14

foreign markets (especially in the West Indies) and establish itself as an
international trading center. Simultaneously, the domestic side of its commerce
grew, based largely on wheat from the "free labor" farming to the north and west,
flour milled from the wheat, and manufactures; secondarily, and only secondarily,
tobacco from the slave-based agriculture of Southern Maryland and the Eastern

Shore figured into its commercial expansion. By 1827, Baltimore's trade in

•y
domestic products outdistanced its re-export trade.'

Growing commerce put great pressure on the domestic transportation
system in the Baltimore region, as it did generally in the U.S. - particularly the
northern U.S. — during the early nineteenth century. During the resulting
"transportation revolution," Baltimore became the hub of an increasingly intricate
land, water, and, above all, rail transport system, causing further expansion of its
commercial economy and enhancing its attractiveness as an international port.
Both the continued expansion of free-labor commercial farming »n the West and
the slave-labor-based cotton boom in the South stimulated Baltimore's commercial
growth. The West was most important as a source of products, the South as a
market (particularly for ready-made clothing); while the slave system was important
to Baltimore's commercial development, this urban center's commerce was not
essentially dependent on slavery."

On the eve of the Civil War, with its economy in a cyclical lull, Baltimore's
ambitious merchant capitalist elite looked to an even greater extension of
commerce in several key directions as the solution. The ruling circles planned,
naturally, for the expansion of the lucrative Chesapeake Bay trade, trade with the
Southern states, and trade with the West. But the big thrust was to be in
international commerce toward South America and the Caribbean. Underlying
these plans was the geographic reality that Baltimore was the southernmost and the
westernmost of the great Atlantic coast port cities, and the one with the most direct
access to the Americas to the south . The Civil War interrupted the immediate