BETWEEN MOBS AND CORPORATIONS
CONGRESSMAN, SENATOR, MAYOR, and major general Samuel Smith died on April 22, 1839. He was 87 years old. He had been out riding in his carriage that morning. When he returned, he lay down on a couch to rest and never woke up. His funeral procession began three days later at his townhouse on Exchange Place. It moved north on Gay Street to Baltimore Street and turned west. In the lead was a sizeable detachment of cavalry, followed by several infantry regiments and then companies of artillery with their horses, caissons, and guns. Two open carriages followed the troops. The first carried the president of the United States, the secretary of state, the governor of Maryland, and the city’s mayor. In the second carriage were the secretaries of the treasury and navy and the US attorney general. The hearse followed, drawn by four white horses and flanked by mounted dragoons. Many more carriages came behind, containing dozens of urban notables. The city guard of Baltimore, whose members Smith had mobilized to put down the bank riot of 1835, marched behind the carriages, without their firearms. Then came a pedestrian procession including the members of the Baltimore City Council, other city officials, judges, members of the bar, professors of the University of Maryland, officers of the army and navy, members of the state legislature, and foreign consuls. When the cortege turned onto Baltimore Street, it was joined by all of the city’s fire companies in their resplendent uniforms. Behind them, thousands of citizens fell in for the march to the cemetery on Green Street on the city’s west side, where Smith was buried.1
Only a year earlier, Samuel Smith had been the city’s mayor. Now he was gone, and so was the Baltimore that made him. His stately departure was one more sign that Baltimore had arrived. The attendance of President Van Buren and his cabinet members could be regarded as a sign of respect, not just for Major General Smith, but also for Baltimore. The Census of 1840 would show that the town’s population had surpassed 100,000. Baltimore had also become a focus of national politics. It was the location of choice for political party conventions, which had inaugurated a new era in national democracy by seizing the authority to nominate presidential candidates from the congressional caucuses. Smith would probably have approved.
The democratization of local politics carried carpenters and saddle makers to the top ranks of political leadership. But they presided over a political system that had fallen under the domination of corporations engaged in “internal improvements” by which the city’s leaders hoped to maintain its competitive position in the emerging national economy. As Gary Browne points out, the “personal and private elitism” of Samuel Smith’s Baltimore gave way before an “impersonal elitism” of corporations and institutions.2
THE DOWNSIDE OF INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS
The new limits on urban democracy were not inherent in cities themselves but by-products of urban history. The members of the Baltimore City Council’s Joint Committee on Internal Improvements had experienced that history at first hand, and little more than a month before Samuel Smith’s last carriage ride in 1839, the committee issued a long and unusually reflective report on the troubles it had seen.
Ironically, the new strictures on urban politics followed from success in overcoming the limits of geography. So long as horses and wagons remained the principal vehicles of commercial transportation, Baltimore’s geography was its destiny. According to the Committee on Internal Improvements, Baltimore had the “natural advantages of [a] geographical frontier, with reference to foreign commerce and the internal trade of the country.” This intermediate position between the western mountains and Atlantic shipping transformed Baltimore from “the condition of a small hamlet” into one of the nation’s leading cities. “Long before political economy was known as a science,” the committee observed, “the fact was well understood that the growth and prosperity of a marine Emporium depended upon the extent of her internal trade. Allow this to be diverted into other channels, and Baltimore will relapse into the condition from which it sprang.”3 Progress had made the relapse more likely: “The mountains were at first only crossed by the adventurous trader on horse back . . . In a short while, new roads were cut—Turnpikes followed—canals were projected—Steam over came the impetus of ascending currents, and Rail Roads have been invented, which transport man from place to place with a celerity that would have been regarded only at the commencement of this century, as the prognostic of some moon struck dreamer. In fine a new era has burst upon us. Baltimore to maintain the advantages of her natural frontier must . . . resort to all the judicious improvements of the age that are calculated to overcome time & space.”4
Even the most judicious improvements were freighted with uncertainty and would not “fully realize the expectations of this community or of those by whom they were projected.” Even more uncertain were the costs of the projected canals and railroads. The corporations overseeing these projects had “in every instance, after a short lapse of time, been constrained to apply to the State or city for necessary aid.” The state and local governments would meet these requests by purchasing shares of stock, often by issuing stock of their own—increasing the burden of public debt to finance privately run railways and canals. But corporations’ initial requests for more support “only proved to be an entering wedge for another” and another, until the city and state together held more than $7.5 million in debt for unfinished projects, a capital investment that could only be listed “under the head of ‘Unproductive.’ ”5
The investment of Baltimore and Maryland amounted to more than $180 million in current dollars. But the sum was hypothetical. The city had pledged to purchase $3.5 million more in B&O stock, but it had not yet paid for the shares. And, in the aftermath of the Panic of 1837, it would not have been able to float an issue of city stock to cover its stake in the railroad. Its certificates would have to be discounted so heavily that they would have added more to the city’s debt than it actually owed to the B&O. For a time, the commissioners of finance met the city’s obligations to the railroad by borrowing from Baltimore banks instead of issuing city stock. To reassure the banks, city authorities levied a tax generating enough revenue to meet the first year’s interest payment.6
The B&O had troubles of its own. The cost of extending the rails from Harper’s Ferry toward Cumberland had already exhausted the company’s capital, and the tracks that led back toward Baltimore needed expensive repairs. They had not stood up well under the weight of heavy steam locomotives. The company’s directors at first decided to demand that its subscribers pay installments on their outstanding balances of $2.50 per share each month from August 1838 through March 1839. Its most important subscribers were unlikely to be able to make these payments. Maryland’s financial condition may have been even more fragile than Baltimore’s. In London, Maryland state bonds were heavily discounted, and there were few buyers even at the reduced price.7
In the autumn of 1839, the B&O directors hit upon a scheme to compensate for the shaky credit of the debt-burdened municipality that helped to underwrite construction of the railroad. With the approval of the Maryland General Assembly, the company began to issue its own currency—called “stock orders” or “railroad notes”—in denominations as small as two and three dollars (later reduced to bills worth as little as 12 cents). The notes were backed by the city stock that the railroad already held, but they insulated the B&O from the depreciation of those municipal bonds. The stock orders were pegged at the full value of the city notes, not their current market value. The company used them as “scrip” to pay for land, labor, and materials. The workers, suppliers, and landowners who received the stock orders could use them to pay Baltimore City taxes or present them to the city for redemption. They would receive an equivalent amount of city stock at par value plus 6 percent interest.8
In effect, the stock orders made Baltimore a financial subsidiary of the B&O. The city council’s Joint Committee on Ways and Means was clearly uneasy about the entire arrangement, and at the end of 1841, the committee addressed an inquiry to a city attorney, asking for his written opinion on a series of legal questions. The core question was whether the city, by agreeing to redeem the railroad’s stock orders, would give them the status of its own municipal bonds. In other words, had the city empowered the B&O to issue city stock?9
Contractors and workers initially accepted the stock orders in payment for supplies and services. The suspension of specie payments occasioned by the Panic of 1837 made the railroad notes an essential medium of exchange and prolonged their circulation. To secure the status of stock orders as currency, the city council petitioned the General Assembly to enact a law making it a felony to steal B&O notes or to obtain them under false pretenses.10 In other words, they held value just like real money. But no amount of official recognition could save the stock orders from their fate. They were doomed to depreciate because they were backed by city bonds that traded at much less than face value.
The stock orders also undermined the city’s credit. Mayor Samuel Brady may have been the first city official to criticize the railroad on this score. In his first annual message to the council in 1841, Brady blamed the B&O’s stock orders for having “brought a vast amount of city stock . . . directly into the market, and by this means held as if at auction.” By flooding the market with its railroad notes, the B&O had undermined the value of the city stock on which the notes were based. The resulting depreciation of city bonds produced a drag on the value of any new bonds that the city intended to issue. According to the mayor, it had become “impossible to sell the stock of the city except at a loss of fifteen to twenty per cent.” Brady worried that the city’s notes might become “unsaleable” if the B&O continued to issue the stock orders. The mayor “felt great anxiety to avoid this result” and recommended that the city use any revenue surplus to retire its debt to the railroad. It also made sense for the city to redeem the notes and withdraw them from circulation. Brady claimed that this would stabilize the value of the stock orders and the city bonds to which they were tied.11
The city council refused to make the sacrifices needed to buy up the stock orders and pay down the city’s railroad debt. Instead, it passed a “Currency Bill” that ordered the city register to continue paying 6 percent interest on the B&O’s stock orders. Mayor Brady vetoed the ordinance, but his veto was overridden in both branches of the council. Brady announced his resignation. Obviously unprepared for the mayor’s reaction, the council reversed its override of his veto; Brady reversed his resignation and proceeded with his plan to withdraw about $250,000 in railroad notes from circulation.12 Two months later, Brady resigned again, this time for good. “It is not necessary,” he wrote, “for me to state the cause that has influenced me to take this course at this time.”13
Stock orders continued to circulate in the city, but they were being discounted at 12 to 14 percent. And in his annual message at the beginning of 1842, Maryland’s governor, William Grason, denounced the B&O for using the scrip “to dispose of city stock . . . at its par value; and to transfer to the holders of their certificates the risk and loss, which they were not willing to encounter themselves of selling it in the market.” The railroad had shifted this risk to laborers, tradesmen, shopkeepers, and suppliers. By March 1842, the stock orders were discounted in Baltimore at more than 25 percent.14
Two pieces of legislation adopted by the Maryland General Assembly aggravated the currency crisis. The first prohibited any organization not chartered as a bank from issuing currency. The measure was clearly aimed at the B&O’s stock orders, and they were soon trading at a 50 percent discount. The second act required all banks to resume specie payments or forfeit their charters. The banks responded by curtailing their issues of paper currency that could be redeemed for hard money. The reduction in the money supply triggered a wave of bankruptcies, and invalidation of the B&O’s stock orders imposed severe losses on workers and suppliers who had accepted the railroad notes.15
While Baltimore endured the Panic of 1842, the railroad extended its tracks to Cumberland and met the eastern terminus of the National Road that led to the Ohio River. The road’s traffic fed freight to the B&O, and the coalfields in the region contributed more tonnage and revenue, but the expenses incurred in reaching Cumberland made it impossible to pay any dividends in 1842. There were only the faintest hints of a brighter future. In 1841, for example, the railroad had delivered to the city its biggest dividend to date—$60,000—an annual return of only 1.7 percent on the city’s investment. Baltimore immediately gave the money back to the B&O to cover its stock subscription. In return, the B&O handed over to the city the remaining difficulties created by their stock orders. Baltimore borrowed another $500,000 to redeem the last of the $1.5 million in notes issued by the railroad.16
DEBT AND DISORDER
After serving as mayor, Jesse Hunt had returned to municipal service in an appointive capacity as the city register. He was responsible for keeping the city’s accounts and overseeing expenditures. Though he no longer had to face mobs, his job still had its difficulties. In July 1840, he had written with regret to Mayor Sheppard C. Leakin concerning the “embarrassed condition of the City Treasury.” Until July, Hunt had held out hope that taxes not yet collected from 1839, together with those paid in 1840, would permit the city to meet its obligations. In fact, Baltimore’s total revenue of about $130,000 was not even sufficient to cover the interest on the city’s stock debt (mostly for internal improvements). Further payments would come due at the start of August, and the city was already $7,300 behind in paying its bills.17
At the beginning of November, on the same day the newly elected mayor, Samuel A. Brady, was sworn in, Hunt sent him another letter about the city’s “financial embarrassment.” He mentioned his earlier “communication to the ex-Mayor . . . in reference to which no action was taken.” The register stressed the urgency of the situation: “It appears impossible to meet the required payments unless additional means are provided.” Mayor Brady may have been too distracted to deal with the city’s financial embarrassments, not only because he had held office for less than a day, but because it was a day that ended with a riot. It coincided with the presidential election in which President Van Buren was defeated by William Henry Harrison. Van Buren had carried the city by 31 votes, but Harrison carried the state. The local Whigs had gathered in front of the office of their party’s newspaper, the Baltimore Patriot, to celebrate or to get the latest election results. Ex-mayor Leakin was there with his fellow partisans. The outbreak of violence occurred when a fire company attempted to drag its engine through the crowd and return to its station. In fact, the alarm that called them out in the first place may have been a signal for the assembly of a mob. The trouble began with “a regular brickbatting,” and then some shots may have been fired. Mayor Brady arrived with a cohort of watchmen, as the violence was subsiding, to address the combatants, urging them to return to their homes. They apparently complied, but ex-mayor Leakin had been seriously injured. The Patriot and the Baltimore Sun would prolong controversy for several more days in a dispute about the Sun’s report that shots had been fired from the Patriot’s offices.18
The city’s financial embarrassment lasted much longer. The debt that Baltimore had incurred to finance railroads and canals and the depletion of its revenues by interest payments left little money for such basic government responsibilities as the maintenance of public order. In his annual message delivered at the start of 1840, Mayor Leakin had noted with satisfaction that the city’s tranquility had been interrupted by only a single riot during the preceding year, and on that occasion the outbreak of collective violence had been “quelled without serious consequence,” demonstrating “the alacrity, promptitude and firmness, with which the City Guard, volunteer corps, police officers and citizens generally resist attempts to disturb the peace.” But Leakin followed up his confident assessment by noting that “the City Watch, upon which the repose of our citizens and the safety of our property so much depends” had not been expanded “in ratio of our population, or the rapidly extending dimensions of our city.” He recommended an increase in the size of the force, which was too small “to afford sufficient protection to all sections of the city.”
The Sun agreed. It contended that “the number of police officers should be doubled at least, and we hope the authorities will become convinced of this fact before our city is disgraced many times more by riot and disorder.—We have no cause to complain of the efficiency of the police generally, but there is not enough of them.” More police, of course, would mean more spending, but Mayor Leakin argued that “inasmuch as it would be disbursed for the protection of the persons and property of our citizens, it would be judicious economy.”19
The single outbreak of disorder that Leakin mentioned in his annual message was a notable one. It had occurred after a mentally unstable nun fled a Carmelite convent. Her pleas for help drew a crowd and roused or confirmed dark suspicions about what went on inside such Roman Catholic institutions. The suspicions may have fed on the sensational (and fabricated) Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, published three years earlier, which claimed to reveal the sordid and deadly secrets of a convent in Montreal. But a mob need not have read the book before assaulting a convent. Two years before the appearance of Maria Monk, a Protestant mob had attacked and burned an Ursuline convent just outside Boston. The assault began, like Baltimore’s, with a runaway nun.20
Though Mayor Leakin portrayed Baltimore’s convent riot as a singular interruption of urban tranquility, it was an early episode in a siege of violence that gripped the city for over a decade, much of it spawned by the anti-Catholic Know-Nothings. The city’s most riotous years coincided with a sustained period of heavy annual losses on Baltimore’s investments in railroads and canals.21 Municipal debt was not the source of disorder, but it surely impaired the city’s capacity to suppress violence. Volunteer forces such as the city guard or the militia might deserve all the praise that Leakin gave them for helping to put down the convent riot. But it could take critical hours to assemble these forces, allowing a street fight to grow into a murderous riot.22
The city council, nevertheless, found it inexpedient to comply with the mayor’s request for additional watchmen. The Joint Committee on Police reported that “in the existing state of the city finances no appropriation can be properly made for the compensation of the officers proposed to be appointed.”23
The B&O’s financial demands on the city continued unabated. Early in 1842, the railroad’s president, Louis McLane, wrote to the chairman of the council’s Joint Committee on Ways and Means to announce that the company would “unavoidably require in current bankable money” several installment payments on the city’s stock subscription, along with back payments, to reimburse the railroad for money it had borrowed over the last two months “in aid of the City Commissioners of Finance, and to meet deficiencies in their payment.” When the city fell behind in its payments, apparently, the B&O had been taking out loans on the city’s behalf and charging them to the commissioners of finance. McLane wanted at least $140,000 over the next eight months, and he wanted the first installment—$30,000—in three days. If the railroad failed to receive the payment, it would take out additional loans “in aid of the City Commissioners.”24
McLane’s request was followed by a series of contradictory demands for payment until, in April 1842, he finally decided that the “sum of $200,000 between this and next November, perhaps less, would probably be sufficient to put the road in full operation.”25
UNRULY BOYS AND RIOTOUS MEN
Once the B&O reached Cumberland, its demands for Baltimore’s money temporarily subsided. The city remained in debt for borrowing money to finance a variety of “internal improvements.” A council resolution noted that the city’s support of the B&O had “caused the heavy imposition of burthens on the people for the purpose of paying interest on said stock,” but the city and its citizens had “as yet received but little benefit for said work on account of the great expense of said company.”26
The city not only failed to benefit; it suffered from a shortage of funds to pay for essential municipal services. Repeated recommendations for expansion of the night watch were rejected as “inexpedient” because of the city’s straitened circumstances.27 Two additional watchmen were hired in 1840 when, under state law, Baltimore was reapportioned into 14 rather than 12 wards to accommodate an expanded electorate.28 Each night, a population of more than 102,000 entrusted its safety to 26 officers. During the day, the number dropped to 14. Though Boston’s population was smaller than Baltimore’s, it had a night watch of 100 men.29
Aside from the occasional outbreak of collective violence, Baltimore also had to cope with everyday criminality. The Sun complained of “infestations” of burglars. So did Mayor James O. Law. In his first annual message at the beginning of 1844, he urged the city council to expand the night watch or to create a “double set” of watchmen, “one set to be on duty every other night.” Though the number of watchmen on the streets would not increase under this arrangement, the men who patrolled the city would not be “worn down by fatigue” from the previous night’s exertions, and the arrangement might make it possible to employ “young active and respectable mechanics” who would not be able to serve as watchmen every night. The council’s only step to curb the wave of burglaries was one that required no additional expenditure: the night watchmen were instructed to abandon the custom of crying the hour. The practice was not just a public service for residents without clocks; it was supposed to reassure citizens that a peace officer was at hand and to signal the watch lieutenants that their men were not sleeping on the job. But it also told alert burglars when and where to strike.30
The mayoralty was the first political office to which James Law was elected, but his career had carried him through most of the civic institutions that sustained the political life of antebellum Baltimore. He began as a member of the city’s mercantile community and soon became the president of a volunteer fire company—the Independent. He was a longtime member of the local militia and would combine his duties as mayor with those of a regimental commander. He was a Whig, like a majority of the city council elected with him, and after retiring from elective office, he became a supervisory flour inspector.31
Almost exactly a year before his election, Law had served as foreman of a grand jury whose report urged the city courts, their constables, and the city police to cooperate in an effort to restore order to Baltimore’s streets. It was not Law’s first public appearance as a champion of public peace. In 1841, his fire company had collided with another, the Vigilant, at the intersection of Baltimore and Gay Streets. In the riot that ensued, the Sun singled him out for credit as one of a handful of firemen who “exercised all the powers they possessed to quell the disturbance . . . Capt. James O. Law, president of the Independent Company . . . acted in a most determined manner, and for his pains, had his coat nearly torn from his back.”32
Law’s first message to the council in 1844 conveyed an optimistic assessment of the city’s financial condition. Baltimore, he wrote, had endured the “monetary trials” occasioned by the panics of 1837 and 1842, demonstrating that even “in her former embarrassed situation,” the city was “able to meet all her liabilities with promptitude and dispatch.” The previous year had left the city with a budget surplus of more than $80,000. It had paid the final installment on its stock subscription to the B&O, and the day was “not remote when the city” would “reap the benefit of her vast outlay in the prosecution of this great work.”33
The mayor may have thought that a positive spin on municipal finances would overcome the city council’s resistance to making needed expenditures. And, in Law’s view, the expenditures most needed were those designed to preserve public order. More annoying than the burglars were the “collections of unruly boys at the corners of the streets.” The Sun agreed: “The citizens of Baltimore are more pestered by ungovernable, mischievous, wicked boys, than the people of any other city in the United States.” The newspaper’s concern was echoed by Baltimoreans in their petitions to the mayor. A resident of Lloyd Street complained that “our privacy [is] broken in upon, and our property endangered by crowds of white boys & young men with songs, cursings, fightings, blasphemies” that made “the street a bedlam, from about sun set to ten or eleven at night.” Another Baltimorean wrote to the mayor asking that he instruct “the Police and watchmen of this ward . . . to disperse from these corners the youths who assemble nightly to the great injury of our business and the annoyance of the neighbourhood by their vulgar songs, obscene language and the striking of coloured persons taking off their caps and hats and keeping them.”34
Controlling juvenile disorder was not simply a problem for the police. There was also the problem of what do with the delinquents once they had been arrested. The city jail was hardly a fit place for them. Its design did not allow much segregation among its inmates. The building’s deficiencies had been a subject of common complaint for years when, in 1843, a local grand jury took official notice of the issue. If space were available, juveniles convicted of crimes were placed with imprisoned debtors “or in other rooms where persons are confined for light offenses.” But a subsequent inquiry conducted by a committee of the city council found that “juvenile delinquents—whose faults are frivolous—often growing out of the mischiefous tricks of youth” were being “placed in rooms where old and hardened offenders are permitted to corrupt their morals.” Lacking the money to build a new jail or to modify the existing structure, the committee could only urge that the jail visitors be “earnestly requested to take into consideration the present inconvenient arrangement of the Balt. City & County Jail & to employ all means in their power to remedy the same.” Private citizens had been trying to raise the funds to build a separate institution for juvenile criminals since at least 1830, when the General Assembly had issued a corporate charter for a projected “house of refuge.” Jesse Hunt and John H. B. Latrobe were members of its board.35 But the fundraising effort stalled. The city council approved a resolution authorizing trustees of the almshouse to build the house of refuge on the poorhouse grounds, but the grant of authority was unaccompanied by any money, and construction of the juvenile institution would not begin until 1851, on a site southwest of the city.36
In the meantime, the city’s urchins and delinquents found a source of diversion in Baltimore’s volunteer fire companies. The firefighters had been lionized in the local press throughout the 1830s, but the volunteer companies were difficult to control. The rivalries among them often turned fires into occasions for street fights and riots. At first, the “fire riots” were blamed not on the firefighters themselves but on ruffians who collected at the scenes of fires, or delinquent gangs that attached themselves to fire companies—the Gumballs, the Screwbolts, the Cock Robins, and the Neversweats. But eventually it became impossible to overlook the riotous conduct of the firefighters themselves. Soon they needed no fires to bring them into combat with one another. A false alarm might be the signal for companies to charge out of their engine houses to do battle with one another, or it could be a ploy used by one company to lure another into an ambush. The fighting became so routine that the Sun concluded a report on the fires of one September evening with the observation that “there were the usual amount of riots among the firemen.”37
A city council ordinance of 1841 had aimed to bring the volunteer firefighters under control. It empowered the mayor to cut off city appropriations to any company “the members of which shall . . . be engaged in fighting or rioting at fires.” Mayor Brady clearly drew no satisfaction from the exercise of this authority. Firefighters were not just voters; they were organized voters. To the presidents of Baltimore’s volunteer companies, Brady wrote that, though no groups “render more invaluable services to the Community,” and “none more readily receive or deserve universal approbation,” he (reluctantly) had to invoke “an obligation still stronger” than the one owed to firefighters—his responsibility for “the maintenance of peace and good order within the limits of the City.” A few ruffians among the volunteers had “subjected the whole body of firemen to the charge of gross improper conduct.” So serious had the problem become that “the Council felt the necessity of passing strong remedial Laws—and imposed upon the Mayor the duty of seeing them executed.”38
In fact, the council’s resolution had merely charged the fire companies to draw up their own rules of conduct and impose discipline upon the members who violated them. But self-regulation proved insufficient, and the problems posed by rowdy firefighters were still serious enough to demand the attention of Mayor James Law in 1844. As a fire company president of long standing, Law brought credibility to the task. To prevent false alarms from being used to bring out battling fire companies, he proposed the creation of a “General Central Alarm Bell, to which all other alarm bells shall be subordinate.” It would be guarded, day and night, by a city watchman. No fire company enlisting minors would be eligible for municipal appropriations. No company could receive support from the city unless it empowered its president to strike from the rolls any member deemed to have acted “in a manner unbecoming a Fireman.” Damage to any apparatus caused by an altercation between two or more fire companies would have to be repaired at a company’s—not the city’s—expense.39
The council approved most of Mayor Law’s recommendations. It also empowered him to impose any additional regulations upon fire companies that, in his judgment, might help to prevent street fights among their members.40 But the council stopped short of creating a central fire alarm guarded by a watchman. That would have required an expenditure of city funds. So would the mayor’s recommendation for a general increase in the number of watchmen. The council did not explicitly reject this increase. The Joint Committee on Police suggested that an expansion of the night watch might help to reduce the frequency of “nocturnal robberies,” and the council forwarded to the mayor two citizen petitions requesting additional watchmen, along with its disingenuous assurance that under “existing ordinances the Mayor has full power & authority to employ as many watchmen as he deems necessary.”41 The mayor, however, did not have the authority to pay as many officers as he deemed necessary.
Mayor Law nevertheless hired 14 additional watchmen. He instructed them to stay on the move, challenging everyone they met at an “unseasonable hour” of the night. In the first month that the new watchmen were on the job, he reported, there were no successful burglaries, and three burglary suspects were arrested. The mayor claimed that he had hired the additional watchmen on the expectation that the council would appropriate the funds to pay them. It did not. The second branch refused the appropriation. The mayor professed surprise and disappointment at the council’s failure to provide funds for additional day and night police on Sundays, when the town’s “unruly boys” were at their worst. Law concluded that he would be “compelled to withdraw those I have employed.” Addressing the council, he declared that “upon you the joint responsibility must rest for whatever destruction and loss of property may ensue.”42
A succession of one-term mayors in the 1840s tried to reassure the city council that the municipality had the means to secure the safety and health of Baltimore’s residents. A succession of city councils refused to authorize expenditures for these purposes. Thaddeus Thomas, a nineteenth-century commentator on Baltimore’s municipal government, suggested that this deadlock may have followed from the democratization of city government. After 1833, the mayor and the members of the city council’s second branch were chosen by popular vote rather than an electoral college. Perhaps the direct election of these officials increased their wariness about expenditures that might raise their constituents’ taxes. “A summary of some of the chief ordinances of this period,” wrote Thomas, “will show the variability and the confusion of functions due to the lack of a true principle of administration.”43
The city council’s guiding principle, however, seems to have been a determination to avoid spending money. While rejecting increased expenditures, the council also attempted to reduce municipal outlays. Most of the duties assigned to the city’s health commissioners were transferred to the street commissioners, who took over responsibility for removing “nuisances” and pools of standing water. The superintendents of streets and pumps lost their jobs and responsibilities to the bailiffs or “day police,” and the council decided that the city could dispense with the deputy high constable. Subsequent modifications of these modifications produced the “variability and confusion of functions” mentioned by Thomas.44
The council pressed on in its mission to reduce city expenditures. It rejected a request from the volunteer fire companies for a special appropriation, not because the funds were unneeded, but because the council’s Committee on Fire Companies did not “feel themselves justifiable in recommending any thing that will increase the many burdens now hanging over the corporation.” A newly created Committee on Retrenchment recommended an across-the-board 20 percent reduction in municipal salaries, though the council rejected it.45 The council did increase disability pay for members of the night watch injured in the course of duty; they could receive full pay (up from half pay) for as much as two months off the job. But the city’s legislators ignored the watchmen’s petition for an increase in pay while they were on the job.46
The council also turned its back on citizen demands for more public schools. In 1845, northwest Baltimoreans asked for construction of a school in their part of the city and even offered to provide the lot on which to build it. At the same time, northeast Baltimoreans complained that they had no school. Enrollment in the existing public schools had grown to almost 3,500, an increase of more than 25 percent over the preceding year. In addition to its 17 primary schools (nine for boys and eight for girls), there were also three high schools. A Central High School for males had been in operation for more than five years, and the school commissioners had recently added Eastern and Western Female High Schools. The young women needed two facilities rather than one to reduce the distance to their schools because “females are more delicate than males, and cannot attend school at a remote distance, especially in inclement weather.” Faced with overcrowding at some of its existing schools and the demands for more schools, the commissioners declared that they deeply felt “the importance of having Schools established in all sections of our beloved city,” but they could not meet the need within their existing appropriation.47
The school commissioners backed the neighborhood requests with pleas of their own. A special committee of the city council was appointed to respond to them. Its report conceded that “it would be desirable (if it were at the disposal of the Board) to erect new schools” for the two neighborhoods requesting them. It suggested, however, that other sections of the city might be just as needful as these. But the committee did not make any systematic survey of the need for new schools—“for these reasons: After some reflection, they have concluded it would be impolitic & inexpedient to ask from the Council, for this year, a further appropriation . . . for the purposes of education.” The committee members were apparently unmoved by the school commissioners’ prediction that those deprived of schooling would “idle their time away in our public streets, many of them contracting those seeds of vice & immorality which the mind is so susceptible of receiving at that tender age.” In time, some of these unschooled children would no doubt join the legions of “unruly boys” and young men who posed a nightly threat to public order. But the commissioners would have to make do with the revenue generated by the existing school tax of 5 cents for every $100.00 of assessed valuation. The council’s committee calculated that the revenues already available, together with railroad bonds held by the school commissioners, would finance the creation of one additional primary school for girls.48
Baltimore faced enormous debt. Signs of this daunting burden were plainly evident in the city’s tax rates. Though it collected only 5 cents per $100.00 for schools in 1845, the city levied a tax of 31 cents to cover interest on debt incurred to finance internal improvements. At more than $360,000, the interest payment was the single largest item in the municipal budget. Total expenditures for the schools amounted to only a bit over $45,000; for “watching and lighting” the city, $47,000. Another 25 cents per $100.00 of assessed valuation was needed to cover the city’s share of state debt, most of it for internal improvements.49 And there was more to come. The B&O still had to make the push from Cumberland to the Ohio River. The Baltimore and Susquehanna line had yet to pay a dividend and was struggling to find a profitable set of linkages with the railroads, rivers, and canals of Pennsylvania. The city’s $380,000 stake in the Susquehanna Tidewater Canal had already been written off. Mayor Law doubted whether “the city will ever receive any benefit from her investment in this work, or at least, the period will be very remote.”50
Baltimore made large and questionable investments in its future prosperity at the expense of its current capacity to maintain public order, public health, and public education. Somewhere beyond this regime of frugality, the city’s officials envisioned a fanciful future in which Baltimore’s willingness to forego dividends would enable the B&O to reach the Ohio River without requiring the municipality to incur additional debt, and would “remunerate the City for a temporary surrender of interest, double her capital, and ultimately reduce her taxes, and incalculably augment her trade, and the value of every description of her property.”51
Until that golden age arrived, however, the city would continue to scrimp on essential expenditures to underwrite its investments in long-term prosperity. In 1848, for example, the mayor and the Committee of Visitors of the city-county jail concurred in the judgment that the existing structure was “wholly inadequate.” They recommended the construction of a new jail, or at least significant additions to the existing building. Not only were juvenile offenders being held with adult criminals, but witnesses detained for pending trials were confined with convicted felons. The city council’s jail committee dismissed these complaints “owing to the distressed condition of the City treasury” and recommended that no jail improvements should be undertaken until the state legislature had compelled Baltimore County to pay its share of the costs.52 In the meantime, the city would suffer grievous costs of its own.
BREAKING POINT
In November 1850, shortly after taking office, Mayor John H. T. Jerome called an extraordinary session of the Baltimore City Council to take action against the “fearful increase of crime, disorder, and bloodshed during the past few weeks.” Jerome asked the council’s support in “devising and adopting . . . such measures and means as will effectually restore and permanently maintain the public peace, and give to all good citizens assured protection for their persons and lives from the murderous assaults and lawless depredations of that ruthless band of Ruffians, Rowdies, and midnight assassins, who have long infested the city, filling it with terror and lamentation.”53
Jerome cannot have taken the council’s cooperation for granted. He was a Whig, and the council majority was now Democratic. Until his election as mayor, he had not even been a prominent Whig. Orphaned at the age of 5 years and raised by grandparents, he had “been compelled of necessity,” he said, “to struggle on and build up for myself, without any hereditary means or money, a character and a position in life that I am grateful to know commands the respect and confidence of the community.”54
He was a grocer who operated from a stand at Lexington and Paca Streets, just outside the Lexington Market. He did not cater to the city’s elite. Jerome advertised his location as “the OLD CHEAP CORNER,” where patrons got discounts for paying in cash. Until his election as mayor, his political career had been dismal. A year before his victory in the mayoral election, he had sought the Whig nomination for a seat in the house of delegates. The Whig convention gave him just six votes and last place among its contenders for the legislature. Jerome had achieved his only previous electoral victories as a member of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, a fraternal organization founded in Baltimore in 1819. In 1850, he was voted grand master of the organization’s Maryland chapter; after several years, as president of the Odd Fellows’ temperance organization—the Crystal Fount Society. Jerome acknowledged that he was a “humble and obscure person . . . suddenly brought before the people for their suffrages.” His speech accepting the Whig nomination for mayor was a kind of autobiography by which he introduced himself to an electorate that knew him only from the advertisements for his grocery stand.55
Only a week before the mayoral election, Baltimore had given a substantial majority to the Democratic candidate for governor. But the Democrats had fallen to fighting with one another over the party’s choice of a mayoral candidate at its August convention, where J. Mabury Turner, an East Baltimore butcher, won a majority of the votes. The partisans of John Watkins, a West Baltimore bricklayer, refused to accept their party’s choice and marched out of the convention to contest the election as “Reubenites,” choosing to name themselves, for obscure reasons, after one of the 10 lost tribes of Israel. Their political inclinations were only slightly less obscure. Reubenite street processions in the weeks preceding the election denounced the Democratic candidate Mabury Turner, a member of the Hibernian Society, as a fawning friend of Irish and German immigrants. Their organizational base seems to have been the New Market Fire Company, of which Watkins was a member.56
The conflict between the Reubenites and the regular Democrats apparently accounted for much of the violence that occurred during the 1850 municipal election. In the tavern that served as the Eleventh Ward’s polling place, Reubenites were suspected as the attackers who had beaten and shot Francis Lafferty. Another man was struck on the head with a club and severely injured. A police officer trying to keep order was knocked to the floor “having been overpowered by superior numbers.” In the tough Ninth Ward on the waterfront, Washington Goodrich, who had a long record as a brawler, attacked Patrick Donegan. “Goodrich adopted his usual mode of fighting,” according to the Sun, “by seizing Donegan’s finger with his teeth, and biting it almost in twain.” At the polling place in the Fourth Ward, just east of the Ninth, Officer Gorton “labored hard to preserve the peace” and “received a severe wound near the eye” for his efforts. The Reubenites deserted their party and threw their votes to the Whigs, giving Whig candidate John Jerome 52 percent of the 20,000 votes cast.57
It was hardly a popular mandate, yet Jerome advanced a more sweeping program for maintaining public order than any of his predecessors and convinced the council to make its most substantial additions so far to the city’s embryonic police force. Two murders had abruptly focused the city’s anxiety on its long slide toward violence. The first occurred just days after Jerome’s election. Edmund Mitchell, president of the Vigilant Fire Company since 1846, had been shot and killed as he was about to enter a “public house” to celebrate Jerome’s victory. The mayor, the governor, and the Vigilant Company all offered rewards for anyone who would identify his killer. Several suspects were arrested, but no one was ever indicted for the crime. The Sun reported that at least 1,000 people marched in Mitchell’s funeral procession, including Mayor Elijah Stansbury, who was flanked by mayor-elect Jerome and defeated mayoral candidate Turner. Clergy of three different denominations—Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist—officiated in the obsequies.58
Fire company presidents were local celebrities in mid-nineteenth-century Baltimore, and Mitchell’s murder may have sensitized Baltimoreans to subsequent incidents of disorder and violent death. Another homicide, less than a month after Mitchell‘s killing, again captured the public’s attention. The victim was James Michael, a young man who happened to be standing on a corner outside the hall where the New Market volunteer fire company was holding its annual ball. Men with muskets were stationed outside the door to ensure the safety of those who attended. There were apprehensions that the Stingers, a local gang hostile to the New Market Company, would launch an attack on the organization’s annual celebration. The watchmen on duty in the area later testified that many of the men gathered in the vicinity of the dance hall were carrying guns, but the officers apparently made no attempts to disarm them. The watchmen themselves carried no weapons save their “spontoons” (the Baltimore term for an officer’s nightstick, later modified as “espantoon” and “battoon”). One watchman stood by as a group of about 15 armed men arrived at an intersection near the ballroom. One of them fired a shot at a group gathered on a corner, and several more then fired as well. James Michael fell and soon died. The Sun condemned the “outrageous conduct of a gang of desperadoes, whose lawlessness . . . plunged an amiable young man into a premature grave.”59
The murders of Mitchell and Michael were the only specific crimes that Mayor Jerome mentioned in his message to the special session of the city council, though he might have cited many others committed during the recent election. He focused instead on the more general environment in which the killings had occurred, one in which multitudes of “men and even boys five years of age and upwards are in the constant habit of carrying deadly weapons concealed about their persons, and used by them with heartless indifference.” There was also “the alarming extent and increase of the intemperate use of intoxicating liquors,” and Jerome complained further that the courts were too lenient in imposing penalties on convicted criminals. But the mayor was peculiarly preoccupied with the effect of poor street lighting. Jerome insisted that a “burning lamp throwing a strong, clear light in front of any dwelling, store or shop, during the night, is a better and more certain protection against midnight marauders and felons than the presence and patrolling of the most vigilant watchman.”60
The watchmen themselves drew Jerome’s attention partly because they were responsible for cleaning and maintaining the streetlamps, tasks that had to be performed in daylight when the lights had been extinguished. Jerome recommended that a team of lamplighters should be hired to relieve the patrolmen of this duty, which in any case, according to the mayor, the watchmen performed badly. In fact, the mayor was no more satisfied with the watchmen’s effectiveness as patrolmen than as lamp tenders. He charged that some of them rarely left their watch boxes and slept while they were supposed to be patrolling. He went further. He dismissed several watchmen for neglecting their duties or for sheer incompetence. Previous mayors had consistently praised the “efficiency” of the watchmen.61 To acknowledge that they were anything less might have undercut mayoral requests for hiring more of them.
Jerome, however, combined his plea for more watchmen with a plan for the comprehensive reorganization of the arrangements for policing Baltimore. He accompanied his request for 100 new officers with a curious scheme in which only half the force would patrol the streets in the manner of the watchmen. The other half were to be plainclothesmen; the officer might “stand at a corner or lurk in an alley or by-place, or . . . secrete himself from observation in some ambush or covert for whole nights and days in succession for the purpose of detecting and arresting criminals and violators of the law.” Jerome also pledged to eliminate the watch boxes where officers could sleep or avoid unpleasant weather.62
The city council did not grant Jerome everything that he wanted. But it authorized him to add 40 men to the night watch. The new officers were to be drawn from the bailiffs who patrolled the streets as part-time watchmen on Sundays, when rowdies and ruffians had the leisure to make trouble. The council also passed an ordinance authorizing the mayor to appoint 34 additional bailiffs. Another resolution instructed the committee on police and jail to prepare a plan “for the complete reorganization of the police and watch force of the city.”63
The reorganization plan never materialized, but Jerome was apparently satisfied. He congratulated the council on its “judicious action” in expanding the city’s police force. The mayor had assigned the officers to two shifts. One reported at sunrise; the other, at 9 p.m. The high constable was effectively the city’s police chief, though he also commanded one of the four police districts into which Jerome divided the city. In 1852, the mayor organized the “boat police” to patrol the harbor, watching out for thefts from docks and vessels.64
Baltimore’s government was still deep in debt and would sink deeper still.65 During 1851, the city ran a deficit of almost $75,000. But it was no longer preoccupied with cheese-paring economies. Mayor Jerome had initiated an era of municipal activism in which the council was sometimes a willing partner. It authorized Jerome to negotiate a new contract with the Baltimore Gas Light Company that would help him realize his plan to reduce crime by illuminating the city. At the mayor’s suggestion, the council approved a plan to accumulate the sum of $50,000 for building a new jail or improving the old one. Jerome also noted the longstanding insufficiency of the local water supply and recommended that the city should either buy out the Baltimore Water Company or build a waterworks of its own. The council did not immediately respond to this proposal, but the municipality would take over the Water Company a year after Jerome left office. His proposal that the city should purchase land for public parks would also be carried out by a later administration, but Jerome managed to secure the top of Federal Hill for the city and provided for grassy open spaces in several city squares.66
The city no longer lived for the far-off day when the B&O would reach the “western waters” and bring wealth to Baltimore. The railroad had announced that it would reach Wheeling on the Ohio River within the next year, and the wealth of the West was expected to flow into Baltimore. The city could address its current deficiencies and hardships because it had finally begun to live in the present.