemporary Art.
A second wave of monument removals in Maryland took place in 2020 and 2021 in the wake of nationwide protests that erupted after a white police officer knelt on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes, killing him. They include:
•A Confederate soldiers monument that stood in front of the Red Brick Courthouse in Rockville was defaced and knocked down June 16, 2020. It was later relocated to White’s Ferry near the Virginia border, where it was vandalized again. The family owning the statue has since placed it into storage.
•A Confederate soldier grave marker in front of Grace Episcopal Church in Silver Spring honored the remains of 17 unidentified Confederate soldiers. It was pulled down by protesters on June 17, 2020.
•The remnants of a Confederate soldier statue was toppled and beheaded in Frederick’s Mt. Olivet Cemetery. The damage was discovered on June 29, 2020.
•The statue of Private Benjamin Welch Owens was knocked down outside Lothian’s Mt. Calvary Anglican Church and spray-painted red. Owens had served in a Confederate Maryland military unit during the Civil War; the vandalism was found on July 3, 2020.
•The statue of Christopher Columbus in Baltimore’s Little Italy neighborhood was tipped over by protesters on July 3, 2020, then dumped into the Inner Harbor.
•O’Donnell’s monument was taken down from its plinth in O’Donnell Square on April 5, 2021, by Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott in response to a petition seeking the statue’s removal that collected about 1,000 signatures.
•A plaque memorializing Confederate Gen. John Winder stood outside the Wicomico County Courthouse on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. It was removed by county officials June 12, 2021.
•The plaque in the Maryland State House was removed on June 15, 2021, following a nearly yearlong effort by House Speaker Adrienne A. Jones. The plaque depicted the American and Confederate flags, and its inscription said the Maryland Civil War Centennial Commission “did not attempt to decide who was right and who was wrong” in the conflict.
•The “Talbot Boys Statue” commemorating Talbot County residents who fought on the Confederate side during the Civil War was dislodged from its base outside the Easton County Courthouse on June 15, 2021, by county officials. They arranged for the statue to be relocated to a historic battlefield in Virginia.
But not every Confederate monument in Maryland has been destroyed, relocated outside state borders or hidden away from public view.
At least one memorial remains in Maryland, and it is on federal lands — the statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee on horseback that looms over the Antietam National Battlefield in Sharpsburg. But it’s unlikely to be moving anytime soon.
A bill to remove the Lee monument was introduced to the U.S. House of Representatives on Feb. 28, 2024 by U.S. Rep. David Trone, a Democrat from Maryland, but failed to make it out of committee.
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