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30 Board of Public Works
hanna Railroad Company. It appointed a majority of the directors "and thus could
appoint all the officers and have the control of everything else."23 As to those companies
where the state did not have such direct authority, Howard opined that under its
general police power the state "had the right to see that no chartered company holding
under their laws, inflicted injury instead of benefit upon the community." Those com-
panies were therefore not beyond all state control. The moment a corporation became
a nuisance instead of a benefit, he said, "the State had a right to pass necessary laws
to bring back that company into a faithful performance of that duty." Those laws could
be enforced if necessary, he added, by proceedings to forfeit the charter.24
The debate dragged on the rest of that day, 15 April 1851, and much of the next,
largely among delegates Davis, Schley, Howard, and Thomas Beale Dorsey of Anne
Arundel County. Most of the time was taken up by a monologue delivered by Dorsey,
then chief judge of the Court of Appeals, whose speeches constitute more than thirteen
pages (of very small print) in the convention debates. Judge Dorsey, a strong advocate
of the Thomas proposal, pointed out that it involved more than a mere transfer of the
duties presently committed to the state agents. In addition to attending stockholders'
meetings, the board would be charged with exercising a diligent supervision over all
public works in which the state had an interest as a creditor and with performing
"such other duties as may be required by law." He envisioned personal inspections
and inquiries by the commissioners and the urging, to the extent of their power, of
"such changes in the operations of the companies, the construction of such new works,
or completion or discontinuance of old ones, the appointment of other and better en-
gineers and officers, if occasion required it, the reduction or increase in the number
of officers or agents in the service of the companies, or of their salaries or compen-
sation." Indeed, he said, their duties were to do everything "to the extent of their
influence and authority, to carry out the designs of the legislature in the creation of
those companies."25
Dorsey then turned to the political issue, which he assumed to be the important
one. A majority of the convention delegates (55 of 103) were Whigs. Moreover, the five
current state agents were all apparently Whigs, and Dorsey discerned an underlying
suspicion among the Whig members of the convention that if a new body were to be
popularly elected its members might be Democrats. He regretted, he said, that the
Thomas proposal "was regarded by the whigs of this body as a political device, resorted
to by the opposite party, for partizan purposes."26 Such a suspicion, he said, was wholly
unwarranted. Indeed the likelihood was, as Harbine had earlier suggested, that the
election would produce two Whigs and two Democrats with the treasurer casting a
tie—breaking vote. As for the treasurer, an official to be elected by the General As-
sembly, Dorsey argued that:
from the nature of his office and his incessant occupation in the discharge of its duties,
[he] would be so far withdrawn from the politics of the day, that should any question of
party politics ever arise between the commissioners, which he could not expect from the
nature of their duties, it cannot but be apprehended that his umpirage will impartially
and justly adjust the controversy between them.27
23. Ibid., p. 414. This was true with respect to the C & 0 Canal Company, but not the B & 0 Railroad
Company. The state was entitled to appoint but ten of the thirty directors in that company, with Baltimore
City appointing eight and the private stockholders electing twelve.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid., p. 428.
26. Ibid. Dorsey was apparently a Whig himself, for after discoursing a bit on the proper limits of parti-
sanship, he "expressed regrets that whispers of his political friends around him, too audible not to have
reached his ears, had informed him that he was not, by them, any longer regarded as a whig, but as one
who had gone over to the enemy." He utterly rejected such a suggestion and asserted that he was merely
"faithfully discharging a positive duty." Ibid., p. 429.
27. Ibid., p. 428.
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