EX-SLAVES, EX-CONFEDERATES, AND THE NEW REGIME
THE CIVIL WAR AND ITS AFTERMATH reshaped Baltimore’s population. During the 1850s, the city’s foreign-born population increased by almost 50 percent, providing an easy target for the Know-Nothings. But the city’s African American population scarcely grew at all, and the number of slaves declined.1 The war, of course, eliminated slavery. It also brought a sharp reduction in foreign immigration. Most new arrivals in Baltimore were migrants from agricultural areas of Maryland; smaller numbers came from Virginia and North Carolina. These new arrivals were predominantly African American. Between 1860 and 1900, the African American population nearly tripled; the foreign-born population scarcely grew. A wave of European immigration did continue to flow through Baltimore. More than 600,000 arrived at the port during the last third of the nineteenth century, but the vast majority landed at the B&O’s immigrant dock on Locust Point then boarded trains for destinations further west, where local economies were growing more rapidly than Baltimore’s. After 1880, Baltimore’s African American population equaled or exceeded its foreign-born population. Baltimore had a larger black population than any big city save the District of Columbia and a smaller percentage of foreign-born residents than any of the 10 largest cities in the country.2
Thousands of ex-slaves and black soldiers had arrived in Baltimore at war’s end. By 1866, the city’s trustees of the poor acknowledged their inability to care for “all worthy persons without regard to nation or color.” Local Quakers did what they could, but the Friends’ Association for the Aid of Freemen found employment for only a few hundred migrants. The principal burden of caring for the newly freed arrivals was taken up by Baltimore’s black community. Institutions built by the city’s free African Americans since the beginning of the nineteenth century now provided support for newly freed slaves and discharged black soldiers. African American orphan asylums, a home for aged women, several black churches, and the Lincoln Zouaves all provided money or care for ex-slaves and ex-soldiers. Twenty-five years after his escape from slavery, Frederick Douglass returned to deliver a lecture sponsored by the Colored State Fair Association; the revenue went to sick and wounded black veterans. Black Baltimore took care of its own.3
Though the population of transatlantic immigrants was no longer growing rapidly, black workers and white workers (many of them immigrants) continued to compete for jobs, and black workers usually lost out to whites. Oyster shucking, for example, had traditionally been a job for black men, but immigrant women took it over during the late 1870s. By the 1880s, according to the state’s Bureau of Industrial Statistics, immigrant women were being hired as domestic servants, “driving the old colored domestic servant out of the field.”4
In the Baltimore shipyards, racial conflicts were frequent a full generation before the Civil War. After Emancipation, interracial competition for waterfront jobs intensified. Between 1865 and 1867, white stevedores attacked black stevedores or forced them off the job on at least four occasions. A few months after the war’s end, white workers at an East Baltimore shipyard went on strike to force the firing of 75 black caulkers. The yard’s owner held out for more than a month, but finally agreed to phase out the black workers. Black caulkers at all of the East Baltimore shipyards walked off the job. Every local newspaper sided with them, but the weight of editorial opinion did not change the outcome.5
The black caulkers invented an outcome of their own. One of them, Isaac Myers, assembled 15 African American entrepreneurs who helped to accumulate $40,000 so that the black caulkers could open a shipyard of their own—the Chesapeake Marine and Drydock Company. About $10,000 more was raised in black churches. The company would eventually employ 300 workers, including some white caulkers and carpenters when they were needed. Within five years the company had repaid its entire debt. In 1869, Myers became the founder and first president of the Colored National Labor Union. Half a dozen years later he organized the Colored Men’s Progressive and Cooperative Union of Baltimore. Its aim was to open white unions and apprenticeship programs to African Americans. The effort was largely unsuccessful, and the black-owned shipyard went out of business in 1884 after prolonged litigation.6 While it lasted, it was one more sign of black Baltimore’s capacity to generate autonomous institutions outside the range of white prejudice.
JIM CROW LITE
Emancipation did not bring radical change for Baltimore’s African Americans. Most of them, after all, were already free. Postwar legal reforms did eliminate some racial inequalities. After the state’s 1867 constitution made it legal for black witnesses to testify in cases involving whites, the US Supreme Court ruled that Maryland’s exclusion of African Americans from service on juries violated the Fourteenth Amendment.7
Baltimore followed many southern communities in its imposition of Jim Crow restrictions, but with less consistency and vigor. The city’s hotels and schools were rigidly segregated. Public transportation was supposed to be, too, but white riders were not sufficiently patient to wait for whites-only trolleys to maintain racial separation. Public parks, concert halls, and lecture rooms were open to the city’s black residents without any discernible protest from whites who frequented the same venues. Baltimore’s black community was also largely spared the terror, mob violence, and lynching suffered by African Americans farther south. In Maryland, 43 lynchings occurred between the 1860s and 1930s—none in Baltimore, although two took place just outside the city limits.8
The regime of Jim Crow did not prevail unopposed. Though the US Freedmen’s Bureau did most of its business in the “insurrectionary” states of the former Confederacy, it opened a Baltimore office on Calvert Street in a building owned by Senator Reverdy Johnson. One of the bureau’s missions in Maryland was to take action against former slave owners who tried to retain control of their younger slaves through fictive “apprenticeships.”9 Most of these “apprentices” were indentured to farmers of Southern Maryland and the Eastern Shore, not Baltimoreans.
The emancipation of young African Americans, however, increased the number in need of education and made them part of the larger constituency for the Freedmen’s Bureau’s comprehensive campaign to provide schooling for freed slaves. Baltimore was not only a command post for this effort but one of its principal fields of endeavor. The state legislature approved the establishment of “colored schools” in 1867, but the level of state support to Baltimore remained below $5,000 annually as late as 1870. The General Assembly pegged its support for black schools at the amount that black residents had paid in school taxes.10 More substantial assistance came from the Baltimore Association for the Moral and Educational Improvement of the Colored People, founded shortly after emancipation of Maryland’s slaves in 1864. In 1865, the association turned to the municipality for financial support. The city council’s education committee recommended an appropriation of $10,000. It was, the committee reported, “not only a wise . . . moral and Christian duty to provide an Educational system for the Colored race among us . . . but a sheer act of justice to a class of people who have so long been paying taxes to the School Fund of the City without receiving one cent of benefits from such taxation.”11
Though it also received funds from out-of-state organizations such as the New England Freedmen’s Aid Society, the Baltimore Association for the Moral and Educational Improvement of the Colored People lacked the money to keep up with the demand for black schools. An alliance with the Freedmen’s Bureau helped to sustain its efforts. The bureau provided funds for the purchase of land and supplied lumber (from dismantled military hospitals and barracks) for the construction of schoolhouses. Other schools occupied space in black churches or on church grounds. Maryland’s African Americans provided both money and labor for the construction of schools and support of teachers. In 1866, for example, they raised $10,000—twice the subsidy provided by the state. By the end of the year, the association reported that it was supporting 23 schools in Baltimore and another 51 in the counties. Almost all had just one teacher. The association was running a deficit of more than $10,000.12
In January 1867, the association turned once again to the city council, this time with a request for $20,000.13 The council did not immediately respond, but in July it voted to assume responsibility for the education of Baltimore’s black children, and the board of school commissioners took charge of the African American schools, with some misgivings.14 A committee of the board reported that the “colored schools” were in poor condition. Their students ranged in age from 6 to 30. Boys and girls were mixed together. Some schools had only white teachers; others, only black teachers; and still others, teachers of both races. The report concluded that the colored schools would need a vigorous sorting out of teachers, students, and curriculum. After receiving the committee report, the school board voted that only white teachers should work in the city’s black schools.15
AMBIGUITY AND EQUALITY
Though Maryland acknowledged African Americans’ right to education, to serve on juries, and to practice law, it did not grant them full equality with whites. They could not vote or hold public office. The debate on adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, beginning in 1866, made it more difficult to maintain this position.
The critical provision of the amendment declared that people born or naturalized in the United States were citizens and entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens. Some of the amendment’s proponents, such as Senator Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, maintained that voting was one of the privileges to which all citizens—including black citizens—were entitled. The Baltimore Sun held otherwise. Women and children were citizens, after all, but not entitled to vote. Like them, African Americans could be excluded from the electorate.16 Even the state’s Radical Unionists initially insisted that their support for the Fourteenth Amendment did not commit them to support black suffrage. Conservative Unionists such as Governor Thomas Swann had no doubts about the political status of African Americans. He was “utterly opposed to universal negro suffrage.” Montgomery Blair, Swann’s rival for leadership of the Democratic Conservatives, complained that the governor’s opposition was not universal enough. Rejection of universal black suffrage left open the possibility that some black Marylanders might be permitted to vote. Blair denounced any such possibility. Black voters, he argued, would diminish democracy because they would fall under the control of Radical Republicans, part of a “plot of Radicals to keep themselves in power and tyrannize over the rest of society.”17
The Fourteenth Amendment held further complications for Baltimore and Maryland. Under Section Two, any state denying voting rights to a portion of its citizens would suffer a proportionate reduction in representation.18 Democrats charged that the amendment compelled Maryland to choose between enfranchising black men and losing a congressman. Radicals argued that the loss of representation was deserved. It would be borne by sections of Maryland where ex-Confederates presided over numerous nonvoting plantation hands.19
RACIAL POLITICS
The Maryland General Assembly refused to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. Maryland was one of six states outside the South to reject it. (Four southern states had to accept it in order to get back into the Union.) The assembly was even more emphatically opposed to the Fifteenth Amendment’s mandate to grant voting rights to black men. Its opposition was unanimous. For their part, Maryland’s Republicans no longer had any reason to back away from black suffrage. They hoped that African American voters might give them some prospect of success against a Democratic Party that enjoyed wide support among white Marylanders. Debates on the two constitutional amendments were exercises in party definition. Southern sympathizers were readmitted to Maryland politics, and blacks became voters. Former Unionists joined either the former slaves or the former Confederates. After choosing their allies, Marylanders confronted one another as Republicans and Democrats.
A parade of 10,000 Baltimoreans, marking ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, marched to Monument Square, where distinguished speakers—including Frederick Douglass—celebrated the extension of voting rights to African American men. Courtesy Maryland Historical Society
Baltimore’s black community organized a huge parade in May 1870 to mark the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment. About 10,000 African Americans marched in the procession to Monument Square. Near the front came carriages carrying notables, including Frederick Douglass, Judge Hugh Lennox Bond, and several members of Congress. Following them were several black military units, with a special dispensation from the commissioners of police allowing them to parade with their weapons. A crowd of at least 10,000 spectators, including thousands of whites, lined the streets. It took about an hour for the procession to pass. In Monument Square, Douglass and other speakers mounted a platform, but before the first of them could address the crowd, the platform collapsed. No one was injured, and Douglass mounted the pile of broken boards to propose three cheers for the Fifteenth Amendment. The speakers delivered their remarks from the balcony of a nearby hotel. The Sun—no advocate of the amendment—reported that the “entire affair was well and satisfactorily managed.” According to the Baltimore American, “On the thousand banners that were borne along there was not one inscription that could wound the feelings of friend or foe.” When the event was over, the “thousands of persons present, about one-third of whom were white, then dispersed, having listened to the speeches for more than two hours with scarcely a break in their ranks.”20
No black voters participated in Baltimore’s first municipal election following adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment. The Maryland General Assembly had given localities a November 1870 deadline to prepare new voter lists that incorporated African Americans; Baltimore’s city council election came in October. The city’s first test under the new amendment occurred in November’s congressional elections. Though white politicians across a wide spectrum had stood in opposition to black suffrage, black voters encountered little resistance at the polls. Party leaders were intent on avoiding conflict. Several days before the election, the chairmen of the local Republican and Democratic parties wrote to the election judges suggesting a “fence or barrier at least six feet in length, extending from the poll window to the curb should separate the lines of black and white voters.”21 Election officials rejected the suggestion, but the voters arrived at informal arrangements for avoiding interracial contact at the polls. Most African Americans voted early in the day; white voters waited until they were gone before lining up. The Sun reported that the election was carried off with “remarkable quiet, considering the excitement of the campaign . . . heightened by the first appearance of the colored man with a ballot in his hand.”22
White politicians had recently railed against voting rights for African Americans. Once the Fifteenth Amendment gave the vote to black men, however, Baltimoreans tried not to make a public fuss about it. They reacted to black enfranchisement in much the same way that Henry Winter Davis had approached the issue of slavery: the best way to deal with the problem was to remain silent about it.
The aftermath of the Civil War brought a large population of former slaves to a city where most black people had been born free. The two groups, understandably, held different perspectives on politics and race in Baltimore. Blacks born free, like Isaac Myers, tended to see progress as a matter of self-improvement and economic organization. “The colored man will not enjoy equal rights with whites,” he said, “until they are mechanics and merchants of means. Then the men will put their prejudices in their pockets.”23
Former slaves were more likely to see white racism as an obstacle to self-improvement. Life experience had radicalized them. A prominent example was Harvey Johnson. He emerged from slavery in Virginia near the end of the war, attended a seminary in Washington, and in 1872 became pastor of Union Baptist Church in Baltimore, where he remained until his death in 1923. Under Johnson’s leadership, the Union Church soon became the state’s largest black congregation. It also seceded from the Maryland Baptist Union Association, in which the state’s white Baptists exercised control over the denomination. Johnson organized the Colored Baptist Convention of Maryland, and in 1885, he and several other Baptist clergymen launched a political organization: the Mutual United Brotherhood of Liberty. At first, it supported lawsuits to overcome the exclusion of black attorneys from Maryland’s state and local courts, but that was only the opening step in a more general program of litigation and lobbying that attacked segregation in public transportation, Baltimore’s refusal to hire black teachers, Maryland’s discrimination against black women in payment of child support, and the absence of a high school for black students. The brotherhood’s success in getting black attorneys admitted to the state bar also prompted the University of Maryland Law School to admit two black students, one of whom—Harry Sythe Cummings—would win a seat on the Baltimore City Council in 1891 to become the first black elected official in the state. Shortly after Cummings graduated, the law school again shut its doors to black applicants.24
Disagreements between recently freed slaves and free black Baltimoreans opened a new axis of dissension in African American politics. On the surface, the issue in dispute was black support for the Republican Party. The new militants denounced not only the party’s failure to fulfill its commitments to racial equality but its refusal to reward the loyalty of black voters with a proportionate share of party leadership positions, elective offices, and patronage appointments. A black newspaper in New York, the Age, lamented the “jealousy and competition for leadership” that fractured Baltimore’s black electorate, the largest in the nation. “With that large voting strength, were the Afro-Americans united, they would far outstrip their brethren in other States and materially benefit the race.” “It is with them at all times a warfare of slander, abuse, political throat cutting, and desertion.” After Cummings’s triumph, “not a dagger is in its scabbard, but every one drawn and aimed at this young man.”25
The postwar political settlement among whites seemed just as difficult to achieve as consensus among blacks. Weeks after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, the first branch of the Baltimore City Council was still issuing charges of disloyalty against perceived traitors to the Union. The alleged seditionists were Methodist churchmen. Their offense was their refusal to join in prayers of thanksgiving for the return of peace and, by implication, the defeat of the Confederacy. The council’s first branch complained that these men had “made themselves exceedingly obnoxious to our people” and noted that “a similar spirit of hostility to our Government has been manifested by these parties on former occasions.” The branch requested that “the Military Authorities in command of this Department be requested to remove” the Methodist clergymen “from our midst and all such dangerous persons as are inimical to our Government.”26
The return of Confederate veterans to Baltimore provoked a similar but more strident response. Both branches of the city council approved a resolution protesting “the Policy of allowing men, who left our City, for the purpose of cooperating with the so called Southern Confederacy against our lives, our property and our Nationality,” to return to live “among us.” The presence of the ex-Confederates, according to the resolution, would “in all probability result in collisions, terrible in their consequences.” Voters from the city’s fashionable Eleventh and Twelfth Wards assembled not long afterward to enter their own “solemn protest against the continuance of such wicked and unlawful men amongst us who have returned unrepentant and traitors in all their principles,” and whose hands were “dyed with the Blood of our Brothers.”27
In a city with Baltimore’s rich history of riot, the presence of Confederate fighters may well have been a legitimate cause for concern. It was more than likely that some of them had taken part in the attack on the Sixth Massachusetts in Baltimore five years earlier. Now they returned, their military skills sharpened by four years of warfare. Exiling the southern veterans, of course, would also have been a political convenience to Republican municipal authorities who maintained their grip on government only by excluding large numbers of Democrats from the polls. If they remained in town, those soldiers might eventually become voters.
THE POLITICS OF ACCOMMODATION
Race and the rebellion continued to structure political divisions in postwar Baltimore, but during the 1870s, the role of the party organizations changed. Long before the days of the Know-Nothings, Baltimore’s parties had been vehicles for political combat, often violent. Sometime after the Civil War, however, the dominant Democratic Party evolved into an institution for the management of conflict, while the Republican Party nearly disappeared.
The principal architect of the new regime was Isaac Freeman Rasin, a member of a prominent, prosperous Eastern Shore clan whose ancestors arrived in Maryland in the seventeenth century. In the early 1860s, when he was about 30 years old, Freeman—or “Free”—Rasin went into business, opening a “straw goods” shop near the intersection of Charles and Lexington Streets. At first, he sold bonnets, parasols, children’s hats, and hoops for skirts, but his merchandise expanded to include cloth, velvet, and felt hats, French corsets, and kid gloves.28
Rasin also branched out into politics. In his postadolescent years, he had been secretary of the Ashland Square American Club, a Know-Nothing organization. Ashland Square is the site of a monument to Henry Wells and Daniel McComas, the two young volunteers killed in the battle of North Point in 1814, where they were supposed to have shot down British General Robert Ross and turned the tide against the British attack on Baltimore. The shrine was an appropriate focus for the patriotic Know-Nothings, but the Ashland Club’s location in East Baltimore’s Seventh Ward was a political handicap. East Baltimore leaned Democratic even when Baltimore leaned in the opposite direction. In 1854, for example, the year the Know-Nothings swept into control of the city council, Democrats managed to win four of the wards east of Jones Falls as well as the Ninth Ward, just across the Falls, but no wards west of Howard Street. The Democratic candidate for mayor won 49 percent of the vote in East Baltimore, but only 39 percent west of Howard.29
A Know-Nothing politician trying to build a political base would have found more opportunities to recruit adherents in West Baltimore than in the east, where the city’s immigrant population was concentrated. Rasin stayed in East Baltimore but became a Democrat. Political opportunism is unlikely to have prompted his conversion. He drifted away from the Ashland Club as the Know-Nothings drifted into the Union camp. The Rasin family had strong southern affinities. Freeman’s father suffered 28 months of imprisonment for refusing to take a loyalty oath to the United States.30
Freeman Rasin completed his political transformation in 1864, when his friends in the Seventh Ward elected him as their representative to the city’s Democratic Executive Committee—by a one-vote margin. Three years later, under the new state constitution of 1867, the Democrats reconquered Baltimore, and Rasin reached the pinnacle of his career in electoral politics. He was elected clerk of the Maryland Court of Common Pleas, this time by a margin of almost 15,000 votes of approximately 25,000 cast. He held the job for 18 years. Its modest title suited him. Rasin managed to run Baltimore while remaining almost invisible. His obscurity was legendary. It was said that he delivered only one stand-up political speech in his life.31 He made his career in politics largely by advancing the careers of others.
Isaac Freeman Rasin, Baltimore’s sometime Democratic boss, at midcareer
Even as he got himself elected clerk, Rasin was spreading his influence beyond his own office. At the same Democratic convention that nominated him for his clerkship, Rasin supported John W. Davis, a political adviser employed by the B&O, for nomination as sheriff. Rasin managed to have the sheriff’s nomination moved to last place in the proceedings. The maneuver gave Rasin and his allies the opportunity to bargain with aspiring nominees for all other local offices, offering support to those candidates who agreed to back Davis at the end of the evening. Davis succeeded, and his defeated opponent is reported to have warned, “Boys, you have made a mistake. You have given Free Rasin a grip in politics, and mark my words, he will never let go.”32
Rasin’s courthouse job came with the authority to make several patronage appointments—two bailiffs, a crier, a cashier, a messenger, and a few clerks and copyists. Though most jobs went to his Seventh Ward friends and relatives, he also reached out to potential allies in West Baltimore’s Eighteenth and Nineteenth Wards and to the heavily Irish and Democratic Eighth Ward, known as “Limerick.” Several of Rasin’s appointees had been delegates to the Democratic judicial convention that had nominated him. The jobs may have been rewards for their support. Rasin’s subsequent appointments also gave him connections with the political leadership of the Second Ward—Fell’s Point—and its community of German-Americans.33
Rasin’s salary as clerk was $3,500 a year, paid out of the fees that his office collected for the issuance of various licenses, including marriage licenses. The fees amounted to more than $300,000 a year. The custom of Rasin’s predecessors was to deposit these funds in a bank, at interest, until the time came to turn them over to the state; they kept the interest. Rasin continued the practice, augmenting his personal income and possibly adding it to the resources that extended his influence and attracted adherents.34
One of Rasin’s youngest recruits was John J. “Sonny” Mahon. At 19 years of age, Mahon was the leader of a juvenile gang in the tough Ninth Ward on Baltimore’s waterfront. “Politics in those days wasn’t any kid-glove business,” Mahon later recalled. “It was rough, and we were as rough as you make them. It was not very long before the leaders uptown began to take notice that they could not carry the Ninth ward in the primaries without us.” Mahon was 20 when he was summoned to Rasin’s office at the courthouse. Half a century later, he remembered their meeting: “That first conversation was a funny one. We talked about things in the Ninth ward and about the fall campaign. The old man cussed out a lot of people and I listened. The upshot of that conversation was that I became Rasin leader in the ward and got a job in the State tobacco warehouse at $2 a day.”35
Muscle still mattered in Baltimore politics. Gang leaders like Sonny Mahon were vital members of the Democratic coalition and essential to its control of polling places. The era’s partisan political parades were mass demonstrations of muscle. But money and jobs had come to occupy a more central role in city politics. Mahon himself would master the finer arts of politics and patronage, get elected to the city council, and emerge as principal boss of Baltimore when Rasin died in 1907.36 Ethnicity also continued to be politically relevant, though not as prominent as it was under the Know-Nothings. Immigrants were not sufficiently numerous in Baltimore to carry elections, but in combination with southern-sympathizing Democrats, they could master the municipality. Material inducements helped to seal the alliance, but there were also attempts to manufacture a sentiment of kinship in the coalition. Residents of the Irish Eighth Ward were told that the nation’s treatment of the South during Reconstruction was no different from England’s abuse of Ireland.
Rasin consolidated his control over the city in 1871, when his candidate for mayor easily won nomination. The victor was Joshua Vansant, chairman of the city hall building committee and the state Democratic Conservative committee. Though there had been some support for the reelection of Mayor Banks, all the Democratic delegates elected in ward primaries were committed to Vansant, and the Democratic Conservative convention dispensed with the usual roll call to nominate him unanimously. At a preelection mass meeting of Democrats in Monument Square, Vansant pledged strict economy in municipal expenditures but made a special point of condemning the Republican administration in Washington for treating “the Southern States as a barbarous power would treat conquered provinces.”37
In the general election that followed, Baltimore’s Democratic Conservatives won every seat in the city council’s second branch and all but one in the first. Vansant carried every ward. His biggest margins were in Rasin’s Seventh and in the Irish Eighth, but his citywide majority was much narrower than Robert Banks’s four years earlier. The Fifteenth Amendment took effect in Maryland a month after Banks was elected. Vansant was the first mayor to face an electorate that included black men, and they generally cast their ballots against the Democratic candidate. They could not vote Republican, however, because there were no Republican candidates on the ballot. Their stand-ins presented themselves to the electorate as candidates of the “National Reform Party.”38 Republicans had fallen into such disfavor that they dared not speak their name. During Vansant’s administration, the residents of Republican Street would petition, successfully, to change its name to Carrollton Avenue.39
THE CITY AROMATIC
One municipal problem emerged as the focal concern of the Vansant administration: Baltimore smelled bad. It became the mayor’s mission to track the odor to its sources and vanquish it. The city had been odiferous for some time. The aroma oozing up from the harbor in the summer months was so overpowering that some were willing to sacrifice the Inner Harbor itself to put an end to the odor. In 1858, a local physician, Thomas H. Buckler, had advocated neutralization of the noxious Basin by simply filling it in with soil, creating a new tract of real estate extending from the mouth of the Jones Falls west to Light Street and south to the foot of Federal Hill, which would no longer exist because Buckler proposed using the soil from the hill to fill up the Basin.40
Apart from its obvious cost to the city’s shipping, the problem with Buckler’s solution was its failure to deal with the Jones Falls, which delivered its own contribution to the harbor’s stench. In 1863, Mayor Chapman had complained about the emanations of the Falls. It was the “receptacle of a large number of sinks on the line of its passage through the heart of the city,” and in the dry summer months, “being filled with a black mud to nearly the surface of the water, it leaves exposed at the slightest depression of the tide a large mass of putrid pestilential matter.” The mayor recommended dredging to remove the offensive layer of muck.41
Under Buckler’s plan to fill in the Basin, the Jones Falls would have continued to add its murky burden to a diminished body of water, intensifying the pollution of the “outer” harbor off Fell’s Point. Without the Basin to serve as a receptacle for the city’s waste, Baltimore would need some other system of sewage disposal. In 1870, the city created the Commission for the Improvement of the Jones Falls to address both the stream’s odor and, more catastrophic, the flood damage caused to properties along its banks. The commission’s proposal to deepen the bed of the Falls would increase its capacity to accommodate storm water and remove the sediment responsible for its “fetid exhalations and disgusting exhibitions.”42
By the end of Robert Banks’s term as mayor, in 1871, the city stench had risen toward the top of the local agenda. The board of health convened a committee of prominent physicians to evaluate the well-being of the city. The committee delivered its report at the office of the mayor in late August, the city’s most odorous season. In general, the report was encouraging. Mayor Banks summarized it for the city council, declaring “cause for earnest congratulation that we can . . . maintain by comparison of vital statistics that our city ranks as one of the healthiest in the country.” The claim was dubious. Baltimore’s mortality rates for the early 1870s were lower than those of New York and Brooklyn but scarcely different from those in Boston, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati.43
The Centre Street bridge across the Jones Falls, when the stream served Baltimoreans as a sewer
According to the doctors, however, one “great problem” threatened the public health of the city: “How Most effectually to abate the grave nuisance made by our basin and docks during the heated term of every year, this year, more serious, it is believed, than ever before.” The mayor offered no program to cope with the nuisance but urged the city council to “set about devising at once a proper remedy to be applied during the fall and winter months” in anticipation of the smelly spring and the even more noxious summer. Banks suggested to the council that it possessed “a means of very decided amelioration of the evil in your power to withdraw the privilege, now enjoyed by some of the City’s hotels and private homes of discharging their water-closets through sewers communicating directly with the basin.” The issuance of sewer permits fell within the council’s authority; they were favors for friends and political patronage for constituents. Their cancellation would be an embarrassment and would reduce the political working capital that council members used to get elected and stay elected. Mayor Banks held out an alternative: “If however the plan of relief of the nuisance made by the basin . . . shall consist in causing the water therein to be active an[d] frequently changing, then it seems that these sewers might discharge into the basin with impunity.”44
The physicians’ report cited one further problem: the “manner of disposing of night soil,” a practice “affecting injuriously the condition of the basin, as well as many parts of the city.” For years, “night men” made the rounds of Baltimore with buckets, barrels, and horse-drawn carts, periodically removing the content of privy vaults and depositing it outside the city limits. Their excavations inevitably stirred up the deposits that they mined, releasing gases thought to be foul or even fatal. According to the physicians’ committee, the collection and disposal of night soil might spread epidemic disease. In 1867, the city contracted with the Baltimore Fertilizing Manufacturing Company to collect all of the city’s garbage and night soil. The night soil was moved to a site four miles downstream from Baltimore on the Patapsco River, where the waste was mixed with ashes, dried, deodorized, and converted into “poudrette,” which the company sold as fertilizer.45
The arrangement with the fertilizer company solved some of the problems arising from the disposal of night soil. But the night men continued to drive their carts through the streets trailing clouds of essence excremental. In 1871, the municipality’s attorneys arranged to terminate the contract under which Baltimore paid $18,000 a year to provide the Fertilizing Company with its raw material. The agreement would expire in 1872. Mayor Banks urged the council to use this interval to “mature some better way of managing these offensive matters . . . which shall be void of the disgusting and offensive features of the present plan.”46
Baltimoreans were hardly the only urbanites assaulted by the odors of their city. London had been overcome by the smell of the Thames during the 1850s. The Houses of Parliament, on the bank of the river, were directly exposed to the nuisance and powerfully disposed to eliminate it. To overcome “the Great Stink,” Parliament approved the construction of many miles of sewers to carry the wastes of the city far downstream.47 Other American cities also reacted to the smells of sewage. In the 1850s, Chicago and Brooklyn abandoned the “privy-vault cesspool system of waste disposal” and constructed sewer networks that relied on water flow to carry off the offensive burden produced by their concentrated populations. Other cities followed their lead. Baltimore was not one of them. It would be the last of the country’s major cities to build a sanitary sewer system.48
DOWN AND DIRTY
Challenged by Mayor Banks to save the city from its sewage, the Baltimore City Council made the subject one of its preoccupations after Mayor Vansant took office. In May 1872, the second branch of the council turned to the board of health for expert advice on eliminating “the stench emanating from the basin.” The board’s first priority, it seemed, was “calming the anxiety of our citizens many of whom suppose that the emanation is of a highly pestilential character.” Though less alarmed about the “emanation” than its own committee of eminent physicians, the board acknowledged that the harbor’s noxious emissions were “not conducive to a high state of health, and therefore ought to be removed or prevented as far as possible.”
The solution, according to the board of health, was “plain and simple.” Fifteen years earlier, the city’s water supply had been “sufficient to allow all the water plugs to run once or twice a week in the afternoon during the summer months to flush out the gutters and after them the sewers and tunnels and lastly aiding in yielding to the docks and harbor a supply of fresh water, and then we had no stenches as is now experienced.”49
The plain and simple problem was the “rigid economy of water” that Baltimore had to observe to accommodate a population that had grown by more than a quarter between 1860 and 1870. In the early 1870s, the city was also contending with successive summer droughts, when the only water that ran through the gutters was “dish and other filthy water, loaded with vegetable and animal matter some of which lodges in the interstices between the stones and there festers and rots in the hot sun thus contaminating the atmosphere.” Without a substantial increase in the city’s water supply, the board could only suggest the use of “chemical agents” to deodorize the harbor, and it could not guarantee their efficacy.50
Some local experts questioned the board of health’s plain and simple understanding of the problem. Charles P. Kahler, a civil engineer and one-time city surveyor, argued that fresh water and harbor water might not mix. The two could differ in specific gravity because their temperatures differed or because the Basin’s water was burdened with sediment. The fresh water might pass through the harbor and join the cooler, deeper, and cleaner Patapsco, doing no good at all for the Basin itself. Besides, Kahler concluded, Baltimoreans had better uses for pure water than to dump it into their malodorous harbor.51
Kahler submitted his observations at the end of the city’s second consecutive summer drought. The city council, in response to the water shortage, was considering how to engineer a vast increase in Baltimore’s water supply by drawing on the Gunpowder River—northeast of the city—pumping its water over a rise and into an existing city reservoir at Lake Roland in Baltimore County. The proposal had been in circulation for at least five years. Mayor Chapman and the council had spent $225,000 to purchase water rights along the Gunpowder, and in 1869, the Sun closed a lengthy review of the city’s water resources with the prediction that it would “not be many years before the supply of water from the Gunpowder will become a necessity.” In its annual report, issued early in 1871, the city water board repeated the prediction and added that “nothing remains but to determine, when the proper time arrives, and the best mode of conveying the water to the city.”52
By 1872, mayor, council, and water board agreed that the time had come. The council’s sense of urgency moved it to create a Joint Special Committee on the Introduction of the Water of the Gunpowder River and the Purification of the Harbor. The committee eventually solidified behind a resolution “to procure the opinion of an Eminent hydraulic Engineer as to the most certain permanent and prompt removal of the annoyance occasioned by the Stench of the Basin.”53
By the end of the year, the committee submitted an ordinance authorizing the water board to begin drawing water from the Gunpowder River to feed the Lake Roland reservoir. The board had already dispatched a civil engineer to lay out the conduit connecting the two bodies of water, and Mayor Vansant had given his blessing to the enterprise in September, partly because the city was confronting another year of severe drought, but also because the “inner basin of the harbor . . . during the present exceedingly warm and dry season has exhaled a most offensive odor, and has alarmed the citizens of Baltimore because of an apprehension that it could engender disease of an infectious and malignant character.”54
The council was distinctly impatient with the water board’s progress in bringing the Gunpowder to bear on the city’s noxious Basin. In September 1873, the council’s second branch asked “how much progress has been made by the contractors for the introduction of the temporary supply of water . . . from the Gunpowder” and what action the water board was taking to deal with contractors who fell behind schedule. A resolution introduced not long afterward was charged with urgency: “Whereas the largest attainable supply of water by natural flow from the Gunpowder River is absolutely necessary at the earliest possible moment,” the council wanted to assure Mayor Vansant and the water board that it was prepared to submit “the most liberal plan” to the Maryland General Assembly “for the power to issue Water Stock to secure the permanent supply of water from the Gunpowder River.”55
By April 1874, the council’s first branch wanted the water board to explain “what retards the speedy introduction of an additional supply of water into the City of Baltimore.” Mayor Vansant responded on behalf of the board. The delay was not the fault of feckless contractors or unforeseen engineering problems. The difficulty was legal. The pumps, conduits, and pipes needed to carry the water of the Gunpowder to Lake Roland had been completed. But a property owner along the line of the conduit obtained an injunction prohibiting the city and its contractors from opening the system so that the water could flow into Lake Roland.56
The legal obstacles were manageable. Bernard Carter, attorney for the intransigent Baltimore County landowner and an ally of Freeman Rasin, wrote to Vansant to explain how an appropriate sum of money might solve the problem.57 Other obstructions proved less moveable. The council’s plan to freshen up the Basin called for the Gunpowder water to be pumped into Lake Roland and then to reach the city “by natural flow.” Engineering an unnatural flow was likely to be expensive and time-consuming. As it happened, getting the water from Lake Roland to the harbor would require six miles of underground conduit lined with brick, along with several new reservoirs, not completed until the 1880s at a total cost of $8 million.58 But the water cure collapsed in the face of a more fundamental problem.
The city council’s Joint Standing Committee on the Harbor reviewed 15 proposals for flushing the stench out of the Basin—some of them appallingly implausible.59 The committee unanimously rejected 13 of the plans. The plan proposed by Milo W. Locke won the support of all but one committee member. Locke was a local contractor who proposed to draw sewage from the Basin through a tunnel extending under Locust Point and emptying into the main channel of the Patapsco. The fetid waters would be drawn into the tunnel by a pair of large propellers rotating at its far end; the current would be propelled by a jet of fresh water pumped into the bottom of the Basin to prevent the accumulation of sediment. The committee’s lone dissenter offered a lengthy, point-by-point critique of the Locke plan as an “engineering conception,” not a scheme tested in practice. He preferred the plan of F. H. Hambleton, who proposed a sanitary sewer system for the city as a whole. The council’s first branch voted to reject this minority report. But the report’s indictment of Locke’s proposal was thorough and compelling. For that reason, perhaps, the second branch rejected a proposal to grant Locke funds to construct a model of his two-propeller plan. The water cure for the harbor had evaporated. The council faced the politically distasteful necessity to cut off all sewers draining into the Basin, including the one that served city hall, and revoking its constituents’ permits to befoul the Inner Harbor.60
Only a fraction of the city’s sewers discharged waste directly into the Basin. The Jones Falls may have received the effluent from the water closets of as many as 15,000 or 20,000 private homes and businesses. But the Jones Falls Improvement project included the construction of high walls along the length of the stream for flood control,61 and the walls would make it difficult to connect household water closets with the Falls. Deprived of opportunities to drain their wastes directly or indirectly into the harbor, Baltimoreans were left with two options. They could support the construction of a comprehensive sanitary sewer system, or they could rely on privy vaults and the “night men” who cleaned them out.
Some Baltimoreans, like Hambleton, had the comprehensive vision needed to conceive a citywide sewer system, but Baltimore lacked the political integration necessary to build it. Instead, the municipality reacted disjointedly to one localized sewage crisis after another, fashioning partial solutions on a neighborhood scale.62 Without a comprehensive sewer system, the night men remained indispensable. But the city’s renewed reliance on them was accompanied by a determination to minimize the offensive by-products of their work. In his annual message of 1875, Mayor Vansant complained that the “intolerable nuisance” of the night carts “should be abated if it cannot be altogether averted.” The city council created the Special Committee on Night Soil to recommend steps that might reduce the odors that resulted from the night men’s operations and the supposed threat to health.63
An innovative technology offered hope that the night soil nuisance might be averted. A new business firm, the Odorless Excavating Apparatus Company, introduced itself to the mayor and city council. The company’s patented equipment pumped privy contents through a hose into an airtight tank with a capacity of as much as 640 gallons. At the top of the tank was a small vent, opened when the equipment was in operation. A small charcoal furnace placed over the vent burned off the noxious gases that Baltimoreans found so objectionable.64
City agencies were among the earliest clients of Odorless Excavating. The school system signed on in 1874 and found that the company charged less than the night men. The health department issued permits exclusively to the company to pump out privy vaults during the summer, when strict regulations governed the removal of night soil. The health commissioner condemned “the old bucket and night cart system” as a danger to public health. He felt bound by his professional standards to use a method that reduced the “nuisance to the minimum.” He asked the council to sustain him “and confer a blessing upon the people” of the city.65
The Odorless Excavating process was controversial because it could eliminate the jobs of night men, but the city council eventually granted the company a monopoly of the night soil business. The jobs lost were replaced by hundreds added in companies operating under Odorless Excavating franchises. The company’s reign over the privies of Baltimore also had an unanticipated consequence. By mitigating the unhealthful stench associated with the excavation of privy vaults, the company reduced one of the irritations that might move Baltimoreans to demand a sanitary sewer system. And the company, its franchisees, and their workers naturally emerged as an interest group opposing such a system.
Demands for a sewer system continued. In 1876, the General Assembly had empowered and required the city to construct one or more “intercepting sewers” that would divert watery waste from the Basin “to some point so distant from the said Harbor as not to be liable to be returned thereto by the operation of tide water.” Two years later, a bill was introduced in the first branch of the city council to provide for the construction of a sewer system along the lines of the one proposed by F. H. Hambleton. It was tabled.66
The work of Odorless Excavating had hardly solved the city’s sewage disposal problems. The company needed a place to dump the waste that it pumped from Baltimore’s privies. In 1872, the municipality had leased several sites in Baltimore County for this purpose and for disposal of garbage in general. The arrangement raised understandable objections in the county. The city’s health commissioner urged the council to produce some “wise legislation” by which the city could be “relieved of this dilemma, and a permanent arrangement be decided upon by which all complaints will be removed.”67 The council’s wisdom operated more slowly than the county’s outrage. In 1873, county officials made their point by ordering the arrest of nine city health department employees for creating a nuisance by depositing night soil in the county. The city council eventually settled on an alternative plan for disposal without arousing Baltimore County officials. The night soil would be conveyed in “air-tight barges” to city-owned land in Anne Arundel County.68