The Grand

Civic

Procession

1822-1837

And, as it is in prosperity, that success in one branch of business enlivens and benefits many others-so in adversity, a pressure upon any particular class of persons is felt by all. The connection is so intimate and delicate between the parties to a community, that every material or valuable part may be said to have a common profit or a common loss to enjoy, or suffer.1

Anew prosperity, a new excitement, a new speculation took hold of Baltimore in the 1820s. It focused on capturing the western trade, and its most powerful city-making effect was the layout of the railroads. But no sooner had fundamental decisions been reached, resources mobilized, and the common profit glimpsed than adversity set in. "Pressure" began to be felt. In the '305 the city was again buffeted by flood and fire, epidemic disease and epidemic violence. Under pressure, the apparent harmony of the great civic celebrations of the '20s splintered into fears and hostilities of party, race, and class.

The city's energies from 1822 through 1836 were bent on "public improvements," based on a geopolitics peculiar to the time. Where in an earlier generation each person for himself had focused on his role in the international web of trade, now attention was directed to the national market, particularly the new trade beyond the Alleghenies. Baltimore's strategy was governed by rivalry with other American seaports for this trade, and its survival depended on collective effort.

In any scheme for heavy hauling, vertical movement requires far more energy than forward motion. Topography is, therefore, a crucial factor governing the costs, the feasibility, and the relative attractiveness of various routes and modes of transport. This generation of Baltimoreans, consequently, became keenly aware of the lay of the land, and placed value on accurate leveling, that is, the topographical survey, which they had till now neglected.

From the general topography of the United States, George Washington had discerned that the prime trans-Allegheny routes must be through the valleys of the Potomac and the Susquehanna rivers, and corporations had been organized in Maryland for the improvement of their navigation as early as the 1780s. The other great routes would be the Ohio-Mississippi system and the Erie-Mohawk-Hudson route. As steamboat navigation developed on the Ohio, the Mississippi, and the Hudson, and as the state of New York undertook the Erie Canal, New Orleans and New York City grew and prospered. Watching them, Philadelphia

and Baltimore and the legislatures of Maryland and Pennsylvania were able to agree that the Susquehanna and the Potomac routes must be developed. Their collaboration had its ups and downs, but Baltimore's problem remained-to funnel the trade of the Susquehanna and the Potomac to itself, in competition with Philadelphia and the federal city. Throughout the period, these twin objectives were kept firnily in mind.

In 1820 Robert Mills published, by subscription of the city's traditional patrons-Harper, Carroll, Caton, Patterson, Oliver, and others-a grand scheme for opening a water communication from the city to the Potomac and Susquehanna rivers. The Potomac River would feed water from above Harper's Ferry (310 feet above tide) across a summit to the Susquehanna River at Conewago Falls (160 feet). From the summit, between Westminster and Gettysburg, another canal would branch toward Baltimore, the great tidewater port of the whole network. "Baltimore is destined to become the emporium of the eastern section of the union-provided proper exertions are made to secure the advantages offered. . . . Shall we remain passive spectators? . . . Shall our energies sleep?"2 The proper exertions Mills estimated at an appalling $2 million, and the problem that he had so brilliantly integrated was again split in two: the state appointed two sets of commissioners, one for the navigation from Baltimore to the Susquehanna, and one for the navigation from Baltimore to the Potomac. In 1823 they published their reports. The proposed million-dollar connection to Conewago was a thirty-six-mile system of canals with 335 vertical feet of locks.3 Again the expense "created a degree of alarm in the people."4 Therefore, the city of Baltimore appointed still another set of commissioners to devise a cheaper plan. Early in 1825 this set recommended that a "stillwater" navigation go from Port Deposit to Havre de Grace as already improved, then to Swan Creek, with a double row of piling to protect the passage against wind and waves of the bay, and then to Baltimore by "through cuts" across the necks of land, with no locks. "The trade of the Susquehanna is the great prize for which the cities of Philadelphia and Baltimore are calling into requisition all their talents and ingenuity to secure. . . . But they appear to be influenced by very different views as to the best means."5

The Philadelphians were now concentrating on the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal "for the exclusive accommodation of themselves," while Baltimoreans were "straining every nerve" to improve the upstream navigation of the Susquehanna. They invested $50,000. Meanwhile, the Maryland legislature, to the rage of Baltimore, committed itself to the construction of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal along the left bank of the Potomac, from Georgetown to Harper's Ferry and on to Cumberland. To pacify Baltimore, a "cross-cut" or extension, known as the Maryland Canal, would come to Baltimore from Georgetown. The surveys for a direct cut from Harper's Ferry to Baltimore proved unfavorable, and even the prospects for the cross-cut were discouraging. Particularly devastating was the 1826 report of General Simon Bernard of the U.S. Army Board of Engineers on Internal Improvements. Meanwhile, Pennsylvania had already begun its expensive system of state works, combining canals with inclined planes.

This view of the Thomas

Viaduct by Michel Chevalier

(Ca. 1834) shows the B&O

Railroad as it crossed the

Patapsco River.

Caught in the squeeze play between Philadelphia and Georgetown, Baltimoreans had visions of grass growing in the streets. But through the imagination of Evan Thomas, who had seen an English mining railroad, and his influential brother, Philip Thomas, Baltimore resorted to a scheme that turned out to be the wave of the future: "The railroad was seized upon by the citizens of Baltimore as the very thing to redeem them from their embarrassments, and restore them to their original rights and inheritance. "6 At a public meeting in February 1827, William Patterson presiding, a committee of twenty-five was created to contemplate a railroad. It supported the canal to the Susquehanna, but looked toward the "immense commerce which lies within our grasp to the West."7 The members of this committee were identified with the earlier plans; many were Mills's subscribers in 1820 or commissioners for the Susquehanna projects.

Within a few weeks, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was incorporated by the legislature; its charter was modeled on the turnpike charters. While the legislature granted half a million dollars for the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal and another half million for the Susquehanna Canal, Baltimore closed ranks behind the railroad. The city council agreed to take half a million dollars of Baltimore and Ohio Railroad stock. Among the private backers were Alexander Brown, Robert Oliver, Philip Thomas, and William Patterson. They expected the venture to turn a profit, but more important, they expected it to promote their merchant trade: "The treasures of three millions of enterprising people will flow into your lap, and Baltimore will yet become the first city of the union."8 The backers sought the best technical advice they could get. The U.S. Army engineers were asked to do the surveys, and the board of engineers functioning in April 1828 included Dr. William Howard (a son of John Eager Howard), Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Long, Captain William Gibbs McNeil, Isaac Trimble, and George Washington Whistler. Jonathan Knight, a Friend and graduate of West Point, was particularly requested; he, Whistler, and Ross Winans were sent to England to examine the state of the art. As soon as Baltimore promoters grasped the new technology, they applied it to the twin goal, and a railroad to the Susquehanna was promptly incorporated. "They knew well their points of attack. The Ohio river and the Susquehanna, were to be made tributary."9

The Railroad at Home

Baltimore citizens found it easy to agree on overall railroad strategy. The first twelve miles of the B&O would follow the Patapsco valley, an easy grade, to Ellicott's mills, the nearest major freight source, and thence to Harper's Ferry and Cumberland, the coal region. But they found it impossible to be

decisive about the railroad's course into and through the city of Baltimore. Justification for the enormous investment lay in the expectation of powerful effects on commerce and property values. The railroad itself was the basis for all land speculation in this era of city building, and these rich benefits were the stakes in the struggles of the generation. As John Latrobe described it later, each person saw the railroad as "the rose of a vast watering pot" that would irrigate his property.10 From April to September 1828, the major problem for the engineers was the manner in which the railroad should be connected with the city of Baltimore. On 28 May, the board of directors ordered the engineers to find the route "best calculated to distribute the trade throughout the town as now improved. "11 This represented an abandonment of any notion of long-range planning and an attempt to soothe the agitation of vested interests in the several parts of town. From this directive "the Board of Engineers have experienced great relief."12 By 23 June, they had gone far enough with their surveys and developed certain principles of location, so that the decision could be reached on where and at what elevation to lay the first stone, on the Fourth of July.

Because the bulkier traffic for many years would be descending toward Baltimore, the main line must avoid uphill grades toward the town. The railroad would be horse drawn at first, but it would be expensively built, to avoid inclined planes and grades greater than a steam engine might manage. In a very broken landscape, the critical levels to be determined were the most favorable passes across the ridge (140 feet) dividing the waters of the Gwynns Falls from those of the Patapsco, across the broad valley of Gadsby's Run (20 feet), and across the Jones Falls. "If the level be low, the quantity of excavation will be greatly increased; on the other hand, if the level be high, the cost of the embankments and bridges will become very formidable."13 The engineers also assumed that the main line should be "remote from places of bustle and business. " Any thickly settled street, such as Pratt Street or Baltimore Street, would be "utterly inadmissible." The controversy was skirted by choosing an elevation of 66 feet, which would leave options open to enter Baltimore by any of several routes, to serve the several parts of town and to approach tidewater at nearly any point without steep grades. In September, the engineers proposed that the main line come in north of the more improved parts of town, from a point on Lexington Street and Chatsworth Run.14 Branch lines would connect the main depots outside the town with warehouses and wharves in the city near tidewater. In May 1829, James Carroll offered the Mount Clare site, a "hickory hill" 19 feet above the level of the road, and it was decided that it would fit into the conception of a main line running north of the town. Mount Clare proved well situated for entry of the line to Washington, under construction by 1833.

Exactly the same set of problems was now posed for the location of the Baltimore and Susquehanna Railroad. McNeill and Whistler were transferred by the army in June 1829 to make surveys for the B&S. Their strategy of keeping options open was the same. By late August the company and the city council agreed that the B&S would commence at the north boundary near the turnpike gate west of the Jones Falls (where the Pennsylvania Railroad produce terminal still is), at an elevation of ninety feet above tide. "From this commanding posi-

_Å_ _After the crucial decision in 1831 to run the B&O Railroad through Pratt Street, horse carts, wagons, streetcars, trains, and cabs all contested for street space near the docks.

tion the whole city is overlooked, and the railroad may be carried on in any direction."15 The alternatives were much the same as those proposed for the B&O, and they represented an effort to conciliate all parts of the city. Winchester's argument shows how the rhetoric of competitive development of the natural advantages of the various regions of the nation reechoed as a mini-problem in the development of the various parts of the city: "By these various approaches to the city, each portion of it will derive a peculiar advantage from that which reflects a general benefit upon the whole."16 In 1830 the B&S obtained three acres for a city depot on Calvert Street, and later prepared "a costly viaduct" over the Jones Falls from Belvidere Street. This was the Madison Street viaduct.

Once those tentative decisions were reached on main lines and main depots, a clamor arose for branches to wharves and warehouses. "Everybody wanted it at his alley gate."17 The city council's priorities were to give value to the city's two undeveloped properties at the city dock east of the mouth of the Jones

af}_Falls and the old almshouse site near Biddle and Madison streets and to insure connections between the railroads at these two points. Early in 1831 the council authorized branch lines along Pratt, Fremont, Saratoga, Chatsworth, and Biddle streets, so that the B&O could run branches from Mount Clare to the two city properties. Virtually all the main streets of Baltimore were conceived as railway branches by one railroad or the other, and in December, at the request of Howard Street property owners, the state legislature acted to force the city council to approve a branch track in any street where a majority of property owners desired it. It was becoming apparent that, regardless of the original conception, the Pratt Street rail line was going to be a major connecting link, the city's streets of " bustle and business" were going to have freight cars in them, and the alms-house site would not become a union depot.

The debate over the railway in Pratt Street was resumed in 1834 and agitated feverishly in March 1835, as council members James Carroll and James Peregoy tried to have it removed. Their discussions resound with appeals to unemployed draymen, laborers, and mechanics. "The rail tracks, we believe, do now infringe the right of property, and the right of labor. "18 At least 2,000 persons signed petitions, including hundreds of draymen, many Irish. In fact, underlying this split was the old issue as to which part of town would profit. The B&S was seen as a measure favoring East Baltimore, and the B&O as a measure favoring West Baltimore.

If the trade acquired by these improvements is to increase the size of the town, all parts ought equally to enjoy the advantages which nature has given them. This can only be accomplished by terminating the B&O railroad at a distance from tide water in the west, and the Susquehanna railroad at a distance from the tide water in the east. Then will the labouring classes find employment in conveying the trade through your streets.19

The new development that actually triggered the alarm was the creation of the Baltimore and Port Deposit Railroad (later part of the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore). The Canton Company had a site for the B&PD depot, and was planning to join all three railroads at a great tidewater terminal outside the eastern city limit on Boston Street. Vested interests in the city basin, as well as property owners in the southwest and northeast of town, felt threatened by this development in the southeast.

The agitation waned, and the council allowed the B&PD to run a branch from Canton along Fleet Street to the city dock. The basic railway entries into the city were now fixed. Later generations would have to grapple with the problems of developing efficient waterside terminals, cross-town hauls, and the mutual accommodation of trains, wagons, pedestrians, and drainage in "the streets of bustle."

By the end of 1835 the Baltimore and Susquehanna was operating horsecars to Timonium. This section was already obsolete. Ill-adapted British locomotives ran the next twenty-eight miles to Hise's mill, and the roadbed was nearly completed to York, Pennsylvania. An eight-mile side branch ran horsecars through the Green Spring Valley to Reisterstown Road and Owings Mills. The

Port Deposit Railway operated between Canton and Wilmington with a steam ferry crossing at the Susquehanna, and the B&O ran to Washington and eighty-two miles up the Potomac valley to Harper's Ferry. Turnpikes were extended or rebuilt as feeders to the railroad. New post offices were established in western Maryland, and the population of the tributary region increased. The city that had sent its engineers to study English track and imported English engines was now exporting locomotives to Leipzig and receiving delegations of Austrian and French engineers to borrow its know-how. The speed of movement and communication had taken a dramatic leap in fifteen years, with the development of the railroad, the clipper, and the steamboat. By 1835 Baltimore was only 2 hours from Washington and 91/2 hours from Philadelphia. Letters came back answered from Norfolk in 41 hours and Jamaica in 37 days.

At this point, the city closed ranks again, fearing that in the economic pressure Baltimore would be outdistanced. "Your day of prosperity is gliding by, and the streams of your power are stealing from you. Is it not time that Baltimore was at work?-Not to make piddling efforts to creep ten miles and then rest."20 John Pendleton Kennedy published three letters from "a man of tlie times" in the American, exhorting citizens to make a new effort to reach the Ohio River in three years. His geopolitics are reminiscent of William Howard and Robert Mills in their plans for roads and canals. "Baltimore should imitate the spider; spread her lines towards every point of the compass, and lodge in the centre of them."21 Baltimore must find $3 million, Kennedy argued, the state legislature $3 million, and Pittsburgh and Wheeling must find $1 million each. Within the year, the legislature appropriated $8 million to finance the advance of the C&O Canal and the cross-cut canal. And Baltimore City subscribed $3 million to the B&O to reach Cumberland.

The enormous city-making potential of the railroad, and, therefore, its potential for land speculation, was illustrated at Canton, probably the nation's earliest, largest, and most successful industrial park. In 1830 three New Yorkers, including Peter Cooper, formed a corporation and acquired O'Donnel's 2500-acre estate for $320,000. It was known as Canton because of the profitable China venture that had allowed him to acquire the land and plant his peach trees. The Canton Company lands formed a suburban tract a third the size of Baltimore, astride the city limits. "All their privileges, appurtenances and energies, also, form a part of the capacity of the whole city, so that their destiny being inseparably interwoven, must rise or fall together."22 Peter Cooper salvaged the operation from the two other speculators, who disappeared. His plan, which bears the mark of William Gwynn, was elaborate, and the kingpin was the tidewater freight depot for the several railroads, just outside the city limits. These depots, as shown on the survey and plat laid out by Caspar Weaver (once superintendent of construction for the B&O), would also provide the critical junction of the several lines. By means of the B&O, the Susquehanna, and the Port Deposit railroads, they calculated that Baltimore would become a great market for coal and iron and other heavy and bulky products, which would take up the whole "Canton Sea Shore." The waterfront was to be commercial and industrial, the landward lots residential. Among the early lots sold were waterfronts between

This rendering details contemplated improvements to Canton Company holdings at the waterfront, as projected on 17 March 1833.

,~1

-~ttIo~~51

The Sachse bird's-eye view reflects Canton in 1869. Boston Street parallels the waterfront and Patterson Park is on the north. Harris Creek is on the east and the Abbot Rolling Mills are at the mouth of the creek.

the city and Harris Creek-seven warehouses to a New Yorker, sites for a steam sawmill, a steam forge and trip hammer works, and a mechanics' shop to operate by steam power. Cooper created the steam ironworks himself, then sold them to Horace Abbott.

The company contrived to raise capital from the sale of lots in order to build the public improvements that would give value to the land. The block size Weaver selected was based on New York City, with avenues 70 feet wide, streets 60 feet, blocks 458 x 204 feet, or 10 to the mile north and south and 20 to the mile east and west. This produced a favorable ratio of two-thirds of the land saleable and one-third in street area. In 1833 the company sold off 200 lots (20 x 60) averaging $100, and retained the ground rents. It spent the money leveling, filling, opening streets, and building wharves. In 1835, about the time Baltimore City subscribed its $3 million for the B&O, there was considerable speculation in Canton stock in Boston, and lots were sold averaging $350 each, the highest along Boston Street running up to $875.

Similar planning initiative was shown in the western part of town. James

eCarroll, nephew and heir of barrister Charles Carroll, offered Mount Clare depot site to the railroad. He carried on a debate with the railroad over the viaduct at the Gwynns Falls; he claimed it was angled in such a way as to disturb the normal flow of the stream and injure his millrace. In addition to several mills, he leased concessions for brick clay on the low lands surrounding his mansion on the hill. The most important was to Jameson, for brick to build a shot tower. When James Carroll died, his heir, the second James Carroll, through an act of the legislature, changed the Poppleton plat of streets and alleys on his entire one hundred acres, bounded by the B&O Railroad, the western city limits, and Washington Boulevard. The new layout was designed to accommodate the street plan to the B&O Railroad line and expected future development along the railroad and Spring Garden waterfront. This is further evidence of the fact that the B &O Railroad was laid out with a sensitivity to topographic levels that had not governed Poppleton's plat, the achievement of the last generation.

The city-building style of this era was captured in John Pendleton Kennedy's satire of 1840, in which he described the growth of the village of Quodlibet. The scheme of Nicodemus Handy, cashier of the Copperplate Bank, can be interpreted as a combination of operations of Evan Ellicott's Union Bank and the Canton Company. As Mr. Handy said, "We must all make our fortunes."

We start comparatively with nothing, I may say, speaking for myself-absolutely with nothing. We shall make a large issue of paper, predicated upon the deposites; we shall accommodate every body, as the secretary desires-of course not forgetting our friends, and more particularly ourselves :-we shall pay, in this way, our stock purchases.-You may run up a square of warehouses on the Basin; I will join you as a partner in the transaction, give you the plan of operations, furnish architectural models, supply the funds, et cetera, et cetera. We will sell out the buildings at a hundred per cent advance before they are finished; Fog here will be the purchaser. We have then only to advertise in the papers this extraordinary rise of property in Quodlibet-procure a map to be made of our city; get it lithographed, and immediately sell the lots on the Exchange of New York at a most unprecedented valuation. My dear sir, I have just bought a hundred acres of land adjoining the Borough, with an eye to this very speculation.23

Speculation was not limited to individuals or private corporations. It became the strategy of the public corporation. Since the property tax was the only substantial local tax, and since nearly all property except street beds was privately held, the prime goal of the city council was to protect and enhance the value of individually held property. The objective of the town as a corporation was to make collective improvements. Only insofar as it succeeded in creating private property values could it increase the taxable "basis" or capacity of the corporation to do more. Any distinction between public and private enterprise was meaningless, although there was continual debate and litigation over whether the costs and benefits of a particular improvement were equitably shared among individuals.

Since the objective of improvements was to increase property value in the future, it seemed logical to postpone costs until those benefits could be realized. As individuals might borrow (or sell in advance) in order to build, so the corpora-

UÅ_ _tion mortgaged the city. In 1827 Mayor Jacob Small, himself a builder, argued that the present holders of property in the city were heavily taxed. They were bearing the expenses of numerous improvements, the costs of the war, the interest on the city debt, and the sinking fund to diminish the principal; "under all these circumstances it may appear wise and equitable to lighten their burdens by the expedient proposed, and to transfer a portion of the load to their

"24

successors. The rising value of property in the city would make it easy for the successor generation to discharge the debt, and meanwhile, taxes could be

reduced by "at least one per cent."

Kennedy took the same position in his 1836 pamphlet urging the swift completion of the B&O to Wheeling: "It must be completed, no matter at what cost. The city has credit, and that resource must be used liberally: -the present generation are able to pay interest; let the next generation pay the principal."25 He figured that an investment of $3 million in B &O stock, at 3.5 percent interest would mean paying $100,000 interest a year, or a dollar a head, and would double city property value. Between 1828 and 1844 the city increased its debt tenfold. Like any developing nation that invests borrowed money, the city began to run high debt-service costs. From 1835 on, interest on loans represented between a third and a half of the net annual outlay of the city.26 The state also accumulated a very large debt for public works, "under the pressure of which the credit of the state reeled and tottered," and it imposed a property tax.

Meanwhile, Baltimore was slow to capitalize on the earlier increases of property values because of constraints by the legislature, always controlled by the large land holders. Only in 1831 was the city allowed to extend the line of direct taxation to include the belt that had been improved or developed since the line was fixed in 1817. "Ripening" as the city grew outward, this property had increased in value. By the act that made it taxable, the legislature put a ceiling on the total amount of taxes the city could collect each year ($220,000) and a ceiling on the total amount that it could borrow ($1.1 million). In 1834 Baltimore was finally allowed to reassess all property for the first time since 1813. The results were spectacular. The taxable basis increased more than tenfold-from $4 million to $43 million-and it was possible to reduce the rate of taxation from

$4.78 to 0.67 on $100.27 State restrictions on city finance and city improvements, and state manipulation of the great public works of national significance exasperated Baltimoreans throughout the years 1822 to 1837. Baltimore still had only two representatives in the legislature. " Country gentlemen have had, always, in all countries, a most preposterous fear of city influence, accompanied with a most insatiable desire to make the cities contribute, without return, to the prosperity of the country. "28

Nonimprovement

Since canals and railroads were the priority of the generation, they diverted resources from other local improvements. A large number of contemplated projects were postponed or reduced in scope. They form an intricate jigsaw of expectations in the development of property values. When the jigsaw puzzle is pieced together, one can discern the perennial problems of the hydrologic system. Residential expansion of the city on the east and the west flanks gave the devel-

opment problems of Harford Run and Chatsworth Run, respectively, greater importance in this period than those of the Jones Falls. Improvements to the Jones Falls and the water Supply were among the projects contemplated and then postponed for a generation.

A severe drought, at its worst in 1826, made the deficiencies of the water company apparent, because the supplemental wells dried up or their pollution became more noticeable. The council's Water Committee of 1829, seeing that neither Fells Point, and most of Qldtown, nor the improving northwest was supplied, and that the quality had deteriorated to "a muddy substitute, " enlisted the volunteer help of Captain Lewis Brantz. The committee recommended a million-dollar program equal to the city's total debt ceiling. They estimated that the Cwynns Falls, if tapped at Calverton mills, would serve half a million people, but opposition came from the ten mills downstream. An alternative was to acquire the Hockley mill on the Patapsco River. Another was to acquire Tyson's millrace, three miles out on the Jones Falls, along with ten mills downstream from it.29 Under the threat of purchase or competition by the city, the water company made some effort to expand. It stayed with the Jones Falls supply, but simply bought the Salisbury mill, the next one upstream.

A succession of serious fires revived the issue, and in 1835 a new council committee recommended buying out the water company. "Experience has shown what indeed might have been foreseen . . . ; it could not be expected that a private corporation would consult the public good when the benefit of the community could only be had by the sacrifice of Corporate interests. "30 Municipal acquisition was also proposed for the gas company and the B&O Railroad. It was part of the nationwide agitation of the Jackson era against the "money power" and against monopolies in banking. The delightful feature of the water proposal was that "it requires no money, but only the issue of a stock."31 The half million dollars in corporation stock would bear 5 percent interest and be paid off over ten years from water rents on all improved properties proportionate to the front footage of the lots. The plan did not, however, face the basic question of how to expand the system, and an engineer, John Randel, was next employed to make a topographic and hydrologic survey and estimate the investment required for an adequate future supply. The progress of leveling experience for locating canals and railroads and the new sensitivity of Baltimore leaders to topographical questions made possible a clear evaluation of the alternatives. Randel's recommendation to go to the Great Gunpowder Falls is the one adopted several generations later. Neither the Gwynns Falls nor the Jones Falls, he stated, could be relied on in a dry season.32 Nevertheless, the high cost of new investment plus the purchase price of the old works stymied the program, and the council scrapped the entire survey.

New flood-control plans were introduced every time the water rose in the Jones Falls. The Mills plan to redevelop the lower falls and the Latrobe plan to divert the creek into Herring Run had been set aside as too costly. All that was accomplished was an ordinance requiring adjoining property owners to build walls along the falls.33 After a freshet in 1831, a council committee suggested diverting the Jones Falls west to strike Chatsworth Run and flow into Spring

Garden. Nothing was done. In July 1837, the rampageous stream drowned seventeen persons, carried away its stone walls, and washed out most of the mill dams. "All the scenes of devastation of the former freshet of 1817 were again repeated; with this difference, that the city, being now larger, and more improved, the destruction of life and property was far greater. . . . At our house the water was 18 inches deep in the dining room."34

In the valley of Harford Run one sees the intricate relationship of the various improvements, as well as the limited approach to hydrologic problems. The mouth of the stream was slowly developed by filling the swampy cove to form a "city block." The wash from Hampstead Hill was diverted from Harford Run into Ann Street, east of Fells Point. By 1824 a "bold shore" had been made around the cove, and French drains were made in Eden and Bank streets, with the "happiest effects" in the view of the health commissioners. In the mid '30s, fill continued east of Harford Run as the easiest way to dispose of one hundred thousand tons of mud from dredging a seventeen foot channel in the harbor to implement the Brantz plan. The city continued to press the President Street site upon the railroad companies. (It eventually became the depot of the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore Railroad.) Meanwhile between Baltimore Street and Wilks Street (Eastern Avenue), Eden Street was filled, and Harford Run itself was walled in as a canal or drain, known as Harford Street, now Central Avenue. It was tunneled-that is, covered over-at major cross streets. In this way, Oldtown and Fells Point were soldered together.

But each local improvement produced unforeseen consequences. In his state-of-the-city message of January 1823, the mayor attributed current complaints of sedimentation at the foot of Ann and Washington streets

to the want of foresight in having imprudently collected into Ann Street . . . all the waters of the surrounding hills, thereby producing a torrent sweeping by its impetuosity thousands of loads of sand and gravel into the boldest and deepest and consequently most valuable part of our Harbor.35

New gullies and washings continued, and in 1828 the affected wharf owners were suing the city for damages.

The problem on the west side of town was much the same, involving the drainage of Chatsworth Run from the vicinity of Biddle Street and George Street. In the early '20s wood bridges were built across it, as at Mulberry Street, and, like Harford Run, the stream was confined in walls. In its lower course a causeway was developed north of Three-Pronged Branch from Ostend Street in the line of Ridgely Street. They began covering the run in 1827. The extension and regrading of streets on the west side allowed the city to spread across the valley of Chatsworth Run onto the high ground of west Baltimore. Of greatest importance were the westward extension of Fayette, Baltimore, and Lexington streets and the northward extension of Division and Pine streets. The area just north of St. Mary's Seminary was developing rapidly. The seminary itself subdivided and sold off a substantial piece of property in 1833. Numerous street openings were associated with the subdivision of G. W. Moore's estate. Part of

-Æ_ _the almshouse property was at last taken for the Bolton depot of the Susquehanna Railroad, and the rest was laid out into lots.

The peripheral growth of the city produced, as always, strains at the center. Congestion increased in the central parts of Baltimore and Oldtown, and new thoroughfares were put through. With Pratt Street under construction, the opening of Lombard Street became the chief controversy. German Street was widened, and the buildings were moved. Ruxton Lane, the focus of the cholera epidemic of 1832, was widened as a slum clearance operation. Hillen Street was carried across the Jones Falls to connect Oldtown and Bel Air Market with the center. As the railroad and the water company expanded, Madison Street was opened, and a viaduct built east of Aisquith Street.

Creations in the Back Shops

Bltimore's economy grew more complex, interconnected, and well buffered. The shape it took in the '20s defined its structure till the Civil War. Its successes vindicated the "American system" promoted so energetically by McKim, Patterson, Niles, and Raymond in the early years of the century. As they had projected, commerce and manufacturing were not rival forms of enterprise any more, but woven together. By 1827 Baltimore no longer traded primarily in reexports; far more substantial were the home-grown and home-processed materials of the region and impressive quantities of local manufactures. The protective tariff had succeeded in nursing new industries that now supplied the American market more cheaply and were beginning to compete in the world market. In one week, twelve thousand chairs of Baltimore manufacture were shipped to South America, and a single ship cleared with $160,000 worth of Baltimore-made cotton goods. The heavy investments in transportation had given Baltimore an exceptional efficiency for several lines of reciprocal trade. Costs were lower and service better because of the reliable return cargoes. For example, in spite of the rise of New York in foreign trade, Baltimore merchants retained a major share of American imports of Brazilian coffee by exporting the flour of the Baltimore region, selected for its good keeping quality for the Brazilian market. Baltimore's exports to Brazil and Chile grew to dimensions rivaling its exports to Liverpool and Bremen. Baltimore and Bremen merchants, linked in family, and social clubs, such as the Concordia, operated a reciprocal trade: they took tobacco into Bremen and brought German immigrants to Baltimore.

The excellence and speed of Baltimore-built vessels contributed to the growth of trade. Coffee and wheat were carried in a coffee fleet built and owned in Baltimore by Hugh Jenkins, Thomas Pierce, and William Whitridge. Even the vessels were exported. "A beautiful and powerful ship, of 64 guns, built at Baltimore by Mr. Beacham, completely fitted, has sailed for Brazil, to serve the emperor. "36 Tied in with shipbuilding was the manufacture of cotton duck for sails. Charles Crooks, Jr., and his brother were employing fifty families (two hundred persons) on a $500 to $600 payroll, in French Street, Oldtown. Baltimore shipowners and captains testified to their canvas. The navy in 1826 ordered a supply for sails of the Constellation. In 1828 Baltimore profited from labor stoppages in the rival mills of Paterson, New Jersey, and the Baltimore mills became a national monopoly and a principal world supplier.

This 1924 photograph records Mount Vernon Mill No.1, a cotton mill.

Cotton duck was only one of several products in this line, and the cotton mills represented a new scale of employment and a much greater value added than the grist mill operations they replaced. Good mill sites with a developed mill race and machinery were rather easily converted from flour to weaving, sawing, or paper making. The cotton mills were, however, sensitive to the business cycle in their capital valuation and the income they generated. The Warren factory, for example, cost $180,000 to build and sold in 1820 for one-sixth the value, but by 1825 had again expanded and was employing nine hundred persons. It produced the first American calicoes finished from first to last in one establishment. It was typical of seven or eight that were incorporated in this period; others were still family owned or partnerships. The village of eight two-story stone dwellings at Warren, since inundated by Loch Raven reservoir, was one of the first of several dozen such villages, strung out along the streams of the Baltimore region in New England mill-town style. When a fire destroyed the calico printing works at Warren in 1830, the flour mill at Rockland was converted into a calico printing factory.

Experiments with steam became more significant. Besides Crooks's mill, other important steam-powered firms were a sugar refinery, a flour mill, two woolen factories, two planing and grooving mills, a glass-cutting operation, a plaster mill, and a mill for grinding chocolate, ginger, mustard, and castor oil.37 In all these lines of work, the steam-powered factories competed with other large firms operated by water power or even, as in rope making, by horse power. Foundries in Baltimore evolved from blacksmith work, ship fitting, and block making to supplying machinery for the first railroads and steamships. Charles Reeder built a steam dredge for the harbor. Canton iron works produced walking beams for steam engines. Stockton and Stokes had a hundred hands building railroad coaches.

The new chemical industries employed fewer people, but were innovators and were linked to other new metallurgical and mechanical industries. McKim, Sims & Co. made alum at half the price of the imported chemical, and also epsom salts, blue vitriol (copper sulfate), yellow and green chrome, tartaric acid, and rochelle salts. Isaac McKim, Jr., built a chrome factory near the new City Block, and Tyson manufactured a wide variety of chemicals at the foot of Fre mont Avenue. The powder mills were at a distance, but their owners built three towers in town for the manufacture of lead shot. Among the shot tower entrepreneurs, Lorman, Gwynn, and Alexander were also incorporators of a gas company and a coal mining company, the first in the state (1829).38 Their concept and timing indicate the interlocking of ideas and promoters in railroad building and industrial technology.

New manufacturers created an economic base for new neighborhoods, and the braiding of trade and manufactures into such chains of enterprise meant also a weaving together of the various neighborhoods. The connections between the various districts of the city became more "intimate and delicate." New prosperity at Fells Point reflected the expansion of the shipbuilding industry.

The yards and shops are filled with cheerful men, and the hum of industry continually greets the ear. The countenances of the citizens,-nay, the very appearance of the houses and the streets, have delightfully changed. Three or four years ago, we never left the Point without gloomy feelings.39

The cotton mill villages hummed in unison, making sailcloth. The margin between Federal Hill and the inner harbor became a zone of industry. In addition to the foundries of Reeder, Watchman & Bratt, the chemical works of McKim, Sims & Co., and the expanded glass works, the Bellona copper works had a large plant on Smith's wharf, and Berry developed a factory for firebricks for furnaces. This halved the price of a producer good formerly imported from England. The manufacture of common building brick increased hugely, as in every building boom, and occupied large areas of Federal Hill and Locust Point, and began surrounding Mount Clare.

Industrialists, prominent among them the Quaker entrepreneurs (McKims, Tysons, and Ellicotts), sought to bring the railroad to their mills or docks. But there is little evidence of industry's coming to the railroad. Baltimore was gradually defining certain tidewater districts of the south, southwest, and southeast as its industrial backyards, and certain streets as work streets--Pratt Street, Fremont Avenue, Pennsylvania Avenue, Howard Street, Central Avenue, and Fleet Street. New industries were also developing in a welter of back lanes. "The passing bales of goods up Market street are seen by everybody-But the creations in the back shops, or small alleys, are known only to a few."40 Niles estimated that the city's $8 million in foreign imports "returned whence they came," leaving only "a tythe" for profits, drayage, and rents. But the new factories, he reckoned, were producing $5 million worth, of which the city retained and recirculated four-fifths.

The New Order of Things

Daniel Raymond had been outraged by the English laws of inheritance- primogeniture and entail--that tended to accumulate property in the hands of a few.41 In 1825 Raymond involved himself in certain lawsuits that turned on the issue of inheritance of land rights through persons in England at the time of the Revolution. He was the attorney for a suit against Charles Carroll of Carrollton and Charles Ridgely of Hampton. Other large prerevolutionary patentees joined them in the defense. Raymond's party lost, but the gradual

effects of time and the postrevolutionary law of division of property were operating to diminish the great estates and transform the structure of society.

The state of Maryland was moving to limit more strictly the right of entail, that is, the right of a man by his will to restrict the transmission of property to the male line or to the eldest in successive generations. Charles Carroll of Carrollton in the mid-1820s created an uproar by re-creating a "tail" to transmit Doughoregan Manor to his eldest son and his eldest male descendant, etc.42 He sought to avoid inventory and probate, and even stipulated that any relative who contested the will would forfeit all rights. His estate included Homewood, Oakland, Brooklandwood, Carrollton, extensive lands in Frederick County, and thousands of acres in Pennsylvania and New York State. In contrast, at the same moment his distant cousin James Carroll had by his will "docked the tail" his uncle, barrister Charles Carroll, had attached to his estate during the Revolution. James Carroll's property included Mount Clare (Georgia plantation), mill sites on the Gwynns Falls and Gwynns Run, The Caves in Baltimore County, and property in Annapolis and Anne Arundel County.43 His action opened the way for the division and alienation of the property and its urban subdivision.

About the time those wills were drawn, John Eager Howard died, and his will divided the estate equally among the families of his eight children. His property was so extensive as to require several years of survey and legal work, but because it formed a belt around the very core of the city, it was ripe for immediate subdivision, and the estate requested the city promptly to open all the streets through it. Their family surveyor was, conveniently, T. H. Poppleton, who certified that the street plans conformed to his city plan of 1822.44

Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited Baltimore in the fall of 1831, recorded his conversation with John Latrobe on the changes in Maryland since the founding of the colony:

Until the Revolution, Maryland showed the face of an English province; birth was as prized as on the other side of the Atlantic; all power was in the hands of the great families.

What changed this state of affairs?

The law of succession. With equal sharing of inheritances, fortunes were rapidly divided. A few families, like that of Charles Carroll, for instance, having only one heir for several generations, have conserved their fortune, but in general the great estates were fractioned into a thousand parts.

The "nobles" of Maryland, Latrobe said, had embraced the Revolution and led the people on the battle field, and then many of them adopted the Jeffersonian party, which favored greater power to the several states. By these circumstances, Latrobe argued, "through love of power and the desire to keep their local importance," they retained favor with the people. Nevertheless,

In two or three generations they will have disappeared. Do you not regret it ?

Yes, in some ways. This class was generally a seed bed of men distinguished in the legislature and the army. They made the best statesmen, the finest characters. All the great men of the Revolution came, in the South, from this class. Yet I am led to think that, all things considered, the new order of things is better. The upper classes

The topographic map of the Jones Falls Valley shows mill no.1 and its village, with "Brick Hill" in the upper left. The Northern Central repair shops and Mount Royal Reservoir are in the lower center, and the Belt Railroad (B&O) "crossover" appears on the right.

now among us are less remarkable, but the people are more enlightened; there are fewer distinguished men but a more general happiness. In a word, we are becoming every day more like New England.

Tocqueville raised this question wherever he went. Evidently Charles Carroll, at ninety-four, regretted the decline of the aristocratic institutions, but James Carroll spoke for the popular role. The question was recognized throughout society as a fundamental political issue.

A series of civic processions in 1824, 1826, and 1828 also reflect the passing of an era, the self-conscious end of a generation, and a shift in the relative weights of the various classes of society. The first was Lafayette's three-day visit. Lafayette's steamboat, the United States, was escorted by four more steamboats, "all beautifully dressed, with flags and streamers flying." The party landed at Fort McHenry, and the governor conducted Lafayette to Washington's tent, where he was received and embraced by the Society of Cincinnati, the patriarchs of the Revolution. "All were convulsed into tears, but they were tears of joy and gratulation." Lafayette was escorted by seven or eight hundred horses past Federal Hill to the crowd in Baltimore Street. In the evening fifty thousand enjoyed the "illumination" of the streets. The general was most delighted at the beauty and order of the scene: "He felt the last especially as coming from the heart, a compliment that money cannot buy or wealth confer." The lighted decorations were marvellous in their eclecticism--civil arches with Greek orders and wreaths of laurel, radiating well-polished bayonets, the golden eagle, and the ensign of Hibernia. On the Baltimore Street bridge over the Jones Falls were erected thirteen arches, one with a transparent painting fifteen feet by ten feet representing the father of our country on a rock amid foaming billows and royalty dashed to pieces.

The general received an honorary degree at the University of Maryland, reviewed the school children, visited his Masonic brethren in their " chaste and beautiful hall," visited the museum, attended divine worship at the cathedral, and received a venerable delegation of the French inhabitants of Baltimore as well as the clergy of the Methodist church, "ministers of a peaceful gospel." The Society of the Cincinnati gave him a splendid dinner at James Buchanan's mansion in Monument Square-- "a brilliant line of the richest plate and glass, and the characteristic hospitality of Baltimore." For the ball, the theater was converted into a ballroom. The decorations, superintended by Mr. Finlay, featured mottoes from Shakespeare and a twelve-foot diameter chandelier ornamented with twenty-four glittering stars for the twenty-four states. With a flourish of trumpets and "Lafayette's March," "the gas light flashed like magic into a blaze almost equal to day."45

On the Fourth of July 1826, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died, exactly fifty years after signing the Declaration of Independence, leaving Charles Carroll as the last survivor of the signers. In honor to the illustrious dead, a funeral procession was contrived, from Baltimore Street up Howard and Madison streets to Howard's Park. A troop of mounted cavalry was followed by a long

line of carriages of the clergy. Six noble black horses drew the funeral car bearing two black-shrouded coffins, on it "the winged globes of the Egyptian mausoleum." As chief mourners, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Colonel Howard, and General Smith rode in a barouche; four generations marched behind.46

That event was elaborately planned, but in the same year a plainer man died, whose passing also represented a shift from an older form of paternalism. A few days before he died, Elisha Tyson called an unprecedented meeting of the colored population in a church. (There were now several black churches, each of which held a thousand persons.) After a Quakerly silence, he said, " I know not who will befriend you after I am gone, unless you become friends to one another. . . . I feel that the Arm of Omnipotence is stretched out for your enlargement."47 The crowd wept and organized a mutual assistance fund. For two days after his death, crowds of mourners thronged the whole of Sharp Street and Baltimore Street for half a mile. That, too, was a compliment money could not buy.

Funeral followed upon funeral--Charles Ridgely of Hampton, Robert Goodloe Harper, John Eager Howard, Robert Oliver, James Carroll, James McHenry, Alexander Brown, and Isaac McKim, Jr. As a new generation took the reins, the processions showed a turn toward a different participation of the masses, reminiscent of the mechanics' politics of 1809, but now harmonized with the goals of the entrepreneurs. On the Fourth of July 1828, as the first shovel was turned for the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal at Georgetown, Baltimore created a spectacular for the laying of the first stone of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, where the Carrollton viaduct now crosses the Gwynns Falls. The Declaration of Independence was read, and Carroll, a "relic" at ninety-one, turned earth. Masonic grand masters from Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Maryland measured the stone, poured wine and oil, and scattered corn. But the engaging feature of the occasion was the procession of the trade associations. The blacksmiths and whitesmiths presented the pick, spade, hammer, and trowel; the stonecutters escorted the stone. In the course of the parade, the hatters manufactured beaver hats for Mr. Carroll and General Smith, the weavers and tailors presented to Carroll a coat made on the way, the bookbinders an engineers' report, and the cordwainers a pair of green morocco slippers, their lining ornamented with a view of the railroad.48

The Union Manufacturing Company had a huge carriage bearing 102 females belonging to the factory. Other trades carried Biblical motifs and labor slogans recalling the Democratic Republican parade. The millers and flour inspectors marched, as did the bakers, and the victuallers in their butchers' aprons bearing pole axe and meat cleaver. A smith's shop with furnace and bellows was in full operation, while 160 united Sons of Vulcan followed under the motto, "American manufactures--internal improvements." The bleachers and dyers carried a banner saying "Ye were naked and we clothed ye," with a circle of gold around the shuttle, the sheaf, and the ship on the other side. Britannia was portrayed in an attitude of grief, as an eagle bore a golden treasure across the ocean to Columbia. Underneath was the motto: "A wise and just distribution of labor and its reward, is the foundation of national prosperity."

§Æ_ _Stirling street was built in the 1830s as worker housing near the manufacturing in Oldtown. It was restored in 1976 through the city's first major concentrated homestead program.

The carpenters, lumber merchants, and plane makers carried a miniature Greek temple seven feet square. The cabinet makers, riding on a "bedstead, " built a patent rocker cradle. The cedar coopers built a barrel churn, churned five gallons of cream, ate the butter, and drank the buttermilk. The tinplate workers manufactured tin tumblers and threw them to the spectators; the printers published the ode and address of the day, handing them up to ladies at the windows with long poles. The printers also carried refreshments, bantered back and forth, and drank toasts with the pilots and shipbuilders, who "sailed" a twenty-sevenfoot model ship, the Baltimore, drawn by six horses.

The sense of harmony, order, and solidarity was characteristic of the revival of prosperity and construction at the rate of five hundred houses a year between 1824 and 1829.49 The population of Baltimore, as shown in the census of 1830, had a more settled character than earlier, due to a somewhat slower rate of growth. For the first time, the white population showed a slight excess of females over males, concentrated in the servant age group under twenty and among the elderly. Young men (fifteen to forty), only 18 percent of the population, were concentrated in the waterfront wards. Among free blacks there were far more females than males at all ages above ten, as slave owners tended to retain males in the agricultural counties or sell them south. The city directory shows half the city's population in skilled and semiskilled craft work: mechanics or tradesmen. The next largest group was in commercial occupations. Less than a thousand persons were listed as professionals or in other occupations requiring formal education and conferring status. All those classes of jobs were controlled by whites. Among blacks, the men were chiefly laborers, drivers of carts, stable hands, and wood sawyers. One in five or six had skilled jobs representing steadier income, chiefly seamen, barbers, waiters, and blacksmiths, and in smaller numbers ship caulkers, shoemakers, musicians, cigar makers, and painters. Both black and white were found among seamen and drivers. A fifth of the listings were women. Nearly all of the black women listed were laundresses, but only a third of the white women had occupations listed, chiefly in sewing trades (seamstress, milliner, silk button maker), or as keepers of shops, boarding houses, or taverns.50

_É_ _Containing Disorder

That age and caste structure represented an increase in the more stable, more docile, and more respectable classes and a relative decrease of the more turbulent elements. But the situation was beginning to change. Railroad construction and the new prosperity contributed to speculative enterprise and attracted both mechanics and unskilled laborers. Nationwide expansion of public works (the C&O Canal, the Pennsylvania line of state works, and the Ohio state canals were also under construction) was associated with an enormous immigration beginning in 1830, including many poor people from England and Ireland, and after 1834 a very large share from Germany. As always, the bulk were young men. Arrivals of foreigners in the port of Baltimore doubled in the year 1830 and doubled again in 1832, from two thousand to four thousand to eight thousand per year. Some of the immigrants, along with local farm laborers, moved on toward the midwest. Baltimore did a brisk trade in fitting out Conestoga wagons. Another share of immigrants was contracted for work on the C&O Canal or the B&O Railroad and was quartered in labor camps at construction sites in the piedmont. Bavarian Jews were settling in Oldtown--on High, Lombard, Exeter, and Aisquith streets--and a number became peddlers in Virginia and western Maryland.

As immigration rose, so did the building boom. "Foundations for new buildings, and the demolishing of old houses to be replaced by new, are to be seen in most streets of our city." Niles recalled the pancake flatness and hundreds of vacant houses of 1820 to 1823 as a contrast to the new scarcity of vacant houses:

"No house, fit for persons to live in, is without its tenant." Construction could not keep up with the demand, and the immigrants took the hindmost. "The large amount of labor employed in our various workshops . . . and on our great public works have packed the people too thickly. We want many houses."51

Massive immigration also produced intense problems of assimilation and adaptation, and one observes a mixture of humanity and brutality in the effort to control epidemic and violence. The average population of the almshouse rose to five hundred.52 The trustees for the poor attributed the increase of paupers to the arrival of outsiders and the use of liquor. Virtually all the inmates are described as intemperate, children of intemperate persons, or "of unknown habits." Of people admitted to the almshouse in the 1830s it was usual to find that a tenth had been in the city less than a week and a quarter less than six months. About 30 percent were foreign born, mostly Irish.33 In 1832 the trustees asked the council, who in turn asked the legislature, who in turn asked the federal government, to curb the importation of English paupers that parishes "shovelled upon us." They were contrasted with arrivals from Bremen, "hardy, healthy and evidently industrious," bringing lots of hearty children and their own wagon and harness.54 A $1.50 head tax was placed on immigrants, which was allotted to the almshouse, the Hibernian Society, and the German Society for their relief activities, and a $4 tax was imposed on liquor dealers for support of the jail.55

Death, as well as dependency, followed hard on the swell of immigration. A drop in death rates had occurred after 1822, as yellow fever and malarial fevers slackened their hold, evidently due to the drainage improvements and the relative

eÅ_ _decline of commerce and privateering in the West Indies. The new threat was intestinal disease--dysentery, cholera, and infant cholera. Added to a new wave of respiratory diseases (tuberculosis, pneumonia, and whooping cough) and outbreaks of typhus, these diseases accounted for a new high death rate in the early 1830s Two-fifths of all deaths in each year were of children under five.56 This reflects both a high rate of infant mortality and a large proportion of young people in the population characteristic of American cities in this generation.

The intestinal diseases had several common features. All were most threatening in warm weather: death rates were highest in July and August, and infant cholera was also known as summer diarrhea. All were spread chiefly through the contamination of foods, especially water and milk, by human excreta. They were the scourge of European cities, too, and their extension was later understood to be caused by increased pollution of urban water supplies from human sewage. Baltimore's water supply was only about a third "external," that is, two-thirds 0£the population relied on wells and springs in town. The sewage of the entire populace was disposed of either through privies draining directly into surface or ground water, or vaults that were periodically emptied: the contents were removed to night-soil depots on the edge of town, where the untreated waste was open to flies and surface drainage. Much of the city's milk was supplied from cows living in the city and fed on garbage.

The strategy of Dr. Jameson, consulting physician to the city, as he observed the spread of cholera across Europe in 1832, was to clean the city and exhort citizens to temperance and moderation. They should avoid an excess of alcohol and cold water, all fruits, certain vegetables, and, above all, watermelons, green corn, green apples, peaches, and crabs. Intemperance and gluttony were identified as sins that God might choose to punish and as lower-class habits. The specific prohibited foods were the summertime indulgences known to bring on colic or intestinal upset, regarded as warning symptoms of cholera. The horrifying feature of cholera was sudden and total prostration. Individuals collapsed cold and almost pulseless or rolled in agony on the sidewalk or in the market, unable to reach home.

In the city of Baltimore there died of cholera, during the summer of 1832, eight hundred and fifty three persons, a very great majority of whom were the most worthless;

but a few of our best citizens were its victims. Here then is a mortality of about one in 96; and, of persons of respectability, one, we believe, in a thousand.57

Treatments were strenuous: copious bleeding and calomel (mercurous chloride) . One young Irishman, for example, "rallied from cholera, is now perfectly salivated and raving mad." He died. Injections of salt water were tried, presaging the modern treatment, but the patients still died. The records of the three emergency hospitals provide a register of the poor, recognized for the first time as a great mass. Few can be identified in directories. Many were immigrants, living in the alleys, back buildings, and upper stories above shops in the center of the city. Irish names are especially common, and five or six had arrived from Germany within a few weeks. Some twenty patients were reported as having

slept the night before in a vacant lot, market house, or lumberyard. " Much emaciated. Has been sleeping in the woods for three weeks." Others are described as having been "out on a frolic" or "on a debauche" for days or weeks. The small children brought to the hospital had to be treated for worms as well as cholera.

The diary of a Methodist minister, Reverend T.H.W. Monroe, reveals the cholera among a broader class of persons.58 Just as the individual survivor went through stages of anxiety, crisis, and convalescence, the city experienced a collective emotional binge. Among those who died and were regarded as martyrs were two Sisters of Charity who nursed at the temporary hospitals, one of the Oblate Sisters of Providence who nursed at the almshouse then nursed the archbishop and his housekeeper through cholera, a doctor in Oldtown, and Lewis G. Wells, "a colored man who had devoted several years to the acquisition of medical knowledge, under favorable circumstances."59

Strong attempts at repression, at tightening up a barbarous system, did not suffice to control violence. Repeated thoughtful reforms and reorganization did not manage to curb the violence of the law. Of a hundred persons in the jail on an average day, half were committed for economic crimes. In 1831, for example, of twenty-three hundred committed, a thousand were jailed for debt (half for less than ten dollars) and another four hundred for various labor offenses, such as suspicion of runaway slave, "safekeeping" of slaves, desertion or mutiny (seamen), and participating in a railroad labor riot. An attempt was made to rationalize the jail by introducing cost accounting and group cooking of food. The limit for debtors was raised to thirty dollars, and the creditor had to pay a week's jail fee in advance.

The Maryland penitentiary, adjoining, continued to develop along the line of thinking of the Philadelphia Quakers and the model penitentiary at Auburn, New York. Its population was more or less stable at 350 to 400 prisoners; 85 percent were convicted of stealing and the average sentence was three years. A new men's prison was built with 325 single cells, so that prisoners could sleep in separate cells. Silence and isolation were regarded as curative. The older building became the dining hall, infirmary, laundry, and women's prison: five beds to a room, straw pallets on planks, and in each bed two or three women.60

Maryland was determined to make the prison system entirely self-supporting, and French observers considered it the best model in the United States for the conduct of labor. Robert Cary Long designed the workshop buildings on a radial plan, with a central control point and slits from which the guards in galleries could observe the work below without being seen. Blacks and whites were partitioned into two shops operated by contractors, with a hundred looms for weaving, equipment for shoemaking, brush making, and stone cutting. The penitentiary labor was paying off the construction loans as well as making a profit for the contractors. After the shops were built, the prison managers introduced a stricter rule of silence and the lock step, and described the prisoners as "relatively subdued." "The convicts received are thoroughly scrubbed and purified; one half of their hair is shaven close to the skin and they are clothed in stout garments, striped horizontally."61

ÙÅ_ _The Difficulty of Our Situation

The jail and penitentiary were also part of a larger system of repression of the I black population. The law made distinctions in the judicial and penal treatment of three classes of people: persons with property, persons without property, and black persons, who were themselves treated as property. For example, to rid the penitentiary of blacks (varying between a third and two-thirds), the state provided that second offenders should be sold into slavery and shipped out of state. Without any judicial proceedings, masters could privately take their black servants and slaves to the city jail to be whipped. Urban public opinion had the effect that slaves in Baltimore were generally better treated than on the plantations. They were more often reasonably well fed and less often beaten. But neither opinion nor law prevented brutal exceptions, such as the two girls in Aliceanna Street whom Frederick Douglass described as always half starved, contending with the pigs for offal in the street, and covered with festering sores from the whip. Douglass had been brought to Baltimore in 1825, about nine years old, to run errands and mind Hugh Auld's little boy. Mrs. Auld began teaching him the alphabet and basic spelling, but Master Auld found it out and forbade her: "Now if you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. . . . From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom."62 Douglass cajoled and bribed little white boys in Philpot Street with bread to teach him further. A few years later he was returned to the Lloyd plantation on the Eastern Shore for a division of the estate. But the taste of freedom and the conception of the pathway were part of the Baltimore experience, not only for Frederick Douglass but for many.

Free blacks were exploring additional pathways of self-help and education. Founded in 1821, the Union Female Society may have been the first of their beneficial societies. Each member paid an initiation fee plus 121/2 cents dues per month, and was eligible for sick benefits of a dollar per week for six weeks, 50 cents during the next six weeks, 25 cents indefinitely thereafter, and a paid funeral. The constitution designated annual elections and a bonded treasurer. They kept their money in the savings bank. The bylaws fixed fines of 25 cents for missing a monthly meeting, 50 cents for interrupting, and a dollar for missing a funeral.63 Several other beneficial and burial societies were formed among the people of color in the 1820s, including the Tobias Society among Catholics. By 1835 there were thirty-five or forty such societies, each with 35 to 150 members.64

State laws barred the public schools to blacks, although they paid the school tax, but several independent schools flourished. The Sharp Street school was managed by blacks and attended with success "beyond any expectation." At least five large churches had black preachers, including St. James Episcopal. In 1824 a pastor was called to an upper room at Park and Marion streets, and a "very neat church" was built soon after at Saratoga and North (Guilford) streets. It was incorporated in 1829. The pastor, William Livingstone, insisted that those in bondage could be members, to the dissatisfaction of some free members. Even in the penitentiary, two hundred black convicts learned to read in the Methodist Sunday school.

QÅ_ _The Oblate Sisters of Providence were instrumental in educating the children of the black community. In periods of economic decline their orphanage would swell in numbers, but it always remained exclusively black.

The Santo Domingo colored, Catholic and French-speaking, had retained a strong identity, nurtured by the Sulpician fathers at St. Mary's Seminary, first Father Dubourg, then Father Tessier. In 1828 Father Joubert, who had been a tax agent in Santo Domingo and was ordained at St. Mary's, encouraged Mary Elizabeth Lange to form an order of nuns, the Oblate Sisters of Providence, so that the children of the community might learn to read, and thus profit from their catechism classes.65 Soon there were a dozen, some from Fells Point families, some from Delaware or Georgetown, some with savings or dowries of several hundred dollars, and some with nothing. They gave lessons in French, English, arithmetic, catechism, embroidery, and sewing. At first, two-thirds of the children had French names. Their physician was Dr. Chatard, one of the French from Santo Domingo. When the sisters made their vows, each received with her habit a chain as a token of their Association of the Holy Slavery of the Mother of God.66 A favorite hymn was "0 Victime de tous les crimes." Visits to the sisters made a decided impression on the American bishops who attended councils in Baltimore in 1829 and 1833. Blacks were being converted every day in Baltimore, and several hundred received communion each month in the Sisters' small chapel in Richmond Street. (In the cathedral as in other churches there was a separate gallery for blacks.) The delicacy of their position is illustrated by the soul searching involved in their agreement to manage the household of the Sulpician fathers. They took care of mending and nursing, with a cook, another woman to work, and a man to serve the table:

We do not conceal the difficulty of our situation. As persons of color and Religious at the same time, we wish to conciliate these two qualities in such a manner as not to appear too arrogant on the one hand and on the other, not to lack the respect which is due to the state we have embraced.67

In contrast to the Oblate Sisters' near-seclusion, foreign visitors often remarked on the gaiety and manners of the Baltimore blacks among themselves, especially the stylishness and chic of the young women in the markets and the cheek and impudence of the younger waiters and drivers. However dated their accounts, they leave hints of the vitality and richness of black life in Baltimore.

Among whites, an Anti-Slavery Society was organized in 1825 through the

ÑÈ_ _efforts of Benjamin Lundy. As in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia, the society was strongest in the communities where there were fewer slaves and a strong witness among Friends. Baltimore supporters included John Needles, cabinet maker; Gerard T. Hopkins; A. Mathiot, chair maker; Jonathan S. Eastman, agricultural implement maker; John and Thomas Berry, brickmakers; and Henry Mankin. Lundy produced his first edition of The Genius of Universal Emancipation for the Fourth of July: "We hold these truths to be self-evident:

that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness." He documented regularly the purchases of slaves by Austin Woolfolk and others, sales in the Orphans Court, kidnappings of blacks, and the droves or coffies of slaves his informants met on the roads going west to Alabama. The society embarked several hundred freed slaves for emigration to Haiti, started a store to sell goods made by free labor only, and nominated an antislavery candidate to the legislature. The campaign platform coupled abolition with removal of Negroes to Haiti or Africa.

"The master and the slave are alike bound in the fetters of fear, distrust and danger. . . . And are we to sleep in quietness upon a volcano? "68 The society's candidate, president, and attorney--Daniel Raymond--proposed gradual emancipation by freeing at the age of twenty-one all persons born after next Fourth of July. "Such a law will infringe no man's rights, because no man can have a right to a human being not yet created. Where is the audacious man that shall dare to claim as his inheritance the future workmanship of the Deity?"89 His views were consistent with his position in the lawsuit against entail or class inheritance. The law of 1715, he said, declaring that children of a certain class should be born slaves, was "the most iniquitous" ever passed, visiting the sins of the fathers upon their children unto the third and fourth generations. Raymond finished last in the election.

The already difficult situation of blacks in Baltimore took a turn for the worse in the summer of 1831, after the Nat Turner uprising. A rumor ran through Baltimore of a vast slave conspiracy to "kill the damnd whites. " The beneficial societies were accused of holding midnight military drill. Baltimore apparently returned to normal without violent reprisals, but in November John Latrobe told Tocqueville, "I am afraid the next Legislature will make some unjust and oppressive laws against the blacks. They want to make staying in Maryland unbearable. One must not hide it, the white population and the black population are at war. They will never mix. One must cede the place to the other."70 On the same day, Tocqueville's personal observation of one black man's nightmare was prophetic of the coming repression:

Today 4 November, we saw at the Alms-House a negro whose madness is extraordinary: there is in Baltimore a celebrated slave merchant who, it seems, is much feared by the black population. The negro I am speaking of imagines that he sees day and night this man attached to his footsteps, and pulling off pieces of his flesh. When we went into his cell, he was lying on the floor rolled in a cover which was his only clothing. His eyes rolled . . . and the expression of his face was one of terror and rage.

ÙÅ_ _From time to time he threw off the cover and raised up on his hands crying: "Get out, get out, don't come near me."71

In March the legislature's Brawner Commission, acknowledging intense disagreement in the memorials presented to them, recommended a legislative package to remove the colored population, estimated at fifty thousand free, largely in Baltimore, and one hundred thousand slave, largely outside the city. The commission considered them all injurious to the prosperity of Maryland; their "remedy" was colonization as an instrument of state policy.72 Funds were provided at thirty dollars a head to transport blacks to Liberia. Free volunteers would be sent first, then individuals manumitted for the purpose. The question was postponed as to the purchase of slaves for resettlement. At the same time, the law restricted manumission ( Elisha Tyson being in his grave) and assured a black the "choice" of consenting in open court to remain a slave if by reason of family ties he did not want to remove to Liberia. A second act codified police regulations: no free Negro could buy powder, lead, or whiskey, nor sell agricultural staples without written testimonials of whites. Religious me ehngs could be held only by permission of whites. Any free Negro who moved into or returned into the state was liable to be sold into slavery. For any criminal punishment except hanging by the neck until dead, a judge could substitute deportation to a foreign country.

What was the attitude of Baltimoreans in this debate? Certain memorials for abolition had doubtless come to the Brawner Commission from Baltimore. Baltimore newspaper reporters remarked cautiously on the peculiar details of the acts relating to manumission and assembly of "free" blacks. They grasped opportunities to comment on the bravery of many persons of color at a waterfront fire, or the colored sisters nursing cholera victims. Baltimore's white leadership regarded the extremism of the legislature as one more aspect of state oppression of Baltimore by the agricultural, land-holding, and slave-holding interests. The slave-holding interest of Maryland, meanwhile, hardened its position, sensing new vigor in the antislavery movement in northern states of the Union. Under these conditions of political conflict, the mood of Baltimore was an almost passionate search for compromise. Baltimoreans both for and against slavery embraced resettlement schemes. The Gazette, for example, was enthusiastic about the arrival of 342 persons of color in Liberia via the James Perkins. The editor looked forward to the day when the whole colored population "will have transferred themselves, by our assistance" from slavery here to independence in the land Providence gave them.

There let them go onwards, as we have done here. Let them subdue the forest, and bring the wild soil into cultivation, and civilize the poor native, and become a powerful and happy people. And, instead of being forever a reproach to us, when we breathe the name of freedom, let them prolong the chorus, on the other side of the Atlantic.73

Projects were dampened when the free blacks flatly refused to volunteer, and news from the colonies was unpromising. Certain Quaker colonizationists, such as Moses Sheppard, despaired of peaceful abolition, but noted the incongruities

of colonization, such as sending lumber across the Atlantic to be carried into the woods of Africa.74 Abolitionist views were no longer published in the daily papers. Men in authority, business, and the churches continued to place hope in the resettlement scheme. English visitor James Silk Buckingham was surprised to find that Baltimoreans did not defend or excuse slavery as New Yorkers did, but seemed to mix great tolerance of opinion with a certain silence. "In all our intercourse with the people of Baltimore, and we were continually out in society, we heard less about slaves and slavery than in any town we had yet visited."75

The willingness of prominent men to acquiesce in the degradation of the blacks, and their eagerness to go after a chimera left a vacuum. In 1833 several Negroes were convicted of crimes "in the most horrid circumstances," under the handicap of white-only testimony: a man for raping a white orphan girl, a cook for poisoning her mistress "by means of arsenic given in a bowl of soup," and two female slaves for conspiracy to rob and murder the family and set fire to the premises. As violence increased in society, in 1834 and 1835, white mobs began to direct more of their attacks on blacks--knocking out windows or ransacking a colored home. Yet convictions were rare. The way in which the law, the climate of violence, and the lack of leadership combined to permit outrages can be seen in Douglass's account of his second sojourn in Baltimore in 1836. This time Auld apprenticed him to William Gardner, shipbuilder. Whites and blacks were working side by side, but all at once the white carpenters knocked off, saying they would not work with free colored workers. The spirit spread to the apprentice boys. "My fellow-apprentices very soon began to feel it degrading to them to work with me. They began to put on airs, and talk about the "niggers" taking the country, saying we all ought to be killed."76 When "hectored around," Douglass defended himself, and the whites combined with sticks, stones, handspikes, and half-bricks to beat him up in the sight of fifty white ship carpenters. The Aulds nursed his eye injury and took him to their lawyer, who said that nothing could be done unless some white man would come forward and testify. "Even those who may have sympathized with me were not prepared to do this. It required a degree of courage unknown to them to do so; for just at that time, the slightest manifestation of humanity toward a colored person was denounced as abolitionism."

Epidemic Violence

Douglass's experience was only one incident in an epidemic of violence in Baltimore. About 1834, as economic conditions worsened, labor trouble became more frequent on the public works. The general level of violence increased in the city, including an exceptional number of suicides. 77 Violence followed a course that can be observed at other cities and in other generations:

a wave of rumors and arson over several months, a weekend of mob action that ceased as abruptly as it had begun, followed by six to twelve months of juvenile disorder and terrorism.

The labor force on the C&O Canal and on the various railroads was quartered in large construction camps by the several contractors. Whiskey was often part of the pay. Disputes arose from cuts in wages or from contractors' attempts to pay in scrip, to postpone payment, or to manipulate the value of money. These

evolved into riots between rival groups over "scab" labor. On a Friday in August 1829, a man was killed and several wounded in " dangerous and disgraceful riots" among the laborers employed on the B &O section adjoining the city.78 Several of the supposed ringleaders were committed to prison. In August 1831 a riot occurred between Irish and black laborers at New Market (Frederick County). Twenty "ringleaders " were taken prisoner, and four hundred Irish rallied to rescue them. At Sykesville Irish workers struck because the contractor owed them nine thousand dollars in pay. John Latrobe and others distributed two thousand dollars and sought to negotiate a return to work, then took out a riot warrant. A posse consisting only of William Patterson and a sheriff was repelled, but a hundred of the state militia arrived by train at dawn and arrested fifty workers. The contractor was replaced. In January 1834 five died on the C&O Canal in a conflict between rival gangs of Irish laborers.79 President Jackson sent regular army units from Fort McHenry. In the fall a mob killed a superintendent on the Washington branch of the B &O "in a peculiarly violent and brutal way" and beat up two others of the contractor's men. This time the militia brought back three hundred prisoners. In another incident on the Washington branch, five or six Germans were wounded. Eleven Germans and one Frenchman were taken "with arms in their hands." They were alleged to have "made assault on those who were content with the wages paid to them." Negro laborers were attacked in Georgetown.

The economic pressure was severe by New Year's Day 1834. When the Warren cotton mills burned, seven hundred persons were thrown out of subsistence, "and they are, generally, very poor."50 The Union Manufacturing Company stopped both their great cotton mills and discharged several hundred persons. Another large mill was doing "half-work."81 Half the journeymen printers were reported unemployed, and many other mechanics out of work. The seamstresses, as in 1822, published their prices to show how widows "and others who have sickly or worthless husbands" were earning only fifty cents to a dollar a week.

Meanwhile, a banking scandal with a bizarre resemblance to that of 1822 provided targets for popular frustration. The issue of insolvent or bankruptcy laws had never died out. "WHAT IS JUSTICE?" asked Niles. While small debtors were jailed and small creditors lost their savings in bank failures, large debtors could declare insolvency, "walk the streets of our cities at large, and roll their chariot-wheels over the widows and orphans whom they have plundered, without ever having made restitution."82 Niles, ever an opponent of paper credit, provides an account from the point of view of the Republican majority. The City bank, the Bank of Maryland, the Susquehanna Bank, the Maryland Savings institution, the United States Insurance Company "and two or three other rag-shops" all went bankrupt. Alexander Brown succeeded in using his personal credit to sustain the credit of certain other individuals, and to float a half-million-dollar loan for the state of Maryland. But there were many losers. "The people have been plundered of more than two millions of dollars." The case of the Bank of Maryland, "the weakest bank in the city," was most deeply resented.83 According to Richard Townsend, it had become the private property of Evan

Poultney, stockholder, director, and controller of its affairs. He borrowed large sums. "Both interest and principal vanished. . . . A shade from the cloud of public stigma came upon the Society of Friends."84 The Bank of Maryland stopped payment in March 1834, and anxiety and political unrest were expressed at numerous meetings in courthouse square. On 23 April such a meeting was broken up by violence. "As decency begets a respect for decency, so does violence beget a spirit of violence, and the end is anarchy unrestrained."85

In February 1835 the three-month wave of arson began.56 There was no apparent political motive, and no reason to believe that a single individual or conspiracy was responsible. Yet every Saturday paper included accounts of fires or discovery of "firebrands." The chair factory burned. The Athenaeum burned, with its law offices, organ, the library, and " beautiful and costly philosophical apparatus" of the Mechanical Institute. "Worse and worse": the courthouse burned. Attempts were made to set fire to Mr. Duncan's church in Lexington Street, the female orphan asylum, the Friends Meeting in Lombard Street, and the office of the Gazette. A range of stables burned, and a wall fell, killing four fire fighters. While the bell was tolling their interment, arson was attempted at the watch house and again at the Gazette. Fires were set at two engine houses, and during another stable fire the hoses of the two companies were cut. Two "old offenders" were arrested as they were burying the tap screws of thirteen fire plugs.

In April a pamphlet war agitated the banking issue. No information was offered to the public by the trustees of the Bank of Maryland, and by August seventeen months had elapsed "obstructed by the law's delay." On Thursday and Friday night, 6-7 August, attempts were made to destroy the houses of the trustees into whose hands the affairs of the bank had been placed. Niles was incensed: "The state of society is awful. Brute force has superseded the law, at many places, and violence become the order of the day. The time predicted seems rapidly approaching when the mob shall rule. "87

In view of the "feverish or fidgetty state of Baltimore," the mayor deputized six hundred citizens and supplied them with strips of muslin to be worn on the left arm and with sticks of turned poplar. Thirty were mounted on horses. They tried to cordon off Monument Square, but on Saturday night multitudes assembled, and the crowd made frequent rushes on the guard. Brickbats and stones were showered. Reverdy Johnson's splendid residence on Monument Square was destroyed, with all his furniture and his ten-thousand-dollar law library. The losses of John Morris in South Street included 171 dozen bottles of wine, of John Glenn in North Charles, a twelve-thousand-dollar law library and 4000 bottles of wine. Others whose possessions were heaped into bonfires in the street were Evan Ellicott, Mayor Jesse Hunt, and Captain Bentzinger, a paving contractor. "More than fifty others were marked." It was supposed that eight or ten persons were killed, including one in the watch house. "The receptacle for the prisoners was the scene of incessant din and commotion." Fifty-seven prisoners were confined at daybreak on Sunday. The mayor had resigned as the situation slipped out of control, and the officers of the militia were out of town for the weekend. "On Sunday, the people, without a head, had nothing

­Å_ _to do but to look on and tremble. No one felt himself safe--as everything was given up. Anarchy prevailed."

But on Monday there was "a general, but gloomy, resolution" to restore order. Eighty-three-year-old Samuel Smith was elected by a great assemblage at the Exchange, took command of the people at an assembly in the park, met with the city council, and issued appeals for the people to stay home. John Spear Smith returned and succeeded in collecting the militia. Recalling the mob of 1812, Niles commented upon this one:

The ostensible ground of the late riots in Baltimore was in the affairs of the bank of Maryland, though we believe that other things were more at the bottom of them; together with that general disposition to violence that prevails at so many places. We shall not pretend to account for it. Whether the effect is periodical! or belongs to certain accidental causes-the foundations of which are deeply laid, to produce the elements of confusion and end their record in blood: and then, perchance, to be followed by a reaction that is peaceful and remarkably kind.88

Over the next eight or ten months, Baltimore experienced a series of juvenile disorders. On the surface they appear unconnected with the August riot. The mayor complained of assemblages of unruly boys from ten to eighteen or nineteen years old. "When dispersed and driven from one place, they assemble in another." There were several cases of stabbing. The mayor sent the council several Bowie and Spanish knives taken from suspicious persons, and urged fines for carrying dangerous concealed weapons. There were also complaints that the fire companies encouraged youths and apprentices to "assemble and carouse at the engine houses, causing fires or giving false alarms for mere diversion."89

The state legislature held an investigation of the riot of 1835 in Baltimore, and as in 1812 punished the city, whose citizens were already deeply resentful of their lack of representation.90 A memorial of the council argued that while the city had two delegates, a group of counties of comparable total population had twenty-six. Annapolis, they said, "the 'bright particular star of the state', has long since paled her fires, and sunk beneath the splendour of the monumental city." Without wishing to insult the framers of the state constitution, "we state the plain fact, that they were not gifted with the spirit of prophecy--that they could not look into the womb of time and see what seeds would grow and what would not. "91

=É_ _

Newspapers used are Niles' Register, the Federal Gazette, and the Genius of Universal Emancipation, published in Baltimore by Benjamin Lundy from 1825 to 1828.

Published annual reports of city agencies include those of city commissioners (on public works), port wardens, jail visitors, and trustees for the poor. Annual reports of the Canton Company are for the year ending 1 June.

Works I have used throughout the chapter are James Silk Buckingham, America: Historical, Statistic and Descriptive (London: Fisher, Son & Co., 1841); Edward Hungerford, The Story of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, 1827-1927, 2 vols. (New York: G. P. Putman's Sons, 1928); and Jacob H. Hollander, The Financial History of Baltimore (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1899).

1.Niles' Register, 1828.

2.Robert Mills, Treatise on Inland Navigation (Baltimore: F. Lucas, 1820). For more

information on canals, see Albert Gallatin, "Report of the Secretary of the Treasury on the

i_

Subject of Public Roads and Canals," Washington, 4 April 1808, reprinted by Niles' Register,

29 August, and 5 and 12 September 1818; Harry N. Scheiber, Ohio Canal Era: A Case Study

of Government and the Economy, 1820-1861 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1968); Carter

Goodrich, ed. Canals and American Economic Development (New York: Columbia University

Press, 1961); Walter S. Sanderlin, A History of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, Johns

Hopkins University Studies 64 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1946); and Joshua

Gilpin, A Memoir on the Rise, Progress, and Present State of the Chesapeake and Delaware

Canal (Wilmington: R. Porter, 1821).

3."Report by the Maryland Commissioners on a Proposed Canal from Baltimore to Conewago," 25 November 1823.

4."Report of the Commissioners Appointed by the Mayor of the City of Baltimore to Explore and Survey the Route for a Canal and Stillwater Navigation from the City of Baltimore to the Head of Tidewater at Port Deposit," 11 February 1825. The commissioners were John Glenn, Robert Cary Long, and James Mosher, with William F. Small, engineer, and Jehu Bouldin, surveyor.

5.Ibid.

6.John F. Semmes, John H. B. Latrobe and His Times, 1803-1891 ( Baltimore: Norman, Remington, 1917), pp.400, 444.

7."Proceedings of Sundry Citizens of Baltimore, Convened for the Purpose of Devising the Most Efficient Means of Improving the Intercourse between This City and the Western States" (Baltimore, 1827).

8.Niles' Register, 17 March 1827, reprinted from the American.

9.Canton Company, Annual Report, 1835.

10.Semmes, Latrobe.

11.Lt. Stephen H. Long and Capt. William Gibbs McNeill, Narrative of the Proceedings of the Board of Engineers of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Company, (Baltimore: Bailey & Francis, 1830), Resolution of 28 May 1828.

12.Report of 4 September 1828, in Long and McNeill, Narrative, p.4.

13.Document F, letter of 23 June 1828, ibid., p. 41. For general principles of railroad location see Stephen H. Long, Rail Road Manual (Baltimore : W. Wooddy, 1828), p. I.

14.Lexington Street crossed Chatsworth Run at Division Street. The site adjoining the city dock became the President Street Station.

15.George Winchester, President, Baltimore and Susquehanna Rail Road Company, in Baltimore City Council journal, 2nd branch, 27 August 1829.

16.Ibid. See also "Report of the Joint Committee of the City Council, Appointed to Examine the Baltimore and Susquehanna Rail Road" ( Baltimore, 1837).

17.Semmes, Latrobe.

18.Baltimore City Council journal, 2nd branch, 19 March 1835, p. 159.

19.Ibid., p.160. See also 1st branch, 12, 15, 17, 18, 19, and 30 March, and 2nd branch,

13 March.

20.John Pendleton Kennedy, Letters of a Man of the Times ( Baltimore: Sands & Nielson,

1836), originally letters to the American.

21.Ibid.

22.Canton Company, Annual Report, 1835, p. 7. See also "Report of Committee of Stockholders," 13 June 1838.

23.John Pendleton Kennedy, Quodlibet (Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1840), p. 35.

24.Mayor Jacob Small, Message, 22 January 1828, p. 134.

25.Kennedy, A Man of the Times.

26.Hollander, Financial History.

27.Ibid.

28.[John H. B. Latrobe], Picture of Baltimore (Baltimore: F. Lucas, 1832), p. 78. See also Niles' Register, 1 and 8 March 1823, 17 September, 12 November, and 3 December 1825.

29.Calverton millrace was at 185 feet elevation, Hockley mill reservoir at 190 feet, and Tyson's millrace at 150 feet (Report of Water Committee, Baltimore City Council journal, 1st branch, 16 June 1830).

30.Ibid., 2 March 1835.

31.Ibid.

32.Letter of John Randel, ibid., 21 April 1836.

33.Baltimore City Council journal, 1st branch, 8 April 1830 and 29 March 1832.

34. Richard H. Townsend, Diary, transcribed by Works Progress Administration of Maryland, 1937, in the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore, Md., p. 201. He lived at 18 Baltimore Street.

35.Mayor's message of January 1823; see also 1825, 1828, and 1829.

36.Niles' Register, 4 November 1826.

37.Thomas's steam sugar refinery burned in 1829, and the planing mill in 1833 (Thomas W. Griffith, Annals of Baltimore, 2d ed. [1824; Baltimore: W. Wooddy, 1833]).

38.Owners of powder mills and shot towers were Lorman, Beatty, and Jameson. The tower on Gay Street was built in 1823, and the Phoenix shot tower in 1828. The coal company was incorporated in 1829. Other details of factories are largely from Niles' Register.

39.Niles' Register, 4 October 1828.

40.Ibid., 26 April 1828.

41.On the law of succession, see Alexis de Tocqueville, Oeuvres comple'tes, ed. J.-P. Mayer, vol.5, Voyages en Sicile et aux Etats-Unis (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), chapter 2; and Daniel Raymond; Thoughts on Political Economy ( Baltimore: F. Lucas, 1820), pp. 232-33.

42.Semmes, Latrobe, pp. 29~93. His grandson, Charles Carroll, lived at Homewood; one daughter, married to Robert Goodloe Harper, lived at Oakland, and another daughter, married to Richard Caton, lived at Brooklandwood, now Catonsville. See Kate Mason Rowland, Life of Charles Carroll of Carrolton, 1737-1832, with His Correspondence and Public Papers, 2 vols. (New York: G. P. Putman's Sons, 1898).

43.The estate of James Carroll can be documented from wills, etc., at the Mount Clare Mansion.

44.Poppleton's survey for the division of the John Eager Howard estate is in the Hall of Records, Annapolis.

45.Niles' Register, 16 and 23 October 1824.

46.Ibid., 19 July 1826.

47.John S. Tyson, Life of Elisha Tyson, the Philanthropist, by a Citizen of Baltimore (Baltimore, 1825).

48.Niles' Register, 12 July 1828.

49.Ibid., 19 November 1825.

50.My estimates of occupational structure are from the city directory of 1827 and the U.S. census of 1830. Free blacks made up 13 percent of directory listings.

51.Niles' Register, 23 January 1830, 23 April, 30 July, and 20 August 1831, and 5 October 1833.

52.Karl Bernhard, Duke of Saxe-Weimar Fisenach, Travels through North America, during the Years 1825 and 1826 (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea, and Carey, 1828), p.167.

53.Harold A. Williams, History of the Hibernian Society of Baltimore, 1803-1957 (Baltimore, 1957).

54.Niles' Register, 15 September 1832. See also Dieter Cunz, The Maryland Germans:

A History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948), pp.159, 236, 241.

55.Niles' Register, 23 April 1831.

56.William Travis Howard, Jr., Public Health Administration and the Natural History of Disease in Baltimore, Maryland, 1797-1920 ( Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution, 1924).

57.Horatio G. Jameson, "Observations on Epidemic Cholera, As It Appeared at Baltimore, in the Summer of 1832," Maryland Medical Recorder 2 (1831): 393. On social psychology and the class impact of cholera, see Charles F. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years :

The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), and

Louis Chevalier, Le Chole'ra, la premiere epidemie du XIXie'me sie cIa (La Roche sur Yon:

Imprimerie Centrale de l'Ouest, 1958).

58."Journal kept by Th. H. W. Monroe, during the Raging of that Awful Plague, the

Cholera, in the City of Baltimore, 1832," Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, Md. See also daily reports in the Federal Gazette.

59.Jameson, "Epidemic Cholera," p.446. Wells may have been an informal student of

Jameson's at Washington Medical College. Rev. Lewis G. Wells is elsewhere mentioned as a participant and memorialist at a meeting of the free people of color at Bethel Church, Sharp Street, 7 December 1826, to promote colonization.

60.Annual Reports of jail visitors. See also M. Demetz and Abel Blouet, Rapport a' Monsieur le Comte de Montalivet sur Zes pe'nitenciers des Etats-Unis (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1837); and David J. Rothman, Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971).

61.Picture.

62.Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass an American Slave, Written by Himself, ed. Benjamin Quarles (1845; reprinted ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1960), p.59.

63.Genius of Universal Emancipation (New Series), 12 July 1828.

64.Niles' Register 44 (1835): 72; and Picture, p.165.

65.The early history of the Oblate Sisters of Providence is movingly told in manuscript diaries in the archive of the order in Baltimore.

66.Ibid., 2 July 1830.

67.Ibid., 15 April 1835.

68.Genius of Universal Emancipation, 5 September 1825.

69.Ibid., 16 September 1826.

70.Tocqueville, Voyages.

71.Ibid.

72.Federal Gazette, 17, 22, and 23 March 1832.

73.Ibid., 3 April 1832.

74.Moses Sheppard is cited in Penelope Campbell, Maryland in Africa: The Maryland State Colonization Society, 1831-1857 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), n. 19.

75.Buckingham, America, p.455.

76.Douglass, Narrative, pp.127-33.

77.Thirty suicides were recorded in 1835, about three times the normal reported level. Suicides are generally understated.

78.Niles' Register, 22 August 1829. On later B&O Railroad riots, see ibid., 14 March

1835, and Hungerford, Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.

79.W. David Baird, "Violence along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, 1839," Maryland Historical Magazine 46 ( 1971): 121-34.

80.Niles' Register, 1 February 1834.

81.Ibid., 26 April 1834.

82.Ibid., 9 September 1826.

83.Ibid., 19 September 1835.

84.Townsend, Diary, p.60. On the relation of the Union Bank, the Bank of Maryland, and local and national party policies, see Frank Otto Gatell, "Secretary Taney and the Baltimore Pets: A Study in Banking and Politics," Business History Review 39 (1965):

205-27.

85.Niles' Register, 26 April 1834.

86.Ibid., weekly, 7 February to 9 May 1835.

87.Ibid., 8 August 1835.

88.Ibid., 15 August 1835.

89.Mayor Samuel Smith, messages of 4 January and 3, 13, and 17 March 1836, in Baltimore City Council journal, 1st branch.

90.Niles' Register, 22 April 1837.

91.Baltimore City Council journal, 1st branch, 18 February 1835.