Chapter 11

CORPORATE CHALLENGE TO EQUALITY AND AN EDUCATIONAL RESPONSE

RAILROADS, AS ALFRED CHANDLER OBSERVED, were “pioneers in the management of modern business enterprise.” They faced unprecedented problems of coordination and control. The swift, safe, and reliable transportation of goods and passengers over relatively long distances required carefully scheduled, multisite operations; continuing maintenance of locomotives, rolling stock, rails, and roadbed; and “brand new types of internal administrative procedures and accounting and statistical controls.” Accounting and statistics were the means by which “an administrative command of middle and top executives” managed and monitored the day-to-day operations of their railroads. As a result, writes Chandler, the “operational requirements of the railroads demanded the creation of the first administrative hierarchies in American business.”¹

The railroad embodied a new order of inequality. The directors and principal executives of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad worked many ranks above the men who prepared the right-of-way and laid the rails. Many of these laborers were recent immigrants from Ireland, not directly employed by the corporation, but supervised and paid by contractors, with whom they frequently had disputes about pay and employment. The trackmen’s working conditions were conducive to radical protest. Matthew Mason observes that they “often lived and worked in remote and sparsely populated country, associating with few people besides their fellow railroad men. They toiled in gangs which could number in the hundreds, much larger work groups than in other antebellum industries besides canal work.”²

The concentration and isolation of the trackmen created the conditions for intensification of grievances and organization of protest. Occasions for conflict multiplied because the contractors’ profits depended on getting the greatest possible effort from their workers for the lowest possible pay. The work was also dangerous, even deadly. Riots and protests radiated along the B&O right-of-way from Baltimore to the west and down the branch line to Washington. The uprisings were serious enough to warrant mobilization of the militia. In one outbreak, the railroad carried a combined force of deputy sheriffs, bailiffs, and militia more than 26 miles from Baltimore toward Washington to arrest rioters suspected of destroying a section of track when a defaulting contractor failed to pay them.³

The expansion and industrialization of Baltimore’s economy both created and depended upon an expanding class of menial laborers, no longer linked to an older, artisan tradition as apprentices or journeymen aspiring to become masters of their own workshops.⁴ But there was little evidence of class animosity or class consciousness. Even among the Irish trackmen on the B&O, hostilities broke out not just between labor and management but also among Connaught men, Corkonians, and the “Fardowns” from County Longford. Regional loyalties originating in Ireland often took precedence over class identity in America.⁵

In Baltimore, the struggling wage laborers were no doubt treated as inferiors by their betters, but they were also regarded as possible candidates for elevation into the respectable classes. In 1818, the first of several banks went into business as special depositories for workingmen. Encouraging habits of thrift and industry among common laborers might lift them into the bourgeoisie. The votes of workingmen helped to elect the “mechanic” Jacob Small as mayor, and his victory may have persuaded them that democracy afforded paths of advancement beyond their present stations. But the most important and costly initiative taken to salvage the egalitarianism of the remembered republic was public education.⁶

SCHOOLS AND DEMOCRACY

Charity schools for children of the poor had operated in Baltimore since the eighteenth century. Many were sponsored by churches. But free schools were designed to serve poor children, not all children. In 1824, citizens in some of the town’s 12 wards held meetings to discuss the possibility of a public school system that would bring together children of all classes. Delegates selected from each ward formed a citywide committee on public education, which met for the first time in January 1825 and soon produced a petition urging the General Assembly to authorize establishment of a “uniform, cheap, and excellent” system of public education in Baltimore like those already operating in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. In 1826, the house of delegates passed a bill empowering Baltimore’s mayor and city council to establish public schools in the city. The town’s sole representative in the state senate was uncertain how to vote on the measure and wrote to Mayor Montgomery for guidance.⁷

His uncertainty was understandable. Public schooling was a controversial proposition that would agitate the city’s politics. The legislature authorized the city to impose something close to a progressive income tax to support public education. It urged city government to have “a due regard . . . for the actual wealth of the persons” who were to pay school taxes, and taxable income would include “all profits of industry, salary, hire, rents, annuities, the revenues of property held in trust for minors,” unless specifically exempted from taxation.⁸ Wealthy Baltimoreans grumbled about the burdens they would bear to educate other people’s children. Critics also worried that some religious denomination might capture the school system and use it to indoctrinate children in its own faith. Still others attacked the apparent collectivism of a scheme that aimed at “amalgamating . . . society into one mass, or, the harmonizing of the general community.” Advocates of the public schools countered that this was just what the city needed: in the “Public Schools there is the most perfect republicanism, for here the rich and the poor literally meet together.”⁹ The schools would not only educate pupils but expose them to a common political culture that would reanimate republican spirit and unify society in the face of widening class divisions.

The proposals for public schools met determined opposition. The first branch of the city council appointed a committee to decide whether it should support the measure. Its report recommended that Baltimore’s representatives in the state legislature be instructed to oppose the bill under consideration. The committee’s chairman, William Krebs, dissented from this conclusion. In the meeting of the first branch, Krebs introduced a perverse amendment that would strike out the word “oppose” and instruct the legislators instead to “procure” a system of public education for the city. The amendment passed by a vote of 14 to 10, but the second branch rejected this attempt to create a city school system.¹⁰ The negative result was denounced by “Citizens of Baltimore” in the columns of the Baltimore Patriot. The council, they argued, had “listened to the voice of such of your rich men as are not willing to be taxed in proportion to their wealth. They have listened to the voice of men who wish to keep the common people in ignorance . . . They have not hearkened to your call for public schools, in which the son of the rich man, and the son of the poor man are educated together.”¹¹

In an earlier time, Baltimoreans might have called a town meeting to vote on public schools, but with its population on the way from 60,000 to 80,000, Baltimore was too big for such meetings and could solicit citizen opinion only through ballot questions in regular elections or at partial town meetings in individual wards. In a city of Baltimore’s size, even voting had become problematic. Election judges in each of the 12 wards might once have recognized the citizens who presented themselves at the polls as eligible voters, but now many of the people who showed up to vote were strangers. To guard against electoral fraud, the state legislature had authorized Baltimore to introduce a system of voter registration. Though this legislation passed in 1821, the mayor and council did not address the subject until 1823, and disagreements between the council’s first and second branches delayed its resolution. The controversy about voter registration was still unsettled when the public school debate erupted, and the two controversies got snarled up in one another.

In 1810, the state legislature had eliminated all property qualifications for voting in federal and state elections for free white males (Free black males, no matter what their wealth, were disenfranchised by the same statute.) The state law did not cover Baltimore’s municipal elections, but property qualifications were apparently dropped in these contests, even though the city had adopted no ordinance on the subject. Enforcing different requirements for state and municipal contests was inconvenient. The new debate about voter registration in Baltimore afforded the advocates of property requirements an opportunity to reinstate such qualifications for municipal elections.¹² A committee of the city council drafted a bill that required the mayor to provide election judges with lists of tax-paying Baltimoreans. It proposed that only “persons assessed . . . for City taxes would be considered and taken by said Judges as registered according to the provisions of this ordinance”¹³

In the first branch, the opponents of a property requirement sought to undermine the measure by requiring any ordinance on voter registration to be submitted to the voters, presumably including those who had been informally qualified to vote when the state abolished property tests in 1810. The measure succeeded in the first branch of the council by a narrow margin, but was rejected in the second branch.¹⁴

The stalemate on voter registration now joined the stalemate on public education. The citywide committee that drew up the original proposal for a public school system early in 1825 may have unintentionally linked the two issues. Although it prescribed several eligibility criteria for pupils enrolling in public schools, one of these standards allowed children to attend if their fathers were registered voters, defined as taxable inhabitants.¹⁵ The relationship between voting and ownership of taxable property thus became a focus of debate within the controversy about schooling. Proponents of public education argued that suffrage restrictions were designed to disenfranchise supporters of common schools who owned no taxable property and to exclude their children from such schools. In the Baltimore Gazette, “A Citizen” disputed this contention but also made the case for municipal voting restrictions: “the corporation of the City of Baltimore” was a private institution much like a bank or a turnpike in which the privilege of voting belonged only to those subscribers “who are the holders of its stock and are affected by its various fluctuations and liable to make good on its losses.” The nation and its states were bodies politic, and their citizens had a democratic right to vote, no matter what their stake in the economy, but in the municipal corporation of Baltimore, the privilege of voting was merely “a municipal regulation growing out of the very nature of the institution and belonging only to those who are interested and contributed toward its support.” It was a perspective that may have been grounded in the old commercial community that operated markets and regulated trades, goods, and transactions. In case this corporate perspective on the city failed to persuade, “Citizen” assured his readers that most Baltimoreans, including the advocates of public schools, were taxpayers. The proposed restriction on suffrage would not prevent most white males from voting.¹⁶

The advocates of public education remained unconvinced. As security against electoral fraud, they conceded, voter registration was “deservedly popular,” but it was “blended with several other propositions calculated in their nature to overthrow the success of Public Schools” because they would “place large property holders in the Councils of the city, whose feelings and interests are alike hostile to a broad and equitable establishment for Public Education.”¹⁷

Those who insisted on property requirements for voting did indeed seem solidly aligned with those opposed to public education. When the city council’s first branch approved a public school resolution in September 1826, every one of the 10 members who voted against it had previously supported a property requirement for voters.¹⁸ The proponents of public education had originally argued that common schools would help to bridge the class divisions that were pulling Baltimoreans apart. As a political issue, however, public education precipitated an eruption of class politics that dominated the 1826 municipal election in which the public school referendum appeared on the ballot.¹⁹

The school and suffrage controversies served as mechanisms for sorting out candidates and voters in an era of no-party politics. Maryland’s Federalist party had virtually vanished. The state’s peculiar procedure for choosing state senators through an electoral college meant that all 15 senators were either Federalists or Republicans. The party that controlled a majority of the electors could fill every senate seat. In 1821, the Federalists had lost control of the electors, and having already forfeited the governorship and the house of delegates, they soon became one of the lost tribes of Maryland politics. Without a Federalist opposition to unite them, the Republican organization had begun to fragment. But a realignment was under way.²⁰

ARISTOCRATS FOR OLD HICKORY

In Baltimore, some of the dispossessed Federalists would find a new home in the party of Andrew Jackson. Though he won a plurality of the electoral votes in 1824, Jackson needed a majority to take the presidency. Under the Constitution, the selection of the president fell to the House of Representatives, where each state delegation cast one vote. The House made John Quincy Adams chief executive. In 1826, while Baltimoreans fulminated about schooling and voting, residents in 10 of the city’s 12 wards held meetings to express their support for Andrew Jackson and their hostility to the Washington establishment that had denied him the presidency. Earlier meetings had denounced the Congressional Caucus for its presumptuous arrogation of the power to nominate presidential candidates. Party conventions had emerged as the preferred mode of nominating candidates for both state and local offices.²¹

Baltimore voters, like those in the rest of the state, were an electorate in motion. Many came to rest with the Jacksonians. One of the most unlikely of these converts was Robert Goodloe Harper. A Princeton graduate, he had grown up on his family’s North Carolina plantation, with a workforce that included at least a dozen slaves. Harper studied law in South Carolina and, after opening a practice in Charleston, won election to the House of Representatives for three terms. Though he had been a youthful advocate of egalitarianism, his political principles underwent profound alteration in response to the violent consequences of the French Revolution and the slave rebellion in Haiti. Harper became a staunch Federalist and a congressional champion of the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Jeffersonian “revolution” of 1800 led him to retire, temporarily, from politics. He moved to Baltimore, where he married the daughter of Charles Carroll of Carrollton. His service as defense counsel in the impeachment trial of rock-hard Federalist and US Supreme Court justice Samuel Chase made him a distinguished figure of the Baltimore bar. As Carroll’s son-in-law and luminary of the city’s legal profession, he was the town’s nearest approximation to an aristocrat, next to Carroll himself. Maryland’s legislature elected him to the US Senate in 1816, but he resigned a year later to attend to his law practice. When fellow Carolinian John C. Calhoun abandoned his presidential aspirations to join the Jacksonians, Harper followed suit. He issued a pamphlet to explain his decision.²²

Though known for his public and courtroom orations as well as his essays on politics, Harper presented himself, unconvincingly, as a “plain man, having no pretensions to literary acquirements, the graces of style, or diplomatic learning.” (He wrote the pamphlet under a pseudonym.) Those acquirements, graces, and learning were precisely the attainments he attributed to John Quincy Adams, only to dismiss them as accomplishments of little help to a president. What was most needed, he argued, was “judgment prudence discernment firmness and decision”—precisely the qualities of character that he claimed for Andrew Jackson, traits that the general had put to good use when he confronted the British at New Orleans. Jackson’s other great virtue, according to Harper, was his lack of political experience. Jackson “was not a member of the cabinet, has held few or no offices under the government, and has very little connexion with power.” Political inexperience was an advantage because it meant that Jackson was untainted by the intrigues of cabinet politicians scheming to succeed the president.²³ It also meant that Old Hickory did not keep company with the Republican forces that had overwhelmed Harper’s fellow Federalists and taken title to Washington.

Harper died shortly after publication of his pamphlet and never saw his hero elevated to the presidency. Other Baltimoreans converged in support of Jackson from a variety of political starting points. Roger B. Taney, one of Maryland’s most eminent Federalists, wrote to a friend about his support for Jackson shortly after moving his law practice from Frederick to Baltimore in 1824. Like Harper, Taney was “sick of all Secretary candidates” and was drawn to Jackson by the general’s political independence and the hope that he might enter the White House unbound to any section, faction, or any “combination of mercenary presses, or local interests.”²⁴ Taney would become Jackson’s secretary of the treasury and later his nominee as chief justice of the Supreme Court. Even the ancient Charles Carroll of Carrollton, who had once denounced democracy as a form of anarchy, joined the Jacksonians.²⁵

John Pendleton Kennedy ran as a Jacksonian congressional candidate in 1826, promising that if the presidential election were again to wind up in the House of Representatives, he would pledge his vote for Jackson. Kennedy lost, probably because of an unpopular vote on canal legislation while in the Maryland General Assembly. (His critics in Baltimore called him John “Potomac” Kennedy.)²⁶ Ten years later, when he finally succeeded in getting elected to Congress, it would be as an anti-Jacksonian Whig. Samuel Smith came to Jackson by way of William H. Crawford, one of the “Secretary candidates” for the presidency. Crawford had headed the Treasury Department under James Monroe. He and Smith had served together in Congress, and Smith attached himself to the faction promoting Crawford’s presidential prospects as early as 1818. When Crawford’s candidacy collapsed, Smith migrated to the Jacksonians. It was Smith, according to Gary Browne, who introduced “the Jacksonian-party machine into local elections.” His control of federal patronage provided the “machine” with essential political resources. He earned his spoils not because of longstanding loyalty to Jackson but because, as chair of the Senate Finance Committee, he was a valuable ally in the administration’s war with the Bank of the United States.²⁷

John Pendleton Kennedy—novelist, congressman, Navy secretary. He also designed an iron bridge that could withstand floods on the Jones Falls.

Local issues such as public schooling and voter registration may have been obscured by the reshuffling of factions into the grand realignment that set Jacksonian Democrats against Whigs, but these local matters were moved toward resolution by the same tide of egalitarian rhetoric that announced the Jacksonian consensus. William Krebs, the determined advocate of public education, served alongside Roger B. Taney as a delegate on the Jackson General Convention of Baltimore.²⁸ Local personages and local issues fell in with national alignments.

ELECTORAL AND EDUCATIONAL DEMOCRACY

It took the Baltimore City Council almost a year to act on the state legislation of 1826 that empowered the city to create a public school system. In the meantime, the General Assembly had approved legislation authorizing local school systems to apply for state financial support.²⁹ Though Baltimore was eligible for state education funds, it was in no hurry to open schools. Several months passed before the council approved the appointment of six school commissioners to supervise six schools, not yet built, and a superintendent to a make a weekly inspection of each nonexistent one of them. In April 1829, the council approved an ordinance creating “one or more schools on the Monitorial Plan.” But it had yet to designate any specific tax to support the schools. The school commissioners finally forced the council’s hand by renting rooms, hiring teachers, and opening three schools in the fall of 1829. Early the next year, the council finally levied a tax of 12½ cents per $100.00 of assessed property for public education. State aid was initially less than $1,000 a year.³⁰

The city also arrived at a temporary resolution of the voter registration issue. In 1829, it extended the franchise to free white males without any property qualifications, the same eligibility standard set out by the General Assembly for state and federal elections. But the new law raised other barriers to voting. After an initial registration period of 17 days, the annual enrollment of voters was limited to three days in October, between 3:00 and 6:00 p.m.³¹

In the Tenth Ward, a meeting of “Mechanics, Labourers, and Poor People generally” convened to demand the “equal rights, and equal political and civil privileges” that the government guaranteed “to every man high and low, rich and poor.” As soon as the mechanics and laborers adjourned, another protest meeting convened in the same hall. It made a more direct attack on the “law for the Registry of Voters as a prelude to an infringement on the right of suffrage.” The participants adopted a resolution demanding the resignations of the two “commissioners of registry” appointed for the Tenth Ward. One of them, William K. Mitchell, responded while the meeting was still in progress. He was proud, he said, “of the opportunity that is afforded . . . me to give an evidence of my ready deference to the will of the people.” He resigned on the spot. He had served as chairman of the preceding protest meeting.³²

A week later, “a numerous and respectable assemblage of citizens” expressed their opposition to the ordinance and elected a committee to issue a public statement explaining why they regarded the registration law as “a restriction of the inestimable right of suffrage.” They objected in particular to the severely limited time that voter rolls would be open to new registrants. The “shortness of the daily session and the multiplicity of the applicants” would mean long waiting lines for would-be voters “who must abandon the dearest privilege of freemen or forego the probable emoluments of several hours of labour.” The statement also challenged the need for a board of registrars to ensure the integrity of the electoral process. Under the legislation, voters could challenge the eligibility of other voters. If the people were “competent to self government, they are also competent to guard the institutions which uphold it.”³³

At the beginning of 1830, in his annual message to the city council, Mayor Small declared that the “Ordinance to provide for the Registering [of] all the Qualified voters of the City of Baltimore passed at the last annual session of the City Council has been tested at the late election . . . and has been found inefficient in its provisions. This matter is respectfully submitted to the wisdom of the City Council.” The council thought it wise to repeal the registration ordinance.³⁴ Baltimore presumably reverted to its usual slapdash voting methods.

It was more difficult to get into the public schools than onto the voter rolls. Households could enroll their children by paying one dollar a year for schooling. The fee could be waived for orphans or children from very poor families, but seldom was. Public school advocates wanted to maintain the difference between charity schools and public schools. In practice, however, only a small fraction of the city’s parents could improve their offspring through public education. With only six schools, the system could accommodate no more than 700 students in a population of more than 80,000 children and adults.

The public schools managed to handle even this small enrollment only by treating instruction as an exercise in mass communication. The ordinance creating Baltimore’s public schools had required that they adopt the “Monitorial Plan” of instruction. As originally conceived by British educator Joseph Lancaster, the monitorial method was devised for the education of children of the poor in schools with little revenue, few teachers, and many pupils. Older students were designated as monitors to hear small groups of young students recite their lessons in arithmetic and spelling, while a senior teacher, through an elaborate system of hand signals, conducted an instructional symphony that coordinated recitation and study across the various groups of learners. In Baltimore, the monitorial system broke down. When children got old enough to be monitors, they were also old enough to leave school and go to work, which is what their parents often wanted them to do. The monitorial method was generally abandoned in favor of simultaneous recitation: a mass chorus of pupils chanting their multiplication tables or spelling words in unison.³⁵

Baltimore’s public schools were financially starved. At the end of 1832, for example, the school commissioners reported a total annual expenditure (including construction costs) of $16,416—about $443,000 today, or approximately $692 per pupil in today’s dollars. Perhaps because they had never known anything better, the commissioners hoped they could run a successful educational enterprise on the funds at hand. In Baltimore, they proclaimed, public education was a “great experiment . . . to determine whether economy of expenditure and efficiency of instruction could not be combined in the same institution.” By the end of 1831, the commissioners were ready to pronounce that the experiment had “completely succeeded.” Their measure of success was enrollment: “Three months of successful operation at the school on Aisquith Street under the care of Mr. Coffin has placed the matter beyond reasonable doubt. This school was calculated to accommodate 400 children. There are at this moment 390 attending.” The number of applications for admission received each week had not diminished since the school opened three months earlier. “The male school under Mr. Willigman and the female school under Miss McConkey on Eutaw Street” were “under similar favor.” Mr. Coffin and Mr. Willigman were paid $600 for the year ($15,600 in today’s dollars); Miss McConkey received $200.³⁶

A year later, some of the most successful schools had encountered setbacks. The school on Aisquith Street had “been very seriously defaced in its exterior.” Even more seriously, Mr. Coffin had lost almost half his enrollment. He claimed that almost all of the scholars withdrawn had “been taken from this school to be placed in business.” The pupils who remained were presumably those too young for “business” or whose family circumstances allowed them to get by without the income generated by child labor. The school commissioners seized on the presence of these children as another sign of success, “that men of liberal minds and in affluent circumstances are found in full proportion amongst the patrons of our system.”³⁷