Chapter 5
 
 

Suspended between memory and hope
 

I. Begins with the ceremonies in 1828 beginning the C&O canal (JQ Adams) and the B&O RR (C Carroll of Carrollton)
 

II. Contrasts ceremonies with life of Frederick Douglass on Lloyd plantation. [Douglass born in Feby 1818]
 
 

Concludes: "After 1815 no American state portrayed as vividly as did Maryland the contrast between slavery and steam power, past and future, convention and change---between what Ralph Waldo Emerson called the party of memory and the party of hope."
 

III. Baltimore-
 

a) 1815 Washington Monument, portrays Washington resigning his Commission in Annapolis; battle monument (both not completed until well into the 1820's).

discusses architecture (Mills, Long, Godefroy, Latrobe) Marchant's exchange, most important building [when built?], thus by Emerson's visit [when?, chk Bell, 1970 article, MDHM] Athen's of America (1816)
 

notes Jared Sparks and Unitarians, vibrant intellectual life of the city;
 

esp the Delphian Club, Harper, Wirt, Neal, Thomas W. Griffith (once imprisoned by the French); thus Bright literary scene in Baltimore; argues it faded because of slavery (p. 191); over? by late 1820's?
 

notes Peale's museum, gas lights, gaslight company (1817); founding of the medical college, instruction in law given by David Hoffman (1817-1823) (1812 new charter for University of Maryland based in Baltimore--see George Calcott's history); ultimately Hoffman left Baltimore for Europe to write fiction because enrollments were low.
 

Thesis: Intellectual and artistic life in Baltimore competed unfavorably with pressing material problems (p. 196), [but does not really show that population is leaving the rural counties]
 

[trying to show Baltimore, rest of Maryland, struggling with competition from European manufacturing, does not really explain why the Maryland Federalist party remained strong long after it was discredited elsewhere--e.g. supported the war effort; peculiar nature of the state senate which prolonged Federalist control of that body]
 

discusses tariff, second bank; notes McCulloch v. Maryland (p. 198)
 

Baltimore loses ground to New York (notes Erie Canal), panic of 1819; McCulloch v. Maryland, 1819. notes troubled times caused by James Buchanan; notes that about 100 prominent merchants went bankrupt (199).
 

"the panic marked a watershed in the social history and ecnomic growth of Baltimore. General Smith slowly recovered. He and his wife cut expenses and lived on his modest pension and meager congressional salary; their son, John Spear Smith, bough back Montebello and made it a working, paying farm. Even so, SMith's ill fortune --his literal discredit -- helped to mark the decline of one commercial aristocracy ...." (p. 199) ... "before 1819 a mercant obtained credit on his word or a friend's endorsement; afterward he needed collateral and signed legal papers."
 

looks at Cohens and lotteries; Moses Rogers and Steamboats (1815-)
 

Internal improvements:
 

Maryland's investment, example of C&D canal (very high, twice that of Delaware, p. 202); C& O Canal financed in part by $1 million from congress [hence John Q. Adams turning first spadeful in 1828]; state obligated itself to $500,000 worth of stock.
 

p. 203: "Just as the prospect of hanging concentrates a man's mind wonderfully, the specter of losing in the war for western trade forced Baltimore commercial leaders to consider innovation over imitiation." hence emphasis on the the Railroad. Philip Thomas's son Evan returns from England where Railroads seem to be the future for business, 1826; state invests in the stock, grants tax immunity forever. "compared to railroad mania, canal fever was perfect health,..." p. 204
 

IV. turns to agricultural reform, slavery, freed blacks
 

1818 Maryland agricultural society (p.206); John Stuart Skinner's publication, Maryland Censor; American Farmer; 1825 Lafayette visits the Western shore branch; 1830's Hussy's reaper rivals McCormick's
 

notes that Agricultural reform was really limited to the rich and those who needed it least. Does note outmigration in the 1830s and 1840s; fertilizer (guano, 1843-) expensive.
 

problem of slaves:
 

help to maintain the illusion of power if not prosperity for small planters with slaves
 

reform movement centered in wester, northern counties, Baltimore city
 

1819-1820 debate over the Missouri Compromise (p. 210); notes that Maryland continues to debate abolition in the 20's when rest of nation is quiet: notes petitions 1826- from Baltimore, Baltimore City, Harford, Frederick for gradual but total abolition in Maryland. by 1828 Cooper predicting that economic reasons would continue to force the decline to abolition of slavery. (p. 210)
 

Free blacks, dramatic rise in numbers (50,000 by 1830), highest mortality in Baltimore city, (p. 211)

1828, Maryland Colonization Society charts independent course; 1831 Nat Turner rebellion.
 

by 1834, Cape Palmas, Maryland in Liberia, under way (p. 213)
 

notes failure of the experiment, quotes at length from Daniel Raymond (1820)
 

1828, William Lloyd Garrison comes to Baltimore to work for Lundy on the Genius (p. 215).
 

1829 Garrison tried and convicted of libel, with lundy and Raymond, leave Baltimore not long after.
 

V. [turns abruptly to the hope side of his argument]
 

Steam power in 1830s; Laurel, in 1830s, largest cotton milling center below the Mason Dixon line. [what does this mean?]
 

Oysters as a commercial enterprise (p. 219)
 

[turns abruptly to national politics] and 1828 campaign in Maryland (harbinger of things to come, p. 220)
 

Jackson men in Maryland an odd lot; Jackson in office does not reward Maryland supporters in the ways they had hoped (Jackson lost Maryland in 1828 by about 1,000 votes).
 

Taney supports anti-bank stand; reelection of Jackson in 1832 with 'diminished support in Maryland' (p. 222)
 

Notes 1829 Chancery court ruling in favor of the Railroad using river bank (contested by the C&O canal); 1832 Court of Appeals reversed the decision;

but in the Charles River V. Warren Bridge case in which the Md case was used as background, Taney "upheld a state's right to grant charters that created competition; to vacate a Boston bridge monopoly did not impair the right of contract." (p.223) [see Bender's article in MdHM 71 (4): 484-485, 1976
 

Bender, 484: "the case of Maryland also suggests that these changes in the legal environment [1820-1840] were related to general and long-term modernizing trends in early American history, such as the movement from a community-oriented, security conscious, deferential and slowly-paced society to a more individualistic, achievement-oriented, competitive, egalitarian, and dynamic one." Legislative intervention solved the dispute in 1836 (notes Bland's call for a survey in 1829); 1836 law (June) outlined a general program of internal improvements for the State. "Although not required by law, in practice nearly every charter granted in Maryland after 1836 included a clause reserving to the state the right to alter or repeal it at the State's pleasure" Bender: 493. [important point: according to the intention of the 1836 law: "In the future corporate rights and privileges would, at least in theory, be subject to the general needs of the state." Bender cites the report of the Ways and Means Committee as summarized in the Baltimore American and Commerical Advertiser, March 21, 1836, n. 30. p. 493; Bender notes that the change in law overturning Buchanan's opinion (Court of Appeals, 1832) came in 1839 with the Washington and Baltimore Turnpike Company case (p. 495-96) cites 10 Gill and Johnson 392 (1839), 402, 403.) Also cites Washington County v. B & O, 12 gill and Johnson 399 (1842), in which an act of the legislature of 1840 releasing the B & O from paying the county $1 million if it did not make it to Washington County on schedule (1835 law) was upheld at the expense of Washington County. (p. 497).]

VI. [turns to social problems]
 

a) new prison: Prisoners put to work, prison was a compromise between competing theories of incarceration, designed by Robert Cary Long, Jr. [cites article in MdHM, 1961, 56:281 by Gettleman]
 
 

b) shifts to reform concerns, loosely following DeTocqueville
 

temperance, Washington Temperance Society, 1840-
 

politics- toward end of Jackson's first term (1832) nominating conventions began choosing candidates, Baltimore hosts a number: p. 225
 

suggests (p. 227) that on most election days, 70-80% of eligible Marylanders turned out to vote.
 

[wrongly implies that Jefferson filled offices half with Republicans, half with Federalists (p. 227); suggests Samuel Smith believed in public office as a civic responsibility(!)]
 

immigrants (p. 228), notes 8,000 in Baltimore in 1832 [but needs to do more with this sources of population growth. Could argue that promotion, reports like DeTocqueville's, and revolution in europe pull, send people to our shores]
 

Constitutional reform: 1830's census reveals inequities, by 1831 Md was in McMahon's words "a confederacy of two shores" (p. 228). Notes surprise of t 1837 Whig dominated assembly: reform: "Whigs agreed to grant Baltimore City as many delegates as the largest county, to provide for the popular election of state senators and of governors (governors' homes had to like successively in eastern, western, and southern districts of the state), and to abolish the old governor's council." (p.229, cites A. Clarke Hagensick, "Revolution or Reform in 1836: Maryland's Preface to the Dorr Rebellion," MdHM, 57 (1962)).
 

[Brugger should tie the frightening collapse of the banks to the Whig reforms; as is he does it ass backwards]
 

1835 bank crisis; Maryland learns that it cannot afford uncontrolled support of internal improvements, etc. [why doesn't Brugger connect the 1836 economic reforms mentioned by Bender re: support of internal improvements to the March 1837 omnibus bill of constitutional reforms?]
 

State faces bankruptcy (p. 232), does not repudiate, but also makes no payments, 1841-1848
 

William Grason, QA, first popularly elected governor
 

VII. Notes founding of historical society, p. 234, in January 1844 "tried to make respect for art and historical lore a means of restoring some of the equilibrium they believed lost in their age." Just prior to the founding Ralph Waldo Emerson visited: "Charles Carroll the Signer is dead, and Archibishop Carroll is dead, and their is no vision in the land." p. 234
 

VIII. turns abruptly to slavery, uses John Pendleton Kennedy as his foil, Maryland slavery more humane than elsewhere.
 

reviews quality of life for slaves, notes miscegination, more freedom among urban slaves (p. 240); relies on Frederick Douglass and especially William Green, Charles Ball (n. 65, p. 692) [see Rick Blondo's m.a.]
 

suggests Maryland slaves, by their proximity to the Bay were not deprived of a nutritious diet. (p. 241)
 

Ends with Harriet Tubman and the underground railroad to counter the impression of the life of the Maryland Slave not being as harsh as elsewhere (suggests closeness of free states had something to do with it)
 

notes that omnibus reform bill of 1837 included the provision that slavery could only be abolished by a unanimous vote of the legislature (p. 246).
 

"Determined at the very least to protect their property rights and themselves from uprisings like that of Nat Turner, Maryland slaveowners wavered between anxious proslavery and calculating self-doubt."

(p. 247)
 

Ends with a letter from Former Governor, Congressman, Charles Goldsborough who decided, in 1834, to send his slaves en masse to a Mississippi cotton plantation so the would not suffer any 'possible severance of connections' and would be 'sure of being as well treated as they ever were.' (p. 247) cites publciation of the letter in MdHM, 39(1944), p. 333.