PIGS AND POLITICIANS
IN 1851, BALTIMORE CITY became fully independent of Baltimore County. Its new status was, in part, the result of a state constitutional convention summoned to replace the constitution under which Maryland had labored since 1776. Southern Maryland and the Eastern Shore—“Old Maryland”—clung desperately to their disproportionate representation under the state’s old constitution. The adjustments to that constitution in 1836 had quieted the demand for reform, but only temporarily.1 The underrepresentation of Baltimore and the counties of Central and Western Maryland had hardly been erased, and the inequities grew more pronounced as their populations continued to expand during the 1840s. State taxes aggravated the grievances of both the underrepresented and overrepresented constituencies. The state’s $16 million debt, incurred largely for internal improvements, weighed heavily on its citizens and set off tax protests that sometimes edged into violence.2 Many favored constitutional reforms that would restrict the legislature’s authority to issue bonds and run up deficits. By the time of the state’s constitutional convention of 1850, a sea change in party politics was further unsettling Maryland. In Baltimore, the Democrats remained divided between regulars and Reubenites. Now the Whigs were on the rocks.
In national politics, the Whigs were undone not just by the epochal issue of slavery but by the prosaic politics of patronage. Whig president Zachary Taylor could nominate as many Whig officeholders as he liked, but they had to be confirmed by the Senate’s Democratic majority. To win approval for the Whig nominees, therefore, Whig members of Congress had to win the support of Democratic senators. The need for cross-party cooperation on patronage compounded intraparty animosities on the issue of slavery that tended to make northern and southern Whigs the enemies of one another and the allies of northern or southern Democrats.3
Although the constitutional controversy in Maryland seemed a matter of adjusting representation to reflect population, it had as much to do with slavery as with apportionment. Maryland’s slaves were concentrated in the southern part of the state and on the Eastern Shore—both Whig strongholds. In Central and Western Maryland, where the state’s population was increasingly concentrated, free black people were becoming more numerous and slaves less so. The defenders of slave property felt threatened, in particular, by Baltimore. The city was by no means a nest of abolitionists, but its investment capital and economic interests did not ride on the preservation of slavery, and it did not seem a trustworthy defender of the institution. A Baltimore delegate to the constitutional convention of 1850 tried to calm the anxieties of the state’s slave owners by introducing a provision that would forbid the legislature from ordering any changes in the relationship between master and slave. The constitutional guarantee was not good enough for the slave owners of Southern Maryland. Constitutions could change.4
The convention itself was a lesson in the fragility of constitutions. The constitution of 1776 did not provide for the calling of constitutional conventions. It specified that the General Assembly could approve amendments to the state constitution by majority vote at two consecutive sessions of the legislature. Though the procedure was alleged to have produced a “shapeless mass of unintelligible and contradictory provisions,” it was the only one explicitly sanctioned by law. But advocates of a convention argued that their preferred procedure—popular referendum—was not explicitly prohibited by law and that the state’s Declaration of Rights gave Maryland’s people the power to change their government. The most compelling argument in favor of calling a constitutional convention may have been the one voiced by Maryland’s governor in his annual address of 1850. If the legislature ignored the demands for constitutional reform reverberating from the most populous sections of the state, “the sanction of the legislature would not much longer be invoked.”5
Baltimore gained little from the constitution approved in 1851. It provided that seats in the house of delegates were to be apportioned according to population—but not for Baltimore. No matter how large its population, the city’s delegation in the house could not exceed the most populous county’s representation by more than four delegates. This meant that the city would gain five seats in the house, giving Baltimore only half of the representation it would have been entitled to on the basis of population. One-fourth of Maryland’s people lived in Baltimore, but the city would hold only one-eighth of the seats in the house.6
Separation of the city from Baltimore County was first proposed by the General Assembly in 1850 as a concession to the county, which had become a decidedly junior partner in the institutions it still shared with the city—the courthouse, the jail, and the almshouse. The legislature authorized residents of the county to elect a commission to resolve such issues as the location of the new county seat. The commission, however, had been unable to reach agreement on anything—even the county’s separation from the city. The resolution of this question then passed to the state constitutional convention, which, in the meantime, had convened in Annapolis. The delegates, as part of a larger scheme to reduce the cost and complexity of the state’s judiciary, redesigned the state’s judicial districts so as to place the city and county courts in separate jurisdictions, and thus eliminated any reason for the city and county to share a courthouse and a jail. In 1853, the General Assembly advanced the separation by authorizing the voters of Baltimore County to decide on the location of the new county seat and the construction of buildings to house its criminals, paupers, and judges. In Baltimore, where each jail cell housed 12 to 14 prisoners, the city had begun to accumulate funds for a new jail in 1851, but disputes about its location delayed construction until 1856.7
In principle, at least, the city’s separation from Baltimore County endowed it with a distinctive status. Since it no longer lay within the jurisdiction of any county, Baltimore became a municipality that also bore the responsibilities of a county. Formally, the city had achieved a greater degree of functional autonomy than most of the towns that sprouted up as the nation’s population moved west, where governing was usually conducted by a plurality of overlapping public institutions—municipal, county, and special district governments.8 Baltimore’s institutional arrangements concentrated public business under the authority of a single government and seemed to lead to greater-than-average political integration. In practice, the city still struggled to pull itself together. The underrepresentation of Baltimore in the General Assembly facilitated legislative interference in the city’s business. State lawmakers would eventually extract major responsibilities of urban government from the city and place them under the jurisdiction of the state.
SWINE
Baltimore’s new political autonomy and increased representation in the state legislature seemed fitting counterparts for Mayor John H. T. Jerome’s municipal activism, but old concerns remained. The town’s enduring preoccupation with “swine going at large” continued. In 1851, a petition reached the Baltimore City Council requesting that hogs be prohibited from wandering the streets. It was referred to the Committee on Health, which was reluctant to adopt any such restrictions because of the hogs’ supposed contribution to public sanitation “under the present imperfect operation of our garbage law system.” The committee confessed that it was unable to agree whether wandering swine should be treated as public servants or public nuisances. Given “such a contrariety of opinion” among its members, there was “no hope of their being able to frame any resolution differing materially from the present ordinances.” The committee asked to be “discharged from further consideration of the subject,” and it was.
A year later, however, a majority of the city council arrived at a sterner position on swine. It sent the mayor a proposed ordinance prohibiting Baltimoreans from keeping hogs in “any sty or yard, or elsewhere on their premises.” The bill also provided that “no hog will be suffered to run at large” in the city. Those portions of the “precincts” still exempt from direct taxation would be exempt from the ordinance.9 Mayor Jerome applauded the council’s determination to keep swine out of the “streets, lanes, and alleys” of the city. But he vetoed the bill because, he claimed, it would have had exactly the opposite of its intended effect. If city residents could no longer keep hogs on their own premises, was “it not reasonable to infer that the streets, lanes, and alleys of the city must necessarily be made hog pens at large?” Of course, the law proposed by the council also made it illegal for pigs to roam the streets, but the exemption for hogs from areas not subject to direct taxation complicated enforcement of this prohibition. Since these pigs were exempt from regulation, they would be free to wander the city’s streets, lanes, and alleys, “and as a necessary consequence,” the mayor argued, “hogs owned by parties within direct taxation will enjoy the same privileges.” There was no way for the agents of law enforcement to distinguish between taxable and nontaxable pigs. The mayor also took issue with the bill’s blanket exemption for “butchers, packers, or drovers.” The members of this privileged class could keep hundreds of hogs in pens or let them run free.10
The council made a new attempt at a hog law. It approved an ordinance making it illegal to bring any hogs into the city except for sale or slaughter, and those entering would have to depart, in one way or the other, within 10 days. Pig owners and their pigs would be subject to the law even if residents of districts exempt from direct taxation.11
Mayor Jerome was satisfied with the new bill. Many Baltimoreans were not. As soon as the council convened for its next session at the start of 1853, it received petitions, some signed by hundreds of citizens, taking issue with the hog law. Almost 120 residents of the Eighteenth Ward complained that, in the absence of swine to consume garbage, refuse was collecting in the streets “creating a nausea which in our opinion will contribute much to the unhealthfulness of the city. And we believe there can be no better plan desired to dispose of such Offal and Slops than to keep Swine to consume it.”12 Another petition asserted that the hog law was “very oppressive upon the poor, who, but for the privilege of keeping Hogs, would be deprived of putting up their pork in the fall.” The petition acknowledged “the argument of some” that the full cost of raising a hog might be greater than buying an annual supply of pork each fall. But Baltimore’s poor, “when their wages is but seventy-five cents a day,” could save “twenty-five or fifty cents out of their stinty wage per week to buy feed for their Hogs, when they cannot raise forty or fifty dollars on one time to buy their pork in the fall.” Allowing pigs to forage in the streets, of course, saved their owners the burden of buying feed out of their “stinty” wages. The petition closed with the familiar claim that roaming swine were “a great means of keeping streets or more especially alleys clean.” It asked that the law be repealed.13
The public reaction to the hog law clearly shook the members of the city council. On being referred one the first petitions, the Committee on Health recommended repeal of the previous year’s ordinance and adoption of a substitute that would transfer the unpopular work of hog regulation from the city council to the mayor. Residents could keep swine in pens or let them run at large if they obtained permits from the mayor. In the council’s second branch, the bill was rejected. Days later, a member of the first branch introduced a bill that would allow pigs the freedom of the city between the beginning of May and the end of October, and hog proprietors could confine their pigs during the rest of the year in “stye or yard,” but if “the filth and stench thereof” should be “offensive to, or annoyed any neighbor or person,” a notification would come from the Department of Health, followed by a daily fine until the filth and stench were no longer cause for complaint. This bill was tabled. A third proposal combined features of the two others. It required pig permits from the mayor and prohibited stench and filth offensive to neighbors. It too was tabled.14
As the petitions continued to come in, members of the council continued to backpedal. One bill would return to the status quo ante: hogs could wander at will from the end of May to the beginning of October, and citizens could keep them penned in—without filth or stench—for the rest of the year. Another proposal allowed residents to keep hogs that were inoffensive to neighbors, but wandering hogs were to be apprehended by police officers and delivered to the almshouse for the sustenance of its inmates. To encourage the officers to tangle with wayward swine, the mayor was directed to pay them 50 cents per pig. A variant included the customary warm-weather privileges for swine in the streets, with the injunction against stench and filth in sties or pens, but directed that roaming “boar hogs,” immense creatures with tusks, would be “forfeited to the city.” It did not indicate who was to apprehend the boars or mention any special compensation for this service. In the second branch, this measure was approved after being read and tabled three times and amended to increase the fine for “stench and filth” from one to five dollars. It won approval in the first branch after being read and tabled twice, but a week after its passage, the first branch moved to reconsider the ordinance, and tabled it again.15
The Baltimore Sun expressed contempt for these proposals to amend or repeal the hog law, especially when their sponsors on the council claimed that wandering swine were essential to public sanitation. The Sun argued otherwise. When public-sanitation pigs were allowed to patrol the city, they only encouraged “total disregard of the ordinance prohibiting the deposit of garbage and offal in the streets!” Reliance on scavenging hogs made humans sloppy. The hog ordinance, claimed the Sun, had been operating effectively, and the experience of swine-free streets demonstrated that the city’s health and cleanliness had not suffered.16 There was no need for further discussion.
But it went on. The city council continued to consider modification of the hog law for at least two more years. Judging by the frequency with which the subject came up, it must have been one of the members’ principal concerns. Many of the proposals made exceptions to the prohibition against keeping penned hogs in Baltimore. Others attempted to upend the ordinance as a whole. In 1854, the city council’s first branch repealed the hog law, but there is no record that the second branch went along. In at least two other instances, both branches concurred in their efforts to roll back the ordinance, but were blocked by mayoral vetoes.17
Other cities had pig problems of their own. In fact, the use of street swine as agents of public sanitation (and winter sustenance for the poor) was common in American towns. European visitors regarded the wandering hogs as a distinctive and colorful feature of American urban life in the mid-nineteenth century—even charming. A Norwegian traveler of 1847 reported that he had not “found any city or town where I have not seen these lovable animals wandering about peacefully in huge herds.” But for many Americans, street pigs ceased to be serviceable or lovable, and the utilitarian case for granting them the freedom of the streets lost its persuasiveness. Efforts to eliminate the pigs were sometimes vigorous and uncompromising. In New York, early efforts to round up street pigs persisted in the face of “hog riots” by poor residents who relied on the animals to feed their families. And when swine were suspected as the source of a cholera epidemic in 1849, the city’s police, often in the face of violent resistance from hog owners, “flushed five to six thousand pigs out of cellars and garrets and drove an estimated twenty thousand swine north to the upper wards.” Subsequent pig round-ups purged lower Manhattan of swine and banished the animals to the semirural regions north of 86th Street.18
PIG TALES OF TWO CITIES
By comparison with New York, Baltimore’s political authorities seemed hesitant and indecisive. The politics of pigs revealed not just official diffidence concerning hogs but the municipality’s limited capacity to control its streets and deal with the conflicting interests of lower-class hog proprietors and more prosperous Baltimoreans averse to sharing the streets with swine. New York handled these matters more resolutely. The contrast reflects, once again, the distinctive circumstances that inhibited Baltimore’s political development. The two cities had emerged and evolved in utterly different political environments. New York City was a functioning polity before New York State came into existence. In fact, the city was the seat of state government until the capital moved to Albany in 1797, and the Albany authorities continued to respect the city’s municipal autonomy for some years thereafter.19 Baltimore, on the other hand, had operated under the shadow of the political authorities in Annapolis since its founding. State officials restricted the city’s legal powers and interfered in its internal operations. The state legislature, for example, had created the areas “not subject to direct taxation” that complicated Baltimore’s regulation of street swine.
The Baltimore City Council’s years of dithering about the hog law in the face of public protests suggest an unusual diffidence on the part of public authorities about exercising their authority over the voters who elected them. Of course, New York’s Democratic politicians also had to cater to their voters, and New York’s municipal institutions were hardly models of efficiency. Their disjointedness meant that the city was governed by a plurality of governments that often acted independently of one another.20 But New York had Tammany Hall, and behind Tammany was a wealth of patronage, all of which served to organize and discipline the municipal rank and file while imposing some measure of order on the fractious fragments of city government.
Baltimore’s party organizations were ephemeral creatures that came to life—often disjointedly—only during election campaigns. But, as Gary Browne observes, parties “played a negligible role compared to ward interests in the City Council voting on important issues.”21
Baltimoreans were accustomed to the limited capacities of their city government. They compensated for its deficiencies through civic institutions such as the Mechanical Company and periodic assemblies outside the courthouse or at the Merchants’ Exchange. But along with the political limitations imposed on Baltimore by the state legislature and aggravated by evanescent party organizations, there were crippling handicaps acquired in the city’s struggle to maintain its prosperity. Baltimore financed its investments in railroads and canals by going deep into debt. By 1853, the city had issued more than $5.5 million in interest-bearing municipal “stock.” It had made itself liable for another $2 million as guarantor of loans taken out by railroads, and it had incurred more than half a million dollars in “floating debt” to pay for such amenities as Mayor Jerome’s public square atop Federal Hill and to finance the construction of a new jail.22 The resulting tax burden became sharply controversial within the city council’s Committee on Ways and Means. To avoid increasing the levy to cover quarterly interest payments, a minority of the committee proposed selling some of the city’s B&O stock to pay the interest on money the city had borrowed to buy the stock in the first place. Failing that, the city would have to borrow more money at interest to pay the interest on money already borrowed. But a majority of the committee and the council held fast to the debt, the stock, and the hope that both would soon carry Baltimore to a new golden age.23
Like Baltimore and Maryland, New York had gone into debt to finance internal improvements designed to stimulate economic growth, though the State of New York, rather than the city, seems to have been the principal borrower for such projects as the Erie Canal. Populous New York City, of course, would have to finance the lion’s share of state debt. But Baltimore residents must have borne a burden more crushing than New Yorkers carried. By the early 1840s, Maryland’s debt exceeded $15 million. Though New York State’s, at almost $22 million, was higher, the per capita burden for New Yorkers was just a little more than one-fourth of what Marylanders had to carry. At more than $32 for each resident, Maryland’s per capita state debt was the third highest in the country—so high that the state eventually defaulted.24 Baltimoreans had the added interest payments made by the city to finance the railroads and canals that were to restore local prosperity. The city’s property tax rate was higher than in most of the nation’s big cities—10 times higher than in New York.25
There was one more critical difference between New York’s and Baltimore’s investments in internal improvements: New York’s investments generally paid off. Baltimore’s were not so productive. The city’s hopes began to fade even before the B&O had made its fateful rendezvous with the Ohio River. A delegate to the state constitutional convention in 1850 invited his fellow representatives to look back to the days of high optimism concerning internal improvements when “every man dreamed he was about to reach a new El Dorado. Taxation was to exist no longer—public debt was to become an obsolete idea.”26 But even after discarding these delusions, Baltimoreans may have been shaken by the disappointments that lay ahead. When the B&O finally reached the “western waters” in 1853, Baltimore’s first return on its investment was an industrial recession. Once the railroad reached its destination, its demand for the locomotives, rolling stock, rails, and other equipment manufactured in Baltimore suddenly dropped. Supplying the B&O with iron rails, in fact, probably never created as much business as some Baltimoreans had hoped. The company imported most of its rails from Britain. Much of the repair work needed for the completed railroad would be diverted from Baltimore to new shops at Martinsburg and Wheeling.27
While it waited for its train to come in, Baltimore had taken its dividends from the B&O not in cash but in more B&O stock. Once the railroad reached the Ohio River, the city council apparently expected that the city would receive cash dividends that could be used to meet the enormous interest payments and retire the debt incurred for internal improvements. In 1854, some members of the council charged that the railroad had made “incorrect” statements in its annual report. The city’s representatives on the railroad’s board of directors were asked to ascertain “what revenue was earned by said company during their last fiscal year w[h]ich was applicable to the purposes of a dividend and if such dividend was earned why it was not paid to the city.”28 The council had already considered selling the “dividend stock” it had received and using the proceeds to cover its interest payments, but only if it received at least $70 per share. (Almost 25 years earlier, the city had paid $100 a share for the B&O stock.) The city apparently failed to get $70. Once again, it borrowed money to pay interest on money already borrowed.29
The B&O was profitable, though burdened by debt incurred for its unexpectedly heavy construction costs, and would eventually pay its dividends in cash. But after reaching the Ohio River in 1853, the company requested and received yet another loan from Baltimore—this one for $5 million—to meet its most pressing debts and to pay for needed improvements, including double-tracking the line from Cumberland to Wheeling so that it could run trains in both directions at the same time. Baltimore financed this loan, like others, by floating a loan of its own.30 B&O revenues consistently exceeded operating expenses, and it would flourish during and after the Civil War, but its profits piled up under the shadow of a looming, long-term liability that would eventually lead to suspension of dividend payments and, before the century was over, bankruptcy.
Baltimore had also begun to accumulate new expenses and debts in anticipation of the urban prosperity that the B&O was supposed to yield. The new spirit of municipal enterprise that germinated under Mayor Jerome increased city expenditures and borrowing. There was the “floating debt” incurred to pay for municipal improvements proposed by the mayor. Acting on Jerome’s concern about the lighting of city streets, the city now had bigger gas bills. After decades of grumbling about the inadequate water supply, the city bought the Baltimore Water Company in 1854 and, in the process, added another $1.35 million of municipal debt.31
The expansion of Baltimore’s police force initiated by Jerome continued, but slowly and unevenly. In 1853, when the council approved an ordinance “to provide for the City of Baltimore an efficient Police system,” Jerome’s successor, Mayor John Smith Hollins, vetoed the measure, claiming that it would be “less efficient and much more costly than the present watch and police system.”32
By 1855, the city employed about 135 officers to protect a population approaching 200,000, and the conditions of police work had apparently changed. In 1852, a council resolution had asked the Committee on Police and Jail to consider the advisability of arming members of the day police and night watch with revolvers. The committee concluded that the police needed guns. Its members were “compelled to admit that the spirit of riot & disorder prevails in our city at the present time, to an extent heretofore unknown & that it is constantly on the increase, & unless met by the strong arm of the law, no one will be safe either in person or property.” The committee asserted “that one means of meeting those who are disposed to riot & disorder is to place the city officers in a position that they may fearlessly meet all who are engaged in any riot & the fact of an officer being armed will in most cases materially aid them in the discharge of their duty without resort to the use of the weapons carried by them.” The committee acknowledged that there might be “some danger in thus arming the police,” but held the hope that by hiring officers of “good moral character,” there would be no danger in giving them guns. The first branch of the council, it seems, was unconvinced; it rejected the committee’s recommendation,33 and for several more years, Baltimore’s peace officers continued to walk their rounds armed only with their wooden espantoons. But the city they patrolled was increasingly troubled by conflicts reflecting ethnic, racial, and political inequalities.