Government in the Streets
COLONIAL BALTIMORE WAS POLITICALLY STUNTED, and its impoverished public life set it apart from most other port cities in the colonies, where, as Gary Nash observes, “political life in general operated more vibrantly . . . than in the country because the urban communities required a greater degree of government, given their size and commercial character.”1 Baltimore was different. By the time it became a town, a provincial political establishment was already entrenched in Annapolis and was not inclined to grant sweeping powers to the upstart village on the Patapsco. Baltimore would be governed from Annapolis or improvise its own political arrangements.
In 1763, several dozen local merchants and tradesman formed a purely private association that would operate as though it were a local government. The Ancient and Honorable Mechanical Company of Baltimore could hardly have been ancient. It was mechanical because it enlisted many of the town’s skilled craftsmen—“mechanics”—as well as its prominent merchants. Whether it was honorable was an open question. From 1763 to 1776, writes George McCreary, “members of the Company discharged nearly all the duties needed for the government of the town, its policing, magisterial function, and in addition, acted as firemen.”2
The Mechanical Company opened the town’s first schoolhouse and its first hospital. Since Baltimore had no post office, a member of the company received letters that came to the town and notified recipients by listing their names in a local newspaper. The recipients picked up their mail at his house. The company’s members drilled regularly, the only organized force to defend Baltimore against attack. Quaker members of the company could not participate in the militia, but they volunteered for the town’s night watch. The company also assumed responsibility for the regulation of public order and morality. Though it had no legal authority to do so, for example, it ordered the “ducking” of one John Brown in the horse pond “for ill-treating his good wife and industrious woman.”3
The Mechanical Company was a new government—a government in the streets—which convened to remedy the obvious shortcomings of Baltimore’s official political institutions. The company assumed responsibility for the maintenance of public order more than 20 years before the state legislature finally authorized the town’s official government to hire its own constables and watchmen.4 Since it was not an institution of government endowed with the authority to exercise legitimate coercion, the company often enforced its pronouncements through collective violence, like the dunking of John Brown.
Little more than two years after its founding, the Mechanical Company provided much of the membership base for Baltimore’s Sons of Liberty, one of the organizations formed to protest the Stamp Act. The new organization had been born in the Mechanical Company’s Lodge Hall at a special meeting of the organization in February 1766, the result of which was “the transformation of the Company into the Baltimore branch of the Sons of Liberty.”5 William Lux, a local merchant and member of the Mechanical Company, was the leading organizer of the Baltimore Sons. He had been corresponding with activists in New York, where the Sons of Liberty got their start, and with Stamp Act protesters in Virginia. In the protest against the stamp tax, Baltimore would become “the chief nexus between the southern colonies and headquarters in New York.” Like other Baltimore traders, Lux refused to import British goods while the Stamp Act remained in force. He also informed his creditors in London that he would be unable to pay them until the Stamp Act was repealed. Such measures were designed to pressure British traders to lobby Parliament on behalf of the American colonists. But the embargo may have served other purposes. It helped local merchants to clear their shelves of unsold goods. And, since Maryland planters would have fewer opportunities for conspicuous consumption, they might accumulate sufficient funds to pay off their debts to local merchants.6
For Baltimore’s mercantile community, the stamp tax was one more adversity following close behind low wheat prices in Europe and the rising debt to London’s traders. Parliament aggravated these difficulties by approving the Currency Act of 1764, creating a currency shortage in the colonies by limiting their capacity to issue paper money. Bills of exchange served as a private currency by which merchants “sold” the debts that were owed them. But, in London, such bills traded at a discount because of the straitened state of the colonial economy.7
In concert with Samuel Chase of Annapolis, son of Thomas Chase, the unfortunate rector of St. Paul’s, the Sons of Liberty spearheaded a movement to compel colonial officials to transact public business without stamped paper. Stamped paper was unavailable because the functionary responsible for issuing it had fled to New York in fear for his safety. The New York Sons of Liberty found him on Long Island, forced him to resign from his post, and earned a thank-you note from their Baltimore counterparts. The Baltimore Sons of Liberty were well represented at public meetings in Annapolis that finally pressured provincial officials to approve doing business without stamped paper, just days before news of the Stamp Act’s repeal reached the provincial capital.8
The colony’s next challenge to British authority would expose a fault line between the elites of Tidewater Maryland and the leadership of Baltimore. The Townshend Acts, approved by Parliament in 1767, imposed duties on paper, glass, paint, and tea. Popular sentiment from Massachusetts to Virginia supported the non-importation of British goods to protest the Townshend duties. The merchants of Baltimore were reluctant to go along. But after the commercial communities of Boston and Philadelphia fell into step with public opinion, pressure mounted for Baltimore’s merchants to do the same.9
Baltimore’s commercial community finally consented to a non-importation agreement in March 1769, a full year after Boston had initiated the movement.10 At a meeting in Annapolis, representatives from all parts of the colony adopted a “Resolution of Non-Importation.” The merchants of Baltimore helped to draft the agreement. It contained numerous exceptions allowing selected British goods to be landed in the town. The boycott never stirred the kind of fervor that had powered the movement against the Stamp Act, and its enforcement was remarkably lax.11 The Stamp Act protest coincided with a downturn in the local economy that left many merchants and their customers in debt and hard-pressed. A suspension of trade provided them with the breathing space to retrench and regain their balance. The Townshend Acts, however, found Baltimore flush with commerce, and its merchants were in no mood to curtail trade.12
As in the case of the Stamp Act, Parliament repealed the Townshend Acts with the exception of the tax on tea, but the non-importation agreements remained in effect. Violations, however, became more frequent, and Baltimore’s merchants broke ranks after hearing that Philadelphia had abandoned non-importation. Representatives of Baltimore’s commercial class went to Annapolis to meet with delegates from other parts of the colony to propose the repeal of the non-importation agreement. They were received with open hostility: “the merchants and traders of Baltimore” were denounced for showing “a shameful Disregard . . . to the most Sacred Rights and Liberties of America” and endeavoring “to destroy the Union and Good Faith so necessary at this, and at all times, for the Safety and constitutional rights of these colonies.”13
The rift was not entirely healed when the colonists staged their next confrontation with British authority—this one confined to Maryland. The dispute concerned the fees that the Lord Proprietor’s officials could charge for performing their duties. As the population of the colony increased, the incomes of officials had grown fat. Delegates in the lower house of the provincial assembly insisted that the time had come for a fee reduction, but the upper house—a council appointed by the governor—included several officials who received fees, and the predictable result was deadlock. The governor prorogued the assembly and issued a proclamation authorizing a continuation of the current fee schedule.14
A pair of dueling essayists—“Antilon” and “First Citizen”—carried the ensuing controversy into the columns of the Annapolis weekly, the Maryland Gazette. They represented two of the wealthiest and most prominent families in the colony. Daniel Dulany (Antilon) was a member of the Governor’s Council and provincial secretary. “First Citizen” was the young Charles Carroll of Carrollton, recently returned from several years of study in Britain and on the Continent. The debate between them began with an imagined dialogue, written by Dulany, in which “First Citizen” attacked the governor’s fee-setting proclamation, and “Second Citizen,” a wiser head, patiently defended the proclamation and exposed criticisms of it as groundless. Carroll surprised and enraged Dulany by assuming the identity of First Citizen, replacing Dulany’s straw man with an independent and gifted debater.15
The rancorous newspaper duel went on from January to July 1773. Behind the exchange of invective, the antagonists were staking out the positions that would later be occupied by Tories and Revolutionaries. For Dulany, precedent was law, and the foremost precedent was the glorious settlement of 1688, which established the sovereignty of King-in-Parliament. Thereafter, the settled usages of judges, ministers, Parliament, and King supplied guidelines for policymakers of the future. By contrast, Carroll insisted on standards of political judgment independent of ongoing practice. “I would not have you confound Government,” he wrote, “with the Officers of Government; they are things really distinct, and yet in your idea they seem to be one and the same.”16 First Citizen grounded his argument in the idea of a constitution—a government of laws, not men—that provided independent standards for evaluating the actions of public officials and distinguishing good precedent from bad. Carroll may also have had a more radical idea in mind. In 1763, while studying abroad, he had written to his father, “America is a growing country: in time it must and will be independent.”17
Baltimoreans, at first, applauded Carroll’s indictment of the proclamation and his contention that the fees unilaterally mandated by the governor were actually taxes that required the consent of the full legislature. In 1773, on the last day of balloting for Baltimore County’s representatives in the provincial assembly, Baltimoreans assembled around the courthouse to celebrate the election of the new delegates. From the back of the crowd, a voice shouted, “No proclamation—hang—burn—and bury the proclamation.” The celebration instantly became a demonstration. A mock proclamation was marched through the streets to the gallows, where it was destroyed. A few days later, Baltimore County’s newly elected legislators published a letter praising First Citizen for his attack on the proclamation.18
In an odd turn of colonial politics, 106 residents of Baltimore Town, almost all of them merchants, signed a letter repudiating the one published by the county’s legislative representatives. They also denounced the mock execution of the governor’s fee-setting proclamation. “We are sorry to see any act of government treated with indecency, and in such a manner that can only inflame instead of healing, the animosities of the public.” The members of the mob, they added, consisted of “the verie dregs of the earth.”19
The Baltimore merchants did not fully explain why they opted out of the attack on the governor’s proclamation. They may have had several reasons. One was their limited political experience in Maryland. Many were recent migrants attracted by the town’s astonishing transformation from village to commercial emporium. Neither they nor their grandfathers had been parties to the more than a century of sparring between the gentry of Tidewater Maryland and the Lords Proprietary. Before Baltimore Town received its charter, Maryland colonists had risen in revolt three times against the Lords Baltimore. The third revolution followed the abdication of James II and accession of the Protestant monarchs William and Mary. In 1689, a faction composed of Protestant colonists took up arms against their Catholic overlord and, with little bloodshed, drove him from power. The Lords Baltimore would continue to hold property and collect quitrents in Maryland, but their political authority passed to the Crown. That was the goal of Maryland’s early revolutionaries—not independence, but rule by King and Parliament.20
The rebel government made Anglicanism the colony’s established religion, deprived Catholics of political and civil rights, and took possession of the offices and fees once monopolized by the Calvert family and its favorites. But the provincial assembly could not prevent the Calverts from returning to rule the colony in 1715. The fourth Lord Baltimore had renounced Catholicism and become an Anglican. That was sufficient to win the Crown’s approval to reestablish proprietary rule in Maryland.21
Baltimore Town had played no part in the insurgency against the Lords Baltimore. The Calverts returned to power 14 years before the town received its charter. Perhaps Baltimoreans kept to the sidelines in the fee controversy with the Lord Proprietor because their political experience had not primed them for the fight.22
At least one historian suggests that the merchants condemned the mob that rose to protest the fee proclamation simply because it was not their mob. Notwithstanding the merchants’ expression of distaste for riots, they were occasional rioters themselves. Only a month before the protest against the fee proclamation, about 100 of Baltimore’s leading merchants and sea captains, faces blackened and disguised as sailors, had armed themselves with “Clubs and Staves” for a mob attack on customs officials who were trying to seize a merchant ship riding at anchor in the town’s harbor. Failing to find the customs collector himself, they beat, then tarred and feathered, two of his assistants.23 By contrast, the mob that rose against the fee proclamation had done violence only to a piece of paper.
PUBLIC MARKETS AND POLITICAL PATRONAGE
It remains unclear whether any of these popular tumults made an impression on Baltimore Town’s commissioners. Gaps in their surviving records from 1754 to 1768 and from 1768 to 1776 conceal their reactions, if any, to the Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts, or the fee controversy. But there is evidence that the commissioners were busy with enterprises of their own, not revolutionary perhaps, but bound to bring change.24 Baltimore was embarking on a venture in government-sponsored capitalism.
In 1751, the town commissioners had solicited voluntary contributions for the construction of a “market-house” at the current intersection of Baltimore and Gay Streets. The enterprise languished for more than 10 years before the market finally materialized. The original subscriptions had to be augmented by the proceeds of a public lottery. The funds collected paid for the construction of a two-story building. The ground floor housed the market; upstairs was a large room where “public assemblies, dances, jugglery now and then, and other matters of public concern were held or exhibited.” The building accommodated the sessions of the Baltimore County Court while its new courthouse was under construction.25
Baltimore’s first courthouse stood atop the bluff that overlooked the town, directly in the path of Calvert Street’s northward extension. Baltimoreans, according to John Pendleton Kennedy, confronted an intractable question: “Was the street to give way to the Court House or the Court House to the streets?” The local stone mason, Leonard Harbaugh, fashioned a compromise. He excavated a trench beneath the courthouse, then constructed an arch through which Calvert Street could pass, leaving “the old Court-House quaintly seated upon its ponderous and solid bench of stone” (John Pendleton Kennedy, At Home and Abroad: A Series of Essays [1872], pp. 169–170).
In leasing land for their public market and soliciting contributions from the project’s “subscribers,” the commissioners had traveled a bit beyond the law, and they acknowledged as much. When the subscribers made their pledges, they signed a document stating that “no Provision hath yet been made by Law or otherwise for Purchasing a Lott or Lotts, whereon to Build a Market House.”26 In fact, the commissioners had no business negotiating leases or purchasing property on behalf of Baltimore Town. Since the provincial assembly had not designated the town commissioners as a “body politic and corporate,” they could not make contracts or sign leases.
The legislature took no official notice of Baltimore’s effrontery until the town embarked on construction of a second market to replace the first. The new location was a marshy tract on the west bank of the Jones Falls. The commissioners first directed the owners of the property to drain it, and then leased it from them for eight pounds a year. The commissioners named the new establishment the Centre Market, but most Baltimoreans called it the Marsh Market. In 1765, the provincial assembly gave the enterprise its retroactive blessing. It decreed that the town commissioners could hold the site “for the Use and Benefit of the said Town in as full and ample manner as if the said Commissioners had been legally constituted as a Body Politick and corporate.”27
The legislature proceeded to draw up regulations for operation of the public market. The county court would have the power to appoint a clerk for the market, who rented its stalls, maintained accurate weights and measures, and inspected provisions brought for sale. Goods deemed “unwholesome or unsound” were to be destroyed.28 In 1773, perhaps in response to Baltimoreans with more markets on their minds, the assembly revisited the subject, but in much greater detail. It gave the town commissioners, rather than the county court, authority to appoint market clerks and to remove them “at their Pleasure and Discretion.” The legislators went further in specifying a clerk’s responsibilities. If “any Butcher or other person shall sell or offer for Sale any Meat within the said Market which shall be blown,” the clerk was authorized “to seize all such Meat . . . and the same to Condemn to and for the use of the Prisoners confined in Baltimore County Jail.” The practice seems to confirm charges that the jail was dangerously unhealthy. The assembly was unusually liberal in allowing the town commissioners to spend market revenues as they pleased. The market clerk was to expend all “Profits arising from . . . Rents and of all Fines and Forfeitures . . . according to the Directions of the Commissioners of the said Town.”29
Baltimore’s public markets were the physical expression of an urban political economy that extended beyond the market houses to the town at large. By an act of 1771, the provincial assembly authorized the town commissioners to exercise oversight of local commerce through a legion of new officers—inspectors of flour, corders of wood, weighers of hay, measurers of grain, gaugers of liquors, cullers of staves, and garblers of shingles. (In eighteenth-century English usage, garblers sorted rather than scrambled.) The regulations and regulators were a response to a perceived epidemic of short-weighting and shoddy goods.30 They may also have contributed to emergence of the “free” market by building a foundation of trust among buyers in the quality and correct measure of goods offered by sellers.
Public markets enabled public officials to regulate prices and oversee the “merchantability” of goods. In Baltimore, the regulations extended to the docks from which lumber, flour, and “salted provisions” were shipped abroad. Like many other towns in the American colonies, Baltimore was a “commercial community.” Its government was primarily concerned with the promotion and regulation of trade, not the delivery of public services. It carried on a municipal tradition extending back to Elizabethan England.31
Not all American towns were receptive to this tradition. In Boston, for example, the public market and its regulations were unwelcome infringements on freedom of commerce. In 1737, a mob attacked the town’s three market houses, leveling one and sawing through the foundation of another. All three were closed. Five years later, the Boston town meeting reluctantly accepted the market that Peter Faneuil contributed to the community, but only on the understanding that it would not displace Boston’s street peddlers and door-to-door provisioners. Baltimore was less resistant to regulated urban markets, perhaps because it had fewer street merchants, or because Baltimore had no institution like Boston’s influential and officially recognized town meeting to organize opposition to regulated markets.32
BALTIMORE EMBRACES INDEPENDENCE
In Annapolis, the lower house of the provincial assembly continued to struggle not so much for self-rule as for English rule. After political reinstatement of the Proprietors in 1715, for example, one chronic point of contention between the assembly and the governor concerned the demand of the lower house to employ a colonial agent in London so that it could appeal over the heads of the Lords Baltimore and their governors to the King-in-Council.33
In Baltimore, the choice between kingly and lordly rule was joined by a third option—independence. The difference in revolutionary spirit between Baltimore and Annapolis may have had something do to with the contrasting economic regimes of tobacco and grain. Tobacco planters dominated the provincial assembly. Though Maryland tobacco found markets beyond Britain, the tobacco trade was conducted and financed almost exclusively through British merchants and carried in British ships. It fostered a colonial frame of mind. Baltimore’s grain trade, on the other hand, was conducted by Baltimore merchants, usually in ships owned by Baltimoreans. The grain trade, in other words, was largely Baltimore’s business and engendered a tendency toward independence. Of course, Baltimore continued to depend on imported British manufactured goods, which accounted for a sizeable trade deficit in the years leading up to the Revolution.34 But debts owed to Britons provided revolutionaries with yet another incentive to sever the colony’s connection with England.
Religion and ethnicity reinforced the economic tendencies that moved Baltimoreans toward independence. The town’s leading merchants were disproportionately Scots Irish Presbyterians.35 Behind them lay a history of deep animosity toward England and its Anglican establishment. According to James Webb, the “democracy of the Presbyterian Kirk, an ancient mistrust of higher authority, and a burning resentment of British hierarchy that had given them so much trouble in Ulster all fueled their interactions with other cultures from their first days in America.” In 1775, the Anglican bishop of Londonderry wrote to the secretary of state for the colonies expressing anxiety about the mass migration of Scots Irish Presbyterians to the American “middle colonies.” He was concerned not about Ireland’s population loss but about the tumult that the Presbyterians were likely to raise in their new home.36
Indeed, this group provided backbone for the American Revolution, which Tories and Revolutionaries alike characterized as an uprising of Scots Irish Presbyterians. King George himself called it a “Presbyterian war,” and a Hessian captain in his service agreed: “Call this war by whatever name you may, only call it not an American rebellion; it is nothing more or less than a Scotch Irish Presbyterian rebellion.”37 Scots Irish merchants such as Samuel Smith, the Purviance brothers, and Andrew Buchanan made up much of Baltimore’s revolutionary elite.
One more stimulus to Baltimore’s revolutionary impulse was its newspaper. During the colonial crises precipitated by the Stamp Act and the Townshend Acts, the town had no newspaper of its own. But in 1773, William Goddard and his sister Mary Katherine began publishing the Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser. At the time of his relocation to Baltimore, Goddard was working to establish a colonial postal system, independent of the Crown Post, for distributing anti-British newspapers and correspondence. His Maryland Journal would keep Baltimore abreast of political developments in other colonies. Only four months after the paper began publication, it brought news of the Boston Tea Party to Baltimore.38
The newspaper gave the town a kind of consciousness, not just about revolutionary politics in Boston, but about life in Baltimore. An early issue of the journal carried a proposal for a library to be supported by subscription. As a channel of collective communication, the newspaper enhanced the feasibility of such enterprises. There was also an editorial by Goddard in which he urged a levy of one shilling a house to pay for street lamps, which were needed not just to keep the streets safe but “to enable us to explore our Habitations without encountering Quagmires and Masses of Mud and Filth.” Goddard unlocked a torrent of complaints about the condition of the town’s market and streets: “Butchers in our market exposing to sale the worst of carrion, and the best meat blown by their infectious breath . . . The stalls and blocks therein not cleaned or washed once a year . . . The passages about the market ancle deep in noisome filth!—Stagnant water in many of our streets, alone sufficient to produce diseases among us!—Hogs innumerable running at large, as ready to devour the innocent as to snatch the bread and butter from its hand!”39 Goddard’s paper gave Baltimore a voice.