A City Divided
1814-1865

III


In Baltimore, a brief but marvelous boom followed the conclusion of the War of 1812. Peace brought prosperity and growth to the port city on the Chesapeake. The fast clipper ships returned to peacetime trade. Steam- powered industries, which had begun to develop before the war, expanded swiftly. Demand for labor drew immigrants from other American cities and from Europe. New buildings rose up. Streets were extended into former countryside. Soon the city added thirteen square miles of territory from surrounding county lands. Institutional growth accompanied the enormous population increase, although not always rapidly enough to meet the needs of all Baltimore's citizens.

Then in 1819, boom gave way to bust. Economic uncertainty hastened a transformation that was already underway locally and throughout the United States. New groups began to demand power in an increasingly factionalized society. The growth and change occurred so rapidly and the dislocations were so pronounced that confusion and conflict often resulted. All this was evident in the life of the city during the decades that followed the War of 1812.

The single fact that stands out above all others is population growth. In 1810, 35,583 people lived in Baltimore. By 1820, newcomers from other cities and from Europe made that number grow to 62,738, by 1840 to 102,054 and by 1860 to 212,418. They met the labor need of the new industries.

People immigrated from American cities further north and from Europe. Increasing numbers of free bl~cks became industrial workers. Roads, canals and railroads connecting Baltimore with points west, south and north employed thousands of other workers. And all of these people provided an additional market for goods and services. New housing was constructed. Roads were extended into new areas. Master craftsmen and their journeymen produced consumer goods in such volume that they soon hired more helpers and began to call themselves manufacturers.

Baltimore's population quickly spilled over the city limits and by 1818 approximately twelve thousand people lived in the precincts of Baltimore County contiguous to the city. These "precincters" enjoyed the benefits of proximity to the city and its facilities without having to pay the considerably higher urban taxes. City officials wanted to bring these people and their tax resources under Baltimore's jurisdiction. Discussions of the question centered around coordinated planning as well as tax revenues. Many of the precincters preferred the low level of services in the county to the higher taxes of the city.

Although the precincters' protests stalled the process for several years, the state legislature in 1818 passed an annexation bill, adding thirteen square miles of county land to Baltimore City. The final decision was a political one. A Federalist-controlled legislature took the Republican precincters out of the county in the hope that Federalists would then dominate there and added them to the already heavily Republican city without changing its representa tion in Annapolis. The city sent two delegates and each county sent four to the state legislature. There city Republicans attempted to gain two additional delegates, but that amendment failed to pass the Federa'~ist legislature. So, in 1818, the city gained thirteen square miles, twelve thousand people and the benefit of their taxes, but had proportionally lower representation in the House of Delegates.

Many newcomers worked in manufacturing establishments that proliferated with the introduction of steam power for production and processing. Textile manufacturers pioneered the use of steam power before the War of 1812. Many of the textile factories were located outside the city. The owners generally provided living accommodations and sometimes garden plots for their workers. Early operations remained relatively small. In 1814, for example, Robert and Alexander McKim opened the Baltimore Steam Works Factory within the city limits. By 1820 they employed seven men, twelve women, and fifty girls aged eight to thirteen. In 1829 Charles Crook, Jr. opened the Baltimore City Cotton Factory with 200 employees. A few master weavers organized a cottage industry that employed men and women working at home. By 1829, over 100 master weavers engaged in this hiring procedure.

Other industries also converted to steam. Charles Gwinn opened the first steam powered flour mill directly on the wharves in 1813. Flour milling expanded rapidly after that. Baltimore exported wheat and flour in increasing quantities to South America and elsewhere. Coffee, sugar and copper came into the port. Several Baltimoreans opened sugar and copper refineries. Industrialization increased the demand for iron ore and coal. Baltimore imported these from western Maryland and the Susquehanna Valley.

Population growth necessitated the increase of various services of the city. In the early 19th century, many services and utilities represented a cooperative effort between private individuals and the city government. For example, fire protection was provided by the volunteer companies until the 1850s, but they were regulated by city ordinance. The Baltimore Water Company, incorporated in 1805 to increase the supply of water in the city, was formed by a group of investors including James Buchanan, Jonathan Fllicott, Solomon Etting, John Hollings, John McKim, and James Mosher. Although it was a private enterprise, the company was granted free use of Baltimore's streets and city protection for its property and facilities.

Baltimore pioneered in the field of street lighting when the City Council in 1816 authorized the establishment of the Baltimore Gas Light Company and contracted with its board of directors to install and maintain a system of street lights throughout the city. Although the network was not completed for many decades, Baltimore was the first American city to illuminate its streets with hydrogen gas instead of oil. Rembrandt Peale had introduced gas lighting to the city when he installed a system in his museum earlier in 1816. It created a sensation at the time. An account in the Federal Gazette and Daily Advertker written by its editor William Gwynn publicized the exper iment: ~ evening, for the first time, the citizens who attended at Baltimore Museum were gratified by seeing one of the Rooms lighted by means of Carburetted Hydrogen Gas. The effect produced by the beautiful and most brilliant light far exceeds the most sanguine expectations of those who had not before witnessed an illumination by similar means." Soon Gwynn joined with Peale to persuade merchant William Lorman, who served as the company's first president, architect Robert Cary Long, and banker James Mosher to form the Baltimore Gas Light Company. On February 7, 1817, the first street lamp was lighted at the corner of Baltimore and Holliday Streets.

Other municipal services besides utilities expanded as the population did. One of the most difficult tasks facing the city was poor relief. The rapid economic changes and large numbers of newcomers strained an already difficult situation to the point where, in 1818, Baltimore created a poor relief board known as the Managers of the Poor. The mayor appointed one board member from each ward. These members

had the authority to determine who needed aid from their own ward and to commit the indigent sick and crippled to the almshouse. The almshouse was administered by another group of appointees called the Trustees of the Poor. Public help never sufficed, and much of the burden fell on private charities, religious institutions, ethnic organizations, and in dividuals. The depression which began in 1819 worsened the situation even further.

In 1819 the nation's economy lurched into a decline that startled many because it followed what had seemed like strong prosperity. Actually, over-expansion, speculation, and mismanagement of funds by officials of the Second Bank of the United States were the roots of the disaster. In those days of convertible paper money, the U.S. Bank tried to improve its own condition by calling in gold and silver specie from state banks. This led to a severe shortage of specie in Baltimore as well as throughout the nation. The local situation was complicated by the fact that many bank officials had used the institution's funds for private speculative ventures. When the crash came, many businessmen faced financial hardship or failure. They included many of the city's leading merchants like politician and general Samuel Smith, former mayor James Calhoun, and James A. Buchanan who was president of the Baltimore branch of the national bank. Because many of these same businessmen were implicated in the scandals they faced both bankruptcy and the loss of the dominant position in politics that they had enjoyed for so long.

Baltimore also suffered stagnation in its maritime trade. Investment capital, always comparatively scarce in Baltimore, was even harder to come by during the depressed 1820s. Furthermore, men who possessed cash turned to industrial investments. These included former merchants as well as those with new fortunes made during the War of 1812. Buyers in the back country, who were also hit by the depression, began buying in New York City which could sell imported goods at lower prices because it lay closer to the British port of Liverpool. The port of New York grew at the expense of Baltimore. The worst blow came in 1825 when the opening of the Erie Canal gave New York City direct access to an enormous hinterland. After that, New York's volume of trade increased to a point where neither Baltimore nor Philadelphia could ever catch up again.

Such economic reverses meant hard times for Baltimore's workers. The lot of the nine teenth century laboring man was not a particu larly enviable one. He commonly worked six days a week, fourteen hours a day during the summer and sixteen during the winter. Wages ranged between $1 and $2 a day. An unskill ed laborer did well to bring home $1 per day.

Desperate for work, new immigrants often accepted even less. Construction and some other jobs were seasonal, with the result that the majority of unskilled workers could not earn more than $200 in a year. November through February marked the low point in employment and the peak of reliance on charity for food, clothing and wood. This scarcity of jobs and low wage scale sometimes led to bitter competition among native whites, the growing number of free black workers and immigrants. Everyone felt the tensions.

These strains were visibly reflected in politics, where change and redefinition marked the decades of the 1820s and 1830s. In Baltimore and the nation new leaders pushed innovations. Andrew Jackson's election to the presidency in 1828 was hailed by his supporters as a victory for the common man. Actually, the election signaled changes that had already begun throughout the country. More democratic suffrage requirements, officeholding by men

Left:

The only surviving volunteer company firehouse, that of the Independent Fire company built in 1819, stands at the corner of Gay and Ensor Streets in Old Town. The Venetian-Gothic bell tower was added in 1853.

Below:

Volunteer companies provided the city's fire protection until 1858, when the municipal fire department was organized. Here a company is shown fighting the burning of the Front Street Theatre in 1838








Left:
After the depression of 1819, the city, needing a larger almshouse, purchased "Calve rton,"which was located on Franklintown Road near Fdmondson Avenue. The two wings were added before this engraving was made in 1824 by Joseph Cone

from groups other than the old elite, and the growth of institutional services that benefitted ordinary people were taking place in Baltimore and elsewhere as part of a gradual change rather than a sudden revolution.

In Baltimore, the old political elite group dominated by General Samuel Smith had drawn its leadership largely from the mercantile class. The mayors who held office from 1808 to 1820, Edward Johnson and George Stiles, came from this faction. In 1818 a new suffrage law increased the eligible voters from all property-holding white males to all taxpaying white males. In 1819 the financial panic and the closing of many Baltimore banks resulted in a decline in popularity of many of the politically active men who were thought to be involved in irresponsi ble financial dealings. In 1820 John Mont gomery, leader of a new rival faction, defeated Edward Johnson's try for reelection.

Montgomery had come to Baltimore by way of Pennsylvania and Harford County, from which he had served as a Republican Congressman from 1807 to 1811. His subsequent tenure as Attorney General of Maryland and Delegate from Baltimore City gave him broad publicity. The appeal of his statewide connections, which led voters to hope he could effect economic improvement, and the disrepute of the old political leadership contributed to his victory. Much of his support came from Ward 4 where many of the textile workers lived and from the rapidly growing southern and western sides of the city where trade provided new jobs and led to the growth of new industries using raw materials from the hinterland.

In 1822, Edward Johnson recaptured the mayoralty. The bulk of his support came from the older established business area just north of the harbor basin and from the part of the city east of the Jones Falls which drew much of its income from maritime trade. But his return was brief.

John Montgomery recaptured the mayor's office in 1824. In this same year John Quincy Adams, representing the National Republican faction, defeated Democratic-Republican Andrew Jackson's first try for the presidency. Despite Sam Smith's alliance with Jackson on a national level, many of the new voters in Baltimore gave their support to Montgomery or to a third candidate for mayor, Jacob Small. The latter was a carpenter and building contractor who opposed the property taxes which were particularly hard on small property owners like tradesmen, craftmen and journeymen. Although the small property owners supported Jacob Small, the victory went to Montgomery.

Recognizing the growing need for urban services and the increasing voting power of the mass of ordinary people, Montgomery inaugu rated a program of deficit spending to pay for all the new undertakings. Montgomery's adminis tration pushed authorization of a new public school system for the City of Baltimore by the state legislature in 1826.

One of the major reforms of the Jacksonian era, public education was developed in many cities during this period. Democrats believed that all people should have access to an education. Elitists believed that public school systems should be established to teach the proper values to pupils who might otherwise fall prey to demogogic rhetoric. In 1827 the City Council approved Baltimore's public school system. Two years later, four small elementary schools began holding classes in houses rented by the city for use until proper schools could be constructed. The eastern and western sections of town each received one male school and one female school. Only white children could attend. In 1830, 3 percent of all white school-aged children took advantage of the new system. By 1840 a high school, the original

Baltimore City College, had extended the education available. In that year, 7 percent of all eligible children attended. High schools for female students opened in the eastern and western section of the city in 1844 and 1845. A "Floating School" on a large sailing ship was added to the public school system in 1857.

Schools, students and teachers in the system increased gradually until 1860 when 23 percent of those eligible (over 14,000) were taught by more than 300 teachers. Education was available but not compulsory. Children whose families needed income from their work generally could not take advantage of the new public schools. Most students came from middle-class families.

Democratic forces in Baltimore made themselves felt not only in programs like the school system but increasingly at the ballot box as well. In the mayoralty elections held in October 1826, the Smith group joined with the middle class property owners and mechanics in support of their candidate, Jacob Small. The combination succeeded and the electors chosen for that purpose, made Small mayor of Baltimore.

In 1827, Samuel Smith organized a group of Baltimoreans to work in Andrew Jackson's 1828 presidential campaign. The Smith Jacksonians and Small's faction split before the Baltimore mayoral election of 1828. For that campaign, Jacob Small realigned himself with Mont gomery's faction and gained much of the Irish Catholic and German vote which he used against the Scotch-Irish Presbyterian and Quaker supporters of the Smith faction. Small won reelection in 1830.

By 1831 taxes had risen so high that a group of 85 large property owners persuaded the legislature to limit Baltimore's taxing power. Small resigned and was succeeded by William Steuart, a stone cutter and builder.

Samuel Smith, throughout this period, had retained his seat in the United States Senate and his powerful position as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. Chief dispenser of federal patronage in Maryland, Smith arranged the appointment of James H. McCulloh as Collector of the Port of Baltimore, the most remunerative federal office in Maryland, and multitudes of lesser officials. Locally, the Smith faction gained by shifting its emphasis away from the ethnic considerations that Small and Steuart had been stressing. In 1832 Jesse Hunt, the Smith candidate for mayor, successfully used economic issues and identified himself with the city's working men. By that time, Smith had introduced the Jacksonian style political machine which required party fidelity in both national and local elections in exchange for patronage and other benefits of power. The tactics succeeded and Jesse Hunt became mayor. The Jacksonian party reigned in Baltimore.

Despite the political confusion, the final years of the 1820s saw the success of several major pioneering economic ventures in Baltimore. The Canton Company, probably the first planned industrial and residential commun ity in the nation, was chartered in 1828. Columbus O'Donnell, son of the sea captain who had brought the first cargo from China and owner of three miles of waterfront land directly east of Fells Point, joined with William Patterson, William Gwynn and other local investors to develop the new community. The charter gave the corporation the right to improve land belonging to the company "by laying out streets, etc., in the vicinity of Baltimore, on or near navigable water, and erecting and constructing wharves, slips, workshops, factories, stores, dwellings, and such other buildings and improvements as may be deemed necessary, ornamental and convenient." O'Donnell and Patterson were instrumental in bringing Peter

Cooper from New York to Baltimore to invest in this endeavor. He established an ironworks at the foot of Clinton Street.

An even more important event of 1828 was the laying of the first stone of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Baltimore businessmen viewed with alarm the advantage that the Erie Canal gave New York. Instead of trying to duplicate that, the Baltimoreans were willing to risk building the first commercial railroad and hope for its success. In February 1827 a group of twenty-five merchants and other civic leaders met at George Brown's house and determined to build a two-track railroad from Baltimore all the way to the Ohio River. This would yield large amounts of trade between Baltimore and points west.

The planners agreed to raise money by the sale of stock. Although the city bought some stock, control of the B&O remained in private hands. Directors included: Philip Evans Thomas, president; George Brown, treasurer; his father, investment banker Alexander Brown; Charles Carroll of Carrollton; William Patterson; Robert Oliver; future Jacksonian Congressman Isaac McKim; William Lorman; Solomon Etting; and future mayor William Steuart.

On July 4, 1828, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, by then a national hero as the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Indepen dence, turned over the first spadeful of earth for the laying of the first stone. On May 24, 1830 the B&O began regular service between Baltimore City and Ellicott's Mills, 26 miles away. Passenger fare was $.75 per ride.

Peter Cooper believed that the success of the Canton Company depended on the B&O Railroad. When the B&O directors said that they thought a steam engine could not manage the curves on the tracks, Cooper set out to disprove them. Working with scrap iron and borrowed wheels, and using gun barrels as boiler tubes, he built the Tom Thumb, the first successful steam locomotive. During the summer of 1830, Cooper took the directors of the B&O on a 13 mile run in the unbelievably fast time of 57 minutes. Shortly thereafter, the famous grey horse beat the Tom Thumb in a race of one or two miles along tracks just west of Baltimore, but only because the engine's fan belt slipped. Convinced by the Tom Thumb's performance, the B&O directors announced in January 1831 a contest offering $4,000 for the best engine. The York, built by Davis and Gartner, won. It burned anthracite coal and carried 15 tons at 15 miles per hour.

The steam engine succeeded and the B&O boosted Baltimore's economy and prestige. Tracks reached Frederick by 1831, Harper's Ferry by 1834, Cumberland by 1842, and finally Wheeling on the Ohio River in 1853. Benjamin Latrobe, chief engineer of the B&O, personally explored the route through the Appalachian Mountains. He built the Thomas Viaduct at Relay which still supports trains.

But even the success of the B&O could not solve Baltimore's economic problems. The cycles of apparent prosperity were actually inflation, and financial panics and depression continued. National banking policy still produced local havoc. President Andrew Jackson believed that the Bank of the United States had too much power and he was determined to destroy it. In 1833 he withdrew the government's deposits from that bank and put them in favored state banks around the country. The fallout from the destruction of the national bank included many local bank failures, a scarcity of money and widespread unemploy ment.

The Bank of Maryland collapsed in March 1834, and failures of numerous smaller banks and savings institutions followed. In April, Baltimore lawyer and former Jackson supporter Reverdy Johnson became chairman of the Whig Party,





Many of Baltimore's leading merchants and bankers participated in the founding of the B&O. (From left to right) Alexander Brown, his son George Brown, Solomon Etting, and Philip F. Thomas, the railroad's first president, were among them












Baltimoreans pioneered in the building of the first major American railroad, the Baltimore and Ohio. In l827agroupof local merchants and civic leaders
met at George Brown's house and made the decision to build the two-track railroad from Baltimore to the Ohio River









newly organized in Maryland to protect Jackson 5 economic policies. Johnson served on the board of directors of the Bank of Maryland.

Another group protested economic losses in a somewhat different fashion. Many small depositors found that their savings had disappeared during the bank failures. By February 1835, their protests had become violent. Fires were set at the Athenaeum and the Maryland Academy of Fine Arts. In April, mobs attacked the houses of trustees in whose hands the affairs of the Bank of Maryland had been placed. Reverdy Johnson's house on Monument Square was a primary target of the mob. On the first night, a small group broke a few windows. On the second night, a larger crowd came but dispersed after a speech by Mayor Jesse Hunt. The following night the crowd attacked with bats and stones the armed guards stationed around the house. Then they moved on to John Glenn's house, where they gained access, and proceeded to break up all the furniture and woodwork. The next night, they succeeded in bypassing the guards at Reverdy Johnson's house. They made a bonfire in the street of his furniture and his extensive law library. They raided the wine cellars of Johnson, Glenn, and others, and hawked fine wines at low prices to all takers. Eighty-three year old General Samuel Smith was asked to take charge and called for an assemblage of armed citizens. The fire companies joined the effort. Mayor Jesse Hunt resigned. Guards took up stations throughout the city and finally order was restored. In a special election, Samuel Smith became mayor, a post to which he was reelected in 1836. The voters turned once again to the hero of the Battle of Baltimore of 1814 because they could find no one else to bring peace.

Violence was not limited to isolated riots. Turbulence frequently accompanied labor protests that punctuated the 1830s. Many of the worst incidents occurred during protests by railroad workers. In 1829, riots among B&O workers left one man dead and several wounded. Two years later, a contractor building one section of the B&O absconded, leaving his workers unpaid. Two or three hundred workers attacked the rails and other company property with pick-axes, hammers, and sledges. Instead of winning their wages, many were arrested. In 1834 a group of B&O railroad workers attacked a contractor and several of his assistants. After they killed three of them, the militia moved in and arrested 300 workers. Frequently the workers involved in incidents like these were immigrants whom employers paid the lowest possible wages. They were so desperate for work and for income that they were forced to accept pay far below what native Americans considered enough to live on. Any delay in wages generally meant no food for the workers' families.

Low pay and the insecurity of the job market led to bitter competition among individual workers and between native white Americans, immigrants and black workers, both slave and free. Employers often replaced native workers with the more easily exploitable immigrants. Resentments grew stronger when employment was scarce. Some white workers, both native and foreign-born, wanted the best positions reserved for them with black labor excluded.

Frederick Douglass, later a leading aboli tionist, worked as a ship's carpenter in Baltimore. A slave, he was hired out to the owner of the shipyard, a Mr. Gardner. In his autobiography, he described an incident that happened to him as labor competition grew bitter:


After receiving more blows, Frederick Douglass managed to escape to his home. His master took him to see a lawyer to inquire what could be done about the incident. The lawyer replied that no recourse could be had unless a white man would testify. No black man's testimony was acceptable in court. No white man would dare testify against another white on behalf of a black man. So the case was dropped.

In light of the riots, labor violence, and individual attacks, Hezekiah Niles' comment in his nationally famous Register of September 5, 1835 is not surprising: "Society seems everywhere unhinged, and the demon of blood and slaughter has been let loose upon us!" All the conflict and danger led many to seek safety and protection within a limited, identifiable community.

Factionalization of society as a whole led to a greater cohesion within various groups themselves. Ethnic communities particularly developed a wide range of supportive and social organizations. The city's largest pre-Civil War ethnic groups, the German (including German Jews), the Irish, and blacks (both free and slave), all experienced a growth of institutions within their own community and a consciousness of group identity.

Germans had been coming into Baltimore since long before the Revolution. The descendants of some of those early immigrants held positions of political, social and economic leadership after the War of 1812. Mayor Jacob Small and a Jacksonian leader of the 1830s, William Frick, were of German descent as was a hero of 1814, General John Stricker. Their identity as individuals and as Baltimoreans far outweighed their German background in people's minds. The old German community had integrated into the mainstream of the city's life. But the arrival of many new immigrants, especially during the 1840s and 1850s, revitalized a sense of community among the Germans. Churches served as focal points for the city's ethnic communities. The German churches reflected the Americanization process in their addition of the English language. At the Reformed Church, in the midst of a public controversy, Dr. Michael Diffenderffer and thirty-five other members petitioned to have the sermon preached in English every Sunday afternoon. The Rev. Lewis Mayer delivered the first English sermon in September, 1818. The system of dual services continued until 1827 when the congregation dropped German altogether. Not until 1845 was another German Reformed church founded because a new wave of immigrants preferred services in their native tongue. The Zion Lutheran Church, which held German services, remained the only church of that denomination until the first English- speaking Lutheran congregation was formed in 1823. They worshipped in a schoolhouse on south Howard Street until 1826 when their

Above:

The collapse of the Bank of Maryland in 1834 and subsequent failures occasioned much popular criticism of the directors who were held guilty of irresponsible financial practices. This satire by Jack Downing was published in 1834


Right:

Reverdy Johnson, a lawyer and former supporter of Andrew Jackson, organized the Whig Party in Maryland to protest the president's economic policies

Above:
Frederick Douglas, an editor of the abolitionist newspaper North Star, lived seven years of his childhood, from 1825 to 1832, on Aliceanna Street in Fells Point. He returned later, still a slave, to work in a local shipyard, but in 1838 escaped, riding the train north to find freedom in New York




church was built.

Four additional English Lutheran congrega tions were formed in Baltimore be,fore the Civil War. Non-Germans began joining these very Americanized churches. The Roman Catholic Church had always resisted attempts to establish a separate German-speaking congregation. The large immigration of the mid-nineteenth century included Redemptorist priests who worked in the German Catholic community. With some help from missionary societies in Germany, Austria, and France (King Ludwig I of Bavaria is said to have contributed $4000), the congregation built St. Alphonsus Church at Park Avenue and Saratoga Street. St. James at Aisquith and Eager Streets, formerly an Irish parish, became German. Before the Civil War, two more churches were opened to serve Baltimore's six thousand German Catholics.

All the German churches had schools. In the Catholic schools, many of the teachers were members of religious orders: Redemptorists, Christian Brothers, or Sisters of Notre Dame. The Zion Lutheran Church school, in existence since 1769, experienced a major revival from the efforts of liberal Pastor Heinrich Scheib. When Scheib came to Zion in 1835, he found the school in such a state of deterioration that determined to establish a new German-English school. It opened in 1836 with 71 pupils. A secular school, only loosely affiliated with the church, the Scheib School attracted students of varied backgrounds. Just before the Civil War, over 400 pupils attended grades kindergarten through seven. The school lasted for sixty years. The St. Johannes German Reformed congrega tion brought several famous teachers to its school, among them Valentin Scheer and Friedrich Knapp.

Friedrich Knapp, one of the participants in the liberal revolution which failed in 1848 in Germany, arrived in Baltimore in 1850 and found employment as a tutor and bookkeeper in the house of William A. Marburg. In 1851 he became principal of the school at St. Johannes Church. Then in 1853 he opened his own school, known as Knapp's Institute, which grew in reputation so much that by the time of the Civil War over 700 pupils were enrolled. Knapp's Institute survived long enough for H. L. Mencken to attend during the 1880s. Mencken's description of Knapp survives in an essay entitled "Caves of Learning." Mencken wrote of his principal:

Gradually the German church and private schools died out, but not until the end of the 19th century when they lost a large share of their






Pastor Heinrich Scheib of the Zion Lutheran Church founded a school that lasted for sixty years



pupils to the German-English public schools that opened in 1879.

The immigration of the first half of the 19th century enlarged the German population so greatly that by 1860 roughly one-fourth of Baltimore's population claimed German descent. Although a clear differentiation between the old wealthy merchants and the new immigrants existed, the older group banded together to aid the newcomers, especially those in greatest need. The German Society, founded in 1783, was reorganized in 1817 in response to the terrible conditions aboard the ship Juf[row Johanna which carried 300 immigrant redemp- tionists. The latter were people whose labor for a specified number of years would be sold by the agent in exchange for their passage. The cold and hunger that the group suffered were so severe that General John Stricker led a movement to find a means to regulate the redemption system. Lawyers William Frick, David Hoffman and Charles Mayer joined him as did many merchants including Lewis Brantz, Benjamin Cohen, Jacob Cohen, Michael Diffenderffer, Jesse Eichelberger, Samuel Etting, Philip Sadtler and Lawrence Thomson. They chose Christian Mayer president of the German Society, which was now reconstituted specifical ly for the purpose of "the protection and assistance of poor emigrants from Germany and Switzerland and of their descendents."

Led by such prosperous and influential men, the German Society secured rapid gains. In 1818 they won legislation regulating the redemption system for German and Swiss workers. Under the new law, no immigrant was to serve longer than four years; those under 21 had to attend school at least two months a year; and no one could be held on board ship longer than 30 days. The German Society took cases of mistreatment of redemptioners to court. Their charitable work was so extensive that an 1832 law granted a portion of the $1.50 head tax collected for each immigrant to the Society for such purposes.

A law of 1841 required that a German interpreter be available in all Baltimore courts. In 1845 the German Society established the so-called "Intelligence Bureau," really a free employment agency for German immigrants. In 1846 the bureau located positions for 3500 applicants.

The huge immigration of the 1840s led to the establishment of a wide variety of clubs. The Germania Club, a literary and social club, had the most elite membership. Another club, the Concordia, became famous for its musical and dramatic presentations as well as its lectures and social gatherings. Singing clubs included Liederkranz, Harmonie, Anon, and the Germania Mannerchor. In 1849 a Sozial- demokratische Turnverein opened in Baltimore. It combined gymnastic activities with lectures on political and literary topics. The membership tended to be working-class and freethinkers. They frequently met opposition from the German clergy, except for the liberal Pastor Scheib of the Zion Church.

The German community supported numer ous newspapers, including several that survived into the Twentieth century. Der Deutsche Correspondent founded in 1841 by Friedrich Raine, when he was 19 years of age, became a daily in 1848. It supported the Democratic Party from its early years until World War I. The Baltimore Wecker founded by writer and poet Carl Heinrich Schnauffer in 1851, was the voice of the liberal refugees from the 1848 revolution. The Wecker was the only Republican Party newspaper in Baltimore during the Civil War.

The German Jews formed a very special but integral part of the pre-Civil War German community. Like the Protestant and Catholic Germans, Jews in Baltimore counted merchants and political activists among their number. The census of 1820 listed only 21 Jewish families in Baltimore. Although they had been participants in both the Revolution and the War of 1812, Jews could not vote or hold public office under Maryland law, which required a profession of Christian faith, even for jurors. In 1818 a legislator from Washington County, Thomas Kennedy, introduced a bill, finally passed in 1826, which changed that situation. Popularly called the "Jew Bill," the legislation stated that

Shortly after the passage of the new law, Baltimore businessmen Jacob Cohen and Solomon Etting were elected to the First Branch of the City Council.

Most Jews who immigrated to Baltimore before the Civil War came from Bavaria, where many German Jews lived and where they faced the greatest discrimination. Most of the Jews, like other Germans, arrived on the ships that carried Maryland tobacco to Germany on the return trip. By 1840 about 500 Jews had settled in Baltimore, many in the vicinity of Lombard Street between Lloyd Street in the west and the Jones Falls in the east. A number of Jews worked as peddlers when they first arrived. One of them was Moses Hutzler who emigrated from Bavaria in 1836. His three sons founded the department store which still exists.

Not until after the passage of the Jew Bill did members of the community establish a formal religious organization. The Baltimore Hebrew Congregation was incorporated in 1830. At first, members worshipped in a rented room above a grocery store at Bond and Fleet Streets. Their first rabbi, Abraham Rice, came to Baltimore from Bavaria in 1840. Five years later the congregation built the first synagogue in Maryland, the Lloyd Street Synagogue. Designed by Robert Cary Long, Jr., this building is the third oldest surviving synagogue in the United States.

Several thousand German Jews came in the 1840s and early 1850s, and the community added three more synagogues before the Civil War: the Eden Street Synagogue, Har Sinai and Oheb Shalom. The congregations held the same sorts of debates that their Christian counterparts did over Anglicization of language and Americaniza tion of practices.

Synagogues conducted schools. The first regular Hebrew school opened at the Lloyd

Street Synagogue in 1848. Joseph Sachs, a native of Bavaria, taught the classes. At the same time, Samuel Gump conducted a school at the Eden Street Synagogue. When Jonas Goldsmith, a graduate of the University of Wurzburg, replaced Gump, so many students attended that the school had to hire five teachers. In the 1850s, Mrs. Solomon Carvalho organized the first free school, a Sunday school which offered instruction in Hebrew, German and English.

While Jews participated in the numerous German charitable groups, they also organized some of their own, among them the Society for Educating Poor and Orphan Hebrew Children, and the Hebrew Ladies Sewing Society which made clothes for the poor. Social groups included the Young Men's Literary Society, the Mendelsohn Literary Society, the Y.M.H.A., and the Harmony Circle which held balls.

Thousands of people came from Ireland to Baltimore during the first half of the nineteenth century. By the Civil War, over 15,000 people born in Ireland lived in the city, as did innumerable children and grandchildren of earlier immigrants. The potato famine of the 1840s forced a massive emigration by a people facing death by starvation and disease. The desperate situation in Ireland drove thousands of people onto the ships headed for America. Most were rural people who arrived with little or no money and without urban skills. Many had to take the lowest paying unskilled jobs, especially the seasonal construction work. Some had contracted to work for years in exchange for their passage and could not accept higher paying jobs until the specified years had passed.

Of all the pre-Civil War immigrant groups, the Irish bore the harshest fate. A Baltimorean recorded in a journal the arrival of the immigrant ship Hampden in the spring of 1847: "The ship Hampden had just arrived, freighted with human misery and death. Six of her passengers died at sea, and there are about 60 more on board, languishing with fever and destitution." Those that did survive the trip often faced prejudice because of their poverty, their lack of education, and sometimes because of their Catholic religion.

An older Irish community in Baltimore joined together to help the newcomers. Even before the potato famine the Irish had faced the difficulties experienced by most immigrants. In 1803 Baltimoreans of Irish ancestry organized the Hibernian Society to provide financial, social, medical and moral assistance to newcomers. The society chose Dr. John Campbell White its first president and Thomas McElderry vice-president. In 1815 John O'Donnell, the sea captain who had participated in building Canton, assumed the presidency. In 1818, John Oliver was elected head of the group. The Hibernian Society counted some of Baltimore's most prestigious business and civic leaders among its membership: John McKim, Robert Oliver, William Patterson, John Pendleton Kennedy, and J. H. B. Latrobe who was general counsel of the B&O and founder of the Maryland Institute. Though most of these early leaders were Scotch-Irish Protestants, their Hibernian Society continued to provide aid as the immigrants became predominantly Catholic.

The Hibernian Society offered assistance in various forms. Sometimes it made cash payments to families in need. In 1838, for example, the society donated between $.50 and $20 to 105 families. In 1852 it gave money to 700 families. The funds came from membership dues and from the head tax paid by steamship companies. A portion of that tax was divided between the Hibernian Society and the German Society for their charitable work. For several years after 1852 the Hibernian Society operated an employment agency that placed at least 25 men and women a month.

The Irish immigrants coming to Baltimore arrived in a city with a long Catholic tradition. The first two archbishops, the Rev. John Carroll and the Rev. Leonard Neale, came from old Maryland Irish Catholic families. The parish churches played an especially important role in the lives of people uprooted from their familiar villages and thrust into an unfamiliar and impersonal city. Many of the newcomers settled around St. Patrick's Church on Broadway ~nd St. John's Church at Valley and Eager Streets. So many of Baltimore's Irish lived in the vicinity of the present City Jail that the area was known for a while as "Old Limerick." It should be noted that Baltimore was not a ghettoized city. Irish and German immigrants and blacks lived in all wards of the city. Often the Irish and the bIack~ shared alley housing behind the homes of the more prosperous residents.

Although extensive poverty meant that many Irish children had to go to work, several schools served the community. St. Patrick's School, the oldest parochial school in Baltimore, opened in 1815. In 1824, John Oliver bequeathed $20,000 to the Hibernian Society for the establishment of a free school for the poor children of Baltimore. He specified in his will that preference be given to those with at least one Irish parent and that no distinction be made because of sex or religion. It is estimated that before it closed its doors in 1891 the teachers of the Oliver Hibernian Free School educated 12,000 pupils. The Christian Brothers opened a free school at the St. Vincent de Paul Church and also ran the St. Peter the Apostle School and the Cathedral School for boys at Calvert Hall.

One unique fact about Baltimore's ethnic history is that the city was home to the nation's largest free black community of the antebellum period. Baltimore combined the population characteristics of a typical northern city and a typical southern city in its large numbers of both European immigrants and Afro-Americans.

The widely diverse black community in Baltimore was a mixture of slaves and free men and women. Urban slavery differed from plantation slavery in that cities offered a measure of freedom unknown in rural areas where slaves generally could not leave the property of their owner. In the cities, most slaves worked either as house servants or in some industrial or skilled trade. Some slaves hired themselves out, that is, found a job, received wages, and paid part of their wages to their master. With the remaining income, they provided for their own lodging, sustenance and amusement. The line between slavery and freedom blurred under such conditions.

An increasing percentage of Baltimore's black population became free from 1800 until 1864, when slavery ended in Maryland. In 1810, the census registered 3,713 slaves and 3,973 free blacks. By 1860, over 90 percent of the total 27,898 were free. Men and women worked in a wide range of occupations and received commensurately varying incomes.

The majority of blacks held unskilled jobs in homes, restaurants, and factories and on the docks and railroads. A substantial number of black men worked as draymen and wagoners and women as washers and ironers. A significant proportion of blacks worked in the skilled trades as blacksmiths, butchers, carpenters, cigar- makers, coopers, milliners, shoemakers, tailors, and so on. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, blacks dominated the barbering and caulking trades and also the catering business in town. A few blacks owned small commercial establishments such as confectioneries, drug stores, groceries and tobacco shops. One black doctor, Lewis Wells, reportedly worked in Baltimore before the Civil War. Blacks as well as whites taught in schools for both children and adults. Black clergymen were prominent as

community leaders.

Blacks, like immigrants, resided throughout the city, often sharing alley blocks with Irish and other immigrants. During the 1830s, 40s and SOs, most slaves and house servants lived in the north central part of Baltimore near the homes of the most prosperous whites. Laborers and wagoners tended to live in the central district near railroad stations, docks and shipyards. Many free blacks and slaves who hired themselves out lived south of center city, the less prosperous in wooden shacks that gave the appearance of a shantytown. The general condition of free blacks deteriorat ed over these decades as white workers pushed many blacks out of skilled and semi-skilled jobs. For example, many men who had labored as draymen or stevedores were forced into jobs as domestics or porters and received commensu rately lower pay. In 1858, whites rioted in an attempt to drive blacks from jobs in several shipyards. As the violence continued, some free men left Baltimore to seek work in other cities.

Churches played as important a role in the black community as they did in the immigrant ethnic communities. The Methodist and A.M.E. churches established earlier continued to prosper, especially Sharp Street and Bethel A.M.E. In 1824, William Levington, the third black man ordained as an Episcopal priest in the United States, founded St. James Church. From 1824 to 1827 the congregation worshipped in an upper room on the corner of Park Avenue and Marion Street. In 1827 the Bishop of Maryland, James Kemp, consecrated a church at Saratoga and North Streets. The congregation moved several times again before settling at its current location on Arlington Street.

The other major black church founded before the Civil War began as a mission. Then in 1850 the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church bought a building at Madison and Park from the Baptists. Much later, the congregation moved to Madison Avenue and Bloom Street. One minister who served at Madison Avenue, Hiram R. Revels, was elected to the United States Senate from Mississippi where he lived after the Civil War.

The churches provided much of the schooling available to blacks in Baltimore. Most churches conducted Sunday schools where rudiments of reading, writing and arithmetic were taught. The Sharp Street congregation had maintained a school since the late eighteenth century. Daniel Coker, who left Sharp Street to join the independent Bethel A.M.E. Church, di rected an African School which in 1812 instruct ed 17 students, and 150 in 1820. Some of the pupils came from as far away as Washington, D.C.

After 1820, when Coker left for Liberia, William Watkins, a former student, took over many of the students. Known as the Watkins Academy, his school lasted for 25 years. In the 1820s, several new day schools opened for black pupils. St. James Episcopal Church operated both a day school and a Sunday school. A school for black Catholic girls, St. Frances Academy, opened in 1828 under the direction of Father James Joubert and several nuns who belonged to the Oblate Sisters of Providence, Sister Elizabeth Lange who came from Cuba, Sister Elizabeth Balas who was a refugee from Santo Domingo, and Sister Rosina Bogue. English, French, religion, arithmetic, sewing, and embroidery and other subjects were taught to both day and boarding students.

Late in the 1820s, a Negro master from Fells Point, William Lively, was put in charge of the Sharp Street school. He renamed it the Union Seminary and introduced a liberal arts curriculum that included English, French, and Latin. He taught classes for both day and evening students and also conducted a free sabbath school for children on Sunday mornings and for adult women on Sunday afternoons.


A ticket from the Washington
Monument Lottery


Support for the schools came from the black churches, students' tuition money, and donations from interested white groups, especially Quakers, and individuals. Baltimore did not maintain public schools for black students, although both Boston and Philadelphia did. Ironically, black residents of Baltimore still had to pay the school tax. At least one petition against this by black taxpayers was turned down as were all efforts to convince the city to open public schools for black pupils.

However, needy people among the Negro population did receive aid from city facilities such as the almshouse where black residents were in approximate proportion to their numbers in the population as a whole. As with immigrant groups, this help did not suffice and blacks formed numerous mutual aid and benefit societies. Baltimore's blacks sought and won exceptions to the statewide prohibitions on meetings and on the establishment of societies by Negroes. In 1835, a committee of Negro ministers reported more than thirty benevolent institutions, among them the African Friendship Benevolent Society for Social Relief, associations of caulkers, coachmen, and mechanics, and many church organizations. Like the other ethnic communities in the increasingly factionalized nineteenth century society, blacks were turning inward to meet many of their needs.

In 1860 over 35 percent of Baltimore's total population had been born in Germany or Ireland or were Afro-Americans. This group of Baltimoreans provided much of the labor that went into the important building of new industries and the construction of port and transportation facilities that accompanied industrialization. With the exception of the Germans, whose leaders came primarily from the older, well established segment of the population, these large ethnic groups did not hold much political or economic power during the antebellum period.

The slums that grew because of the immigrants' poverty and the industries that spewed pollution into the air made the downtown area an undesirable place to live. Those people who could afford it began to move out of the central city business district to establish residential enclaves which were designed to provide a pleasant environment. Most notable among these was Mt. Vernon Square.

Mt. Vernon Square was constructed on land which George Eager purchased from Lord Baltimore in 1688. The estate passed on to his son John and then to John's daughter Ruth, who married Cornelius Howard. Their eldest son, John Eager Howard, donated part of what was known as Howard's Woods for the construction of the Washington Monument which began in 1815. Only the house of Nicholas Hitzelberger, foreman of the stonecutters and later keeper of the monument, stood nearby until 1829. Where the Peabody Institute now stands was the Bevan and Sons marble yard where workers cut and prepared the stone brought from the Ridgely quarries in Baltimore County.

In 1829, Charles Howard, youngest son of John Eager Howard, built a house on the future site of the Mt. Vernon Place Methodist Church. Howard's friends ridiculed his choice of location, saying that he might have to sell his home as a beer garden because his father allowed the public to visit the site of the monument and to hold military exercises and public meetings on the estate. Visitors picnicked by the monument. And, it is said, a site northwest of the monument served as a dueling ground.

When John Eager Howard died in 1827, the land, known as the Belvidere estate, was distributed among his heirs. They contributed the land for the park, laid out in the shape of a Greek cross, in 1831. The surrounding space was divided into lots and sold. By the 1850s, Mt. Vernon Place and Washington Place, the squares to the north and south of the monument, became the social center of Baltimore.

The rapid population growth spurred concern for planning the physical development of the city. During the decades preceding the Civil War, the government and several individual Baltimoreans made provision for maintaining open spaces within the ever more crowded city. Only a few houses had been built near the Washington Monument in 1839 when two builders, James and Samuel Canby, proposed a large-scale development of middle-class housing on the western outskirts of the city. They bought a 30-acre tract and offered a square of ground in the middle to the city as a public park. Franklin Square became the first of many similar small squares, followed by Lafayette, Harlem Park, Perkins Spring, Johnson, Madison and Collington. Landscaped boulevards such as Eutaw Place, Park Avenue and North Broadway were planned to serve the same purpose. The row houses for which Baltimore has become so famous soon lined the squares and boulevards where they offered an attractive alternative to downtown living.

The early suburbs were made viable by the beginning of an omnibus service in 1844. Within the first decade, Washington Square, Fells Point, Canton, Towsontown, Ashland Square, and Franklin Square all could be reached by omnibus. Their popularity increased after 1859 when the horsedrawn trolleys of the Baltimore City Passenger Railway Company began to link the new residential neighborhoods to the central business district. These nineteenth century suburbanites became Baltimore's first regular commuters.

Awareness of creating a pleasant environment also led to the establishment in 1860 of a Public Park Commission. Using tax money paid on the gross receipts of the street railway company, the Park Commission purchased the 500-acre estate Druid Hill from Lloyd Nicholas Rogers and began landscaping according to the plan of Howard Daniels, a landscape gardener and engineer. Daniels planned the park to provide picturesque views, wooded pathways and formal promenades, lakes for swans and boats, and a grand formal entrance at the gate at Madison Avenue. The official opening of Druid Hill Park took place on October 19, 1860. Several thousand of Baltimore's public school children marched in the parade. A military display, band music, a dedication address by Mayor Thomas Swann, the firing of a gun for each state and territory and a final salvo for the park all marked the occasion.

When Druid Hill Park was planned in the western section of town, the city purchased 29 acres in East Baltimore to add to Patterson Park. Most of the planned improvements had to be put off until after the Civil War when a lake, music pavillion, and 19 more acres of land were added.

Parks built for the use of all the citizens were symbolic of a broadening of life in Baltimore. During the antebellum period the government and individuals both established many institu tions with the wide variety of membership and purposes possible only in a large city with its diverse population. Facilities for education and entertainment received widespread support for all segments of the population.

In addition to the schools already discussed, numerous institutions and societies came into existence. In 1822 the Apprentice's Library was formed with the purpose of making books available to young people wanting to better themselves. In 1823 a number of Baltimoreans joined together to sponsor the construction of

an Athenaeum, whose rooms would be used for meetings and lectures for many years to come. The cornerstone was laid in 1824 at the site at the corner of St. Paul and Lexington Streets. In 1825 two other important and enduring institutions were incorporated: The Maryland Academy of Science and the Maryland Institute for the Promotion of the Mechanical Arts, now known simply as the Maryland Institute.

In 1829, the "New Theatre and Circus" opened on Front Street with a performance of a musical farce, "The Spoiled Child." Announce ments advertised the price of seats: boxes 50~, pit 25~, colored gallery 25~. Three thousand spectators attended the first night. During that same year, a group of Baltimoreans formed a temperance society to combat the evil influence of liquor on the town's citizens.

In 1839, a new subscription library appeared: the Mercantile Library Company. Initiation cost only $2, a sum much more readily payable than the old Baltimore Library Company's $50 fee. Several facilities came together nine years later in 1848 when the new Baltimore Athenaeum opened. Built with $40,000 raised by contributions, the building housed the merged Baltimore and Mercantile Library Companies and the Maryland Historical Society which a group of local citizens had organized in 1844. John Spear Smith, son of General Samuel Smith, served as the latter's first president.

One notable fact about the institutions established during this period is that many have survived to the present day. The educational and cultural institutions especially received sufficient support from the expanding city's private sector to allow them to prosper. Several important educational institutions opened their doors during this period. In 1846, Professor Evert Marsh Topping, whose unorthodox methods of teaching Latin had created great controversy at Princeton, opened a school on Garden Street and began teaching Latin to sixth grade students. After Topping's death, George Gibson Carey took over what became known as the Carey School and later as the Boys' Latin School.

In 1848 the School Sisters of Notre Dame began their work in Baltimore when they established a school for boarding and day students. In 1873 the academy purchased 64 acres from David Perine and Joseph Reynolds and began construction of the campus on North Charles Street. The college of Notre Dame of Maryland graduated its first class with an A.B. degree in 1899.

Loyola College opened in September, 1852 with 58 young men enrolled. The president, the Rev. John Early, S.J., and eight Jesuits comprised the faculty. After two and a half years of holding classes in two rented houses on Holliday Street, the college moved to its new home on Calvert at Madison, the current location of Center Stage, where the college remained until 1922 when it moved to Charles Street and Cold Spring Lane while the high school remained downtown. In the year 1857, George Peabody donated $300,000 to the city to establish an institute. His philanthropy and the Peabody Institute will be discussed later.

No account of the antebellum period would be complete without some mention of the "great happenings" of those years. From time to time a famous visitor or a major event drew enormous crowds. Rich and poor, members of all ethnic groups, turned out to mark certain grand occasions.

In late summer, 1824, the Revolutionary War hero, French General Lafayette, made a return visit to Baltimore. A delegation met his ship at the Delaware line and sailed with him to Fort McHenry where the formal welcome took place. Four ships fully dressed with flags and streamers sailed into the harbor to greet the

Horse-drawn trolleys such as this one shown in front of the Holliday Street Theatre began to link new suburban neighborhoods to the central business district after 1859

General and his son Washington Lafayette and Secretary of State John Quincy Adams. The crowd of dignitaries included Samuel Smith, John Eager Howard, Charles Carroll, and Maryland Governor Samuel Stevens. A later chronicler described the reunion with Revolu tionary War comrades: "The scene was one of the most impressive and heart-touching that was ever witnessed. All were convulsed into tears, but they were tears of joy and gratulation." The welcome in town was even more elaborate. Special arches, paintings and crowds lined the route. After the mayor welcomed him, Lafayette reminisced: "It is under the auspices of Baltimore patriotism, by the generosity of the merchants, by the zeal of the ladies of this city, at a critical period when not a day was to be lost, that I have been enabled in 1781 to begin a campaign, the fortunate issue of which has still enhanced the value of the service then rendered to our cause." All this endeared him even more to the city whose parades and celebrations continued for several days until Lafayette's departure.

Several years later, a crowd of 20,000 turned out to mourn John Adams and Thomas Jefferson who died on the same day, July 4, 1826, exactly fifty years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. On the morning of July 20, the tolling of bells announced the commencement of ceremonies. Businesses closed. The Battle Monument was draped with black shrouds. A funeral procession marched northward through the city to Howard's Park, turned through the Belvedere gate at the north and into the woods to a natural amphitheater where 20,000 people heard Methodist Bishop Joshua Soule deliver the eulogy.

The newer generation of politicians drew smaller crowds than did the Revolutionary heroes Baltimoreans welcomed Andrew Jackson in March, 1825 with a ball at Barnum's Hotel, a military presentation of colors, an open public reception and an evening at the theater. When Henry Clay came to town in May, 1828, the ship Patuxent carried a crowd down the river to greet him. Like Jackson, he held hours of open reception for all who chose to visit him. Clay, however, declined formal festivities like dinners and theater parties so commonly arranged for visiting dignitaries.

Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson both came to Baltimore in 1833. Clay typically received citizens individually but declined the invitation to a public dinner. On the other hand, Jackson's visit this time drew enormous crowds. Most people turned out not so much to see President Jackson as to catch a glimpse of the man with whom he met: Chief Black Hawk. The year before, Black Hawk had led the Sauk and Fox tribes in rebellion against Jackson's policy of removing all Indians from land east of the Mississippi River. Even in defeat, the chief defied Jackson magnificently at the conclusion of the hostilities, "I am a man and you are nothing more." The government imprisoned Black Hawk for several weeks and then took him on tour of the eastern cities to impress him with their strength. Two of his sons and several other prisoners accompanied him. Crowds expected to see a savage but discovered instead a patriarch, standing tall in a red-collared blue coat, wearing bright ear decorations and carrying the "medicine" skin of a sparrow hawk at his side. The press of people was so great that Jackson and Black Hawk had to move to Fort McHenry to carry on their discussions.

A less happy but very enthusiastic crowd assembled in Monument Square on May 23, 1846 to support the American annexation of Texas and the war that followed. Reverdy Johnson, General Sam Houston, and William Yancey, a member of Congress from Alabama, all addressed the Baltimore audience. The city contributed a unit of soldiers known as "Baltimore's Own" and three other companies which left the city on June 4 under the command of Col. William H. Watson. They fought at the battle of Monterrey and in other engagements until their term of service expired in May, 1847. Other Maryland companies fought throughout the war. The, Baltimore Sun, founded by Arunah S. Abell in 1837, did some extraordinary reporting of the Mexican War. Using relays of horses and riders the newspaper often brought stories before the official messengers did. In the spring of 1847 the Sun telegraphed to President James K. Polk word of the fall of Vera Cruz. Samuel F. B. Morse's first telegraph message had been sent from Washington to Baltimore only three years earlier.

A different sort of crowd assembled to welcome the Swedish singer, Jenny Lind, on December 8, 1850. Several thousand people waited at the depot and at Barnum's Hotel to catch a glimpse of the young woman who was taking America by storm. The great demand for tickets for her performances at the Front Street Theater led to an auction. Although the price had originally been set at $3, the first choice ticket sold for $100, and the sales finally averaged out at $7 a seat. Spectators were allowed to sit on the stage. On the night of the last concert, theater officials charged 12 1/2 cents for the right even to bid in the ticket auction. Even this financial chicanery did not deter people's quest to hear the famous "Swedish Nightingale."

In 1851, a foreign political leader, the exiled Hungarian patriot Louis Kossuth, drew cheering crowds who identified his struggle for national liberty with America's own. Kossuth had led the Magyars in 1848 and 1849 in their losing struggle against Austrian domination. Ice and snow notwithstanding, Baltimoreans paraded in his honor.

An assemblage of a rather macabre nature occurred in April, 1859 when 30,000 spectators turned out to witness the execution of four convicted murderers. The event marked the culmination of a legal drama. Three of the four convicted were young men of respectable parentage. Influential friends had tried to convince Governor Thomas Hicks to intervene. Twice he delayed the execution but finally he declined to lessen the sentence. Some called the execution a tragedy, others a victory for the impartiality of the law

One uniquely American festivity is the political nominating convention. Baltimore was a popular convention city from the 1830s through 1860. Good transportation facilities made the city easily accessible. Baltimore lay close to Washington, D. C., the practical residence of many of the leading delegates. Furthermore, in this border city neither the worst aspects of slavery nor too many abolitionists were visible. For all these reasons, Baltimore frequently witnessed parades of the politically famous and nominations of winners and losers throughout the antebellum period.

In 1831, in September, the Anti-Masonic Party met at the Athenaeum and nominated Baltimore lawyer, William Wirt, for president. The Anti-Masons, the first party to hold a nominating convention, made the secrecy of Masonry its primary concern, but were drawn into the anti-Jacksonian camp because Andrew Jackson was himself a Mason. The other anti-Jackson group, the National Republicans, also met in the Baltimore Athenaeum in December and chose Henry Clay to oppose Jackson's bid for reelection. The following May, the Democrats gave Baltimore a clean sweep of the convention trade when they assembled in the city to confirm Jackson's renomination and chose Martin Van Buren as his running mate. This group spilled over into the Universalist Church which seated 1600 people.

The Democratic delegates returned to Baltimore in 1835, met in the First Presbyterian Church and nominated Martin Van Buren, who followed Jackson into the presidency. In 1840, the party returned to nominate Van Buren for a second term. While the Democrats held their sessions in the Music Hall, the Whig Party rented the Canton Race Track, offered free hard cider, and invited Baltimore citizens to hear Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and others praise their candidate, William Henry Harrison, who won the election the following November.

In 1844 both the Whigs and the Democrats met in Baltimore. The Whigs assembled at the Universalist Church and chose Henry Clay to carry their party banner. When the Democrats met at the Odd Fellows Hall, the contest was between John Tyler who had proposed that the United States annex Texas and Van Buren who opposed the acquisition. A deadlock between the two finally resulted in the nomination of a dark horse, James K. Polk, who became president.

Only the Democrats came to Baltimore in 1848 when they met in the Universalist Church and nominated Lewis Cass of Michigan. This convention established the first national committee, which consisted of one member from each state and was charged with the job of running the campaign. Their techniques must not have been perfected as the Whig candidate, General Zachary Taylor, took the victory.

The Democrats returned to Baltimore in 1852 when five thousand assembled at the Maryland Institute and labored through 49 ballots. The result was a rather obscure figure, Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire. Later the Whigs also came to the Maryland Institute, and in 53 ballots, chose Mexican War hero General Winfield Scott, whom Pierce defeated.

In 1856, only the nativist third party, the American Party, convened in Baltimore where they nominated Millard Fillmore. The local strength of the Know-Nothings, the name generally used by the nativists, may have been responsible for the major parties' choices of other locations for their conventions.

In 1860 Baltimore more than made up for its lack of conventions in 1856. The year before the Civil War broke out, the Constitutional Union Party and two groups of Democrats brought their troubles to the city. By 1860 slavery was the dominant question in the country. Passions ran high, and many already believed that civil war was unavoidable. A group of men, mainly from border states, formed a Constitutional Union Party whose primary purpose was to remove the slavery question from national politics. Sam Houston, headquartered at Eutaw House, and John Bell of Tennessee, working from Barnum's Hotel, vied for the nomination. The party delegates, meeting in the First Presbyterian Church, chose Bell. Baltimorean John Pendleton Kennedy was a leading local supporter of this party that hoped for compromise but lost.

The Democratic Party divided so severely that its first convention, held in Charleston, adjourned without agreement on a candidate. The delegates reconvened in Baltimore's Front Street Theater on June 18, 1860. Unionists and secessionists faced each other for a second time. Sen. Stephen Douglas of Illinois, who proposed "popular sovereignty," whereby each state and territory would be allowed to decide for itself whether or not to have slavery, ran his campaign from Reverdy Johnson's house. The secession ists, who wanted the Democratic Party to endorse slavery without reservation, operated out of Robert Gilmor's house. Because both men resided on Courthouse Square, the area became the scene of rival speeches and bands, and crowds alternately cheering and booing. When the pro-Southern delegates found that they

could not carry the convention, they withdrew, reconvened at the Maryland Institute Hall and nominated John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky. This left the regular Democrats free to nominate Stephen Douglas. The only candidate not nominated in Baltimore in 1860 was Abraham Lincoln. Changing their name to the Union Party, the Republicans did come to this border state city in 1864 when Lincoln was renominated at the site of the 1860 Democratic cleavage, the Front Street Theater.

Baltimore's local politics was as confused as national politics was during the decades that preceded the Civil War. Confusion, disorder, and violence characterized the last antebellum generation. But through it all, there was a beneficial trend towards greater centralization of city services, facilities, and powers. This movement continued in the hands of whichever party or faction held power. Democrats, Whigs, and, later, Know-Nothings vied for control. Regardless of which group was in power, they presided over the construction of new public buildings, the extension of city streets, increasing governmental control of services and utilities, and a continuing drive for greater municipal authority and autonomy.

After the termination of Samuel Smith's mayoralty in 1838, a succession of Whigs and Democrats held the office, none for very many years. From 1838 to 1854, Baltimore had eight different mayors. In chronological order these were: Sheppard C. Leakin, Samuel Brady, Solomon Hillen, Jr., James 0. Law, Jacob G. Davies, Elijah Stansbury, John Hanson Thomas Jerome, and John Smith Hollins.

Following the riots of 1835 and the panic of 1837, the city faced huge administrative problems. For one thing, its tax collection procedures were unreliable. In its most prosperous year, 1836, Baltimore collected just over half of the total $295,000 levied. To remedy this situation the state legislature authorized the city to confiscate the property of delinquent taxpayers in 1841. For another example, before 1834, street repairs could be made only when every resident in the affected area agreed and paid two-thirds of the cost in advance. In 1834 the requirement was changed to approval by only two-thirds of the residents. And in 1836 the power of street extensions within the city was transferred from the state to the city. Only under Mayor Samuel Brady, in 1841, did Baltimore begin appointing street commis sioners with the power to initiate both construction and repairs.

Other municipal services, especially police and fire protection, were equally far from the professional calibre modern urbanites expect. In Baltimore, the daytime police remained separate from the night watch. Politicians appointed the policemen, only one-third of whom earned salaries. The other two-thirds' income came from fines collected for violations of city ordinances. Fire protection continued in the hands of the volunteer companies that were also undisguised political organizations. In order to stop the fights over which company would put out a given fire, the City Council in 1842 divided Baltimore into three fire districts and appointed over each a Chief Marshal with absolute authority in his area.

In politics, the transformation to Jacksonian- style machines took place in all groups. Politics became fun. Political parties offered steamboat rides, picnics, dances, free food and free liquor to their followers. One of the more gala events occurred in 1844 when the Democrats invited thirty thousand Baltimoreans to a picnic in Gibson's Woods and distributed free hard cider to all. On election days, the party faithful distributed circulars, transported voters to the polls, and sometimes even provided lodging for potential voters. They also fought for their



candidates, and election days were marked by much violence.

A common practice was "cooping," the rounding up of drunks, strangers, and anyone else who looked like an easy victim for the purpose of marching them from precinct to precinct to vote as ordered. The writer Edgar Allen Poe, who lived in Baltimore during part of this period, was probably the most famous person cooped during the city's electoral contests. Poe, who was the grandson of Baltimore's Revolutionary Deputy Commissary General, David Poe, died here in the Washing ton College Hospital in 1849, shortly after being cooped during the October elections.

One major cleavage was at least partially resolved before the end of the 1830s. The Democrats had remained split between the old Jacksonians like General Samuel Smith and his son John Spear Smith, longtime Baltimore merchants whose family connections played a role in their political ascendancy, and newer leaders like William Frick whose position was based on service to the party. By the mid-1830s, leading Democrats like Benjamin Chew Howard, John Eager Howard's son, were beginning to recognize the need for cohesion within the party. The appointment of Frick to the lucrative position as Collector of the Port of Baltimore symbolized the rise of the new faction. Frick reigned as the Democratic boss in Baltimore in the late 1830s.

A big gain for Baltimore City came in the Reform Act passed by the legislature in 1837. This gave Baltimore representation in the State Senate equal to that of each county and representation in the House of Delegates equal to that of the largest county. Continuing efforts by reformers to reduce the state budget and to modernize Maryland's constitution finally succeeded in 1851. The new order shifted apportionment in such a way that Baltimore and the populous counties of Western Maryland held the power. It also separated Baltimore City and County, making each an independent political unit. This constitution remained in effect until 1864.

By 1850 the Whigs were a dying party. Their last national effort came in the unsuccessful presidential bid of General Winfield Scott against Franklin Pierce in 1852. Their demise and the corruption within the ranks of the local Democrats led one former Jacksonian, later converted to the Whigs, to withdraw from politics. John Pendleton Kennedy declared, "Nothing can be more contemptible than the state of politics and management in Maryland. We have not a man in public office above mediocrity, and the whole machinery of our politics is moved by the smallest, narrowest, most ignorant and corrupt men in the State." Many men apparently agreed with Kennedy. The state was ripe for a new party. The first was a short-lived Temperance Party that swept Baltimore in 1853 and sent ten delegates to Annapolis. These men and their colleagues failed to gain prohibition of alcoholic beverages, and the party quickly declined in favor of a second new party, one promulgating a platform that more completely aroused people's ardor and loyalty.

The Know-Nothing Party began as a secret society whose members received instructions to say that they "knew nothing" if asked about the organization. Strongly nativist, the Know- Nothings served as a focal point for all the confusion and discontent resulting from the rapid industrialization, low salaries and poor working conditions, the massive immigration of the 1840s and 1850s, and the increasing violence and crime, all of which frightened people and seemed uncontrollable.

One group of victims were native American workers, whose wages and standard of living

were depressed because of competition, particularly from immigrants whose dire need forced them to accept long hours and little pay. The natives began looking back to what they believed to be better times. They talked about the heroes of the Revolution. Their contempo rary program emphasized immigration restric tion. They considered the Catholic Church to be an anti-American foreign power and talked about prohibiting Catholics and immigrants from holding public office. These fears resulted in irrational violence by followers of the new society that brought condemnation to the group.

In addition to their xenophobia, the Know-Nothings criticized corruption in politics and the growing national agitation over slavery, which they feared as destructive to national unity. In Maryland, their strong anti-sectional position attracted support from men who did not want to divide the Union over the question of slavery. Educated upper-class men like John Pendleton Kennedy and Anthony Kennedy, Henry Winter Davis, and Thomas Swann became Know-Nothing Party leaders and gave the group a respectability it did not possess elsewhere. Baltimore became a Know-Nothing stronghold in the late 1850s.

The Baltimore Know-Nothings ended their secrecy in 1854 when they announced Samuel Hinks as their candidate for mayor only two weeks before the election. Most campaigning was conducted inside the Know-Nothing lodges. To the astonishment of all and the consternation of some, Hinks won. The next year, Know-Nothings won all ten of Baltimore's seats in the House of Delegates. In the state at large they elected four of six Congressmen, 54 of 74 Delegates, and 8 of the 11 State Senate seats that were open.

In 1856, Baltimore elected a second Know-Nothing mayor, Thomas Swann, a former president of the B&O, and Maryland gave its majority vote to the Know-Nothing candidate for president, Millard Fillmore, who ran on the American Party ticket. Maryland was the only state that supported Fillmore. In 1857, Marylanders chose a Know-Nothing governor, Thomas Hicks, and in 1858, Mayor Swann won a second term and his party carried 29 of 30 City Council contests.

These elections were so marred with fraud and violence that Baltimore once again was referred to as "Mobtown." Clubs succeeded the volunteer fire companies as centers of political activity. Democratic party clubs like the Bloody Eights, Pluckers, Double Pumps, and Butt Enders physically fought the Know-Nothing Plug Uglies, Rip Raps, Gladiators, Stay Lates, Screw Bolts, Black Snakes and Tigers.

On election day, both Democrats and Know-Nothings used scare tactics against the opposition. Know-Nothings, for example, displayed pools of bloody water obtained from local butchers known as "blood tubs" to scare immigrants coming to vote for the Democratic candidate. In 1856 approximately 15 people died in the election day violence. In 1857 a Know-Nothing policeman was killed on election day. In that same year, the first ward Rip Raps greeted voters with a cannon. Both parties increased their votes by cooping strangers and drunks and then marching them from one polling place to the next under pain of injury or death if they did not vote the right way. Voting was not done in secret as people deposited large ballots, coded to their party's color, in a box in full view of everyone else present.

Despite the fraud and violence that soon discredited the Know-Nothings, the two men who served as mayors of Baltimore proved beneficial to the city and its development. They were efficient managers and did much to centralize the operations of the city government.

In 1854, after the Baltimore Water Company refused to extend its services into areas with new housing, Samuel Hinks directed the purchase of the facility and organized the municipal Water Department.

Over the years from 1853 to 1857, the city government consolidated the day police and the night watch and organized four police districts under one city marshal. Policemen, about 350 of them, received their appointments from the mayor, often as a reward for political service.

In 1857, Mayor Thomas Swann created the office of city comptroller. One result was increased efficiency in the collection of taxes. In 1858, Swann replaced the volunteers with a salaried municipal Fire Department, adminis tered by a Fire Board appointed by the mayor. In 1859 the Swann administration granted the franchise for the Baltimore City Passenger Railway Company. Within a few months, Baltimore had 22 miles of tracks and 65 passenger cars. All these measures, and many similar ones, aided in the ongoing expansion of Baltimore.

Despite the effective measures of Hinks and Swann, the bigotry, corruption and violence of the Know-Nothings soon led to organized opposition. In August 1857 the Baltimore American called for a town meeting to discuss the problems of corruption and disorder. This meeting and the Know-Nothing victory in 1858 resulted in the creation of the City Reform Association by old elite Baltimoreans, often Democrats. Statewide, the Know-Nothings were declining. In October 1859, Democrats regained control of the Senate and House of Delegates. This legislature, responding to a request by the Baltimore reformers, took control of the city police away from the mayor and put it in the hands of the state government. They also voided the results of the 1859 election on grounds of fraud and unseated Baltimore's Know-Nothing delegates.

In the mayoral election of October 1860, reform candidate George William Brown, a member of the Baltimore banking family, defeated Know-Nothing Samuel Hindes in a landslide. Reformers also gained control of the City Council. Sadly, the reformers had little opportunity for real reform as the Civil War broke out a few months later. As war approached, many former Know-Nothing leaders moved into the Unionist camp to try to deal with the crisis.

On the eve of the Civil War, Baltimore was truly a city divided. Half northern, half southern, Baltimore's heritage included abolitionism and slavery, old southern families and recent immigrants, industries and remnants of a landed aristocracy. About sixty percent of Baltimore's trade was with the north. At the same time Baltimore was considered the southern city with the most manufacturing. In 1860, roughly one-fourth of Baltimore's population had been born in Europe, a bit less than in many northern cities, a bit more than in most southern cities.

Twelve percent of all Baltimoreans were black, most of them free. Northern cities had only small black populations. Southern cities repressed free blacks, fearing the growing number of uprisings and escapes. As 1861 began, some Baltimoreans supported Lincoln while others talked of secession. Most stood in between those extremes. When war broke out, Baltimoreans fought for both North and South. Families, friends and business partners split. Baltimore was a city divided during the Civil War.

The conflict had been a long time coming. Post-Revolutionary abolitionism resulted in free states in the North and slave states in the South. In Baltimore, slave owners and abolitionists lived side by side. Late in the eighteenth century, a Baltimore chapter of the Maryland Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery was

established. The membership, although heavily Quaker, included many prominent Baltimor eans like Philip Rogers, Dr. Geor£e Buchanan, Samuel Sterett, and Alexander McKim.

During the 1820s, an abolitionist of national renown, Benjamin Lundy, lived in Baltimore and published the nation's only exclusively anti-slavery newspaper, The Genius of Universal Emancipation. His printer, Daniel Raymond, ran for the City Council in 1826 but was defeated. In 1829 and 1830, William Lloyd Garrison came to Baltimore to work as Lundy's co-editor. Garrison, for the first time, lived where slavery existed and the experience led him to take a more extreme anti-slavery position. An article Garrison wrote against Francis Todd, the owner of a slave ship, resulted in a libel suit. Garrison was convicted, was unable or unwilling to pay the $5000 fine and instead spent several months in the Baltimore jail. After his release, Garrison moved to Boston and on January 1, 1831 issued the first edition of his own famous anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator. Although Lundy remained a gradualist, even that position was becoming unpopular in Baltimore and he moved the Genius to Washington, D. C.

After 1830, the few abolitionists left in town were shunned by much of the community. A small abolitionist paper, The Saturday Visitor, was viewed as an outrage by most citizens. Baltimore's most vocal abolitionist of the 1840s and 1850s, William Gunnison, had to close his mercantile establishment in 1851 because the local bankers refused to do business with him. Undeterred, he campaigned for the Republican Party in 1860, when only 1087 Baltimoreans voted for Lincoln. During that election, the few Republicans that dared campaign had eggs and bricks thrown at them. The one Republican newspaper in town, the Baltimore Wecker, voice of the German liberals, was the target of mob attack a few months later.

As abolitionism became suspect and as popular fear of the increasing number of free blacks grew, more and more Baltimoreans became involved in the movement to "col onize" free blacks in Africa. The American Colonization Society began in 1816. In 1831 a group of Baltimore businessmen founded the Maryland State Colonization Society "to promote and execute a plan to colonize (with their own consent) the free people of color in our country, either in Africa or such other place as Congress shall deem most expedient

Many prominent Baltimoreans, including Solomon Etting, John Eager Howard, John B. Latrobe, and Luke Tiernan, actively supported the effort to send people to the Society's colony at Cape Palmas, known as Maryland in Liberia. Benjamin Lundy and other former abolitionist leaders became active once abolitionism was impossible in Baltimore. Despite heavy propaganda and expenditures, no more than 1,250 people were convinced to make the move. Most free blacks agreed with the resolution passed at a meeting of black Baltimoreans in 1831: "that we consider the land in which we were born and in which we have been bred our only true and appropriate home

By 1860, most Baltimoreans were less interested either in destroying or in maintaining slavery than they were in the question of whether there would be war. Republicans were feared, because they were considered radicals. In the election, John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, the nominee of the southern Democrats, carried Baltimore, as did the reform Democratic candidate for mayor, George W. Brown. The year 1860 saw a realignment in Maryland politics because of the desire to avoid war, the fear of Republicans and also free blacks, and the collapse of the Know-Nothing Party. Many former Know-Nothings, consistent with their earlier position, became Unionists. The

Democratic Party revived its strength in Baltimore and throughout the state. Democrats tended to favor states' rights, including the South's right to secede. Unionists, including the slaveholders among them, opposed secession and also, before the fighting broke out, generally opposed war.

The year 1861 was destined to be an agonizing one for Baltimore. The city was suspect in the North because of the pro- Southern leanings of some of its residents. As the year progressed, Baltimore fell into increasingly greater disrepute in the North. The first blot on Baltimore's reputation came from what was probably a non-event. When Abraham Lincoln left Springfield, Illinois early in February to go to Washington for his inauguration, the detective Allan Pinkerton warned him that there was a plot to kill him when he passed through Baltimore. Lincoln was due to pass through the Monumen tal City around noon on February 23. Because an ordinance forbade railroad engines from traversing the city, Lincoln was to ride from the Calvert Street Station of the North Central Railroad to the Camden Street Station of the B&O in a horse-drawn carriage. Pinkerton asserted that a group of assassins would approach the carriage and kill the president- elect. This would then be the signal for Southern sympathizers to seize Washington, D. C.

Lincoln resisted cancelling engagements at Philadelphia and Harrisburg but was finally convinced to leave Harrisburg early in order to traverse Baltimore under cover of darkness. Taking a Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore train, he arrived at the President Street Station at 3:30 A.M. A team of horses pulled his sleeping car silently through the streets of Baltimore. The group departed from Camden Station at 4:15 A.M. The next day, when crowds lined the streets to see the new president, he was already in Washington. Baltimoreans generally were offended. Later, Pinkerton was accused of inventing the plot to gain publicity for his detective agency. No proof has ever been found that the plot really existed.

April 1861 was marked by violence in Baltimore. One week after the first shots of the Civil War were fired at Fort Sumter on April 12, the first deaths of the war occurred in Baltimore. On April 19, the Massachusetts Sixth Regiment

arrived in Baltimore on its way to Washington, D. C. Many residents objected to their transit and barricaded the streets between the President Street Station and the Camden Station where they were expected to march. Although Mayor George Brown walked at the head of the line of soldiers and Police Marshal Kane at the rear, bystanders began throwing rocks. Soon somebody fired a shot. The riot was on and, before it ended, four soldiers and twelve Marylanders lay dead, the first casualties of the war.

On the following day, a mob attacked the Wecker office, because of the newspaper's Republican stance, and destroyed the press of Sinai, a German-Jewish monthly edited by Dr. David Finhorn, an abolitionist. When word came that additional troops might be headed for Baltimore some of the authorities, fearing further violence, burned all the railroad bridges north of the city. Mayor Brown and Maryland Governor Thomas Hicks met with Lincoln and requested that no further troops be sent through Baltimore. Lincoln agreed, and temporarily troops going south bypassed the riot-torn city. Calm returned slowly and pro-Union sentiment began to reassert itself.

Then on May 13, Union General Benjamin Butler and one thousand troops arrived in the city. When Baltimoreans awoke the following morning, they found the unit encamped on Federal Hill, setting up weapons designed to ensure Baltimore's loyalty to the Union. General Butler issued a series of proclamations, among them that his troops would enforce the law, that armed men were not to assemble, that arms and ammunition headed south to aid the Confede rates would be seized, and that no one was to display Confederate flags or banners. After this time, federal troops began to pass through Baltimore again.

Once it was clear that there was to be war, pro-Union sentiment began to assert itself more strongly. By the spring of 1861, the Know- Nothing and Constitutional Union parties had collapsed and the Democrats were split between unionists and secessionists. On May 23, 1861 a convention met in Baltimore to organize the Union Party. Brant Mayer became chairman. The new Maryland party opposed secession, endorsed the federal government's right to use force to preserve the Union, and supported Lincoln's war policies. At a special election held in June, Marylanders chose members of the

Unionist Party to fill all six of the state's Congressional seats. In August, the party convened in Baltimore and nominated Augustus W. Bradford to oppose the States Rights Party candidate, Benjamin C. Howard, for governor.

Before the November victory of Bradford and the Unionist candidates for the State Senate and House of Delegates, there was some fear that pro-Southern forces in Annapolis would try to get Maryland to secede and join the Confederacy. The Union would not tolerate a Confederate state between the northern states and its capitol. Operating under Lincoln's suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, federal forces took into custody a large number of Marylanders who were merely suspected of harboring pro-Southern sentiments. The most important case was the arrest of John Merryman of Cockeysville, who was imprisoned in Fort McHenry for seven weeks before his release was secured, probably with the help of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney. The inventor and builder of railroad cars, Ross Winans, who was a member of the House of Delegates and favored secession also served time in Fort McHenry. Police Marshal George P. Kane was imprisoned there too and the federal government took over the city's police force. Many other Baltimore officials, including Mayor George Brown, and Delegates Severn Teackle Wallis and Henry M. Warfield spent time in prison. Once the elections of November 1861 put Unionists in power in the state government, Northern fears that Maryland would fall into the hands of secessionists subsided and the repression grew less harsh. Gradually the federal authorities released the civilians and Fort McHenry housed predominantly military prisoners through most of the war.

The Union Army maintained an active presence in Baltimore throughout the war. Well-equipped military establishments stood on Federal Hill, which by the end of 1861 held fifty heavy cannon, and at Fort Marshall just east of Patterson Park. Army encampments appeared in Druid Hill and Carroll Parks, in Lafayette Square, near the McKim mansion, and on the grounds of the Maryland Agricultural Society around the present corner of Charles and 27th Streets. The Army brought Confederate prisoners taken at Antietam and Gettysburg to Baltimore. By 1863, Fort McHenry housed 680 southern prisoners and the Baltimore City Jail an additional 700. Pro-Confederate Baltimoreans sent clothing, food, blankets, and money to the prisoners.

The federal government confiscated the estate of General George H. Steuart, Confed erate States Army, and turned it into Jarvis Hospital. Located near Mt. Clare Station, the hospital was protected by a nearby ridge. Other large hospitals were located in Patterson Park, in the National Hotel near Camden Station, and in the Union Dock on Pratt Street.

Although the situation eased somewhat after 1861, pro-Confederate Baltimoreans felt repressed by the federal occupation. Display of Confederate banners was forbidden. The most famous pro-Confederate newspaper, The South, and eight others were suppressed. Organiza tions and clubs run by Southern sympathizers were closed. The occupying army wanted to ensure that northern soldiers' lives were not endangered because of pro-Confederate activity in Baltimore.

Baltimore men joined the armies of both the North and the South. No exact figures are available. One estimate is that thirty thousand people left Baltimore during the Civil War, some to fight, some to live where there was less danger of war. From Maryland as a whole, roughly sixty-three thousand men, including nine thousand blacks, served in the Union forces and twenty thousand fought for the Confederacy.

Very little military action took place in the

vicinity of Baltimore. Fighting near Frederick in July 1864 and the Union defeat at Monocacy made Baltimore fear that the Confederates would next attack Baltimore. Women and children fled the city. Businesses loaded their money and valuables onto ships in the harbor. The attack did not come, however, because the Southern troops headed towards Washington.

Military action took place within the current city limits only during the raids of Confederate General Bradley T. Johnson and Major Harry Gilmor. Just before the Battle of Monocacy, General Johnson's cavalry brigade and the Baltimore Light Artillery received orders to cut off Baltimore and Washington from the north and then release over fifteen thousand southern prisoners detained at Point Lookout, Maryland. Johnson's men rode from Frederick through Westminster and on to Randalistown, Reisterstown and Cockeysville. Following the Northern Central Railroad tracks, they destroyed bridges, ripped out track, and pulled down telegraph wires. Then they rode into Towson and south along Charles Street to burn the summer home of Maryland Governor Augustus Bradford, located where the Elkridge Club now stands. Next they rode west to the Northern Central Relay House by Lake Roland, destroyed more railroad equipment, and pushed on through Owings Mills towards Washington, destroying B&O property along the way.

The arrival of northern reinforcements forced abandonment of plans to free the Point Lookout prisoners and to attack Washington. Before the Confederates turned south from Cockeysville, Johnson ordered Major Harry Gilmor of Baltimore County to take the 135 men of the First and Second Maryland Cavalry to raid the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad. They rode through Texas and Timonium and on along the Dulany Valley. In Kingsville they burned the farmhouse of Ishmael Day who refused to lower the United States flag at their command. Then, at Magnolia, they captured and destroyed two trains and took five Union officers prisoner. They returned south along the Philadelphia Pike. At Towson, they encountered a group of Union cavalrymen whom they chased down York Road as far as Govans. Then they rode west through Riderwood and the Green Spring Valley, turned south down Reisterstown Road, cut across to Randallstown and rejoined General Johnson at Poolesville.

The major political development of 1864 was the passage of a new constitution for the state of Maryland. More than a year after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation went into effect in rebellion areas, Marylanders voted to hold a convention to write a new constitution. The document, which passed by a narrow margin in October, ended slavery in Maryland, set up a system of test oaths and voter registration, and reapportioned the state in such a way that Baltimore increased its representation in the legislature. Democrats opposed the constitution and argued against Unionists using dire predictions about the future of blacks without slavery as a means of control. The constitution went into effect on November 1, 1864, and the war continued.

On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. The remaining Confederate forces surrendered within a few days. Finally, the war had ended. On the night of April 14, John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln as he watched a performance at Ford's Theater in Washington. Most Baltimoreans mourned their dead president. Then, like the nation as a whole, they began the long, slow, and painful process of reunification.