after revolution to 1805 87

corded facts. Scharf says⁴¹ that it was a severely
dignified bench.

There was no special bar for the Court of Ap-
peals in the eighteenth century, or before 1805.
Its bar was that of the General Court and the
Court of Chancery. Annapolis was still, until the
last decade of the eighteenth century, the center of
the bar of the state, but in the last decade Balti-
more's rapid growth centered the chief work of
the profession there, and a number of lawyers left
Annapolis for it. More than half of the lawyers
had left by 1790, says Scharf.⁴² But generally
speaking, the lawyers from one part of the state or
another who practiced in the General Court, were
those who argued the cases in the Court of Ap-
peals. Those who came from a distance helped
to build up the custom of Mann's Hotel, later
known as the City Hotel, on Conduit Street, in
Annapolis, which was to become almost as im-
portant a center of the bench and bar of the Court
of Appeals as the court room itself. The hotel
was opened just prior to the Revolution, first in a
two-story house which had been the residence of
Lloyd Dulany, and later through buildings on
Conduit Street, as far as the Duke of Gloucester
Street. Mann was proprietor during the Revolu-
tion, and purveyed copiously for the official sup-
per given upon General Washington's resignation
of his commission as Commander-in-Chief.

A change in the court which probably seemed
to contemporaries much more revolutionary than
that which took place in 1776, came to pass in

41. Scharf, History of Western Maryland, I, 382.

42. History of Baltimore City and County, 708.