Biography
Henry May was a United States Congressman from Maryland representing a Baltimore district, elected as a Unionist to the Thirty-seventh Congress. In September 1861 he was arrested as part of a federal roundup, beginning shortly after midnight on September 12, that also detained Baltimore Mayor George William Brown and eleven Baltimore members of the Maryland legislature. May was taken into custody on suspicion of treason — without formal charges and without recourse to habeas corpus, which President Lincoln had suspended in Maryland — and held at Fort Lafayette in New York Harbor. He was released in December 1861 without any charges ever being brought or evidence produced, and returned to his seat in Congress. He was never tried or convicted. Drawing on his own imprisonment, in March 1862 May introduced legislation requiring the government either to indict political prisoners by grand jury or release them; the principle was incorporated into the Habeas Corpus Act of March 1863.
