KNOW-NOTHINGS
IN 1854, BALTIMOREANS BROKE OUT of the two-party system to elect a Know-Nothing government. Mayor Samuel Hinks and a majority of the city council belonged to secret lodges of the American Party. Hinks won even though he had never held public office, announced his candidacy only two weeks before the election, and did almost no public campaigning. Like his party, his election was an underground affair. Even the convention that nominated him was held in secret, and his victory shocked the Democrats for whom Baltimore had been a rare and reliable stronghold in a state that usually went for Whig presidential candidates. Know-Nothings later swept the state elections, and in 1856, the party elected four of the state’s six congressmen. Maryland was the only state to give its electoral votes to Know-Nothing presidential candidate Millard Fillmore. He won a larger percentage of votes in Baltimore than in any of the counties. By 1858, the city was “a political barony controlled by the Know-Nothings.”1
In Baltimore, the ground had been prepared for the Know-Nothings by a short-lived American Republican Party, whose members declared their animosity toward foreigners in general. Its convention in 1845 nominated candidates for local and state offices, but won few converts and went underground.2
The inciting spark for the reemergence of nativist sentiment, now intensified by anti-Catholic hostility, was a piece of legislation introduced in the Maryland General Assembly in 1852. The bill was sponsored by Baltimore Democrat Martin Kerney, a prolific author of school textbooks, who chaired the house of delegates’ Education Committee. Its most incendiary provision came near the end of the 70-page bill. It provided that “whenever any white child or children . . . shall be taught gratuitously or at the same rates as the pupils in the Public Schools, in any Orphan Asylum, School, or Academy . . . it shall be the duty of the School Commissioners of the City of Baltimore and the Trustees of the School Districts of the several counties to pay . . . such sum for the education of each child taught.”3 The bill was an ancestor of today’s school voucher proposals. And it was explosively controversial because it would have authorized the payment of public funds to parochial schools. The debate in the legislature spread to the Baltimore City Council when the local archbishop petitioned its members to grant a portion of the school budget to Roman Catholic schools. The response inside the council and out was vituperative and only intensified when Maryland Catholics asked that their Douay Bible be substituted for the King James version in the public schools.4
Other states went Know-Nothing too. By the mid-1850s, the American Party had elected nine governors, 70 members of the US House of Representatives, and majorities in 12 state legislatures. In the South, the biggest cities—Baltimore, New Orleans, and St. Louis—were all centers of Know-Nothing strength.5 The sudden eruption of the new party was most obviously a reaction to foreign immigration. During the 1850s, nearly 100,000 foreigners entered Baltimore. Many of them stayed only long enough to find transportation further inland, but by 1860, one in four of the city’s 212,000 residents had been born in Europe. Yet it was the character as well as the volume of immigration that may have been decisive for igniting nativist animosities. Through the 1840s, most of the foreigners arriving were Germans, but at the end of the decade, Irish immigration rose abruptly as a result of the potato famine. Most came from rural Ireland; they lacked literacy and the skills suited to an urban economy. To native-born Protestants, the immigrants’ supposed obedience to the Roman pope made them a threat to the autonomy and democracy of the United States.6
Even the Germans did not escape the nativist attack. Many of them had arrived in Baltimore after the failure of the European revolutions of 1848, and they expected to return to Germany as soon as political conditions allowed. They resolutely resisted Americanization, and some ex-revolutionaries advanced proposals so radical that they outraged many Americans.7
Apart from the rancorous nativism that energized them, the Know-Nothings also capitalized on voters’ estrangement from the old parties. Like many other Americans, Baltimoreans disliked the contention generated by warring Whigs and Democrats. John Pendleton Kennedy longed for the deference and civility of political life in a younger, smaller Baltimore. The party organizations formed in the 1830s, he thought, had mobilized “the profoundly ignorant, the vicious and dissolute, the frequenters of tippling houses, the idle, the unthrifty, the fraudulent debtors, the decayed and brokendown workmen, the outlawed and cast off members of society under bar for incorrigible faults.” Kennedy, a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian, was drawn to the Know-Nothings, but never formally joined the party.
He became a secret member of the secret party. In a letter marked “confidential and private,” he wrote that the “American party, of which I have been from its first public development, a member in every thing but the form of initiation, is, I think, destined to the consummation of great good to the nation.” He publicly supported Millard Fillmore’s Know-Nothing bid for the presidency in 1856. (Kennedy had served in the Fillmore administration as secretary of the navy.) But Kennedy’s advocacy was ostensibly nonpartisan support from a political independent. In fact, he was a Know-Nothing operative: “I would not have hesitated to enroll myself amongst its members if it had not been that in consultation with some of the most influential members in New York it had been thought advisable that I should not do so.” Fillmore’s candidacy, he was told, would be regarded more favorably if promoted by someone outside the Know-Nothing ranks. “In short, they thought that I could do more for the cause outside of the order than in it.”8
Kennedy clearly viewed the Know-Nothing candidates and officeholders as an improvement on the Whig and Democratic hacks they had displaced. They were, he wrote, “Young men new in our politics . . . very worthy men I understand, and much above the average of our former delegates.” Because they were young, however, they were also inexperienced, and Kennedy judged some of them as undeserving of public office: “Every man now is fit for every place, and I hear men talked of for Senator who have never rendered any recognized service to the state or have any political antecedents known to anybody.” One of them was his younger brother Anthony, who became a Know-Nothing member of the legislature and then a US senator. John regarded his brother’s elevation not as a credit to the party but as “the strangest freak of fortune.” “He is a pleasant, careless, light hearted fellow who never thought a thought, read a book, or troubled his head with a serious application to any grave purpose.” Anthony, according to his older brother, “knows nothing of history, diplomacy, political concerns, national law or any one subject that a Senator might [be] expected to know.”9 He was the perfect Know-Nothing.
The Know-Nothing party appealed to antipartisan sentiment by pretending not to be a party. It was a movement dedicated to principle, not an organization in pursuit of public offices. The “Maine Law” temperance movement had opened the way toward nonparty politics in 1853, when it offered to back local candidates of any party who would support prohibition. Alcohol and immigration were closely linked in the rhetoric of the Maine Law enthusiasts. Irish whiskey and German beer fests, they claimed, contributed to Baltimore’s crime and moral turpitude.10 The temperance crusaders served as an opening act for the Know-Nothings.
Nationally, the Know-Nothing movement disintegrated when the slavery issue trumped the immigration issue. Northern delegates walked out of the American Party convention in 1856, and the party’s national council dissolved in 1857, advising its adherents to adopt structures and policies “best suited” to local circumstances.11 In most states, the party simply collapsed; in Maryland, the Know-Nothings soldiered on. Their cause, however, had evolved. The vehement anti-Catholicism of the party subsided. It had always been a bit awkward; Maryland’s founders and first families were Roman Catholics. Some of the party’s Maryland lodges dropped Catholicism as a bar to membership. A Baltimore delegate to the National Council of the American Party in 1855 tried to persuade the body that native-born Roman Catholics should be permitted to join the party. His proposal was overwhelmingly rejected. But, in Baltimore at least, Protestant nativism was replaced by a fervent devotion to the preservation of the Union.12
In 1855, a Know-Nothing congressman from Baltimore contended on the House floor that his party pointed the way to the nation’s salvation. It had sidetracked the slavery debate that was destroying the old parties and, unlike them, had become a truly national party, “knowing no North, no South, no East, no West.” For Baltimoreans, Know-Nothingism was the solvent of sectionalism, a party ready “to stand by the Union as it is and the Constitution as it is.” By 1859, another of the party’s congressmen from Baltimore was arguing for formation of a new party, “an opposition that rejecting all dangerous and useless dogmas, all questions of vain and irritating differences between sections and people will array itself firmly up on the platform of the constitution and win by its moderation, its good sense, its high conservatism, its unquestioned nationality, the good and true men of all parties and sections.” His fellow partisan, Senator Anthony Kennedy, joined in the call for a party to succeed the Know-Nothings, a “union organization” that would insist on the preservation of the Constitution and the Union and “exclude the slavery question.”13
Many Baltimoreans desperately wanted to extract themselves from the imminent collision between North and South on the issue of slavery. Baltimore congressman and premier Know-Nothing orator Henry Winter Davis embodied his city’s position on the subject. Though a slave owner, his misgivings about the peculiar institution moved him to offer his slaves their freedom—but only if they would move to Liberia. Davis shared Baltimoreans’ longstanding preference for saying as little as possible about slavery, at least in public. “The way to settle the slavery question,” he said, “is to be silent on it.”14
THE KNOW-NOTHING MUNICIPALITY
Baltimore’s Know-Nothing government did nothing to limit the political rights of immigrants or papal loyalists. Once Baltimore’s Know-Nothings “finally possessed the power they had been seeking . . . they stoutly refused to use it for nativist purposes.” Nativism, as William Evitts observed, was “suited for agitation, not action.”15 Once the party ceased to be a movement and became a government, its concerns differed hardly at all from the enduring preoccupations of the city’s mayors and councils.
First came railroads. In December 1854, Samuel Hinks began his term as mayor by calling the city council into special session to choose Baltimore’s representatives for a meeting of the directors of the newly formed Northern Central Railroad. The Northern Central had absorbed the Baltimore and Susquehanna Railroad, in which the city held a substantial interest. The new company had also taken over several other roads and had finally offered Baltimore the chance to succeed in its longstanding quest to secure a direct rail connection to the Susquehanna Valley. The Northern Central reached even farther. It could carry Baltimore’s commerce through Harrisburg and another 55 miles north to Sunbury, Pennsylvania, where it could make rail connections with Buffalo and Lake Erie. In their enthusiasm for the project, the members of the city council voted to transfer to the Northern Central the city’s entire stake in the Baltimore and Susquehanna—stock, interest, and unpaid debt. Mayor Hinks’s predecessor, John Smith Hollins, had vetoed the proposition as overly generous, but the council had overridden his objection.16
The city turned over $950,000 in Baltimore and Susquehanna stock to the new railroad and relinquished the city’s claim to unpaid interest on its investment. By the time the Know-Nothings seized control of the municipality at the end of 1854, there was reason to regret this decision. The Northern Central announced sharp increases in its rates for freight and passengers, “very seriously interfering with & retarding the business of the City by driving freight & passengers to other routes.” The mayor and council sent a resolution to the railroad’s directors to register their objections, which appear to have been ignored. While the rate increases angered city officials, they created a buzz in the market that drove up the price of the company’s stock. The Baltimore Sun commended the Northern Central for its “wise and practical determination—that is not to work for nothing.” The directors “revised their toll sheet so as to increase their rates to the standard set by the late Railroad Conventions.”17 In a later age, the Northern Central might have been charged with price fixing, but in the 1850s, it was simply doing business as usual.
Baltimore’s unhappy experience with the Northern Central did not sour the city on financing railroads. It agreed to provide a loan guarantee to the Pittsburgh and Connellsville road, which made its connection with the B&O at Cumberland. The city had a similar agreement with the Northwest Virginia Railroad. The line met the B&O at Grafton and carried its traffic to the Ohio River at Parkersburg, expanding the B&O’s reach toward western markets. Together, the two B&O feeder roads represented another $3 million liability for Baltimore.18
A second concern was the city’s water supply. Having bought out the Baltimore Water Company, the city now became responsible for overcoming the deficiencies that had induced the municipality to purchase the waterworks in the first place. The town’s citizens were impatient. A petition signed by more than 1,300 Baltimoreans complained about “the long delay on the part of the city authorities to obey the people of Baltimore to introduce an additional supply of Water into the city.” The petitioners complained that the municipality’s inaction had “exposed a large part of the city to the risk of conflagration, and continues to impede the growth and prosperity of the city.”19 In the special session of the city council called by Mayor Hinks after his inauguration, the first ordinance approved would create a new agency—the water board—charged with the management and maintenance “of the dams, reservoirs, mains, pipe-yard, and property” of the waterworks. It was a formidable establishment consisting of “foremen, mechanics, keepers, watchers, laborers, and other persons,” including a treasurer, a bookkeeper, and two collectors to oversee the receipt and disposition of “water rents.”20 The water board promptly submitted a request that the city sell $98,000 in municipal stock to finance the purchase of land and water rights needed to increase Baltimore’s water supply.21
Another ongoing project that the Know-Nothings embraced was the construction of a new jail. The council formed a committee to select a site and solicit proposals from building contractors.22 The only city ordinance that may have reflected the distinctive ideological inclinations of the Know-Nothings had to do with “the encouragement of the Volunteer Corps in the City of Baltimore.” The law provided subsidies to local militia companies on the condition that they parade in full regalia on days specified for patriotic celebration.23 Patriotic display was a natural indulgence for nativists, but it was not their paramount concern.
Like many of their predecessors, the Know-Nothings were concerned to prevent crime and public disorder, even though some of the party’s adherents were known for their ferocity as street fighters. Not long after the election of Mayor Hinks, the city council made two attempts to overhaul the city’s night watch and day police by consolidating them under the authority of a chief of police. Disagreements within the council prevented both bills from reaching the mayor’s desk.24 But a new urgency about law and order marked the administration of Hinks’s successor, Thomas Swann. Swann had been president of the B&O Railroad. He won the mayor’s office as a Know-Nothing by defeating the president of the Northern Central Railroad, a Democrat.
The election itself may have helped to intensify fears of collective violence and mob rule. Baltimoreans were already acquainted with the coincidence of voting and violence. But the public disorders that surrounded the municipal and presidential elections of 1856 exceeded anything in the city’s experience. Both parties were backed by street-fighting forces made up of fire companies and their allied gangs. The New Market Fire Company sided with the Democrats, who were also supported by the Calithumpians, the Pioneers, and the Empire Club. The Know-Nothings relied on the Mount Vernon Fire Company, the Plug Uglies, the Rip Raps, and a variety of smaller gangs—the Blood Tubs, Rough Skins, Black Snakes, Tigers, Decaturs, Little Fellows, and Ranters.25
The Rip Raps opened the election season by attacking the Seventeenth Ward Democratic headquarters on Federal Hill. There were two fatalities and 22 seriously injured, some of them nonparticipants struck by stray bullets. On October 5, Democratic partisans triggered a riot by tearing down a Know-Nothing banner. They held off the Know-Nothings by barricading a house and defending it with firearms and a small artillery piece.26
As the election drew near, the Sun published a lengthy editorial headed “Riot.” It begged voters to cast their ballots in peace. Elections conducted by fraud and violence threatened the preservation of the Union just as much as did the slavery question or “the Pope of Rome himself.” “Of late,” the Sun observed, “we have recorded frequent riots in our city, and it is beyond doubt that they have been of a political complexion.” The preelection disturbances, the Sun predicted, were a portent of the severe violence likely to occur on the day of the election itself. “And if we consent . . . to such violence, intimidation, or any other demonstrative means by which legal votes can be excluded from, or illegal votes admitted into the ballot-box, we are guilty of moral treason to the republic.”27
The political street fighters were beyond persuasion. In a postelection report, the Sun claimed that the “Municipal Election in this city yesterday was accompanied by a most unusual amount of violence and disorder—more perhaps than ever before on such an occasion.” The Rip Raps and the Plug Uglies had engaged the New Market Fire Department in a pitched battle in and around the Lexington Market, lasting two to three hours, “unchecked and unheeded, apparently, by any efficient show of police force.”28
In the Irish, Democratic Eighth Ward, Know-Nothing voters were driven from the polling place. Know-Nothings of the Seventh Ward launched a counterattack on the Eighth Ward Democrats. The two forces clashed near the intersection of Calvert and Monument Streets, and the battle flowed up and down the slope of Monument Street, with the Washington Monument towering high in the background. Combatants fired at one another from behind tree boxes and marble doorsteps. According to the Sun, at least two were mortally wounded.29
Violence swirled around each of the city’s 20 polling places, one in each ward. The Know-Nothings generally got the best of the fighting. The party’s paper ballots were “striped” and easy to recognize. Election judges received them from behind wooden counters or windows that could easily be blocked by a few strong men. Voters who approached the polls with ballots lacking the correct stripe risked beating or worse. The Know-Nothings’ characteristic weapon, the shoemaker’s awl, became a party symbol in Baltimore. Its image was displayed on banners. Easily concealed, an awl could inflict nasty puncture wounds. Occasionally, however, conflicts to control the polls expanded into quasi-military engagements, with organized volleys of gunfire and small artillery pieces.30
According to the Sun, in the First, Second, Third, Fourth, and Fifth Wards, “we heard of nothing more than the usual fighting.” In the Fourth, the “usual fighting” included an attack on a voter who “received a severe cut across the top of his head with a pistol, and was shot at three times while making his escape.” He was apparently unable to cast his ballot. Elsewhere, the election turned deadly. “A man named either Andy or Charles Brown was shot through the chest near Paca Street and was brought down through the Lexington Market by four men, one having hold of each hand and foot, while the unfortunate victim’s face lay toward the ground. He was taken into the apothecary shop of Mr. Smith . . . where, lying gasping upon the floor he breathed out his life.” The Sun estimated that the election had cost four killed outright and five or six wounded, “whose cases are pronounced hopeless.”31
Know-Nothing electoral violence was another indication that anti-Catholic nativism had ceased to be the party’s driving force—even among the rank and file. If nativist sentiment had continued to animate the street fighters, they might have attacked convents, churches, or the meetings of the local Hibernian Society. But they concentrated on polling places. Their principal concern was to win control of public offices and political patronage.32
The disturbances surrounding the October municipal election aroused widespread apprehensions about violence in the November elections for president and state offices. A committee of prominent citizens petitioned outgoing Mayor Hinks to convene a special session of the city council to adopt measures “to preserve the peace of the city, especially on the day of the Presidential election.” Hinks replied that such precautions were “inexpedient” because he had no information “to justify me in anticipating a recurrence of the scenes which recently disgraced the city.” In any case, he was confident that the arrangements already made “as to the civil and military force” would “quell any disturbance that may arise.”33 Hinks ordered a division of the local militia to assemble at its armories on election day, but later withdrew the order. Governor T. Watkins Ligon, a Democrat, came to the city just before the election to offer the state’s assistance in keeping order. His offer was dismissed.34
Mayor Hinks called “special meetings of the city police captains to inform them that the services of their men would be required for special duty on election day.” The police seem to have made an earnest effort to preserve public order, but they were generally ineffective. The presidential election generated even more carnage than the local election. In a reprise of the October riots, a mob from the Know-Nothing Seventh Ward, “armed with muskets and every description of small arms,” attacked the Democratic Eighth Ward’s polling place. Twenty-five armed police officers were dispatched to restore order, but “found themselves utterly unable to cope with either party of rioters.” The battle soon spread to the Sixth Ward, where the election judges “refused to receive a vote until order was restored.”35
Fighting erupted at the Belair Market in Old Town (formerly Jones Town). The chief constable, his deputy, and a police sergeant rushed to the scene and confiscated two muskets and a “swivel”—a small artillery piece—but were unable to restore order even when reinforced by additional police officers. The Belair Market engagement resulted in 10 or 11 fatalities. At an apothecary shop nearby, 12 of the wounded were laid out on the floor.36
Many of the wounded and a few of the dead appear to have been noncombatants—a 12-year-old girl shot while entering her house, a 15-year old boy returning from work, a man “aged about sixty years and an excellent citizen” whose jaw was shattered. A justice of the peace was hit on the back of the head by a brick. One of the fallen was reported to have “died of fright” that brought on a heart attack.37
A precise casualty count is impossible. The Sun offered a terse summary: “Killed, 5; wounded, supposedly mortally, 15; wounded, 53—total 113.” Assuming that the mortally wounded fulfilled expectations, the death toll of 20 is probably close to accurate, but recent accounts of the November riot estimate the number of wounded at about 250.38 The election riots of 1856 cost close to 30 lives and at least 300 other casualties. Fillmore carried Baltimore by more than 7,000 votes.
FIXING THE POLICE
Six days after the presidential election, Mayor Swann delivered his inaugural address. He did not mention the election riots. He did acknowledge that government was responsible for the “quiet and good order of a city.” And, without mentioning Mayor Hinks by name, he seemed to endorse his predecessor’s decision not to use troops against the rioters: “A resort to military interference . . . is not only irritating to the people, but in direct hostility and theory of our free institutions.” It might also backfire by inciting more violence.39
Little more than a week later, Swann summoned the city council into special session and wasted no time in addressing the city’s failure to preserve public order. “It cannot be disguised that for some time past a spirit of lawlessness has prevailed to a large extent in our city, and that the power of the corporation is at this time wholly inadequate to its suppression.” The remedy was to create “a proper system of police.” The value of the system was “not to be estimated by dollars or cents,” and the “burthen of taxation” should not be a consideration. He urged the council to make “the establishment of an efficient police” its first order of business.40
The year before Swann’s election, Know-Nothing councilman Charles Krafft, a member of the Joint Committee on Police and Jail, asked that his committee be instructed “to convene from time to time to take into consideration the police system as now in force.”41 Though the proposal seems to have been rejected or ignored, the committee nevertheless proceeded to consider alterations of the police system, and in February 1855, it submitted an elaborate bill that specified even the stationery budget for the police chief’s office. The bill’s most significant provisions, however, were a consolidation of the day police and night watch under the chief’s authority and a significant expansion of the police force to 300 “strong, able-bodied men of good moral character” who were not to attend the theatre or frequent “any public house or bar room where spirituous or malt liquor was served.” After a few desultory amendments, a motion was introduced proposing “that the further consideration of the bill be permanently postponed.” The motion passed by a vote of 10 to 8. The reason for the council’s refusal to consider the ordinance may lie in another motion made by Democratic councilman J. S. Wright, one of those who voted to shelve the police bill. Wright moved that “in the present state of the finances of the city, and heavy burden of taxes imposed upon our citizens, we will not receive any business after the first day of April and adjourn ‘sine die’ at an early day thereafter.”42
The council’s second branch also considered the proposed expansion and reorganization of the police force. After several amendments, the bill passed. Councilman Krafft attempted to reintroduce the police ordinance in the first branch in March 1855. The branch’s president declared his motion out of order, “a similar bill having been indefinitely postponed” earlier in the session. Krafft contended that because the bill had been amended in the second branch, it was not similar to the earlier measure. But the council upheld its president’s ruling by a vote of 11 to 8.43
The bloody election riots of 1856 triggered a decisive shift in the city council. The Joint Committee on Police and Jail revived its plan to devise a “more efficient police system” and expanded on it. After declaring that the “present Watch and Police systems of the . . . City shall be abolished,” the committee’s report went on to order a sharp increase in the number of police officers. The new force would consist of “One Marshal, One Deputy Marshal, Eight Captains, Eight Lieutenants, 24 Sergeants, 347 Police officers, five detective Police officers, and eight Turnkeys.” There would also be 42 lamplighters under the supervision of four superintendents of lamps. A city fire inspector would report on the origin of each fire and inspect new buildings to ensure that their construction complied with municipal ordinances. The marshal was to exercise sweeping authority over the police and law enforcement, but his power was closely tied to that of the mayor. One unusual provision of the ordinance required the marshal of police to meet with the mayor every day.44
Each of four police districts would be divided into “beats.” After roll call, the sergeants would “lead forth their platoons” and assign each officer to his proper beat. For the first time, the officers would wear uniforms and numbered badges. Ordinarily, the police officers would be armed only with a wooden “battoon,” 22 inches long and at least one and three-quarter inches thick. But in times of “great emergency” they would be issued revolvers or muskets. The mayor or the marshal could “at any time . . . call out the whole police.” This time, the first branch of the council gave its unanimous approval to the police ordinance; the second branch passed it by a vote of seven to three, and Mayor Swann promptly signed it.45
POLICING IN PRACTICE
Opinion concerning the efficacy of Swann’s new police department has been generally dismissive. A hagiographic history of the city’s police force published in 1888 acknowledged that the reorganized and expanded department was “more efficient than the former ones,” but “the new force was gradually filled with ‘Know-Nothing recruits,’ who, instead of maintaining the peace, became willing tools of violence and riot.” More recent assessments have been no more favorable. The verdict is that “Baltimore’s enlarged police force did little to restore election calm.” The police stood by as “spectators” at election riots. When they did intervene, it was often as active partisans engaged in street-level hostilities against Democratic voters, especially naturalized citizens.46
The new police force would face its first practical test at the elections for magistrates and for the first branch of the city council in October 1857. Know-Nothing candidates for the council faced no opposition in 3 of the city’s 20 wards—a sign, perhaps, of their party’s success at intimidating challengers. A Democratic candidate in the Twelfth Ward withdrew the day before the election when he learned that the election judges had relocated his ward’s polling place. It was now just two blocks away from the poll of the Know-Nothing Twentieth Ward. He was concerned that his supporters might have to brave bands of Plug Uglies to exercise the franchise.47
The October election of 1857 was markedly less deadly than the contest of the previous year, perhaps because many citizens decided that it was too dangerous to vote. The Know-Nothing vote declined by about 5,000, and Democratic turnout fell by 7,000, a reduction of about 50 percent from 1856. Still, a police sergeant was killed during a skirmish between Democrats from the Eighth Ward and Know-Nothings from the Fifth; another officer was wounded in the same engagement. Others were injured while trying to defend the Seventeenth Ward Democratic headquarters on Federal Hill against a Know-Nothing attack. At least some members of the enlarged and reorganized police department seem to have taken their responsibilities seriously. But they were unable to prevent the majority party in most wards from blocking the polls against the local minority.48
Elections for Congress, governor, the house of delegates, and other state offices were to be held in November. As in 1856, the disturbances that marred the October elections were seen as a portent of even greater trouble in November. Perhaps because of the carnage at the previous year’s election, Governor Ligon asserted state authority more vigorously than in 1856. He again came to Baltimore, but this time he was prepared for a more extended stay. He took a room at Barnum’s Hotel and dispatched a letter to Mayor Swann asking what measures had been taken to ensure the “personal security, and free exercise of the suffrage by legal voters” in the upcoming election. The violence of 1856 “conclusively established the inadequacy of the existing city police to secure the elective rights and personal safety of the voters.” Ligon hinted at state intervention to ensure the integrity of the election.49
In a barely civil response, Swann rebuffed the governor’s request to discuss his preparations for the November canvass, though he did not “object at any time to impart to you, or any other citizen, the fullest information in regard to matters connected with the government of the city.” The mayor recognized his accountability to the people of Baltimore, not to state authorities. If he needed state assistance, he would ask for it. If the governor chose to place the city under “military supervision,” the mayor could not resist, but he warned that “such a policy might seriously endanger the peace of the city.”50
Ligon promptly ordered Major General John Spear Smith to enroll six regiments of 600 militiamen each to be ready for duty beginning on the Saturday preceding the election. The governor issued a proclamation asserting his constitutional duty to guarantee the right of Baltimoreans to cast their ballots in safety and promised “just retribution” for anyone who attempted to prevent citizens from voting, and also for citizens who voted excessively.51
The governor and the mayor exchanged a few more curt letters but chose not to confer face-to-face, even though they were within walking distance of one another. The most immediate effect of Ligon’s proclamation was to arouse Know-Nothing anger. One American Party adherent claimed to have little interest in the election until he took offense at Ligon’s pronouncement. The commander of the First Rifle Regiment, a Know-Nothing who had recently fallen out with his party, appeared at city hall to offer Mayor Swann the services of his regiment on election day. Governor Ligon’s call to arms was generally ignored by the militia units that he summoned. Even if they had been willing, there were not enough weapons to arm all of them. Ligon sent a request to Virginia to borrow 2,000 muskets.52
The governor refused to withdraw his order to mobilize the militia, but he expressed satisfaction with a face-saving alternative offered by Mayor Swann. To keep the peace on election day, the mayor agreed to appoint 200 temporary policemen drawn from both parties—10 officers for each ward. Swann then issued a stern proclamation threatening severe consequences for anyone creating a disturbance at a polling place or attempting to obstruct the polls. All firearms that might be “used to intimidate persons from voting” would be confiscated. Finally, all “drinking houses” would remain closed on election day.53
The proclamation and the special police may have reduced disorder at the polls. The only known fatalities occurred in the Seventeenth Ward, a frequent site of political violence. A young man under voting age was “stabbed through the loins with a sword cane” and died a day later. His assailant was immediately struck by five shots and was not expected to survive. The Sun reporters circulating among the polling places told of “violent demonstrations” by gangs with partisan affiliations, and witnesses reported that voters were sometimes beaten. Naturalized citizens, in particular, were prevented from voting. The Sun reported that “as the day wore on several of the wards were in the possession of men who seemed pretty much to control the proceedings.”54
ORDER MAINTENANCE IN RETROSPECT
The conduct of Baltimore’s congressional election in 1857 became the subject of an investigation in the US House of Representatives in the following year. Democratic congressional candidate William Pinkney Whyte charged that his American Party opponent, J. Morrison Harris, had secured a majority by blocking Democratic voters or discarding their ballots. Justices of the peace deposed witnesses in Baltimore. Thomas J. Rusk, a Democratic voter from the First Ward in southeast Baltimore, testified that he “attempted to vote; was pushed away from the window; told by the parties present that [he] could not vote that day; no fighting, no rioting, and perfectly quiet at the time.”55
Vote suppression no longer required much overt violence. Most voters knew that the polls were overseen by partisans who “seemed pretty much to control the proceedings.” It was pointless to challenge them. In the First Ward, voter intimidation had become nearly ceremonial. Thomas Rusk testified that the night before the election “between 9 and 10 o’clock p.m.; there were parties of some twenty or thirty persons armed with guns and muskets marching up towards the polls with a cannon . . . and the following day I saw the cannon close by the polls.” It was fired, at nothing in particular, several times during the day, as if to announce that the American Party was still in command.56
David C. Piquett, a Democratic candidate for magistrate in the Second Ward in the October election, said that his experience in that contest convinced him not to vote in November because “I thought my life of more consequence than voting that day.” A police officer had warned Piquett not to vote, but he tried to vote in spite of the implicit threat. He was, after all, a candidate. As he approached the polling place, he noticed 10 or 12 members of the Rough Skins standing in front of it. They were accompanied by the police officer who had previously threatened him. One of the gang members threw a piece of brick at him. He was able to avoid it. “I drew my revolver, and snapped it at the fellow who threw the brick . . . I snapped it at him twice before I was shot. Several shots were fired at me, and one of them struck me in the shoulder. I snapped my revolver twice after I was shot, but finding that it would not go off, I thought it better to get off myself, and left.” Two men pursued Piquett—a member of the Rough Skins and the police officer. The officer overtook him and prepared to strike him with his “billet,” but a storekeeper nearby persuaded the officer to desist.57
Not all polling places were controlled by gangs. A special police officer in the Democratic Eighth Ward testified that the voting “was perfectly orderly and quiet; and all persons had full, entire, and free access to the polls.” Another special officer confirmed his account. In other wards, police officers actually tried to help voters by shouldering aside the Know-Nothings who blocked the polls, but were rarely successful. Far more frequently, the police made no attempt to arrest or drive off the ruffians, but they were not entirely passive. A special officer testified that when voters were beaten at the polls, “the general conduct of the regular police was to take the beaten parties in charge and persuade them to leave the polls.” Some special police officers adopted the same approach.58
The advice of the policemen was probably the best that could be offered under the circumstances. The outnumbered officers, armed only with wooden “battoons,” faced crowds of pistol-packing Know-Nothings. A concerted attempt to place the ruffians under arrest might provoke the violence that had made earlier elections so deadly. In counseling the battered and unsuccessful voters to go home, the officers were performing one of the vital and enduring jobs in police work: “order maintenance.” Unlike law enforcement, order maintenance does not require apprehension of the guilty. Instead, it calls on officers to exercise their personal judgments to identify those persons—guilty or innocent—whose presence poses the most immediate threat to public order.59 The safest way to preserve order around Baltimore’s polling places was to remove the unfortunate citizens who provided targets for Know-Nothing assaults.
The expansion and reorganization of the police accomplished under Mayor Swann did not erase the city’s reputation as Mobtown, but it was a distinct step forward in the struggle to sustain public order. With its badges, beats, battoons, uniforms, and administrative hierarchy, the new department provided a foundation for a modern police force.
Swann presided over a similar transformation of Baltimore’s firefighting forces. Like mayors before him, he both complained about the disorder surrounding the city’s volunteer companies and took care to blame the trouble not on the firefighters themselves but on the gangs that “ran” with the fire companies. His annual message in 1858 called on the city council to undertake a sweeping reorganization of the city’s firefighters. The nine-member commission appointed to come up with a plan for a new fire department subsequently produced two of them. Both would have incorporated the latest technology in firefighting: the steam-powered pump engine and the fire-alarm telegraph. The steam engines were thought to require a level of technical expertise that part-time volunteers could not master, and the engines were too heavy to be pulled through the streets by anything less than 30 firefighters. The commission’s majority therefore proposed that full-time, paid firefighters should staff seven companies with horse-drawn steam engines, while the rest of the department would continue to consist of unpaid volunteers on hook-and-ladder trucks or hand-powered pump engines. A minority report called for “total abolition of the present system, and the adoption in its stead of an entire paid department, in which steam and horse power shall be introduced to the greatest practicable extent.” The minority consisted of Henry Spilman, a veteran volunteer firefighter from the Mechanical Company, the city’s oldest fire company.60 He would later become the chief engineer of Baltimore’s full-time fire department.
Resistance to reorganization came from the Baltimore United Fire Department, which had represented the volunteer companies since 1833. It had been an experiment in self-regulation, pledged to discipline and control the most troublesome fire companies among its members. The organization was determined to preserve its member companies “inviolate from dismemberment by any proposed violent action by the mayor and city council.” By way of self-defense, the group appointed its own committee to propose an alternative to the reorganization plans of the city commission, but the representatives of the volunteer companies voted against their committee’s proposal, and some firemen submitted petitions endorsing Henry Spilman’s demand for an “entire paid department,”61 perhaps because they hoped to be its members.
The city council, however, passed an ordinance based on its commission’s majority report, allowing a combination of paid and volunteer fire companies. Mayor Swann vetoed it. In his message, he announced his opposition to any settlement that would leave obsolete, hand-powered fire engines in place. Perhaps more important, he suggested that the division between paid and volunteer fire companies would only add another axis of conflict to disturb the peace of the city. He called instead for “an out and out paid department—to consist exclusively of steam machinery—under the management and control of the municipal authorities.” The council bowed to Swann’s emphatic rejection of its ordinance and quickly submitted another along the lines suggested by the mayor and Spilman. Swann signed it shortly after beginning his second term.62