I. In looking at Chicago, William Cronon begins with the environment and focuses his attention on the interaction between humans and the modification of the environment. The personal lives of people, the developement of their ideas, perceptions of themselves and the city, except in the most general of terms are not a part of his analysis
II. With Baltimore, and to some extent by referencing to other cities like New York, we have tried to add the human dimension of the city in its most basic form: perceptions from within and without the city about what the people of a city are like, and what that means in terms of political and social norms. We have concentrated on the the perception that the bulk of the city is composed of people who are of dubious character and and are easily be roused to mob action, which means that the cityis always suspect and and is kept as much as possible from political power by the majority who live outside its geographical limits. Yet the very presence of the mob and the civic concern about the mob, leads to a civic conscience that pushes out the mental boundaries of who is thought capable of making decisions about society, and who is thought capable of participating in the decision making process. The city democractizes America, not, as Frederick Jackson Turner would have us believe, the geographical frontier of dispersed population and rugged individualism.
As with Cronon's thesis about the city and the countryside, our thesis about the interaction between the people of the country side and those of the city, both in a reactive and in uneasy alliances, the interelationship between the two over time is what is paramount, not the distinctions between the two. The City is the place where democaracy is at its worst and its best, but it cannot gain a hold on the whole of American Society as an ideal without the approval of the majority of those who live outside the city, thus the populist pressures from the rural areas for regulation of freight rates, greenbacks to make life more affordable, and the other issues that have rural (grassroots support) come from the interaction of the City and what the city represents with the countryside.
III. In defining how the city leads the country in the direction of greater participation in the poltical process, improved health care (meaning all aspects of improving the welfare of the human condition, first through achievements in the public health side of medicine, but also the corallaries of better living conditions with regard to housing and income), improved municipal and state government, increasing poltical & social acceptance of those who are different (meaning immigrants, both european and african), and ultimately to the blurring of the distinctions with regard to what roles men and women play in society, it is extremely important to point out
that the City and the Frontier however defined, work in tandem with one another. People who are different, who do not conform are always pushed to the peripher of society, but that periphery may be a city of the temporarily wide open spaces or rugged mountains of the geographical edge of settlement.
IV. In order to develope the thesis about the ways in which the central, core city, promotes economic, political, social, and cultural change within American Society, I will use Baltimore as the example off which we will bounce your reading and reference to other urban centers, the most important of which will be the largest of American Cities, New York.
Today and before we get to the next reading assignment in Cronon, I would like to focus on the elements that made a city like Baltimore a place for social experimentation and reform, suggesting, but not fully resolving why and how the City provides an opportunity in the American Context for those who elsewhere in the world might remain oppressed, or at least prevented, from improving their world, regardless of whether they lived in an urban or a rural area.
V. The Opening of American Society?
In the 1780s, while cities were a small, but highly visible component of American Society, the leadership of the poltical world was uncertain what their presence meant. The ideal citizen was the yeoman farmer and the poltical and social world was firmly grounded in well-defined notions of property and property ownership (we discussed last week Aaron Burr's sucessful challenge to some of that notion in NYC which led to his uneasy acceptance as a major player on the national scene. Burr found he could not hold on to National Power and found himself pushed to the geographical periphery where he may have conspired to bring about the downfall of the republic, or at minimum envisioned setting up a new state in the wilderness where he and his daughter could rule unfettered by Jeffersonian ideals of normative behavior. Freedom to those in the countryside was to be governed by the decisions of the landed yeomanry, implicit in which was the notion that the more property one owned the greater say he might have. As one writer put it in 1788: [6-546, p. 514]
The Yeomanry possess a large
share of property and strength, are nervous and firm in their opinions
and habits -- the mechanics of towns are argend and changeable, honest
and credulous, they are inconsiderable for numbers, weight and strength,
not always sufficiently stable for the supporting free government."
Indeed, unbeknownst to those advocates of the rule of the yeomanry, the city provided a context for the develolpment of a dynamic, but largely stable world in which there proved to be considerable opportunity for the working out of serious and always protentially distruptive social issues, not the least of which was the questions raised by the institution of slavery. While the geographical frontier provided the context for an increasingly bloody confrontation between pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces in America (the experiences in Kansas in the 1850s is the best known and worst example) a City like Baltimore provided a context for limited social experimentation and home for networking among slaves, free blacks, and anti-slavery whites that could not prevent a Civil War, but could at least provide a testing ground for limiting violent solutions to racial issues in American society.
VI. Before we look in some detail next week at the development of a an urban-based subculture for the African American presence in American Society, it is necessary to ask how it is that the American experience allowed for such a phenomena to develope at all in its cities and how it was that cities would have such a profound and different effect on the society as a whole than was the case in Europe or for that matter anywhere else in the world?
The answer lies in the accident of American Geography and the opportunities presented human beings in the new-world setting to exploit what William Cronon refers to as First Nature, transforming it into second nature or the human-made world.
VII. Before turning to Baltimore, we should first look at the unleashing of the the human exploitation machine on the natural world of America after peace was achieved from Great Britain in 1784.
Robert Wiebe in his book the Opening of American Society ignores the role of cities in the deveopment of the the American Exhuberance for development (what Cronon refers to as boosterism), but he does make it clear that in the first decades of the 19th Century Americans acquire a selfconfidence about their future that leads to massive internal improvments (Roads, Canals, and Railroads), broadening of the suffrage, a commitment to public education (uneven and fitful as it may have been), and the rejection of the ordered world of the founding fathers. Imbedded in the exhuberance was the central problem of slavery: whether or not human beings should literally be considered nothing more than chattel, i.e. personal disposable property, or whether the institution should be abolished to allow the full meaning of the declaration of independence to be realized. Any resolution of that problem was delayed by political compromise and deflected by concentrating resources on westward expansion, known colloquially as the 'Manifest Destiny' of the United States to span the continent.
The facts are that the physical bounds within which American Society could expand to exploit the natural world within a temperate climatic zone were unlike anything any other peoples had experienced up to that time. Those who formed the society were themselves people either drawn to periphery of Society, or pushed there by circumstances, and the level of their optimism about what they might do and how they might do it, whether they lived in the city or the countryside was also unique to the history of the world.
VIII. Baltimore from 1800 to 1835
overlay: 26-248,
I. Earliest known contemporary printed view of Baltimore painted by George Beck, an English landscapist who was a Baltimore resident in 1796-97. May be a view from what is now Mt. Olivet Cemetery on Frederick Avenue. The stream at lower left is Gwynn's falls. The harbor with the surrounding town is to the left of the tree. Whetstone Point, now Locust Point, is the neck of land to the right of the tree, jutting between the basin and the Middle branch of the Patapsco river. [4-1429, Lois B. Mc Cauley, Maryland Historical Prints, p. 4)
I. Commerce is the Mainspring, 1796-1829
A) Periodization of the City's History
The periodization of a city's history is not an easy task. Sherry Olson chose to end her chapter on Commerce is the Mainspring in 1821 with the enigma of Slavery and the implication that the major problem for the city and its development would be the resolution of the African American problem.
Her quote is taken from an 1820 publication concerned with the Epidemic of yellow fever in 1819:
53: 1819 "poverty and congestion had reached new dimensions, as business depression deepened and construction declined. During the yellow fever season, an anonymous physician begged to commend to the mayor's attention the poor east of Harford Run:
Commerce is the main spring of this City. Fells Point is as it were the key thereof it is therefore important to all. But this same business which diffuses life, vigor and activity to the City, brings down upon this part of the city most of these poor. They have all been, more or less, directly or indirectly engaged in commerce, and have felt its depressed spirit comparatively speaking, a thousand fold more than the merchants. [1820; a series of letters relating to Yellow Fever ...]
1821: 'squeeze gut' alley; nest of houses tenanted by negroes;
B) What Olson was trying to do was to focus attention on the consequences of Commerce where there is little or no concern with the internal problems of the city on the part of the merchant community, but in doing so she misses the underlying rhythm of change and development with in the city.
In trying to understand when a Port town becomes a city and what the predominant pattern of development and change is within that transformation, especially as it relates to place like Baltimore, you need to ask yourself what makes a city.
I would argue that it is probably the consciousness of being one, of being different from the surrounding country-side, needing problems solved, services provided that simply are not pressing issues in the rural world,
issues that are being addressed and discussed by some common forum of communication: newspapers, or weekly journals; By 1800 Baltimore had at least two principal newspapers and in 18ll Hezekiah Niles founded his Weekly Register (A National weekly that concerned itself with local issues)
issues that encompass self-government (resisted in Baltimore until 1796)
Issues that encompass a commonality of interest different from the rest of the State (a bias towards a strong National Government that protects trade and manufacturing;) and results in an adherence first to the Federalist Party until in Maryland it is dominated by rural interests, and then the Democratic=Republican Party of Jefferson which, by 1800, offers a larger measure of political freedom and a larger base of participation in the political process (universal white manhood suffrage) than do the Federalists
addresses issues like education (the first efforts at educational reform, as advocated by Noah Webster of Webster's speller and dictionary fame, were tried out on a not two receptive Baltimore)
addresses issues like abolition of slavery (more effective in Baltimore City than anywhere else in the State
What we are looking at in Baltimore by 1800 is a fundamental change in american society that is focused in the transformation of port town to cities. While Olson is correct in highlighting the resistance, even within the port town to the change (the business of trade is trade, not caring for the poor or seeking better streets for the town), the change takes place none the less, and it the timing of how and why that change takes place that is most important to our understanding of the evolution of the city.
C) the urban phenomena that before the American Revolution existed in isolation and were largely independent of the country side (Boston and Philadelphia were the least so, Baltimore, New York, Annapolis, Charleston, more so);
The urban phenomena that before the 1790s had little influence on or with (especially in a legislative sense the majority of people who live in rural areas and the majority of people who governed,
by 1800 was beginning to address its internal problems and making its mark on the country-side,
in the Chesapeake Bay Region, by the 1820s Baltimore replace London as the metropolitan influence (with some competition from Richmond)
at the same time Baltimore began to come to grips with its own problems:
[26-258]
by paving streets (adding sidewalks)
improving the water supply
creating markets
assuming some social responsibility (Maryland Hospital begins in the 1790s on the site of what is now Hopkins Hospital()
[use map from Barnes of Varle that shows Baltimore in 1800 with Market, hospital circled; 26-248]
D) By 1800, America's cities, but especially Baltimore, are no longer merely the port towns that Jacob Price describes; the characteristics of colonial city life that historians like Carl Bridenbaugh and Gary B. Nash (Urban Crucible, 1979) examine, are transformed from superficial signs of a civic consciousness into the reality of a true urban landscape that were now more than a mere pass through for immigrants and temporary stopping place for imports and exports.
The City was beginning to be a force to reckoned with (for good or for evil) in the political, economic, social world of the country. 26-255; keep in mind that the majority of Americans then and perhaps now, did not like the urban presence and wished that it would go away: The rest of Maryland wanted the business and prosperity that Baltimore represented but did not want its problems. From 1776 elements within the city and without did not want the urban presence to grow into a political power of its own. The ambivalence of the rural elite towards the city is perhaps best expressed by an analogy of a protective brother concerned about the seduction of a younger sister, the sister representing the rest of Maryland and the seducer representing the city. By 1788 Jeremiah Townley Chase had done a lot for Baltimore city, although he had left the city for Annapolis in the late 1770s. He had represented the city in the constitutional convention of 1776 and had argued persuasively that Baltimore deserved representation in the General Assembly, although he had also failed in convincing the Convention to let the representation grow as the city grew. [quote 26-274]
II. The underlying rhythm of change for Baltimore from 1800, when the city first had to begin to cope with the consequences of one white man one vote in the city, to the 1830s when at last the city gained entre into the political decision-making circles of state government by constitutional reform that gave it increasing representation in State government based upon population, the city passed through three distinct periods of change:
A) 1790s-1807; Commercial elements concerned mostly with the re-export trade dominate the city and keep its attention largely focused on the European, west indian trade
B) 1807-1816: european wars draw the nation into their conflict; Baltimore's re-export merchants withdraw from trade and invest in
1) changing the city's orientation towards manufacturing and exploiting the internal markets of the nation with considerable disagreement on what those markets can and should be;
2) solving the problems of the city through philanthropy and through increasing local governments' role in solving city issues with tax dollars
C) 1816-1830 when new avenues of development must be pursued for the survival of the city as a commercial entity:
growth of manufacturing
investment in internal improvements to access internal markets
III. Lets begin with an overview of the city and its population
A) in 1800,
B) in 1818 when the city boundaries were expanded,
C) and finally ca. 1835
A) Best description of Baltimore in 1800 is from Scharf, chronicles of Baltimore, published in 1874 which reprints this account of the city at about the time that Warner and Hanna published Charles Varle's map of the city
1) quote from Scharf, 26-248
B) In the 1816 the legislature pulled a fast one on Baltimore and increased its geographical size while not allowing it any increase in representation in the General Assembly (quote from Niles Register)
26-41
Niles (1817):
The Legislature, at its late sitting, passed an act to annex the Precincts, as they were called, to the City of Baltimore, against the consent of nine-tenths, perhaps, of the people of both. By this procedure the CITY acquires a population of 16 or 17,000 souls; and still has only TWO members in the house of delegates -- a FORTIETH part of the power of legislation, and a FIFTH, if not a FOURTH, of all the white persons in whole state.
The mere ADDITION thus made to Baltimore city for population or value of property, is far greater than that of any one of seven or eight of the counties of the state, and equal, or superior, to that of two several pairs of united counties--But each COUNTY sends FOUR members to the legislature. THIS IS MARYLAND REPRESENTATION.
Of the political motives that led to this procedure, it does not belong to this work to say any thing.
Griffith (1824-1830):
At the session of 1816, the limits of the city, are extended by an act entitled "An act to enlarge the bounds of Baltimore city," including the old precincts. Those limits form a parallelogram of about three and a half miles from North to South, and four and a half from East to West, and contains in land and water, about 10,000 acres surface, all included within the twelve wards of the city. [4-95-217/218]
Scharf, Chronicles (1874):
same as Niles, but abbreviated in the editorializing re: power of counties viz. city. [4-87-381]
Scharf, History of Baltimore City and County (1881):
pp. 61-62: follows Niles argument and includes a map of the City showing how the original tract of Coles Harbor was to the north of the present harbor (p. 62).
NOTE:
according to Niles, 1817: 305;
there were 8 wards in Baltimore City. By 1820 there were 12.
Population growth, 1800-1820 from Griffith:
Year White Males White Females Other Free Slaves Total
City without the Precincts:
1800: 11,294 9,606 2,771 2,843 26,514
1810 35,513
1820 39,404-40,795
City and Precincts combined:
1790: 6,422 5,503 323 1,255 13,503
1800: 31,514
1810: 19,045 17,147 5,671 4,672 46,555
1820: 23,922 24,133 10,324 3,357 62,738
1830: 30,021 31,693 14,788 4,123 80,625
Precincts only:
1800: est. 5,000
1810:
East: 4,050
West: 6,922
TOTAL: 10,971
1816:
Estimated Total: 16,000-17,000
1820:
Estimated Total: 21,942-23,334
C) Housing, population in Baltimore, 1829
In 1829 the houses in the city were: one story, 1,466; two stories, 8,189; three or more stories, 2,143; total 12,798 of which above 10,000 are of brick; [6.29 people on average per building]; In that year the city cared for 409 paupers per month out of a population of 80,625, while the county cared for 47 out of a population of 40,251.
Griffith: Appendix
D) Housing from 1800 to 1830; must remember that physical growth of a city can be both horizontal and vertical with the remaking of a city taking as much a vertical dimension as a horizontal: Mostly taken from The Architecture of Baltimore, a Pictorial History, 1953; The print on the title page is from a view of Baltimore ca. 1847, more germane to the week after next than to next week in terms of the overall impact of what the city looked like;
[26-261, to look at housing and note the vertical developments as well as the horizontal]
IV: In the parallel careers of Robert Oliver and Samuel Smith we can see more clearly the two distinct phases Baltimore passed through from 1807- 1830:
The first phase is typified by Robert Oliver's withdrawal from trade which he completed by 1818 (analysis taken from Bruchey, 4-12), but for the rest of the city was dramatically closed by the British attack in September of 1814.
A) Oliver to 1818:
Two main points,
1) merchants like oliver made a lot of money by the time of the War of 1812; war intervened; what would they do with it and what direction would they take the City in?
2) importance of the War-born demands on industrialization:
quote Bruchey, 4-12: p. 103
The war-born demand encouraged the "milling interests" of Baltimore and its environs, and the manufacture of flour increased so greatly that after 1795 it largely replaced wheat int he city's exports. By 1799 there were "fifty capital merchants mills" within 18 miles of the city. Sixteen of them were within 4 miles, and adjoining the town was a large mill capable of producing 150 barrels a day. Production time and costs had been cut by the adoption of the inventions of Oliver Evans. In history of the flour-milling industry Kuhlmann says that "The Baltimore millers seem to have been quicker than any others" to use Evans' inventions, "and the resulting advantage in costs of production doubtless helped to build up the Baltimore Mills faster than those of their competitors in the outlying area." Under conditions of increasing demand, rising prices, and lower costs, the port of Baltimore, in the judgment of a ... student, "soon became the leading flour center of America."
caveat: poor Oliver Evans never profited fully from his inventions which millers like the Ellicotts and the Tysons used freely with out much compensation to the inventor: It would not be until the late 19th century that the legal profession would hone its skills finely enough to make considerable money for itself defending the patent rights of such inventors as Edison, Bell, and Armstrong (Radio)
The War of 1812 brought an abrupt halt to the major profits to be made in the re-export trade and place the city itself in acute physical danger for the first time in its short history. Samuel Smith came to the rescue.
B) Samuel Smith and the defense of Baltimore
While many merchants intentionally stayed out of politics (Robert Oliver for one); Smith wasted several fortunes on politics and in 1814 successfully assumed command of the defenses of the City. Smith was most successful: [overlay of Smith, British attach on Baltimore, then quote:]
Cassell, p. 209:
both on land and sea the British had been repulsed. On September 14, the [British] fleet lifted its bombardment and drifted down the Patapsco to North Point where they rejoined the troop transports. Before sailing for the West Indies Cochrane released several American civilians he had been holding, including Francis Scott Key, who carried with him some lines of poetry scribbled on an envelope, the future national anthem. News of the victory at Baltimore lifted the spirits of many American still shocked by the burning of Washington. More substantively, the Battle of Baltimore, when coupled with the simultaneous victory at Plattsburg [N.Y.] on the northern frontier, improved the bargaining position of the American negotiators at the peace talks in Ghent. No longer could the British seriously contend that the United States should accept a loss of territory as the price of ending hostilities. For Samuel Smith the events of September 13-14 were the high point of his life. He had accomplished many things in sixty-two years and he would do more, but none could compare in his own mind with the successful defense of Baltimore in 1814. Unfairly, Smith's achievement has frequently been obscured by some, who have stressed the parts played by John Rodgers or George Armistead [see the monument to Armistead on the top of Federal Hill]. These an others of Smith's subordinates fought hard and well, but he was the chief architect of victory, a man whose energy, stature, and personal prestige made Baltimore capable of resisting the British. From first to last it was his triumph."
C) With the War ended, when now did Baltimore's future lie?
The spokesperson for the city, Hezekiah Niles, initially saw its greatest rival to be Boston and Boston's aggressive merchants. note the reference to Mob Town. [quote from Niles, 26-240]
1) the city looked to its internal markets for its future, first training its attention on the market to the north as drained by the Susquehanna River
2) Robert Goodloe Harper, CCC son-in-law, in 1824 took issue with the idea that just because NY and PA were completing canals that Baltimore should compete by improving the navigation of the Susquehanna; Meeting on the 20th of December, 1824 at the Exchange; Harper spoke for the equivalent of 78 pages of small type (it was no wonder that they had to break to refresh themselves); I won't read it all but will excerpt the substance of his argument which was contained in a resolution that:
the improvement of the Susquehanna not be considered more important than accessing the western trade: What was needed was "direct communication ... with all those parts of Maryland which lie in or contiguous to the Potomac, embracing the counties of Allegany, Washington Frederick and Montgomery, and containing a population of seventy-nine thousand eight hundred and two souls; with all those parts of the state of Virginia which lie contiguous to the Ohio the Potomac and their branches, and contain together a population of two hundred and six thousand six hundred and seventy three souls; with all those parts of Pennsylvania which lie contiguous to the Ohio and lake Erie and their waters, and contain a population of two hundred and thirty thousand one hundred and sixty; with the whole state of Ohio, the population of which amounts to five hundred and eight-one thousand four hundred and thirty-four; with all those parts of Kentucky which lie above the falls of Ohio, and contain a population of two hundred and eighty-seven thousand tow hundred and thirty-six souls; and with the whole state of Indiana, the population of which amounts to one hundred and forty-seven thousand one hundred and seventy-eight: making in the whole a population of one million five hundred and thirty-two thousand four hundred and eighty three; three times as numerous as that which is now to be found contiguous to the Susquehannah and its branches, and inhabiting a country far more extensive, equally fertile, and consequently susceptible of much greater increase in the future." p. 38
While his analysis was succinct and clearly prescient of things to come, Harper's solution was not feasible: he was arguing that a canal be built from Washington D.C. to Baltimore to complement the work then being done on the C & O Canal (one of many internal Improvements projects in that era of Canal building mania).
In three years, however, another, more viable solution to expanding the City's contacts with the western parts of the United States offered itself and the moneyed men of the city took it to their bosom with a vengeance: The Railroad: return to Robert Oliver; 26-232
D) The City turns its attention to the interior markets as well as to its own physical improvement, 1816-1830.
A) character of international trade changed: Baltimore helps foment revolution in South America; (no longer looking to Europe as much as to South America for Coffee, Sugar, Beef to which flour and manufactured commodities are exported:
B) Railroad helped it to hold on to its importance as a commercial and manufacturing center by opening up the western markets just as Robert Goodloe Harper predicted could happen (so what if he was wrong about the means?)
Oliver.txt 10_166.043
Scharf Chron:
472: Robert Oliver d. 1834, 12/28 age 77
[Brugger: 145, estate was Greenmount, [later Greenmount Cemetery]; Olson, p. 36, says he acquired it ca. 1799; is on the Varle map of 1797-1800; 4-2320, Wilson on Cemeteries: "Cemetery was incorporated by act of Legislature in December 1837. Bought the Country Estate of Robert Oliver. $65,000 for 68 acres; Oliver also owned a townhouse on Gay street south of Baltimore consumed in fire of 1904; Green Mount was built in 1800 where the gothic Chapel of 1856 now stands; Oliver buried near the gatehouse, but originally buried in Westminster; grave marked by simple marble shaft.]
428: 7/4/1828 present at beg construct of B &)
3/1828 State of Md subscribed $1,000,000 for stock in B & O
444: 8/28/1830: Main Keystone of the Arches of the fine granite structure passing over the Frederick Turnpike road at Ellicott's Mills was adjusted into place by Robert Oliver. President Philip E. Thomas spoke: "The directors of the B&O RR Co., having deemed it advisable to dignify the several most important structures upon the road by the names of those citizens under whose influence and patronage this great work has been sustained, [first after Carroll, second after William Patterson, and third:] The noble edifice of which we have just witnessed the completion, I have been instructed to designate by the name of a fellow-citizen no less distinguished for his liberality, public spirit, and generous support of the magnificent enterprise in which we have embarked. This structure will accordingly hereafter be distinguished by the name of the Oliver Viaduct."
462: 12/27/1832 Robert Oliver vp of meeting in Baltimore which disapproved of the nullification resolutions of South Carolina "as tending to disturb the harmony, good faith, and impairing, if not destroying, the general prosperity." Strongly supported Jackson's stand.
463: on April 20, 1832? the first train of cars from Point of Rocks arrived in Baltimore laden with 3-400 barrels of flour.
469: 1834 funeral procession for Lafayette, Oliver Pall Bearer
[Brugger: 207, Robert Oliver supported John Stuart Skinner, American Farmer publisher, experiments in agricultural reform at his Maryland Tavern outside Baltimore; Isaac McKim helped too]
C) By 1830 the city was well on its way to securing its commercial future but the City was also on the verge of dramatic change in terms of its s political an social world. At the out set of the lecture tonight I alluded to the first major change in the body politic with the adoption of universal manhood suffrage. In the 1830s Baltimore at last got some of the political representation it deserved in Annapolis and thus in State Affairs, at the same time that the character of city politics was also changing dramatically. The mob town that the people of Boston referred to as Baltimore became a political reality compounded by a major influx of foreigners:
as chronicled by Scharf, p. 460:
1827 1,429
1828 1,843
1829 1,581
1830, 4,100
1831 4,381
1832 7,946
The political world of the city would be in turmoil and the demands on the city fathers for the care of their citizenry would reach new and dramatic heights.
When President John Quincy Adams visited the city in 1827 he both attended the funeral of John Eager Howard, and christened the city the "Monumental city." Three years earlier, with the help of the rural districts in Maryland Adams would stole the election from the hero of New Orleans, General Andrew Jackson: Out of 33,292 votes cast (4-29, Willis p. 33) Adams won 14,692 votes and Jackson won 14,534; (Jackson got 7 out of 11 electoral votes; election in Baltimore city close; only 904 votes separated the winners from the losers as candidates for electors, George Winchester won as Jackson elector from BC)
quote 26-12
X. How then did the cities help with the resolution of the problem of slavery in American Society? What do Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), Nat Turner (-1833), and Thomas W. Henry (1794-1877) have in common? What can they tell us of the dramatic and important role cities played in providing a context for the development of a viable african-american subculture in America? A Sub-culture that would provide a buffer against the worst aspects of slavery and a training context for the leadership necessary to take African American from Slavery to Freedom.