who did no teaching and excluded teachers who did not have tenure. The background of the
faculty must have given a good deal of concern to the black applicants. The Dean of the Law
School, John Prentiss Poe, did not take an active role in the Civil War, but his sympathies were
with the south.30 Professor Richard M. Venable had been a confederate soldier.31 Professor
Thomas Hall had been a major in the confederate army.32 Among the tenured professors, only
Judge Charles E. Phelps had served on the union side. A former congressman, Phelps had voted
consistently in support of President Andrew Johnson against the radical republicans. This
support included a vote against the fifteenth amendment.33 In the litigation over admission of
blacks to the bar, however, Phelps characterized the racial barrier as a "relic of barbarism."34

The non-teaching faculty seemed less problematic. George Dobbin and John H.B.
LaTrobe were the surviving members of the non-teaching faculty under David Hoffinan's school.
In 1869, when the medical school proposed a revival of the law school, Dobbin and Latrobe
appointed the rest of the faculty. Dobbin became the first dean. (After a year, Poe succeeded
him.) Nearly two decades later, both Dobbin and LaTrobe were still members of the faculty.35
Dobbin had graduated from the University of Maryland Law School in 1830, when David
Hoffman was its only teacher. He had been elected a judge of the supreme bench in Baltimore in
1867 and when he passed the age limit of 70 in 1879, the General Assembly passed a special act
to permit him to remain on the bench. He was one of the founders of the Maryland Historical
Society and a trustee of both Johns Hopkins University and the Peabody Institute.

John LaTrobe was the son of the architect, Benjamin LaTrobe. He was a leading lawyer
and public citizen, one of the founders of the Maryland Historical Society. Although three of his
five sons served in the Confederate army, he had sought to preserve the union. Another son,
Ferdinand, was for many years the mayor of Baltimore.36 LaTrobe's passion was the project to
colonize blacks in Africa. He drafted the constitution and ordinances for the government of
Maryland in Liberia, serving for many years as the president of the Maryland Colonization
Society and in 1853 became the president of the American Colonization Society. He had
opposed slavery, but doubted the feasibility of racial coexistence.37

Bernard Carter was a relative of confederate general Robert E. Lee and, like Dean Poe,
had been a southern sympathizer during the war. He had taught at the law school from 1878 to
1884, and was regarded as one of the city's finest lawyers.38 During the suit to admit blacks to
the bar, Carter, then city solicitor, was asked his opinion. The newspaper reported that Carter
replied that "he had not thought about the policy of the matter at all, but that personally he saw
no objection whatever in admitting colored men to practice at the bar.39

The fourth non-teaching member of the faculty was George William Brown. In 1842 he
had written articles in opposition to the slaveholders convention. A founder of the Bar Library
and the Maryland Historical Society, he was also a trustee of the Peabody Institute and Johns
Hopkins University. When the Civil War broke out, Brown was the mayor of Baltimore. The
federal government, fearing loss of control of Maryland, arrested Brown and others and held
them without trial for a year as they imposed martial law on the city of Baltimore. After the war,

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