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authority and by my independent act, a force adequate to the pro-
bable necessity which menaced the occasion. I accordingly left
the full measure of accountability with the Mayor and his subordi-
nates. How fearful that accountability was, the sanguinary deeds
of that election day have sufficiently proved. Again party ani-
mosity run riot throughout the city; the most desperate encount-
ers look place, in which hundreds of infuriated partizans were en-
gaged; arms of all kinds were employed; and bloodshed, wounds,
and death, stained the record of the day, and added another page
of dishonor to the annals of the distracted city. I retired from the
scene, convinced that all this might have been prevented, and not
without a painful sense of duty unfulfilled.

A year glided away, and with the fall of 1857 the political ele-
ments were again stirred for the election contests or the season.
In the meantime the civil condition of the city, had become more
sensibly demoralized. The press without distinction of party was
teeming with every days report of wrong, outrage, violent encount-
ers of partizans, desperate assaults and homicides. These things
thus grouped, are but the catalogue of deeds transpiring in rapid
succession, and culminating in frequency and ferocity, as the day
of the municipal election drew near.

Since the elections of the preceding year, a new and enlarged
organization of the city police had been made, and I was not with-
out hope, that it would exert a conservative force, in some rational
proportion to the emergency of the occasion; I was assured by
numerous gentlemen of the city that they expected nothing of the
sort, and they referred to the daily record of violence as abundant
proof of its inefficiency to subdue even preliminary disorder.
The day of election came and passed, and although the bloody
scenes of the preceding year were not re-enacted, violence was
every where in the ascendant; outrages were perpetrated with en-
tire impunity, and many thousands of the citizens were, by causes
beyond their individual control, deprived of the exercise of their
suffrage. In a word the Democrats of the city, both native born
and naturalized, were, to an extent that a few years since, would
have been absolutely incredible, virtually disfranchised. Facts
exist, and are available in abundance for the verification of what 1
thus assert, and publicity has been given to current outrages of the
day in one ward, of the city, (and that ordinarily one of the most
reputable,) attested by the vouchers of many highly respectable
citizens.

The experience of that clay was presented to me by several emi-
nent citizens of Baltimore, as the sufficient proof, that the munici-
pal authorities were wholly inadequate, from some cause, to cope
with the fierce organization which held absolute control of the
polls. I was assured and convinced the people of Baltimore were
inextricably involved within the grip of a dilemma. On one side
was a party disfranchised by lawless violence, with which it was