The war-and-peace rhythm of Baltimore's eighteenth-century growth continued into the nineteenth century. Gold flowed in, gold flowed out. Wealth increased, poverty increased. The timing of mobs and strikes, prizes and bankruptcies, fires and epidemics corresponded to fits of growth or sudden arrest. Philadelphia editors and Virginia politicians accused Baltimore of a collapse into anarchy. Baltimore citizens, faced with successive crises and galled by the critics, began tinkering with their municipal institutions and trying to make sense of their urban experience.
Population doubled in the first decade as it had in the 1790s. It continued to rise until 1816, when growth slackened for several years. An accumulation of people required an accumulation of houses, and most of the house building was concentrated in bursts of a few years before and just after the War of 1812.1 Intense building booms of a few years in a cycle of roughly twenty-year periods have been characteristic of American cities, and are related to international migration and to counterwaves of construction in Europe. This time Baltimore experienced a greater upswing and slightly different timing from other cities, notably its archrival, Philadelphia.
The accumulation of buildings-three hundred in the boom years-provided a showcase for the accumulation of wealth. As individuals piled up fortunes, they began to display their private wealth and to pool their capital for civic improvements and even civic grandeur. Society was projected on the landscape, as the variations of individual wealth were expressed in the site and scale of town dwellings. Homes were advertised for the genteel and respectable, and architects were employed to design the town residences of wealthy merchants, notably Lorman, Oliver, Gilmor, and Smith. The accumulation of wealth made possible construction on a larger scale. In this period the habit was acquired of building ordinary houses and warehouses in rows of six to twelve at a time. Financial intermediaries were present to organize this, such as Elkan Solomon, broker, who was ready to "raise money on brick houses in town." Financial pools were also created to insure them, since a single fire might destroy, as in 1822, a range of twelve dwellings and sixteen warehouses on McFlderry's wharf. Wealthy merchants built distinctive terraces: Pascault's eight houses on Lexington Street, William Patterson's wharf, William Shipley's row on Pierce Street, George Grundy's on Richmond Street, Wales' and Clopper's warehouses on Bowley's wharf, an elegant four-story terrace on Saint Paul Street, and others on George Street and Sharp Street. Most elegant was the water company's "Waterloo row" on Calvert Street.
The rate of incorporations matched the rhythm of construction. A special act of the legislature was needed to form a corporation for either profitable or social purposes. Among the ventures for profit was the Union Manufacturing Company, incorporated in 1809, with both private capital and shares taken by the state. The company bought 300 acres from the Ellicotts on the Patapsco River and developed an elaborate hydraulic system that could supply numerous mill seats. By 1812 they were employing forty families and developing a third large cotton mill. The Washington Cotton Factory was built on the Jones Falls. On Gwynns Falls, Worthington, Jessup, Cheston, and others erected five mills known as the Calverton mills on a two-mile race with a fall of eighty feet. The Napoleonic wars, the War of 1812, and the Spanish-American revolutions stimulated the chemical industries. In 1810 Lorman's powder mills, capitalized at $100,000, were as large as the Brandywine powder mills.2
All of these were on a new scale in terms of capital, structures, water power, labor force, and production. The shift of capital into manufacturing and the transformation of merchants into manufacturers was a national process, but in Baltimore it represented a more decided break with the past than in New England or Philadelphia. Much credit must be given to the influence of the Quaker miller families as they diversified their interests, developed the hydraulics, and created instruments for cooperation. John McKim operated the big steam cotton mill on French Street (Oldtown) and started the Union Manufacturing Company; Benjamin Ellicott dominated the Union Bank; and Isaac Tyson manufactured drugs and chemicals on Pratt Street, explored the uses of chrome pigments, and acquired the chrome-bearing properties at Bare Hills and Soldier's Delight.
Collective enterprises were organized on a new scale and incorporated for public uses. Some of the new institutions were modeled on Philadelphia. Several nonprofit corporations were formed to promote the development of manfactures. In 1809 seventeen hundred persons subscribed twenty thousand dollars to the Athenian Society; they agreed to "wear American," and operated a warehouse and store in Market (Baltimore) Street for receiving and vending domestic dry goods. They became "a prosperous little society," although they limited dividends in order to achieve their long-run objective of decreasing prejudices against American-made goods. Churches began to rival one another in lifting up towers and steeples out of the mass of houses. Cosmopolitan Baltimore, in its pride, sought a scale and a style to rival the old-world cities of culture and history. Buildings would express meanings and impose order. The most impressive were the great domes-the Catholic cathedral, the Exchange, the Unitarian church, Saint Paul's Episcopal Church, First Baptist, and that "superb edifice," the Medical College. The ultimate was the conception of monuments with no function other than commemoration, above all, the Washington Monument, from which Baltimore claimed its nickname, "the Monumental City," and the Battle Monument, dedicated to those who died in the 1813 battle for North Point. The city council also authorized two large paintings as "monumental remembrances" of the defense and "second birth" of Baltimore.
For siting their monumental structures, the builders developed a new appreciation of the natural topography as a stage. Baltimoreans determined to build on a scale at once to rival and to exploit its piedmont setting. The original site for a cathedral, near Granby and Exeter streets, was abandoned in 1806 in order to fix it upon a hill. The Washington Monument, originally proposed for the courthouse square, was resited on Howard's Hill. The two structures together defined for Baltimore a unique skyline, and dominated it for a century. For a century, they also defined a locus of legitimacy. Tough men with a sense of a great future for Baltimore had founded a past, a rock of religion, a mythology of elegance and noblesse oblige exemplified by George Washington and John Eager Howard. The building of those two "great piles" (still standing) was the establishment of the Establishment.
Other new institutions were sited on the west or northwest of the city to obtain advantages of country air and drainage, cheaper ground, or because their presence might threaten a densely populated district. This was the case with the hospitals and colleges, remarkably creative in this period. The beautiful domed Medical College, founded by the doctors in the southwest, had a magnificent prospect of the Patapsco River. The doctors invited the Sisters of Charity, Mother Seton's order from Emmitsburg, to provide the nursing in their teaching hospital. The charter for the Medical College contained the concept of a state university, and David Hoffman taught law. William Sinclair and James Priestly built an $80,000 structure on Mulberry Street for their Maryland College. Within walking distance was laid out the Lexington Market, also on a hill. Together with Saint Mary's Seminary, the new cathedral, and the Washington Monument, these institutions-all fixed on ground of John Eager Howard-provided a scaffolding for the "genteel" development of the western perimeter of Baltimore in this construction boom and the next.
Citizens were determined to create symbols in the center of the city as well. The courthouse, admired as an immense edifice," was built between 1805 and 1809, and after the war the square was regraded to locate the Battle Monument on the crest of the hill. Nearby was the Masonic Hall, which later served as a federal courthouse. Lawyers took possession of the district, and publishers and booksellers clustered at Calvert and Baltimore streets. Two blocks south and east, toward the waterfront, the merchants decided to build an Exchange, a collective palace that would outclass the country houses of the planter aristocracy such as Homewood and Mount Clare. In 1820 they occupied their newspaper reading room and stock exchange, and rented spaces to the federal post office, treasury, and customs offices, and to numerous brokerage and insurance offices. The construction of the Exchange was an attempt to create order, symmetry, and mass in the midst of a waterfront all disorder, bustle, brick, and rigging. Symbolic of the curious mixture of great vision and grudging implementation was the practice of financing all these magnificent structures by lotteries and taking for granted their future operation as self-supporting.
The search for meaning and the passion for imposing order on a complex world reached into every domain. The collection of grand semipublic works fixed in Baltimore for some years a number of remarkable architects, notably Benjamin Latrobe, Jr., Robert Mills, and Maximilian Godefroy. But they were recognized, sought after, and hired through the influence of a more fixed circle of local men who were thoughtful and sophisticated. All the innovations in institutions, in literature, building, mechanics, medicine, agriculture, and science, are traceable to a single network of gifted and articulate men whose ideas sprang up like mushrooms all over town.3 Vital in this network were several editors of considerable persuasive powers, in person as well as in print. One was William Gwynn, publisher of the Federal Gazette, enthusiast of the theater and the Spanish-American revolutions. He was a member of the original committees to create a water company and a gas company. Gwynn backed Sower's type foundry. He held together the Hibernian Society and the important literary circle known as the Delphian Club.
Fielding Lucas, Jr., bookseller with Philadelphia connections, stocked hundreds of titles in French, published some of the finest made books in the nation, played the flute, and founded the Baltimore Harmonic Society central to the musical life and charitable efforts of Baltimore. After the war he was associated with Catholic publishing ventures and the zeal for Bolivar. He published a new-style Spanish grammar by a priest of Saint Mary's Seminary and a magnificent atlas of the West Indies, for which he drew many of the maps himself from information garnered from Baltimore sea captains. Lucas and Gwynn secured a loan to a Philadelphia theatrical company, to build the Holliday Street theater. As a manager of the Washington Monument project, Lucas was in close touch with Robert Mills. He had Mills design a new store front and interior for him, and published Mills's Treatise on Inland Navigation and his atlas of South Carolina.
Hezekiah Niles, through his weekly Register, of national circulation, helped formulate the "American System" of public works and protective tariffs for manufacturing.4 He promoted the Athenian Society and the Economical Society, as well as vaccination and Spanish-American independence. Joseph Townsend, a member of the Society of Friends, was involved in nearly every social or institutional innovation~the African school, the Protection Society, and the potter's field. He was the manager secretary of the Equitable Society, a member of the board of health, commissioner of the Maryland Hospital, and a commissioner for the town plan. John Skinner's American Farmer was probably the nation's most important agricultural journal, and also reported on technical and medical devices beyond the realm of agriculture. Skinner was the secretary of the state agricultural society and personally imported new breeds of livestock.
Another key person in the network was Robert Goodloe Harper, congressional representative from South Carolina who came to Baltimore about 1800 to pursue his career as an attorney. Married to Carroll's daughter, and thus brother-in-law to Richard Caton, Harper was often the channel between wealthy patrons and impecunious men of ideas. He was an active member of the Delphian Club and a prime mover in the Library Company and in the construction of the Exchange. In these roles he figured as a patron of both Mills and Latrobe, despite their rivalry.5 Mills dedicated his canal plan to Harper, who organized the subscription for the publication. Harper was a central figure in the new movement to free and resettle blacks in colonies on the coast of Africa, similar to the British experiments in Sierra Leone. He believed slavery was a curse and free blacks were destined for hopeless inferiority and consequent degradation. "You can manumit the slave," he argued, "but you cannot make him a white man."6 Although his objectives now appear unrealistic and ambiguous, his reading of the British and French explorers of Africa is impressive, and he showed a grasp of the geographical and geopolitical requirements for a successful colony. He recommended the initial Mesurado River sites and the name Liberia for the Maryland colony.
Several other gentlemen played similar roles as channels of communication between men of capital and men of ideas. William Lorman, founder of the gas company and president of the Bank of Baltimore, had Latrobe build him a row of shops on Charles Street at Conewago. Robert Smith, a planter, played the role of model farmer and patron of prize livestock and agricultural inventions. James Mosher, variously identified as bricklayer, mason, architect, or builder, was often teamed with Robert Cary Long. Long was carpenter, architect, builder, and lumber merchant. Mosher and Long were spokesmen for the growing class of "mechanics," craftsmen whose economic and political importance increased in the period of intense construction. The mechanics demanded more democratic participation, but nevertheless accepted a certain paternalism in their institutions. Mosher was the president of an apprentices' library, and Long was the secretary of the Carpenters Society.
The intellectual network seems always to lead to a few "back lanes," particularly Chatham Street, which ran west from the courthouse. The original site of the Mechanical Company clubroom and engine house, it had become a residential street convenient to the new courthouse, the publishing corner at Baltimore and Calvert, and to the prestigious new residences along North Charles Street near the cathedral. In Chatham Street in 1804 were found William Gwynn; James Mosher; Mary C. Goddard, a remarkable old lady who had been a publisher, political gadfly, postmistress, and shopkeeper; the Baltimore General Dispensary; Horace Hayden, the dental surgeon and geologist; and Dr. James Smith, who spearheaded all organization against smallpox. There were Mrs. Coffey's dame school and Mrs. Lacombe's young ladies' seminary. The new Union Bank was on the corner of Chatham and Charles streets, and just around the corner on Saint Paul's Lane were James Priestly and William Lorman. Daniel Raymond set up his law office in Chatham Street. After Chatham Street was demolished to develop Fayette Street, Baltimore was never the same.
Circulation
Characteristic of this period was the recognition of the dynamic properties of great systems of circulation. The merchant city was part of such a circulatory system, and Baltimore grew off its levy on the circulation of goods, money, and information. The accumulation of wealth, visible in the new buildings, depended upon an acceleration of the flows of money and goods. The number of banks increased from two to nine, and the new ones had much larger capital. As Niles said, "It is the great secret of banking to keep the bank bills in circulation with the least chance of a demand being made for their payment."7 The extraordinary development of the international circulation of money through Baltimore is shown by two bizarre ventures of Robert Oliver, by means of which he became a millionaire.8
In the years 1801 to 1803, when a hundred Baltimore merchants had been ruined by "the disasters of the peace" (the Treaty of Amiens), Oliver noted, "We see so many people ruined by speculative and extensive operations that we intend to be very cautious."9 Oliver had, however, a contract to supply cash for a British paymaster and purchasing agent in Martinique and later Barbados. For a 5 percent commission, he procured gold, had it melted down and recoined into Spanish joes by a Baltimore firm (Bedford and Morton), then captured additional profits on the charter of vessels, insurance, negotiation of the bills of exchange, and sales of return cargoes of sugar via Saint Croix. Oliver and his go-betweens redeemed notes of banks in Alexandria, Washington, Georgetown, and Wilmington, until "all the Banks within reach south of Philadelphia are drain'd of Gold."10 The business was highly secretive because the banks did not like the reduction of their lending capacity, and the ship captains were not told they were carrying specie. Through his brother-in-law, John Craig, Oliver was able to obtain gold in Philadelphia to the extent of $100,000 in one year.
From mid-1806 through 1808, again through the collaboration of the same Philadelphia brother4n-law and his brother-in-law, who was in favor with the Spanish court, Oliver entered a still more amazing trade, which poured gold into Baltimore. As neutrals, Oliver and Craig obtained a coveted Spanish monopoly license to trade with the port of Vera Cruz. The Spanish king owed a vast tribute to Napoleon; a French banker paid Napoleon and arranged for a Dutch loan, secured by the Spanish treasure stores of gold and silver in Vera Cruz. The Dutch bankers negotiated with Craig and the Olivers for the movement of the gold in American-that is, neutral-ships, to be converted into American goods, which were shipped, again in American vessels, to Antwerp. Oliver was able to seize this opportunity in part through the exceptional sailing vessels and insurance facilities of Baltimore, in part through his carefully developed connections and correspondences. He "bought" half a million dollars worth of the Mexican gold stores at a 21 percent discount and nearly a million more at 17 percent. Thus, a million and a half was brought to Baltimore in Oliver's schooners in less than a year, and the gross profit was a quarter of a million. Much of the money was advanced to Baltimore merchants-Smith and Buchanan, Lemuel Taylor, John Donnell, Mark Pringle, and Isaac McKim-who handled the consignment of goods to Europe, to pay off the Dutch loan.11
The embargo of 1807 cut back trade, but the declaration of the War of 1812 unleashed new enterprise as daring as during the Revolution. More privateers were commissioned in Baltimore than any other port, and a third of U.S. Navy ships were built in Baltimore.12 After the war, some of the unemployed vessels were refitted for the slave trade outside the United States, while other Owners harnessed their energies to the cause of the Spanish-American revolutions. Baltimore became the principal world center for privateering and propagandizing in the service of the new republics. At least twenty privateers, carrying two thousand men, were outfitted in Baltimore.18 The "respectable" Baltimore merchants publicly disapproved of this activity, which verged on piracy and required duping crews or kidnapping sailors. But a number privately participated in "the American Concern," an interlocking directorate of the operation. Legitimate merchant channels were essential to the disposal of the prize cargoes. Politically active Baltimoreans such as General William Winder, attorney William Pinkney, collector of the port James McCulloch, and postmaster John Skinner were involved in the legal defense of the concern. John 0. Chase was one of the most successful captains. On one voyage in the spring of 1818, under flags of Buenos Aires and Uruguay, Chase plundered twenty Portuguese merchantmen. Three of the prizes he took in the Fortuna were estimated at $750,000. Chase came up the Chesapeake on a pilot boat to deposit $100,000 cash in the Union Bank and the Marine Bank in Baltimore before he rejoined his ship and sold off the rest of the cargo in St. Thomas. He brought the ship back empty to Baltimore to refit, and to face the legal challenges.
As Baltimore's international activities grew, it became evident that the facilities for inland trade were lagging. The circulation of money depended on circulating the goods, and an acceleration of trade through Baltimore required, in each generation, improvements in land transport to match ocean transport. In 1804, when the legislature failed to pass a road bill, a great clamor arose in the newspapers for road improvements to the wheat-producing regions westward. The farmer and wagoner complained of "the miery sloughs, the dreadful precipices, the often-times impassible streams, which would everywhere freeze him with horror-chills."14 The advocates of road improvements shivered worse as they watched Alexandria's trade developing, the District of Columbia laid out, and Baltimore capital moving out of shipping into real estate: "One year we see them all running into the water like ducks. . . . Now they think of the water with as much horror as if they had the hydrophobia on them; and every man who can buy a lot, is building a house of some kind."15 They suggested that Baltimore merchants "forego shaving on building a year or two" and spend the money paving a road across the Monocacy to Hagerstown or Cumberland. They entreated Baltimore to recognize,
whenever cities suffered their inland trade to depart from them, it required nothing but the inexorable tooth of time to dissect them into ruins, and to gnaw them into dust. Such, too, 0 Baltimore, will be thy fate, if thy perverse stars shall doom thee much longer to be so unrepresented.16
Within the year they obtained a turnpike incorporation bill and abandoned the convict labor system that had failed to maintain the old-style roads. By 1809 three great turnpike roads-Frederick, York, and Reisterstown-were completed twenty feet wide and stoned twelve inches deep, altogether about 150 miles in length, at a cost of $1.5 million.17 The land was offered free because of the value the road added along its route. Freight could now be hauled year-round. Other turnpike companies were incorporated and built soon after: Falls Road, the Washington Road, the road to Havre de Grace, and Harford Road.
Meanwhile, the state legislature made an extraordinary move. Seeing that the Baltimore banks were the great pool of wealth (the popular intuition of their secret ventures was, after all, correct), the state would renew their charters in return for the banks' accepting a tax to establish a state system of country schools and a bank investment of half a million dollars to build a fifty-eight-mile turnpike road to Cumberland. The policy of transforming commercial capital into social overhead capital, such as public roads and schools, is the modern strategy of the national development banks created by European governments toward the end of the century and developing nations today. The road would benefit Baltimore and sustain the urban-centered commercial economy. It also turned out to be a profitable undertaking. The Cumberland Turnpike Company is said to have paid 20 percent on its stock for many years,18 and, as shown in the next chapter, it stimulated thinking on a still grander scale of investment.
Fire and Flood
The circulation of money was one of the complex vital Systems. The other was the circulation of water. Because of its new spread and height and its vast stone piles, the city was recognizable as a man-made or artificial system, in a special relation to nature. As great structures were raised and foundations sunk, earth and mud were moved and slopes were adjusted in ways that interfered with or corrected the existing system. It is in the hydrological system, or circulation of waters, that nature imposes system thinking. In this period, by the intense aggravation of everyday problems and by successive catastrophes, Baltimore citizens were disciplined to consider systematic planning.
The need for water to put out fires was the incentive to create a water company. The matter was always discussed after a serious fire~cisterns on the housetops, cisterns under the street-and the fire of 1804 finally stimulated the formation of a water company. Philadelphia was already embarked on developing a supply from the Schuylkill River, in a similar "fall line" environment. The chief problems were not technical, they were the problems of mobilizing resources. On 5 May 1804, the commissioners for the water company expressed disappointment with stock subscriptions. The editor of the PederaJ Gazette confessed no great surprise: "Every enterprise of this kind, in a city so devoid of public spirit as ours, must depend upon a few." Charles Carroll of Carrollton subscribed 200 shares to set an example, and three days later 1,000 shares were subscribed (chiefly by the Maryland Insurance Company, the Marine Insurance Company, John O'Donnell, John McKim, and the Equitable Society), sufficient to "secure an influence over fire plugs." Once the enterprise was assured, the stocks were subjected to a "bubble" of speculation.19
The technical debates turned on how diversion of water from the Jones Falls, Gwynns Falls, the Gunpowder, or the Patapsco might affect the existing mills or future development of mill seats. Industry was developing swiftly, and water power was its prime source of energy. On the Jones Falls there were already a dozen mills developed along a fourteen-mile stream with a fall of 350 feet. The Baltimore millers were involved in the water company, not only to protect their interests, but because they had the experience with hydraulics and engines. The plan adopted was simple: buy off the rights of the five or six mills nearest the mouth of the Jones Falls, take water by a race at Keller's dam (east of the present Guilford Avenue bridge), and raise the water by means of pumps driven by a water wheel (near the present Sun Papers building) to reservoirs at the present intersections of Calvert and Centre streets and Cathedral and Franklin streets. A second pumping station, with reserve steam pumps, was created near the Belvidere bridge, and the water company race supplied the Salisbury mill at that location.
A supply of drinking water was a secondary matter, for convenience and for defraying the costs of the fire-protection system. "A Citizen" figures that "genteel families" able to pay $12 to $20 a year would include three thousand out of five thousand households in the town, for water conducted to the house: "all those who know how much time is consumed, and how many servants are spoiled, in sending to the pumps for water."20 In fact, thirty years later, the corporation was only supplying four thousand households, and service was not yet available to all parts of town. Meanwhile, the city continued to supply drinking water by sinking shallow wells wherever eight property owners offered to pay for their installation. By 1816 the town had 290 such pumps, and 59 were out of repair. The shallow wells were contaminated from surface drainage and from the privies "dug to water" in spite of regulations. Germ theory was undiscovered, and the water of the most dubious wells was particularly celebrated, as the Green Tree Pump in Oldtown.
The water company was more important as a developer and agent of development than as a supplier of water. The company's works formed the structure for a large new section of town, and its engineers applied their talents to a larger domain of environmental problems. The company managed to lure John Davis away from the Philadelphia waterworks to supervise the construction and operation of the Baltimore works. On the side he consulted on nearly every hydraulic undertaking in the region. His fee was 10 percent of the construction costs. When the stone arch bridge over the Jones Falls fell in, Davis built a new bridge. As consultant engineer for the city, he redeveloped several valuable old springs as fountains in ornamental squares, with cupolas and shade trees. The first was the "City Spring" in the bank of the Jones Falls near Saratoga Street.21 Similar plans were adopted for Clopper's and Sterrett's springs. He led water from the water company's spring in the bank of the Jones Falls near Centre Street to supply water to the Centre Market. Davis located many of the new cotton mills on the Jones Falls. He supervised the erection of the Lanvale cotton factory on water company property, and a large flour mill six miles out. On Gwynns Falls he "surveyed, leveled and attended" the building of Calverton mills and millrace. He supervised the location of Cumberland Road and the renewal of the Susquehanna Canal. Davis was proudest of his deep well at Fort McHenry, finished in time to supply the troops during the Bombardment.22
When Robert Mills of Philadelphia was chosen architect for the Washington Monument, the water company hired him as consultant, then as superintendent.23 During his association with it, he was a commissioner for laying out North Street through water company property.24 He designed and built on water company land a terrace of twelve houses known as "Waterloo Row" fronting on North Calvert Street. This project capitalized on the site of the monument, the company reservoir, the new road, and the Howard image, to create an elegant residential row along the new axis of legitimacy.25 Mills also managed the works of the new gas company, on North Street at Bath, adjoining the city mill. He designed homes in the Mount Vernon area, notably John Hoffman's on the northeast corner of Franklin and Cathedral streets opposite the other reservoir. He designed and installed warm air furnaces for churches and elegant homes. The web of idea men sustained him, but it was his association with the Jones Falls water supply that allowed Mills to influence the development of the city.
Mills's most ingenious renewal plan was never carried out. He offered a remedy after the catastrophic 1817 flood. The useful millstreams of Baltimore had certain perennial inconveniences. Every thirty years more or less, a torrential summer downpour caused flash floods of this magnitude. The Jones Falls was ordinarily confined by stone walls and houses to a width of sixty feet, its depth "nowhere above a horse's knee." But on 9 August 1817, toward midday it swelled suddenly to twenty feet above its normal height and swept away all its mill dams and wood bridges. Bridge timber, tree trunks, and hogsheads lodged against the stone arch bridge, and water overflowed the streets, particularly Harrison Street and the old "Meadow," to depths of six to ten feet. Several lives were lost. By sundown all the water had drained away.26 Robert Mills proposed to remove all nuisances situated on the banks, open a street on either side of the falls, scour the bed, and cover it with a sheet of water deep enough for navigation as far as Madison Street. Self-interest would guide property holders to contribute to the opening of the new streets, "as they obtain by this means an additional front, and that upon a street of business." The bend between Madison and Bath streets would be straightened, and low wharves between the streets and the stream bed would give a greater width for runoff, "a second bed to the stream" in time of high water. The falls would become an "embellishment," instead of a menace. The Jones Falls was the ideal location for a promenade:
"Its central situation, the romantic scenery and waterfalls, which present themselves as you proceed up, and running North and South, giving every advantage of air and shade, all contribute to make this spot preferable to any other."27 The vision was new but consistent with the way Davis was redeveloping the springs. The need for recreation and refreshment was evident in an age when everyone, including the wealthy, walked. The city council opined that Mills's plan might be of considerable importance to the city, but it was "of such infinite extent and magnitude" that they preferred to postpone spending any money.28 The first bridges were rebuilt conforming to Mills's suggestion of a single wide span, and the council eventually paid him some city stock for his advice. Meanwhile, they paid Benjamin Latrobe $500 for an alternate plan. He proposed to divert the entire stream of the Jones Falls into Herring Run, by tunneling under Gallows Hill. It was a still more ambitious engineering scheme with great impact on the lower mills.29
Floods recede quickly from memory. A rare event, seen in a generation as an act of God, perhaps should not be expected to govern the organizing of an everyday system of hydrology. Both of these elegant plans nevertheless represented a new grandeur of conception-systematic and integrating-and an earthy calculation of the costs and benefits of a multipurpose plan. They provided fuel for a century of debate. Mills's conception of the storm drainage problem on the falls was intelligent, conformed to the common view, and indeed was essentially the same plan proposed de novo and carried out after the flood of 1868-widening, straightening the bend, and walling. But the public promenade and the development of the private property values in this district were opportunities missed once for all.
"Foul and Filthy Spots"
Death rates were exceptionally high in the years 1818 through 1822. Although estimates are less reliable before 1812, there appears to have been also a wave of deaths in the years 1799~1801.3o Long swings in the death rate are thus the inverse of the building cycle. There are several possible elements of explanation. A likely factor is the exposure of "a newly collected people"; mortality rose following a period of heavy immigration, wartime mobility, and the European migrations and epidemics following the treaty of 1815. Depressed construction and high death rates coincided with increases of homicide, pauperism, begging, and vagrancy. The intense population growth and uncontrolled construction created sanitation problems of new dimensions, whose handling depended on the habits and whims of thousands of individuals as well as the whims of nature.
Specific diseases have cycles in their natural history that are not fully understood. They vary in their frequency of attack and in their virulence. There were notable outbreaks of measles in 1802, 1808, 1813, 1819, and 1823; whooping cough in 1816 and 1819; and membranous croup (diphtheria) in 1812. These diseases entered Baltimore as epidemics, more or less widespread and fatal, but after several episodes they became endemically established in the population, and later, over several generations, they tended to become less fatal. Other major causes of death were tuberculosis, pneumonia, and infant cholera. Each reached death rates as high as two persons per thousand for the specific disease in a single year. They tended to concentrate their fatalities among the poor, the very young, and the old, and they were ignored by the city fathers as essentially personal, medical, and theological problems.
In sharp contrast was the attitude toward smallpox and yellow fever, catastrophes more terrifying than flood or fire. They were hideous, and they were no respecter of persons. Civic leadership could not ignore them. Baltimore had a more progressive and thoughtful collection of doctors than most American cities at the time, with backgrounds from both France and Scotland, the most advanced medical centers of the western world. Over this period I detect a learning process at work, and the creation of new institutions of collective response. Although yellow fever and smallpox were "as generically distinct from each other, as the sheep and the hog; or the oak and the pine,"31 and the strategies to combat them differed, both diseases were clearly identified as system failures, susceptible to some reengineering of the city or reorganization of its life.
Smallpox flourished in the cold season. It had appeared in Baltimore numerous times in the eighteenth century. As early as 1755, Dr. Henry Stevenson was inoculating people with "vaccinia" or kine pox and nursing them through a generally mild illness that reduced their susceptibility to smallpox. During an outbreak in 1800 Dr. James Smith obtained smallpox vaccine from London and introduced Dr. Jenner's practice of vaccination. Dr. Smith performed his first vaccinations on persons in the almshouse, then set up a Vaccine Institution in his front room in Chatham Street, vaccinated his own children, and exposed them to the smallpox.~2 Local doctors became ardent protagonists of his method, although the public responded cautiously. The state approved a lottery to help finance free distribution, and a Jennerian society was formed, but lapsed. The outbreak of a serious epidemic in 1812 produced a new acceptance. The upper class had its children and slaves revaccinated. Niles accused those who neglected the duty of "murder of the first degree."33 When the smallpox began to rage in 1821 and the death rate again approached two per thousand, a Vaccine Society was again formed. Its five young men vaccinated seven hundred persons unable to pay, and physicians paid by the city council vaccinated thirty-two hundred more.34 Although it seems doubtful whether vaccination had any effect on the scale of these epidemics, Baltimoreans believed vaccination could protect the individual and arrest the epidemic. In spite of this conviction action was always proportionate to the immediate threat.35
There was considerable controversy over whether the various fevers-remittent and intermittent, bilious and yellow-were the same or distinct diseases, and the diagnosis seems to depend sometimes upon the degree of "malignancy," that is, whether the patient died. In 1819, 350 died of the true "yellow fever," characterized not only by yellowness of skin and eyes, but by horrifying last stages:
A black vomiting or purging, hemorrhages from every part of the body, especially the stomach, uterus, bowels, nostrils, and the incisions made by the lancet in bleeding; carbuncles and numerous little biles . . . deafness, excitability to touch, a considerable degree of delirium, and small purple spots.56
In terror five thousand residents temporarily moved out of Fells Point. A thousand with small resources were forcibly encamped for weeks in a ropewalk on Hampstead Hill (Patterson Park).87
It is now known that in the life cycles of the organisms that are the agents of malaria (remittent) and yellow fever, essential vectors are species of mosquitoes that breed in standing water. The mosquitoes and the diseased human hosts were repeatedly introduced through commerce with the West Indies, but the mosquitoes did not survive Baltimore winters, and the disease did not become endemic to Baltimore. However, the theory prevailing in Baltimore since the 1790s was putrefaction of vegetable matter.18 Variations on it stressed the role of damp air, decaying wood, or spoiled cargoes of hides and coffee. The theory, combined with new outbreaks of the disease in the same locations, fostered observation of meteorological conditions and local environments. It was generally agreed that the difference between conditions on high ground and low held the key to health or sickness. The low ground and swamps on the necks, inlets, and creeks of the Patapsco were the environment of fevers. The natural swamps were regarded as unhealthy, but the most vigorously debated question was the effect of human intervention in changing the environment. A published self-criticism, consisting of letters from the doctors to the mayor after the 1819 epidemic, pointed to the problem of land fill: "Those who have suffered most from Fever, dwell on a soil made with their own hands."39 The doctors disagreed about the effects of construction of the City Block and reconstruction of the old cove at the mouth of the Jones Falls. In 1819 there still remained twenty acres of marsh and water between town and point, and several doctors opined it was "a foul core in the heart of the City."40 A larger number pointed to the improvement as evidence that intelligent public works could remove the local tendency to yellow fever. Not a solitary case was traced in 1819 to the blocks most deadly in 1800 and since drained. "It belongs peculiarly to foul and filthy spots, and from the experience had, it is also evident that those spots may be divested of their destructive qualities."41 The doctors' demand that the section of "made ground" at Fells Point be reengineered laid the basis for the next round of public improvements.
Coupled with environmental theories of disease were social theories. Doctors, public officials, clergy, and laymen, brought face to face with the ultimate question, all framed their own rationalizations. As tension mounted, each individual projected into the situation his own fears and guilts and his own conception of society, what it was and ought to be, problems of social class differences and private virtue. The victims were carefully recorded as temperate or intemperate; doctors and publishers took for granted that the lower classes were intemperate, the craftsmen respectable, and the genteel irreproachable. The wealthiest class was generally able to escape yellow fever by leaving or avoiding the district. Each epidemic provided new revelations of poverty, as nuisances were inventoried, the sick were succored, and those still healthy were relocated. Disease was concentrated in the pockets of poverty, the lanes of both the outskirts and the center. In 1799 Dr. Davidge noted, "The skirts of most cities are occupied by the poorer class of inhabitants-their houses are exposed to the first and most violent assaults of all endemical epidemicks."42
In 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 whole 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.43
The vaccine physicians reported in 1821, "we found the smallpox confined almost entirely to such of the streets and alleys of the city as were inhabited by the greatest numbers of poor people."44 And Dr. G. S. Townsend described a slum behind the lower end of Frederick Street, between Pratt and Water streets: a nest of houses, tenanted by Negroes, and divided by an alley, very appropriately called "Squeeze Gut"! If I may be allowed to judge from the quantum of excrementitious matter and stench with which it abounds! . . . Disease and death have year after year, luxuriously rioted among the miserable and abandoned victims, who have there nestled together.45
A Plan for the City
Epidemics called attention to certain foul and filthy spots and spurred the increase of regulatory power, but it was the everyday nuisances in the physical environment that created an awareness of the need for system in the layout of streets and led to Baltimore's first serious attempt at a city plan.
Because physical growth had always outstripped the pace and powers of municipal management, it was customary for the town to accept street beds laid out by private persons. The layouts of the three original sites and several early additions did not match. Attempts to connect them created problems of traffic movement and-more serious-drainage problems. The streets themselves were the storm drainage system; the footways and stepping stones were pedestrian bridges. Imperfect grading of the streets created the perennial nuisances of stagnant water, gullying, and deposits of sand and manure.
As growth rose to a high pitch about 1808, the town began to look toward annexing a large surrounding territory called the precincts, already subject to certain urban taxes and fire regulations.
The parts which are not built up, but remain in the hands of rich proprietors, derive all their high value from their proximity to the commercial parts, to the markets, to the navigation &c., and consequently ought in justice to contribute to the maintenance and support of these important objects.46
The legislature authorized special commissioners, one board for the eastern precincts and one for the western precincts, to lay out streets and establish their building lines and grades. On receiving a petition, the commissioners published a notice that they would meet on the site to make a survey and receive testimony; at their next meeting they recorded the decision in their minutes. The commissioners were about equally occupied with boundary disputes between property owners and with storm drainage problems.
The western precincts commissioners seem to have been more formal and legalistic. They proceeded block by block. The owners of large tracts were frequent petitioners, sometimes in groups. The process was evidently a speculative platting and turnover in advance of building. The mixed public/private character of town making persisted. Lewis Pascault, for example, was at one time or another a commissioner for development of the Lexington Market, a western precincts commissioner, the developer of a range of houses on Lexington Street, and the subdivider of a tract.
In Oldtown, the eastern precincts commissioners were more pragmatic, concerned mainly about connecting the streets. Their alignments framed in the development of East Baltimore for a generation. They located the Bel Air Market and ran the line of McElderry Street, and Aisquith Street from Belair Road north to intersect Harford Road on Gallows Hill. James Sterling and Thomas McElderry were landowners whose decisions to sell, lease, or develop were important in the layout of this district.
The commissioners found that every establishment of a grade in one street segment forced them to reexamine the grades of all streets nearby. The streets had to be level enough for travel but steep enough to drain properly. When they did drain well, they washed down silt. For example, the wash from Hampstead Hill (west side of Patterson Park) down Washington, Wolfe, and Ann streets caused filling in the cross streets. The commissioners ordered Ann Street rebuilt in a concave form with a one-foot rise, creating a storm drain channel directly into the harbor. On the southern end of town the principal developer was Christopher Hughes, who planned an enclosed dock with quays on both sides. The gradual cutting down of "Hughes Street" at the base of Federal Hill caused continuous erosion into the harbor.47
Since all the drainage of Baltimore found its way into the active portions of the harbor and channel, anxiety again arose about silting. In the 1780s filling was accelerated by the clearing and cultivation of the hills; in the 1790s the harbor was made smaller by the extension of wharves and filling of the borders. Now the rapid urban construction on the perimeter of the town was the main source of sedimentation. Shoals tended to form at the mouth of the Jones Falls.
The war drew attention to the military and commercial importance of Baltimore harbor, and in 1816 the port wardens authorized a map of the harbor. Lewis Brantz, merchant and sea captain, was employed, and his was the first scientific survey of the Patapsco River harbor. The charts were used until the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey sheets were published in the 1840s. The triangulations., sightings, and the ranges of depth soundings in the harbor were made along the lines of house fronts, "all the measurements on Shore perfectly agreeing with the Triangulations on the Ice." Brantz also developed historica] information about the sedimentation of the harbor. He consulted Mr. Burton, who had resided at the point since 1778, and who made a profession of grappling for and raising things from the bottom, "which naturally made him intimately acquainted with its depth throughout a long course of years." Brantz concluded that the "mud machines" were laboring in vain, and that the mean depth of the inner harbor was now only eight or nine feet, formerly ten or eleven.48
In the same year as Brantz's survey, the annexation was authorized, tripling the acreage of the city and increasing its municipal powers and representation somewhat. A board of commissioners was authorized to employ an engineersurveyor, T. H. Poppleton, and a secretary, Joseph Townsend, to survey the new boundaries, lay out streets in the annexed territory, select lots for public uses, and harmonize street names.49 For the first time the legislation specified that they should establish a true meridian and durable landmarks. The city paid two thirteen-year-olds twenty-five cents a day to take part in locating the boundary stones, so that they could transmit the information to a later generation.50
"It was never the intention of the Board to interfere . . with the old part of the City." But rapid growth of the city as a whole always put pressure on the central district. The need to connect all parts of the perimeter of growth and to handle a greater circulation of goods through the city forced changes in the old parts. As the turnpike roads were built and wharves extended, the city's street network had to accommodate increased traffic between them. Several breakthroughs were made to the north, where the controlling factor was the crossing of the Jones Falls. Cathedral Street was extended, angled to cross the falls and connect with the new Falls Road. North Street and Aisquith Street were laid out in Oldtown to York Road (Greenmount Avenue). Charles and St. Paul streets could be extended Only as far as the Howard estate, but Calvert was connected by Belvidere or North Street (now Guilford Avenue), to cross the falls by the Belvidere bridge, a timber structure of 170-foot span.51 To the south, Forest and Goodman streets were extended to intersect the road to the ferry, and Green Street was opened leading from Pratt Street to the Washington turnpike.
Crosstown routes were always a difficult problem because of the high value of property in built-up areas. Centre Street was authorized to cross the falls. It was found possible to connect the segments of Saratoga Street by twists, but proposals for through routes below Saratoga were bitterly fought, despite congestion. Lombard Street was authorized between Hanover and Calvert, but not put through. There was litigation over a private property obstructing Water Street. And the Opening of Pratt Street across Hollingsworth, Cheapside, and Ellicott docks provoked debate for twenty-two years: "The question was agitated until 1818." Every move was contested in both the council and the legislature.
A constant, irregular and absurd interference in our local affairs by the legislature, renders everything attempted to be done by the city authorities, either as regards improvement, revenue or order, uncertain in its continuance, and consequently of little avail.52
The obstructions of wharf owners, the interference of the legislature, and the interruptions of the War of 1812 created a crisis in 1818, when several costly, long-delayed projects had to be undertaken at once, just as depression set in: the $150,000 loan for opening Pratt Street, and the $100,000 loan for opening and extending North Street and the Belvidere bridge. The Jones Falls flood had occurred in 1817; the timing helps to explain the council's reluctance to embark on a major engineering effort in the Jones Falls.
Late in 1821 the commissioners displayed Poppleton's plan for public examination and invited corrections. Admitting that there were some unavoidable "deformities," they claimed that a glance at the plot would show that
a striking regularity as a whole, pervades the plan.-And that the disjointed settlements which before made up the city, are interwoven and connected together in a manner which, we flatter ourselves, could not be improved. The combination exhibits the metropolis of Maryland in an aspect of great beauty . . . entire accuracy. All is certainty.
It ought never to be forgotten, that it is a great system which must be preserved in all its parts.55
Poppleton's plat was preserved entire to a surprising degree, in its best and worst features. It was the basic framework for the development of Baltimore until 1888, within the boundaries of the present North Avenue, Edison Highway, East Avenue, and, on the west, a line just beyond Monroe Street south to the mouth of the Gwynns Falls. The standard Baltimore block that Poppleton selected differed from New York, and his hierarchy of street widths-front, side, and alley-created a pattern for future construction and for differentials in social structure that persist to this day. Poppleton's solutions for stitching together the several preexisting street grids along the seams of through streets produced the modern traffic engineer's nightmare and the pedestrian citizen's delight. Dozens of Baltimore streets jogged, or met in intersections of five streets. A street vista was often visually closed by an angled terrace, a steeple, chimney, or turret. Sometimes triangular points of land were left, better suited to a statue, fountain, or garden than a house.
The chief limitations of the plan stemmed from the fact that it was not a topographical survey. In order to save money, topographical survey was rejected, and the final plan was two dimensional. Its "striking regularity" was achieved at the cost of ignoring variations of terrain. This feature, too, contributed to the character of inner-city Baltimore: straight rows of houses step up and down the hills, and vistas surprise the driver at each rise or dip. But much of the costly bridging, filling, tunneling, storm sewering, and regrading for a century must be attributed to a cavalier attitude toward the relief. A two-dimensional plot, as some citizens realized at the time, would not produce order in the hydrologic system, correct the nuisances, or minimize future public investments. It did, however, make possible the continuation of subdivision and private speculative development. Ads began appearing immediately that suggest why the plot met with the "entire approbation" of all the large landowners. Christian Mayer's estate was offered for sale: "In the late plan of the city a public square is laid out on it, with Baltimore street extended running through the estate, with a front of about 240 feet." Part of Edward Ireland's estate was subdivided along the newly plotted Chatsworth Street front.54 City planning of this kind was an essential tool for efficiency in the private exploitation of urban land. Public control of the proper sort stimulated the speculative system. Facilitating the circulation of money took precedence over facilitating the circulation of water.
The Social Environment
The contradictions were glaring. The means of developing and controlling the physical environment increased, yet, as I have shown, environmental problems loomed larger than before. The same thing was happening in the social environment: the resources were greater, but so were the disharmonies. The dimensions of poverty seemed to increase. Like smallpox and yellow fever, violence threatened to break into mob rule or anarchy. Everyone saw the visible signs of success and failure all around, and everyone experienced the pressures of boom and collapse. For the rich and the poor, both vulnerable, these experiences intensified the sense of disorder and produced a yearning for order. Each struggled in his own way to make sense of his world.
The most common and perhaps easiest interpretation to make was frankly partisan. Property qualifications for voting and holding office were reduced, opening up roles for home owners and master mechanics who owned their shop and tools. Jefferson came to the presidency in 1801, and Baltimore voters, especially the mechanics, were his enthusiastic supporters (Democratic Republicans), while the state government and many members of the bar in Baltimore were firm Federalists, among them Samuel Chase, Luther Martin, James McHenry, Robert Goodloe Harper, and merchants Robert Oliver and Robert Gilmor. Political rhetoric was taken from national politics: the "war against property and rags versus houses and land."55 The "rags" were inflationary notes issued by banks. Tension ran high during the "disasters" of the peace of Amiens (1801) and again in the doldrums of trade embargo (1807-9). Episodes of party feeling in Washington produced tremors in Baltimore, in particular, the impeachment of Samuel Chase, Federalist justice from Baltimore, and the alleged conspiracy of Aaron Burr. A mob of fifteen hundred "made up at Fells Point" set out to hang Burr's associate, Blennerhasset, when he passed through town. (They didn't find him.) Baltimore supported, indeed demanded, the embargo, but it caused losses and unemployment, making the political splits more intense. During that debate a mob burned Holland gin on Fells Point, while the crowd made off with all it could from the gutters.56 The journeymen cordwainers went on strike, and the grand jury indicted three dozen. Even the Fourth of July was a partisan affair. "A numerous and respectable company of Federal Gentlemen from the city celebrated the day with great glee, harmony, and pleasure at Govanstown," toasting "the Virtuous Minority," John Eager Howard, the governor, the judiciary, the navy, and the flag of Maryland. Meanwhile, the Democratic Republicans organized a spectacular parade from Fells Point through Baltimore Street to Howard's Park. Each association, from the biscuit bakers to the students of medicine, the barbers, and the cordwainers, had a workshop drawn by horses. An eighteen-gun ship, the Union, saluted at the cross streets. Republicans toasted the president and Congress, the fall of faction, universal suffrage, jury trial, "a free but pure press," American seamen, and "the independence of the poor, the security of the rich, the happiness of all."
The occasion was gay, but feelings ran deep. The trend toward war with England and the oncoming presidential election of 1812 touched off more sinister mob action in Baltimore. A press was destroyed, and the Federalist editor and his backers, including merchants Mark Pringle and George Winchester, were lynched. The mob stormed the jail, killed one, and dreadfully beat and abused eleven others.57 Investigations were launched, and the violence drained away like a flash flood, but a certain tension remained through the summer. The Federalists urged an "association of all men of property, & all men of principle." As Ben Stoddert stated in a letter to McHenry, "Our Union is worth saving, so is civil liberty-so is the prosperity of those who possess it."58
The need to defend the city after the burning of Washington restored a degree of unity. "A view of the enemy has made the people's eyes sparkle. The word is Union."59 The banks agreed to lend up to half a million dollars for the defense (actually $100,000 was borrowed), and the Committee of Vigilance and Safety was broadly representative. Samuel Smith again took charge of defense.60 Baltimoreans acquitted themselves splendidly and recovered their pride, but the legislature refused to grant the city funds for its defense or the right to tax itself to repay the defense loan. Instead, they sought to punish the city for the mob and for its Republicanism.
Year after year, the city failed to obtain adequate representation.61 By the legislation of 1816 it was given two delegates in the legislature, while each county had four: "A fortieth part of the power of legislation, and a fifth, if not a fourth, of all the white persons,"62 and half the value of real property in the state. Partisanship between factions in the city died down after the war, but resentment of the oppressive treatment of the legislature solidified. Niles, whose paper was read throughout the nation, directed frequent barbs at the Maryland state constitution, "the most uncouth thing of its sort that ever appeared."63 He mourned the death of the state chancellor, Mr. Kilty, who, it is said, is perhaps the only person in Maryland, who can readily decide what is the constitution of the state-which, originally composed of the very worst materials, has been tinkered over and over again so often. . . . Its most disgusting feature is, that it provides no way by which the people can destroy it and make another.64
Potentially united in the face of outside oppression, Baltimore became more and more divided in dealing with its own underclass of paupers. Pauperism was described as "a luxuriating plant yearly increasing in size and fruitfulness." Poverty was a crime, and the poor, especially the black poor, were frequently referred to as an infestation. Who were the poor? how many? where did they live? One can only piece together fragments of misery. About half the people admitted to the almshouse were recorded as suffering from acute diseases, and an inventory in a winter appeal for rags for bandages mentions numerous cases of frostbite and cuts or burns that had become infected or gangrenous. In 1806 the mayor sought to make provision for the protection and maintenance of "unfortunate helpless maniacs" who were appearing on the streets. In 1810 he noted a great increase of idle and wandering poor.65 Individual cases of humanity were publicized, chiefly "women left with children and without husbands, and old men, both destitute and helpless-without work, and every year increasing." Among them, for example, was a poor family in a wretched upstairs tenement at the head of Frederick Street. The father, a rigger, and two sons had died. The fourteen-year-old was trying to provide for his mother and three smaller children by crabbing. A certain Thomas Paul died leaving seven children; the mother, living in Harrison Street, was making umbrellas.
From these and other fragments, patched together and dated, one cannot escape the conclusion that poverty had its rhythm. It was seasonal, as in earlier years, and its dimensions were sensitive to the ups and downs of trade and to the longer-period building cycles. Poverty was most intense in all its manifestations for several years after the Peace of Amiens, more briefly during the embargo and the war, and acutely in the five or six years after 1816. The American, in October 1817, seeing a depression deepen, an increase of rents, a high grain price, and winter setting in, commented, "Misery could not be exhibited in a more condense form than it is in the suburbs, lanes and alleys-the huts, hovels, and dens of Baltimore."66
Financial upheavals among the wealthy produced misery at the bottom of the heap. Bank runs occurred in June 1819. Revelations of embezzlement and speculation by James Buchanan, respected citizen and merchant, were part of a national scandal that broke the Baltimore branch of the Bank of the United States67 and ruined Buchanan's partner, General Samuel Smith, who was bankrupted overnight and lost his Montebello estate.65 By 1821, 350 persons had applied for insolvency.69 In 1822 Niles calculated from the observatory pennants that half the ship owners and importers had failed within four years:
It is sickening to the heart to see the lists of persons who are published weekly in the Baltimore papers, as making application for the benefit of the insolvent laws of Mary-land. The amount of debts due by them is enormous. . . . They who were a little while since the "tip of the ton" and residing in palaces, are thus engaged in settling their debts, and dragging many sober and discreet mechanics and tradesmen along with them.70
Manufacturers were reported "some of them at the lowest ebb, and others but heaps of mouldering ruins."71 A woman and several children were in want, among hundreds laid off from the cotton mills. References were made to multitudes of arrivals, especially Irish, who flock to the town, to worn-out Negroes, and infant beggars.
I live in a part of the city particularly exposed to the interruptions and importunities of street beggars. . . . A new set lately appeared. Wounds, legless, eyeless, ague-shook visages, little flaxen-haired, dirty-faced apprentices to mendicity, young blackies greased to elbows gnawing on a bone. . . . To have every feeling of your soul harrowed up by a sight most shocking to humanity, age in rags, in want, in pain, homeless, friendless, penniless. To have this is unacceptable in our State, and an infinite inconvenience to its citizens.72
That writer, who ends by asking for enforcement of the vagrant laws, exposed the ambivalence of the leadership class toward poverty. When unemployment rose, new societies were formed: in 1792 a Corporation for the Relief of the Poor and Distressed of every Sect or Religious Denomination whatsoever; in 1804 the Friends of the Poor, who wanted a "permanent" solution;73 and in 1822 a Society for the Prevention of Pauperism in Baltimore, P. F. Thomas, President.74 Their interpretations of the problem, strongly influenced by English debates on the poor law and the Irish question, revolved around the moral value of work. They attempted to distinguish the deserving from the undeserving, the afflicted from the corrupt. Griffith, for example, a trustee for the poor, believed provision must be made for the afflicted not only because it is commended by heaven and imposed on our feelings by nature, but because the title to superior wealth, when most legally acquired, might be shaken, if a state of suffering was permitted to arise, which by accumulation, in numbers or degree, might render doubtful the disadvantages of the savage state or the benefits of civilization.75
The inquiry of 1822 was sparked by rising costs of welfare. A report of the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism cited Thomas Malthus, recommending schools to deal with ignorance and regulations to restrict intemperance. The price of whisky had been cut by half, and domestic consumption nearly doubled since 1810. "Cheerfully conceding" the need for benevolence, the report focused, nevertheless, on the ethic of work: "Idleness is the very core of the disease."76 The society feared a system of benevolence that might "nurse the crime," and posed the question
Whether the relief of some has not excited the sanguine, but unjustifiable expectations of others, and decoyed them from those industrious efforts they were compelled to make under the pressure of many necessities. . . . Such a stimulus seems to be absolutely necessary to promote the happiness of the great mass of mankind.77
Its lead was followed by the city council, who acknowledged "serious doubts, whether by legalizing poverty we do not hold out strong inducements for its increase."75
What kind of public policy results from a philosophy that asserts that poverty is a crime and that the misery of the poor promotes the happiness of the mass? The basic policy recommendations of the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism were accepted in 1822 by the mayor, the council, and the trustees for the poor: the expansion of institutions mixing relief with repression. They recommended the creation of a "house of industry" as part of a larger almshouse on a new site at Calverton, overlooking the Gwynns Falls. The trustees expected to accommodate eight hundred or nine hundred paupers. "Pauperism has always kept pace with the utmost efforts of philanthropy to relieve and cure it."79 Development of the farm surrounding the almshouse would permit more strenuous enforcement of the vagrant and begging laws. Chronic drunkards, vagrants, and prostitutes could be forced to work off the costs of their keep.
This scheme was the most coherent formulation of a policy, but in practice it did not differ substantially from the policies of the previous twenty years, or the years following. It was merely one episode in the uneven growth of public institutions. The institutional population of Baltimore~jail, state penitentiary, almshouse, hospital~rose dramatically over a few years, but still amounted to only about 1 percent of the population. Just as with houses and warehouses, Baltimore in this period also pulled down its human warehouses and built greater. The new structures were "better appropriated to the use," they were monumental, and they were relatively isolated. The combined effects of their increased population, their walled isolation, the mixed feelings of taxpayers toward the inmates, and the political struggle between state and city meant that every reform degenerated immediately. In 1801, for example, legislation was passed to substitute a state penitentiary for the old wheelbarrow gangs on the roads. The criminal code was revised, eliminating the death penalty except for murder, rape, arson, or treason. Prisoners were set to work at weaving, brush making, oakum picking, and nailing, and the penitentiary was expected to pay its way, as well as to rehabilitate the criminals through labor. Numbers promptly rose from the 51 transferred from the roads in 1812 to the design capacity of 360. They were mostly male, and although they are often described as "perfectly comfortable, quite contented, and having no symptoms of shame,"50 mutinies and riots occurred every few years.
The new city jail housed a hundred, a much larger capacity than the old courthouse cellar, and it was designed to separate men from boys, witnesses from accused, and blacks from whites. The jailed blacks were chiefly presumed runaways or slaves lodged "for safekeeping" by their masters. Prisoners were issued wood, raw meat, and cornme~, and made their own fires for cooking.~~ Half the white prisoners were there for small debts, while the insolvent laws offered a bankruptcy and trusteeship procedure for the rich.
The Maryland Hospital was built east of town by state loans and lotteries. It was owned by the city and leased back to the doctors who had initiated the plan. Maniacs and diseased persons were sent by the city at fixed rates for longterm care. The university's new hospital treated acute cases.
The catchall institution was always the almshouse. Its population had averaged 250 persons, but it doubled during the four years of depression, plus one hundred out-pensioners, or persons on home assistance. Such averages meant the reception of 1150 individuals in a year, rising to 3000 or even 4000. About a fifth were children. As their numbers rose, the costs rose, from $14,000 to $20,000 a year. However, the level of spending matched a small town like Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and bore no comparison with the other large seaboard cities; 1818 was the first year in which Baltimore's spending exceeded the amount spent for relief before the Revolution.82
Misery was still "condense," but the movement to prevent pauperism was perhaps not as fruitless as it might seem from the warehousing of the dependent. Doctors, teachers, editors, and clergy introduced ideas from many sources for helping the "deserving poor." Poor people were likely to be considered deserving if they were young and malleable, and the institutions were straightforwardly paternalistic. The Dispensary, an outpatient clinic and pharmacy on Chatham Street, in 1803 had 234 patients; by 1822 it had 6000. "The honest poor are dreadfully afraid of a doctor's bill." Dispensaries were later opened in Fells Point and Eutaw Street. The Savings Bank of Baltimore was organized in 1818 on models from Boston and Scotland. Active among the founders were Friends: Isaac Tyson, Evan Ellicott, and Moses Sheppard. The "industrious poor" were invited to save, and the rolls were occasionally purged of individuals too wealthy. The bank was mutually owned, that is, profits were distributed among the depositors, so that overall interest averaged 6 percent. Management remained in the hands of the founding trustees of the merchant class, and the funds were kept in the Farmers & Merchants Bank of Baltimore. Employers often opened accounts on behalf of their apprentices and employees, black and white, and oversaw their management. Employers such as James Mosher, a builder, participated in the establishment of an apprentices' library, brainchild of the city's booksellers.
The Sunday school movement was another new institution oriented to promoting literacy and a Protestant ethic of thrift, decency, self-reliance, temperance, and order. Its missionary effort was toward the children of the lower class. By 1825 over 4000 were enrolled. Most of the full-time "free schools" were organized through churches and reflected a philosophy of noblesse oblige, or a responsibility of the fortunate for the children of misfortune. Saint Peter's Protestant Episcopal School in German Lane, endowed with ten thousand dollars by Jeremiah Yellott and James Corrie, was a model Lancastrian school of rigid mass discipline. A new African school was organized, associated with the African society of the Methodist Episcopal church. On Fells Point, St. Patrick's Church organized the first Catholic parish school. John McKim endowed a free school in Oldtown. At the Orphaline Charity School "thirty little innocents"-that is, girls~were fed, clothed, and instructed, and would be bound out as apprentices. The two philosophies of self-help and noblesse oblige were combined in the Pay Soup House, a kitchen opened in the hard winter of December 1819: cheap soup and bread tickets could be purchased by the working poor or purchased for individuals by their charitable patrons.
The Conscience of Baltimore
A city is a projection of society on the ground. The changes in the physical structure of Baltimore reflected the deep contradictions of American society: an economy based on war in a nation committed to the pursuit of happiness; a monument to the sober virtues of George Washington, built by public lottery; extremes of wealth in a republic of equals; the coexistence of slavery with an ethic of dignity through labor and craftsmanship; periodic unemployment absorbed by a workhouse where the idle poor would pay for their keep; a "want of good laws" felt in a nation "under a government so happy and free." All these ironies of human society could be seen in the new shape of Baltimore. From the windowed dome of a new and magnificent palace of commerce, seat of the banks, brokers, insurance companies, and the U.S. treasury agent, one might look west toward the dome of the new school of surgery; north toward that great dome of glory to God, set on a hill, and beyond it to the monument; northeast past a Greek temple of justice to the Tudor fortress of a jail, its gallows and whipping yard, and the factorylike penitentiary; or east over the new city block, the lumberyards, and shipyards. Snuggled around the Exchange were the elegant townhouses of several millionaires, the masts of their ships in the docks, and the back buildings of an alley called Squeeze Gut.
Elisha Tyson and Daniel Raymond, two men very different in temperament and style, made heroic attempts to resolve the contradictions of public policy toward the poor and the black. They were the conscience of Baltimore.
Tyson walked the Friend's tightrope between law and justice, in a society where the laws were, in Niles's words, "palpably unjust." His family recorded a rare account, as Tyson told it to them, of the tragic dimension of Maryland law. A man of Anne Arundel County came late one evening to Mr. Tyson. His master had promised him his freedom, provided he would pay $500 within six years. The slave had earned and paid his master half of the money, and the six years had not expired, yet he was about to be sold to Georgia. Tyson asked whether he had any receipts. The man had none. Any witness? None but the master's wife. "Then the law is against thee, and thou must submit. I can do nothing for thee." The man rose and clenched his fist to heaven. "I will die before the Georgia man shall have me." Then he melted into tears. "I cannot live away from my wife and children." Said Tyson, "This is no common man, he will do what he has resolved." Soon after, a man was found drowned in the basin. Tyson went to see the body. It was the same man.83
On other occasions, Tyson, the stalwart of the Protection Society, was able to obtain some legal point or some gain in public awareness. "Well knowing that all laws in a republican country are founded upon public opinion, his great object was to work a change in that regard." In 1812, Tyson obtained writs of habeas corpus for five blacks who had been arrested on suspicion of being escaped slaves, but had not been claimed by any master. Such persons, after languishing in jail for several months, were usually auctioned off by the state at the jail door to slavers to pay the jail fees. In this test case Judge John Scott released the five, and in 1817 the legislature acknowledged that unclaimed persons should be eventually released.84 The 1817 laws also made it illegal to sell out of state persons who had only a term of years to serve. By this means "the jail was rid of the crowds of negroes with which it was heretofore infested," but the dealers created private jails. One night Tyson, informed that two boys and their mother, free blacks, were being held in one of these dens, went alone to the tavern and took the keys from the three men drinking there. "Shoot if thee dare," he said, "but thee dare not, coward as thou art, for well does thee know, that the gallows would be thy portion." He found six people chained in the cellar and released the woman's gags to hear her story. By waking up a judge and giving his personal bond, Tyson was able to have a constable remove the three free persons.8 In all likelihood, this occurred at Slater's, on Pratt Street near Howard, just a block from Tyson's home and the Friends meetinghouse.
Tyson had always mistrusted the Maryland Colonization Society, because of the participation of slavers who sought ultimately to banish all free blacks, clamp down on slaves, and abolish all manumission. But a privateering incident brought him into collaboration with the colonizationists. A Colombian privateer commanded by that same Captain Chase of Baltimore (lately naturalized in Colombia) captured a Spanish slave ship returning from the coast of Africa to Havana with forty-two slaves. The captain selected eleven strong and able-bodied men for the service of the privateer, disposed of the rest in the West Indies, then made for Baltimore to be refitted. Although it was illegal to import slaves, the men appeared to be part of the crew and spoke no English. By the time they docked, Tyson, whose information system stirs admiration, had filed a petition for their freedom on the presumption that they were held involuntarily. They were brought to the jail for safekeeping. Elisha Tyson, Robert Goodloe Harper, and Dr. E. Ayres, agent of the African Colonization Society, together went through the legal maneuvers involving the president, the navy department, and the federal marshal in Baltimore. The chief justice of the city court decided he had to release the men, and they could go with whomever they wished. With much difficulty, Tyson located an interpreter. The Colombian captain managed to grab three boys, but ultimately eight were returned, "much emaciated, and reduced almost to a skeleton," to their hometowns and kin near Sugary.86
Where Elisha Tyson was a man of exceptional moral courage and perception, Daniel Raymond was a man of intellectual honesty and scathing tongue and pen. His pamphlet, The Missouri Question, expressed his position On slavery:
And can the idea be for a moment endured, that for countless ages this poi~onous plant is to infest our soil, blasting as with mildew, the beautiful tree of liberty? Can we endure the thought that millions and millions of our fellow creatures for ages to come shall be born to drag out wretched lives of slavery! Shall we leave our postenty to grapple with this monster of iniquity, and possibly if not probably be finally overcome in the struggle? Or shall we not rather if it be possible, labour to eradicate it ourselves . . .
Raymond opposed slavery, not only on moral grounds, but on the grounds of its practical consequences. "The footsteps of an angry God, are plainly visible throughout a state where slavery abounds."88 His basic argument, much discussed, was the demographic experience of Maryland and the other slave states. He used census figures to show that slave populations grew faster than free black populations, and faster than the free white populations of slave states.
Raymond also believed that the colonizationists were deluding themselves. His pamphlet directly countered Harper's letter, published the year before, which described the manumitted as an ldle, vagabond, and thieving race destined for degradation. Raymond claimed that the character of manumitted slaves tended to change in the course of one or two generations: "The industrious thrive and increase,-their offspring, accustomed to liberty, acquire the habits of the whites, and make equally as good citizens, that is, the laboring class. .
The worthless come to naught."89 Raymond belonged to the Colonization Society and expected it to do some good, but as a means of solving the problem of slavery in its massive dimension, it was chimerical. "The African race is effectually planted in this country, and will remain here until the last day. . . . They are here, and have as much right to remain here as the whites."90 He favored encouraging manumission, and opposed extension of slavery to new states. "Diffusion is about as effectual a remedy for slavery as it would be for smallpox."91
But Raymond cut deeper into the contradictions, elaborating an interpretation of poverty relevant to both black and white. He disagreed fundamentally with Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus, and contrasted the peculiar conditions of the American economy with those of England and Ireland. He arrived at a thoroughly modern labor theory of value: "Labour is the cause, and the only cause of wealth."92 As a lawyer, he defined a nation as a corporation or unity of all its citizens, and regarded national wealth as something quite different from individual wealth. Individual wealth or property is a capital or stock. But national wealth, Raymond said, is not an accumulation, but a productive capacity. The laws of property govern the distribution of the stock of wealth among a few individuals and families, who thereby control the product of all the earth and have the right to determine whether the rest of the people shall be allowed to labor and obtain any share of the product. "The rich and powerful have established a system, which has thrown all the property in the kingdom into the hands of a few; the necessary consequence of which is an immense number of paupers in the kingdom."98 More astonishing, the rich managed to blame the paupers for their lack of industry and frugality:
If a man were to plant his field with trees, and then complain o~ the corn for not growing under them, it would not be more unreasonable. . . The laws of justice, as well as the laws of the land, require the rich either to furnish the poor with labour, or support them without labour.94
If, indeed, pauperism was the consequence of an unequal division of property, the remedy was obvious: "such modification of the laws of a country, as shall produce a more equal division of property."95 In Baltimore's interminable discussions of putting an end to poverty, this is what no one else dared to print. It was unpopular. Mathew Carey offered $500 to endow a chair of political economy for Raymond at the university, but received no reply from the doctors.
Raymond's ability to put his finger on numerous other contradictions of the economies of England and Ireland reveals close observation of events in Baltimore: "It is a singular fact, that while multitudes of people were starving; cargoes of potatoes were imported into Baltimore from Ireland, and sold for a fair profit. .. . There is food enough in the country, but it all belongs to a few."96 His Thoughts on Political Economy must be considered the first comprehensive American theory of political economy. While he had much in common with Mathew Carey of Philadelphia, and Hezekiah Niles, in arguing tariff protection for manufacturers and opposing the paper credit system, Raymond was more coherent and systematic. Every argument recalls the viewpoint of a Baltimore resident and the intense conflicts of Baltimore in the depression years after 1818.
Especially modern are his interpretations of war, public works, and monetary policy as stimulants to the economy, and the need in times of unemployment to force consumption to "tread hard upon the heels of production."91
The body politic like the natural body is liable to fall into a state of comparative lethargy and torpor. It then becomes necessary to arouse its dormant energies, by administering stimulants. The expenditure of public money, in public works, will often produce this effect.98
If, for example, the Susquehanna Canal-a live issue in Baltimore in 1820-could be built without diminishing the agricultural or manufacturing product of the country, it was worth doing regardless of the value of the completed structure. The banks he also regarded as a potential stimulant, but, unregulated and working on a wrong theory of wealth, they tended to store or hoard up wealth instead of forcing the money to circulate.
Every available shred of Raymond's work shows it to be the result of reflection upon Baltimore as a model of political economy and a mirror of the human condition. Baltimore provided the example of the effects of war on the economy. War stimulated industry by furnishing a demand for labor, "but as war cannot be permanent or lasting, that demand may be suddenly withdrawn, and then distress is produced. . . . All fluctuations are unfavourable to national wealth and happiness."
The entire network of men of ideas, as well as the whole apparatus of municipal leadership, met in an extraordinary moment of truth the night of 28 December 1819. Tyson, Harper, and Raymond, working together in spite of their differences, sought to demonstrate that although Maryland was counted among the slave states, Baltimore City did not favor the admission of Missouri as a slave state. According to custom, they advertised a public town meeting at the courthouse and solicited speakers. Mayor Johnson presided over a tense and prolonged session of two hundred of the "most respectable" men in Baltimore. Niles and Bishop Kemp took part in the committee, and several slave holders (John Hoffman and Thomas Kell among them) spoke for the resolution, "Resolved, That in the opinion of this meeting, the future admission of slavery into the states which may be hereafter formed, west of the Mississippi, ought to be prohibited by Congress." Daniel Raymond acted as secretary and wrote the memorial they agreed upon: "We know that we are, and we fear that our posterity may be cursed with slavery; but, as lovers of our country, we would not willingly see this evil extended."99 Two thousand Baltimore citizens signed the petition within hours, and it was forwarded to Congress. Astonishment produced "a very strong effect" in the House of Representatives, but the issue was compromised. In Baltimore itself, the proslavery forces now became relatively quiet, and the number of slave dealers was reduced and "hid themselves in the very skirts of the city." In July 1821, advertisements headed "cash for negroes" were excluded from Baltimore newspapers, and a "dealer in and stealer of negroes for the southern market" was sent to the Maryland penitentiary for five years. Still the trade continued. In spite of the politicking and pamphleteermg, in spite of the courage of Tyson and the logic of Raymond, the poisonous plant still grew. In that same month, this incident occurred on a public wharf in Baltimore-the black man's moment of truth.
Liberation: A miserable black man, brought from one of the lower counties of Maryland to Baltimore, and sold to a dealer in human flesh for transportation, cut his own throat and died at the moment when he was about to be delivered over to the bloodmerchant, through his agent, a peace officer!100
Niles' Register, ed. Hezekiah Niles, was published weekly in Baltimore from 1810 to 1837, and is supplemented by dailies, the American and the Federal Gazette. Annual messages of the mayor were delivered, usually in January, to the city council for the year ending 31 December. Other city documents are found in the Baltimore City Council journal (city hall library) and in Records of the City of Baltimore, ed. Wilbur Coyle(Baltimore: King Bros., 1905), vol.4, Special Commissioners, and vol. 5, Eastern Precincts Commissioners (1812-17) and Western Precinct Commissioners (1810-17).
Many important public works documents are found classed as "canal pamphlets" or "railroad pamphlets" in the Peabody library and The Johns Hopkins University library.
1. Useful comments on the varying intensity of building activity are found in Niles' Register, 1 May 1813, 29 April and 3 June 1815, 1 June 1816, 5 July 1817, and 2 July 1818; for examples of magnificent private houses, see the entry of 19 September 1812.
2. Niles' Register reported much detail of manufactures.
3. On this influential circle of intellectuals, see John E. Uhler, "The Deiphian Club,"
Maryland Historical Magazine 20 (1925): 305-12; James W. Foster, "Fielding Lucas, Jr., Early 19th Century Publisher of Fine Books and Maps," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society (October 1955), pp.166-91; John E. Semmes, John H. B. Latrobe and His Times, 1803-1891 (Baltimore: Norman, Remington, 1917); and Charles H. Bohner, John Pendleton Kennedy: Gentleman from Baltimore (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1961 I located their residences and those of patentees from Baltimore city directories.
4. Niles's economic philosophy and the "American system" of Mathew Carey and Daniel Raymond are discussed by Broadus Mitchell in Dictionary of American Biography, ed. D. Malone, 20 vols. (New York: Scribner's, 1934), 15: 406-7 and 13: 521-22.
5. On Latrobe's architectural work in Baltimore and rivalries with Robert Mills and Maximilian Godefroy, see Thomas Hamlin, Benjamin Henry Latrobe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), pp.483-504. See also R. H. Howland and E. Spencer, The Architecture of Baltimore (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1953); and Carolina V. Davison, "Maximilian and Eliza Godefroy," Maryland Historical Magazine 19 (March 1934).
6. "A Letter from General Harper, of Maryland, To Elias B. CaIdwell, esquire, secretary of the American Society for colonizing the Free People of Colour in the United States, with their own consent" (Baltimore: E. J. Coale, 1817). Penelope Campbell, Maryland in Africa:
The Maryland State Colonization Society, 1831-1857 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971). On Harper's national political significance, see David H. Fischer, The Revolution of American Conservatism (New York: Harper & Row, 1965). On the relation to the national colonization movement, see George Frederickson, Black Image in the White Mind (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).
7. Niles' Register, 20 June 1818.
8. Stuart Weems Bruchey, Robert Oliver, Merchant of Baltimore, 1783-1819, Johns Hopkins University Studies 74, no.1 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1956).
9. Ibid., pp.218, 222.
10. Ibid., p.229.
11. Ibid., pp.265-99. Ouvrard was the French banker; the Dutch bankers were Hope & Co.
12. Niles' Register, 24 October 1812 and 20 February 1813; John P. Cranwell and William B. Crane, Men of Marque: A History of Private Armed Vessels out of Baltimore during the War of 1812 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1940).
13. Charles C. Griffin ("Privateering from Baltimore during the Spanish American Wars of Independence," Maryland Historical Magazine 35 [1940]) discusses the American concern and recounts the exploits of John 0. Chase. See also Jared Sparks, "Baltimore," North American Review 20 (1825); and Laura Bornholdt, Baltimore and Early Pan-Americanism, Smith College Studies in History 34 (Northampton, Mass.: Smith College, 1949).
14. Federal Gazette, 10 January 1804; see also ibid., 3, 5, and 6 July 1804.
15. Ibid., 14 February 1804.
16. Ibid., 10 January 1804.
17. Thomas W. Griffith, Annals of Baltimore, 2d. ed. (1824; Baltimore: W. Wooddy, 1833).
18. Maryland State Roads Commission, A History of Road Building in Maryland (1958), cites J. Thomas Scharf, History of Western Maryland, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: L. H. Everts, 1882), 2: 1331, with respect to profits of the Cumberland Turnpike Company.
19. On water company subscriptions, see Federal Gazette, 5 May 1804; see also ibid 8-12 May 1804, and Nelson M. Blake, Water for the Cities: A History of the Urban Water Supply Problem (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1956).
20. Federal Gazette, 14 April 1804.
21. City Spring is now the site of the Mercy Hospital garden.
22. John Davis worked for the Philadelphia waterworks about three years. He was solicited by Baltimore in fall 1804 ("Autobiography of John Davis, 1770-1864," Maryland Historical Magazine 30 [1935]: 11-39.)
23. Robert Mills was chosen as architect for the monument in 1815, and as water company consultant in August 1816 ("The Daily Journal of Robert Mills, Baltimore, 1816," Maryland Historical Magazine 30 [1935]: 257-71).
24. North Street was also called South Street Extended, then Belvidere Street, and now Guilford Avenue.
25. Drawings of Waterloo Row are found in publications of the Baltimore Museum of Art. See also American, 3 June 1818.
26. American, 11 August 1817, and Niles' Register, 16 August 1817.
27. Robert Mills, "Report on the Survey of Jones Falls," was published in full but without maps in the American, 3 October 1817; see discussions of 29 and 30 October.
28. Baltimore City Council journal, 29 September 1817.
29. Benjamin Latrobe's alternate plan was described in reports on the flood of 1868 (see notes to chapter 8) and mentioned in Records of the City of Baltimore, vol.4, 15 March 1819; Baltimore City Council journal, 1st branch, 15 March 1830 and 29 March 1832.
30. On death rates and epidemics, I have relied heavily on William Travis Howard, Jr Public Health Administration and the Natural History of Disease in Baltimore, Maryland 1797-1920 (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution, 1924).
31. John B. Davidge, Physical Sketches (Baltimore: W. Warner, 1814).
32. Niles' Register, 5 January 1822. See also Federal Gazette, 2 May 1804.
33. Niles' Register, 25 January 1822. See also ibid., 5 January and 23 February.
34. Federal Gazette, 14 February and 6 April 1822.
35. Griffith, Annals of Baltimore, pp.172-73. Howard opines that vaccination had little effect on the epidemics.
36. Davidge, Physical Sketches.
37. Niles' Register gives weekly reports on the epidemic from 17 August to 16 October 1819.
38. Topographical accounts and ideas about putrefaction are found in A Series of Letters and Other Documents Relating to the Late Epidemic of Yellow Fever, Published by Authority of the Mayor (Baltimore: William Warner, 1820). The letters are from the doctors of the Second Dispensary.
39. Ibid., p.96.
40. Ibid., p.101.
41. Niles' Register, 11 August 1821 and 26 October 1822.
42. Davidge, Physical Sketches.
43~ A Series of Letters.
44. Federal Gazette, 23 February 1822.
45. A Series of Letters, p.46.
46. Records of the City of Baltimore, vol.4 (1818).
47. Hampstead Hill is the high ground on the west side of Patterson Park. Effects of reorganizing drainage from Hampstead Hill and from Hughes Street at the foot of Federal Hill are discussed in chapter 5.
48. Lewis Brantz describes his survey in a torn manuscript fragment in the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore, Md.
49. On the Poppleton plan, see Federal Gazette, 1 January, 25, 28, and 30 March, 6 April, and 3 and 12 September 1822. Thomas Griffith was one of the citizens who wanted a true topographical survey.
50. Richard H. Townsend, Diary, transcribed by Works Progress Administration of Maryland, 1937, in the Enoch Pratt Library, Baltimore, Md.
51. North Street in Oldtown is now known as Hillen Street; the new York turnpike is Greenmount Avenue. West of the falls, North Street was known as Belvidere, now Guilford Avenue. Lewis Wernwag built the Belvidere bridge; he also bridged the Schuylkill in 1812 and the Susquehanna in 1818. The Centre Street bridge was authorized in 1809, and the Saratoga Street connections in 1811. At the mouth of the falls, the drawbridge ran from Chase's wharf, now West Falls Avenue, to the City Block.
52. John Skinner, American Farmer 1, no.1 (1819): 6.
53. Federal Gazette, 30 March 1822.
54. Christian Mayer's and Edward Ireland's estates (Federal Gazette, 24 January and 15 March 1822).
55. Niles' Register, 20 June 1818.
56. Henry-Marie Brackenridge, Recollections of Persons and Places in the West (Pittsburg: J. I. Kay, 1834), p.45.
57. Niles' Register, 8 August 1812, 1& January 1813 (legislature's report), and 6 February 1813.
58. Ben Stoddert to James McHenry, 15 July 1812, cited in Bernard C. Steiner, The Life and Correspondence of James McHenry (Baltimore: Burrows Bros., 1907), p.582.
59. Niles' Register, 17 April 1813.
60. Ibid., 14 August and 10 September 1814.
61. Ibid., 8 June 1816 and 31 January 1818.
62. Ibid., 1 March 1817.
63. Ibid., 31 January 1818, 16 December 1820, and 9 March 1822.
64. Ibid., 25 November 1820. See also 13 October 1821.
65. Mayor's messages, January 1807 and January 1811. The mayor and council also discuss the misery of chimney sweeps (ibid., January 1820), and foreign mendicants and superannuated slaves (Baltimore City Council journal, 24 January 1833).
66. American, October 1817.
67. Niles' Register, 5 and 26 June and 23 October 1819.
68. Frank A. Cassell, Merchant Congressman in the Young Republic: Samuel Smith of Maryland, 1752-1839 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971).
69. Niles' Register, 3 November 1821 and 2 November 1822.
70. Niles' Register, 26 June 1822.
71. American Farmer, 8 October 1819.
72. Federal Gazette, 20 August 1822.
73. Ibid., 9 February 1804.
74. Blanche D. Coil, "The Baltimore Society for the Prevention of Pauperism, 1820-1922," American Historical Review 61 (1955): 77-87.
75. Thomas Griffith, as cited in Douglas Carroll, Jr., and Blanche D. Coil, "The Baltimore Almshouse: An Early History," Maryland Historical Magazine 66 (1971): 135-52.
76. Ibid.
77 Ibid.
78. Special Report of Council Joint Committee, Federal Gazette, 24 January 1822.
79. Letter of Trustees of the Poor House to the Legislature, ibid., 1 January 1823.
80. John M. Duncan, Travels through Part of the United States and Canada in 1818 and 1819, 2 vols. (Glasgow: The University Press, 1823).
81. Reports of Baltimore Grand Jury on conditions in the jail, Federal Gazette, 9 February 1804 and 15 March 1822; and Board of Visitors to the City Jail, Annual Report, 1830.
82. Letter of 0. B. (probably Thomas Griffith), Federal Gazette, 31 October 1822. 0. B. published other letters on the subject in October and November.
83. John S. Tyson, Life of Elisha Tyson, the Philanthropist, by a Citizen of Baltimore (Baltimore, 1825).
84. Paul S. Clarkson and R. Samuel Jett, Luther Martin of Maryland (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1970).
85. Tyson, Elisha Tyson.
86. Ibid.
87. Daniel Raymond, The Missouri Question (Baltimore: Schaeffer S. Maund, 1819), p. 7~
88. Idem, Thoughts on Political Economy (Baltimore: F. Lucas, 1820), p. 436.
89. Idem, Missouri Question. On the character of freed slaves, Raymond takes issues with General Harper, "Letter."
90. Raymond, Political Economy, p.448.
91. Ibid., p.456.
92. Raymond's labor theory of value is developed in Political Economy, pt. 1. Charles Patrick Neill attributes to Raymond a decided influence on Friedrich List, who in turn influenced Marx and Engels. Thus, although he was reprinted a few times in Baltimore and then forgotten, and never translated in Europe, Raymond belongs to the mainstream of economic theorists. See Charles Patrick Neill, Daniel Raymond, Johns Hopkins University Studies 15, no. 6 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1897). For biographical data, see Charles J. MacGarvey, "Daniel Raymond, Esquire, Founder of American Economic Thought," Maryland Historical Magazine 44 (1940): 111-22.
93. Raymond, Political Economy, p.453.
94. Ibid., p.452-53; see also p.220.
95. Ibid., p.253; see also pp.233, 248-49.
96. Idem, The Elements of Political Economy, 3d ed. (Baltimore: F. Lucas, Jr., 1836).
97. Idem, Political Economy, 1st ed., pp.258, 302.
98. Ibid., p.294. See also p.302.
99. Federal Gazette, 29 December 1819.
100. Niles' Register, 19 May and 21 July 1821.