AMERICAN PARTY RECKONING
THOMAS SWANN CLAIMED that he did not intend to run for reelection as Baltimore’s mayor in 1858 but was persuaded to do so by the American Party’s convention. His name was the only one placed in nomination, and he was the unanimous choice of the delegates. Swann must have had some inkling of the outcome. According to the Baltimore Sun, when the nominee was ushered into the hall shortly after the vote, he “delivered a speech of considerable length, accepted [the nomination], and reviewed his whole political life.”1
The Democrats nominated no candidate for mayor and only one for the city council—in Northeast Baltimore’s Irish Democratic Eighth Ward. But the Know-Nothings faced a hastily organized opposition. A collection of independents, the nucleus of a new Reform Party, nominated a slate of candidates about three weeks before the general election. Their choice for mayor was Colonel Augustus P. Shutt, a son of German immigrants, former Whig, and respected officer in the local militia. He had served as high constable and then as warden of the city jail. An improbable swerve in his career took him to the B&O Railroad, where he was a conductor on passenger trains.
Shutt and his fellow independents ran against the violent reputation of the Know-Nothings and the culture that sustained it. He charged that people of “adjoining places” were reluctant to enter Baltimore for fear of being assaulted.2 But his condemnation of Know-Nothing violence took an odd turn. He claimed that it was bad for business. It sapped “the foundation of commercial advantage by alarming merchants at a distance, and through the instrumentality of intestine feuds, terror, bloodshed, and death, diverts every description of business to other and more peaceful places.” And the Know-Nothings “corruptly, for party reasons,” increased the “burthens of municipal taxation” to support their lavish patronage system. For these evils, Shutt offered a familiar remedy: “It is a municipal government free from the bonds of faction.”3 Shutt ran against political parties, much as the Know-Nothings had done. Nonpartisan government, he argued, was the key to local peace and prosperity.
At about noon on election day, Shutt resigned his candidacy to avoid placing his supporters in danger of being assaulted by the Know-Nothings who controlled most of the city’s polling places. As in 1857, however, there was comparatively little overt violence. A political dispute erupted in a group of workers on their way to a polling place. One of them was shot and killed. Another would-be voter in the Second Ward was “set upon” as he attempted to cast his ballot. Several shots were fired at him, and he took refuge in a nearby house. His assailants surrounded the place, but a “force of police” arrived and stationed themselves on the roof and at the doors and windows of the house to protect him.4 The police may not have helped him to exercise his right to vote, but they did intervene to save his life.
Many shots were fired while the voting went on, some of which struck people, but most of the fighting ended soon after the polls opened. Once the Know-Nothings took control, their opponents knew better than to exercise their voting rights. Many of those who were prevented from voting in their own wards by American Party toughs went to the Eighth Ward, where they could cast their ballots under the protection of Democratic Party toughs. The Eighth was the only ward that Shutt carried.”5
Swann and the American Party triumphed everywhere else, but the mayor drew little satisfaction from his success. Soon after his victory, he called the city council into special session to receive a morose message about the state of public order in the city. “Scenes of disorder and violence . . . which have transpired within a few weeks past” demonstrated that city authorities had to make further exertions “in maintaining the supremacy of the laws.” Two police officers had been murdered. Their killing, Swann said, illustrated “the resolute and determined spirit with which these brave men . . . have stood up day and night in carrying out the requirements of their official oath.” Swann urged the council to provide for the families of officers killed in the performance of their duties. While on the subject of police sacrifice and bravery, the mayor asked the council to authorize him to award one policeman, Officer Cook, with some appropriate recognition “as an appreciation of his gallant conduct.”6
Three weeks before the municipal election, officers Benjamin Benton and Robert Rigdon struggled to take David Houck into custody. Houck appeared to be drunk, and he had attempted to crash a party against the wishes of its hostess. A friend of Houck’s, either Henry Gambrill or Richard Harris, approached the police officers as they grappled with Houck and fatally shot Officer Benton in the neck. Gambrill, Harris, and Houck were all members of the Plug Uglies, a gang affiliated with the Mount Vernon Fire Company and the American Party.7
Gambrill’s trial began two days before the election. It lent substance to the reformers’ contention that Know-Nothing government floated atop an ocean of Know-Nothing violence. The trial became a public sensation. The Sun reported that the courtroom was “crowded to suffocation,” and the case soon became even more heated. On November 5, Officer Rigdon, the principal witness at Gambrill’s trial, was assassinated in his home on West Baltimore Street. The murder occurred on the day of Gambrill’s conviction. Officer John Cook heard the shot that killed Rigdon and spotted the probable assassin as he left Rigdon’s house. Cook exchanged fire with the killer, then pursued him for several blocks until he was finally able to knock him to the ground and, with the help of two other officers, take him into custody. Earlier on the same day, two of Gambrill’s friends had created a disturbance in the courtroom. They were charged with causing a riot to give Gambrill the opportunity to escape. One of them was David Houck.8
The American Party’s expanded and reorganized police department was at war with the party’s own thugs. The Gambrill case was clearly on Mayor Swann’s mind when he delivered his somber message to the council following his reelection triumph, now diminished by Plug Ugly police killers. The mayor plainly wanted to purify his party of any connection with the city’s criminal class. The urban outlaws were “recognized and sustained by no party having any claim to respectability.” They were the creatures of “low drinking establishments” that drew violent men together and dissolved their inhibitions. The danger they posed was magnified by the lack of any law against carrying concealed weapons. And, once they had been brought to justice for their crimes, punishment was neither swift nor certain.9
Swann held himself and his party blameless. They needed one another. The mayor gave the Know-Nothings respectability, not to mention his tireless and creative leadership. For his part, Swann needed solid Know-Nothing support to advance his plans for municipal improvement. The alacrity with which the city council bowed to his vetoes was a token of its loyalty. The Know-Nothings’ support for his reorganization of the Fire Department, in particular, demonstrated their readiness to defer to his leadership even when it ran up against their partisan interests. Eliminating the volunteer fire companies, after all, removed one of the vital mechanisms of Know-Nothing organization and influence. But the Know-Nothing majority on the council marched behind its mayor. The party was not one of those exiguous organizations that came to life only during election campaigns and disappeared as soon as they were over. Swann could count on Know-Nothing support not only in getting elected but in winning approval for his policies. The party’s durable political presence may have been grounded in secret lodges that continued to function between elections.
For Swann, however, the party was also a burden. Its electoral practices cast doubt on the validity of his victory. Near the end of his message to the council, he implicitly acknowledged Know-Nothing fraud and coercion at the polls, but added, “There are none who can doubt, with any prospect of being sustained, that I have been returned to this office by an overwhelming majority of the legal voters of the City.” He hoped that those who observed his conduct in the election would “do me the justice to believe that I was sincere in my desire that the laws should be faithfully executed, and the humblest citizen protected in his right.”10
TROLLEYS AND PARKS
Mayor Swann’s campaign of municipal improvement lost no momentum to the unfortunate events of 1858. Having overhauled the public agencies that protected citizens against fire, crime, and riot, Swann turned to amenities. At the opening of its session in 1859, the city council considered a resolution instructing its Joint Committee on Highways to report on the feasibility of building a street railway for horse-drawn cars, extending from the western to the eastern boundaries of Baltimore. Two groups of investors petitioned the council for the street railway franchise. The council sent an ordinance to the mayor authorizing a group led by William H. Travers, a local attorney and Know-Nothing politician, to lay tracks on the city’s streets for horsecars. Mayor Swann vetoed the measure.11
Baltimore’s first horsecar made its inaugural run in 1859. Just over 25 years later, the city became the first in the nation to introduce an electrified streetcar. Its route began outside the city limits and ended in Hampden, a distance of only two miles; it never reached the city center. The streetcar drew its power from a dangerous “hot” third rail. To avoid electrocuting pedestrians, the line used overhead wires at intersections and street crossings, but unlike streetcar lines in other cities, Baltimore’s did not move to overhead wires citywide. Instead, the city abandoned the third rail for steam power. Trolleys were attached to underground cables driven by steam engines located in warehouses distributed across the city. A central powerhouse soon replaced the warehouses; its four smokestacks still punctuate the city’s skyline. In 1896, after five years of expensive and unhappy experience with steam power, Baltimore finally abandoned it for overhead wires. The electric streetcars were retired in 1963. In 1992, a “light rail” line began operating, using an old railroad right-of-way and crossing the city on Howard Street, where this horsecar once traveled. Courtesy Enoch Pratt Free Library, Cator Collection
Swann was not opposed to street railways. In fact, he was convinced that they would add dramatically to the value of Baltimore real estate. Before the introduction of “omnibuses” in 1844, according to the mayor, “suburban property in and around . . . Baltimore was comparatively valueless.” The horse-drawn coaches had made outlying areas accessible and “added millions to the basis of taxation.” If the omnibus, struggling through muddy, cobbled streets, could prove so advantageous, “what might not have been anticipated from this more perfect mode of transportation?” But Swann hesitated. He claimed to be concerned about “the power of the city of Baltimore over her public highways.” Echoing the debates provoked by the railroads 30 years before, Swann asserted that the city’s authority over its streets was “the most important conferred by her charter.”12
Such a crucial element of municipal power should not be compromised without adequate compensation, especially for horsecar railways because “the occupation of the streets . . . by a railway company,” Swann argued, “is the exclusion of all other modes of transportation.” Swann may have overstated his case. The tracks laid by trolley railways were usually embedded in grooves to minimize their interference with other uses of the streets. But it served Swann’s purpose to cast the horse-car lines as monopolies in order to strengthen the case for municipal regulation. The mayor wanted, in particular, to control carfare. Swann observed that in most cities with street railways, passengers were charged a uniform fare of five cents. The companies bidding to build Baltimore’s horsecar lines were offering fares of three to four cents. Given the other fees and exactions that the city council planned to impose on them, Swann wondered whether the trolley companies’ revenues could keep them running. He recommended that Baltimore’s horsecars, like those of other cities, charge five cents, and that the city should be “entitled to one-fifth of the gross receipts for all passengers . . . the same to be applied towards the establishment of a public Park in some convenient location to be fixed by the council . . . to cover an area of not less than 200 acres.”13
Swann’s vision of a park entailed something more than 200 acres. He resurrected a dream that had emerged from a committee of the city council six years earlier. His 200-acre park on the outskirts of the city was to be the centerpiece of a grand avenue—250 feet wide—that would encircle the entire city, beginning on the east “at the Patapsco River, on the Canton Company’s grounds, and terminating at Fort McHenry,” at the tip of Locust Point. This suburban Champs-Élysées would be 14.5 miles long and would tie together a necklace of parks and public squares on the city’s outskirts. The entire scheme, according to Swann, would promote “the health of our whole population, and more especially for the industrial and working classes, whose pursuits confine them within the corporate limits.”14 The horsecars would allow the working classes to reach the promenade and parks along the city’s boundaries. One penny of each fare collected would finance the parks.
On the same day that the city council’s first branch received Swann’s veto message, the members voted to table the ordinance they had earlier approved. Then a substitute was introduced incorporating the mayor’s five-cent fare and devoting the revenue collected to the purchase of parkland. The council then voted to skip the first reading of the bill so that the branch could vote on it immediately. Not surprisingly, it passed, but without any provision for Swann’s magnificent avenue. Like the original bill, the substitute assigned the horsecar franchise to a group of investors headed by William Travers.15
Travers and his associates, however, were not the investors they pretended to be. A Philadelphia businessman, Jonathan Brock, seems to have given Travers and his four colleagues at least $500 each to pose as Baltimore-based trolley financiers, on the reasonable expectation that a local investment group would be more likely to win the franchise than capitalists from out of town—especially if the outsiders came from Philadelphia, Baltimore’s longtime commercial competitor. While Brock and his backers provided the capital, Baltimoreans were to control the construction and operation of the trolley lines. Work began on a Broadway line in East Baltimore shortly after passage of the street railway ordinance. Two other lines were planned. One would carry passengers along Baltimore Street; the other would run north on Greene Street and then northwest on Pennsylvania Avenue.16
Rumors about the “sale” of the trolley charter circulated less than a month after the council passed the ordinance granting the Travers group the franchise. Hard-edged suspicions arose in June 1859, when the company was to offer its stock to investors. The more shares purchased in Baltimore, the fewer would be left for Brock’s Philadelphia investors. Travers and his local “investors” therefore needed to minimize the sale of stock to Baltimoreans. When they opened the books to investors, they did not specify the number of shares available or the total amount of capital to be raised. Prospective investors had no way to calculate the price of the shares, the cost of building the street railway, or the size of their potential stakes in the company. On those terms, the stock attracted few customers.17
The street railway ordinance required that the subscription book remain open to the public for a minimum of five days. The number of subscribers increased as the deadline approached. But as soon as the fifth day ended, the subscription book was closed and spirited away to the state penitentiary. (The warden was an ally of Travers’s fictive investment group.) When the book emerged from prison, it contained the names of two new subscribers for almost all of the remaining stock. One of them was a relative of the warden.18
In early June, after construction of the Broadway line was well under way, the mayor received a visit from Jonathan Brock, spokesman for the street railway’s Philadelphia investors. He said he had come to answer any questions that Mayor Swann might have about Baltimore’s passenger railway. Brock, presumably, was the person who had the authoritative answers. Swann had more complaints than questions. Most of them related to apparent failures of the Travers investment group and its Philadelphia sponsors to comply with the provisions of the street railway ordinance. If the Travers group had transferred control of the enterprise to Brock’s investors, then the group had no authority to open the company’s books for stock subscriptions. In effect, they were selling stock in nothing. The Philadelphia investors who actually owned the city’s streetcar charter had the authority and obligation to open the subscription book, but they had never done so and therefore had violated the ordinance. The mayor observed that the real and supposed investors in the street railway might soon face a day of reckoning. The trolley company had yet to receive a corporate charter from the Maryland General Assembly.19
Before the request for a charter reached the legislature, Maryland politics suffered a sharp jolt. In October 1859, John Brown and his fellow conspirators launched their raid on Harper’s Ferry. The attack itself horrified most Marylanders, but its more enduring political effect may have been shaped by the northern response to Brown. Northerners, according to the Sun, “seem desirous to invest him with something of the character of a martyr.” In the reaction to Brown’s crime, Marylanders could sense the depth of sectional discord. The man who seemed a monster to most southerners was embraced by many northerners. “Day after day,” wrote the Sun’s editorialist, “. . . we have cumulative evidence, furnished voluntarily by the press and the pulpit, that John Brown is in fact the representative man of a very large class of people of the North.”20
Maryland elections for Congress and the state legislature came little more than two weeks after Brown’s attack. In Baltimore, the Know-Nothings held fast, but almost everywhere else in the state, their party suffered severe reverses. The most dramatic of these occurred in the General Assembly. In the Maryland House of Delegates, where the American Party had enjoyed a substantial majority, the Democrats now held a majority just as comfortable. Control of the state senate shifted as well, but the Democrats held only a two-vote margin there.21
In the house of delegates, hearings on the Baltimore City Passenger Railway Company occupied the Committee on Corporations for 10 days. The committee confirmed what everyone already knew—that the “investors” who won the streetcar franchise had simply provided a Baltimore front for the Philadelphia financiers. The house committee members persistently inquired whether any member of the city council had received money for supporting the Travers franchise. All of the witnesses denied that there had been any bribery. But in the process, they also revealed the extent to which personal and political connections purchased success in the streetcar business. One of William Travers’s four associates, for example, was the brother of a city council member and subsequently became superintendent of the city passenger railway. The brother of another council member won a contract to supply lumber needed for construction, and still another council member got a contract for laying the tracks.22
A Baltimore attorney, one of the committee’s more candid witnesses, explained why he supported Philadelphia sponsorship of Baltimore’s streetcar venture: “I was appealed to as a party man—an American—that it would be policy for Brock to get this charter from the Legislature.” The critical consideration was political patronage. The Travers group and its fellow Know-Nothings “should have the entire control of the road—that all the contractors and appointees should be members of the American party . . . [the venture to] be an American measure altogether, as I understood it.”23
That was the general understanding as well. Even Know-Nothing street fighters found employment on the streetcar lines. David Houck became assistant superintendent for construction of the Greene Street branch. John Wesley Gambrill, Henry’s brother and a Plug Ugly captain, became a timekeeper on the Baltimore Street line, where Richard Harris served as assistant superintendent.
Harris, along with Henry Gambrill, had been a suspect in the murder of Officer Benton. Gambrill continued to declare his innocence even from the gallows, when he was hanged along with two men convicted in the murder of Officer Rigdon. Richard Harris fell gravely ill little more than a year after starting his job on the streetcar line. Shortly before his death, he confessed that he, not Henry Gambrill, had murdered Officer Benton.24
AMOUNTING TO NOTHING
The Baltimore street railway did not win its corporate charter from the state. It functioned without one until 1862. But the Know-Nothings had achieved a new level of political maturity. The party had become Baltimore’s first political machine, controlling not only government offices but additional jobs running the city’s street railway. The party’s foot soldiers did not abandon street fighting. Muscle, after all, was an essential component of machine politics. But the party’s access to government patronage made the Know-Nothings venal as well as violent. City jobs were rewards for service to the party, and those rewarded were expected to supply a significant portion of the funds that sustained the party’s political operations. This expectation was so systematically enforced that the American Party’s finance committee used a printed form to notify city employees of the sums they were obliged to contribute, indicating the location of the committee’s offices and the hours during which municipal workers could drop off their “donations.” Its message ended on a vaguely threatening note: “You will no doubt see the importance of an early and prompt attention to this request.”25
The Know-Nothings’ rapid rise from underground movement to political party and then to governing authority must have made them seem irresistible. Their Democratic opponents, after all, had simply abandoned active campaigning. But the very fact that the Know-Nothings could now offer jobs and offices to their adherents also fueled intraparty conflicts. Party members who lost out in the scramble for spoils became party malcontents. Partisan infighting was obvious as early as 1857, when the Know-Nothings held nominating conventions for court clerks and magistrates. Fights broke out at the meetings in the Sixth and Ninth Wards, and the police had to be summoned to keep things from getting out of hand. The citywide convention that followed did not need the police, but the delegates spent considerable time challenging one another’s credentials, and when they finally got around to voting on nominees, they frequently needed multiple ballots to resolve deadlocks. The Sun floated the possibility that defeated Democrats and dissident Know-Nothings might combine to challenge the American Party’s dominance.26
Something of the kind materialized less than a month after Augustus Shutt abandoned his campaign for mayor. A new City Reform Association delivered an “address” to Baltimore. It was signed by 166 men, including some of the city’s most prominent residents, and declared that “a state of things exists in this community under which its members can no longer rest in safety or without disgrace.” The association’s members came together “for the purpose of vindicating their political, personal and civil rights” against a regime of “recognized violence and despotic ruffianism.” Like Shutt, the Reform Association planned to overcome the corruption and violence by “the exclusion of partisan purposes” from municipal government.27
As the elections of 1859 approached, the American Party’s internal fragmentation intensified. Know-Nothing nominating conventions degenerated into fist fights. In the Thirteenth Ward, a faction calling itself the “Regulators” seized the ballot box, and a Know-Nothing voter was badly beaten in the fracas. In the Nineteenth Ward, no nominee could be declared because the convention “broke up in a row” before the ballots could be counted. Know-Nothing violence and intimidation, once directed at opposition voters, now turned inward.28 In the meantime, the Reform Association gained in solidarity and scale. It nominated only eight candidates for the first branch of the council, but it established Reform committees in all of the city’s 20 wards and won 6 of the 30 seats in the city council.29
The Reformers made no gains in the November elections for the state legislature. The Know-Nothings took all 10 of Baltimore’s seats in the house of delegates. But American Party losses in the rest of Maryland gave the Democrats a substantial majority in the house and exposed Baltimore’s Know-Nothings to unaccustomed scrutiny in Annapolis. The 10 defeated Reformers contested the election of the 10 victorious Know-Nothings, and the hearings before the House Committee on Elections exposed the electoral practices of the American Party to relentless examination.
The evidence showed that the party’s ruffians no longer confined their bullying to opposition voters. They used force to compel nonvoters to cast fraudulent Know-Nothing ballots. In the First Ward, a man sitting on a bench opposite the polling place was approached by several Know-Nothing foot soldiers. They handed him an American Party ballot and demanded that he submit it to the election judges. He refused. According to a witness, one of the gang members sat down beside him on the bench and “struck him with something (it could not have been his fist, it sounded too hard).” When he fell over, another of the Know-Nothings “kicked him in the face, and from the sound of it [the] witness thought that it wasn’t a fair boot, there must have been something on the end of it.” The toughs “continued kicking him in the side, and others beating him over the face.” One of them pulled out a “horse pistol or blunderbuss” and placing its muzzle against the man’s back “used the observation ‘I’ll put him through.’ ” At that point “a police officer rushed up and said, ‘I’ll be God damned if I can stand that.’ ” He wrested the pistol away from the assailant and discharged it into the air. But he made no attempt to arrest the would-be killer, who followed the officer as he walked away, asking if he could have his pistol back.30
William Mauer, “a cooper by trade,” testified that he was at his business in the Second Ward when “five or six men came up to me and knocked me down, and put a ticket in my hand to vote it; I wouldn’t; they drawed my clothes down and pulled me like a dead dog along; my neighbor Charles Beckert, came to help me, and one of them said, ‘Shoot him! Shoot him!’ and after they shooted, he falled and is dead and buried.”31
The testimony of William Bartlett revealed a more systematic approach to the recruitment of involuntary voters, called “cooping.” Bartlett was walking through Fell’s Point on the evening of October 31. Three men came up behind him and demanded that he accompany them. He managed to shake off two of them, but the third “jerked out his blunderbuss,” and Bartlett surrendered. He was taken to the cellar of a nearby house, where he was imprisoned together with about 60 other men; many more were kept in other rooms of the house. At about noon on election day, after more than 36 hours of captivity, Bartlett was escorted to the Second Ward polling place. Though it was directly across the street from the building in which he had been held, he was walked around the block so that he would not be seen approaching the polling place directly from the coop. Bartlett was given a Know-Nothing ballot and told to turn it in to the election judges. Though Bartlett was not a resident of the Second Ward, the Know-Nothing operative who had him in custody vouched for him, and the judge accepted his ballot.32 Many of the men kept in coops would be forced to cast votes in several different wards.
MEASURES OF REFORM
The house of delegates did not immediately unseat the Know-Nothings from Baltimore. If it had expelled them before the end of the legislative session, a special election would be required to replace them, and the Democratic legislators were reluctant to authorize another election under the auspices of Baltimore’s Know-Nothing government. Expulsion of the Baltimoreans was delayed until the last day of the session.33 By that time, the General Assembly had enacted two pieces of legislation to break the Know-Nothings’ hold on Baltimore. The bills were drafted by members of the City Reform Association. One of them virtually eliminated municipal control over the police department. It placed the force under a four-member board of police to be appointed jointly by the two houses of the General Assembly. The mayor would serve ex officio on the board, but his authority was limited. The absence of the mayor, for example, was not to be taken into account in determining whether the board had a quorum. No “officer or servant of the Mayor and City Council of Baltimore” was to interfere with the operation of the city’s police department under state authority. (The prohibition presumably applied to the mayor.) The board was not to appoint or remove any police officer on account of his political opinions, but the statute made a conspicuous exception for abolitionist “Black Republicans,” who were not to be hired for any position in the police department.34
The Baltimore Reformers sent a second bill to Annapolis that would transfer authority over city elections from the municipal government to the board of police. The board was to divide each ward into precincts and appoint three election judges for each. The increase in the number of polling places would shrink the number of Baltimoreans who congregated around each poll. Diminishing the size of the crowd reduced the likelihood of riots and the massing of enough rowdies to block access to the polls.35 Passage of the two reform bills was followed by a purge of Baltimore’s police that eliminated most Know-Nothing officers. Mayor Swann challenged the new legislation in court.36 But it could not be blocked.
The measures that transformed the organization and control of the city’s police had a parallel in New York. In 1857, Republican reformers in the New York State Assembly and a Republican governor created a state-controlled police force for New York City—the Metropolitan Police—whose commissioner was appointed by the governor, not by New York’s Democratic mayor Fernando Wood. Though both cities confronted attempts at state control of the police, Baltimore and New York differed in their responses to the provocation. Instead of going to court, like Mayor Swann, Mayor Wood persuaded the city council to establish the “Municipal Police,” consisting of all the officers then in New York City’s force. It was under the direct control of the mayor. The Municipals and the Metropolitans fought in the streets for control of the city. The Metropolitans finally prevailed, but only with the support of an infantry regiment.37 In both New York and Baltimore, the city-controlled forces were finally defeated. New York’s Democrats, however, had put up a fight. Baltimore’s Know-Nothings, who did not shrink from violence, put up a lawsuit, perhaps because they realized that reliance on street fighting had become a political liability, or because Baltimore did not have the political clout and autonomy of New York City.
In Baltimore’s municipal election of 1860, the Democrats stood aside in all but one ward so that opposition to the Know-Nothings could unify behind the Reform Association. Though their party was on the ropes, the Know-Nothings might find consolation in the party’s achievements. Little more than a month before the election, Mayor Swann informed the council that the city’s park commissioners had succeeded in purchasing the land for his great park—Druid Hill. It would be three times as large as the 200-acre preserve he had originally envisioned and included a picturesque lake that doubled as a city reservoir. It would be named after the mayor—Swann Lake. At about the same time, commissioners had been appointed to look into the construction of a real city hall. Construction of a new city jail was nearing completion.38
The American Party struggled through one more municipal election in October 1860. The Reform candidate for mayor was George William Brown. The Know-Nothings had ballots printed with the name of William George Brown, an obscure resident of the Fourteenth Ward. The ruse fooled almost no one, and George William Brown was elected mayor by a vote of more than two to one. Reformers also took every seat in both branches of the city council.39