Henry May (American politician)

Henry May (February 13, 1816 – September 25, 1866) was a U.S. Representative from Maryland.

Born in Washington, D.C., May pursued an academic course. He attended Columbian College (later George Washington University), Washington, D.C.. He studied law, was admitted to the bar in 1840, and commenced practice. May was sent by President Franklin Pierce to Mexico to investigate claims under the United States' treaty of peace with Mexico. He moved to Baltimore, Maryland, in 1850.

May was elected as a Democrat to the Thirty-third Congress (March 4, 1853 – March 3, 1855). He was an unsuccessful candidate for reelection in 1854 to the Thirty-fourth Congress, but was elected as a Unionist to the Thirty-seventh Congress (March 4, 1861 – March 3, 1863).

May sat in the special session of Congress held in summer 1861 after the outbreak of the Civil War.[1] In September 1861 May was arrested without charges or recourse to habeas corpus on suspicion of treason and held in Fort Lafayette.[2][3] (Lincoln had unilaterally suspended habeas in Maryland in spring 1861, a move ruled unconstitutional without Congressional authorization in June 1861 by Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney speaking for the federal circuit court of Maryland in ex parte Merryman, a ruling which Lincoln disregarded.) May was eventually released—no charges were ever brought or evidence produced—and returned to his seat in Congress in December 1861. In March 1862 he introduced a bill requiring the federal government to either indict by grand jury or release all other "political prisoners" held indefinitely without recourse to habeas.[4] The provisions of May's bill were included in the March 1863 Habeas Corpus Act in which Congress finally authorized Lincoln to suspend habeas corpus, but required actual indictments for suspected traitors.[5] The "political prisoners" affected included Baltimore newspaper editor, and vocal Lincoln critic, Frank Key Howard, who had been a co-prisoner with May, and was also a grand-nephew of Chief Justice Taney's wife Anne Key, (Francis Scott Key's sister).[6]

In 1862 Henry May and Ohio Congressman Clement Vallandigham, an anti-war Democrat, led an investigation into telegraphic censorship of the press instituted by Lincoln's Secretary of State William H. Seward in certain cities.[7]

He died in Baltimore, and is interred in Cathedral Cemetery.