THE RING
WHILE BALTIMORE BATTLED ITS STENCH, Isaac Freeman Rasin extended his reach in local politics, but only faint hints of his influence broke the surface of the city’s business. In 1873, for example, the city council took special pains to maintain and improve the Wells and McComas Monument in Ashland Square. It appointed a committee to “arrange for a celebration of the successful defence of the city in 1814—and the dedication of the Wells and McComas Monument.”1 No other city monument got so much attention at the time. The monument, of course, was located in Rasin’s Seventh Ward. More important, both square and statuary had served as the symbolic and patriotic focus of the Ashland Square American Club, the organization that introduced Rasin to politics. In 1880, the city council’s Joint Standing Committee on Highways proposed a new street in southeast Baltimore to be called Rasin Street. But the street never got beyond the proposal stage.2
While maintaining his roots in the Seventh Ward, Rasin extended his operations to the city at large, and then beyond. In 1870, at a conference of Democratic leaders in his office, Rasin met Arthur Pue Gorman, a member of the Maryland House of Delegates from Howard County. After the meeting, Gorman and Rasin had lunch together at Barnum’s Hotel, along with B&O lobbyist John W. Davis, who had been elected sheriff, with Rasin’s help, four years earlier. Gorman’s political career had begun at the age of 11 when he was appointed a page in the US Senate. The experience ignited his determination to return to the Senate as an elected member. Rasin assisted his progress toward that goal in 1871, when his support helped to lift Gorman to the speakership of the house of delegates.3 Until ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913, state legislatures elected US senators, and leadership in Maryland’s General Assembly provided a platform for vaulting into the upper house of Congress.
The alliance between Gorman and Rasin—later known to their opponents as the Gorman-Rasin Ring—breached the boundary between Baltimore politics and state politics. Together, the two bosses arranged the election of William Pinkney Whyte as Maryland’s governor in 1871. Whyte, an antebellum member of Congress, was already a commanding presence on the Baltimore City Democratic Committee when Rasin was elected a committeeman from the Seventh Ward. Rasin served part of his political apprenticeship as one of the older man’s allies. Whyte had gotten a whiff of the US Senate when he served out the term of an incumbent who had been appointed ambassador to Great Britain, and he badly wanted to be elected a senator in his own right.4 As governor, he could woo state legislators with patronage and favors.
Railroad politics probably figured more immediately than legislative politics in Whyte’s election. The incumbent governor and Whyte’s rival for the nomination was Odin Bowie. Before winning the governorship, Bowie had joined other citizens of Prince Georges County to secure a charter for the Baltimore and Pope’s Creek Railroad. The charter permitted the company to build branch lines, and Bowie approached the Pennsylvania Railroad to propose that one of the branches might reach out to Washington, thus breaking the B&O’s monopoly on rail traffic between Baltimore and the capital. The Pennsylvania Railroad backed Bowie’s election and provided a $400,000 loan to help with construction of the Washington branch. The B&O wanted Bowie out of the governor’s mansion before the line could be built. Whyte was a good friend of B&O president John Work Garrett and many of the railroad’s directors. In 1871, the railroad put its considerable resources behind his campaign to prevent Bowie’s reelection.5
According to Frank Kent, the Baltimore Sun’s foremost commentator on state and local politics, the election of 1871 marked a seismic shift in the character of Baltimore politics—the first election in which vote buying played a significant role. The practice followed the addition of African American men to the state’s electorate under the Fifteenth Amendment. The city’s Democratic organization countered black voters’ understandable affinity for the party of Lincoln by paying them to stay away from the polls. Rasin may not have invented the arrangement, but he made it habitual. The boss’s chief operative in the black community was Thomas A. Smith. The day after an election, Smith would appear at Rasin’s courthouse office to count up the registered black voters who had cast their votes. Smith would be paid according to the number of black voters who had failed to show up at the polls. Smith’s dilemma, in other words, was to maximize black voter registration but minimize black voting. He and his associates sometimes depressed African American turnout by arranging grand picnics or Chesapeake Bay excursions on election day. “From buying the negroes,” wrote Kent, “the next step was buying the white men, and it did not take much of this sort of thing before the politics of Maryland became thoroughly steeped in corruption.”6
Though undeniably corrupt, vote buying represented a far more civilized means of managing the electorate than the homicidal violence of the Know-Nothings, and it was certainly preferable to the vote blocking practiced further south by the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
If Baltimore’s Democratic leaders would pay Thomas Smith to keep black men away from the polls, they might also be willing to pay black voters to support Democratic candidates. The possibility of such bargains and the estrangement of black voters from the Republican Party also suggested to white Democratic politicians a strategy of restraint on matters of race. While Democrats elsewhere in Maryland sought to bar black voters from the polls, most of Baltimore’s Democratic politicians prudently avoided racial aggravations that might rouse the city’s substantial African American electorate to renew its loyalties to the Republicans. Skillful bartering might turn them out for Democrats.
CHALLENGES OF MACHINE BUILDING
Arthur Gorman profited far more handsomely from the election of Governor Whyte than did Thomas Smith. Whyte fired the incumbent president of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal and appointed Gorman in his place.7 Gorman gained not only a substantial salary but control of the numerous jobs connected with maintenance and management of the canal. His leadership of the C&O, however, also had politically awkward implications for his (and Rasin’s) corporate affinities. The C&O operated in competition with the B&O. Having just helped to elect a friend of the B&O as governor, the Gorman-Rasin Ring now embraced the C&O and its occasional political ally, the Pennsylvania Railroad. The Pennsylvania’s counsel, Bernard Carter, entered Rasin’s circle of political associates. When the B&O engaged his canal in a rate war, Delegate Gorman maneuvered in the General Assembly to achieve rough parity between canal and railroad rates.8
Rasin’s connections with Governor Whyte and Arthur Gorman gave him leverage beyond the city limits and helped to compensate politically for the city’s gross underrepresentation in the state legislature. With half the state’s population, Baltimore held less than 20 percent of seats in the house of delegates and 12 percent of the state senate. Governor Whyte was generous in his distribution of state jobs to Rasin allies—among them, John J. “Sonny” Mahon’s job in the state tobacco warehouse.9
Though Rasin had augmented his patronage resources, his Democratic organization faced an energized Republican opposition able to draw on the federal patronage of the Grant administration. In 1872, instead of running under the National Reform alias, Republican candidates for the first branch of the city council ran openly as Republicans, and they increased their representation from one council seat to three. In the congressional election, both of Baltimore’s Democratic incumbents won, but by smaller margins than in 1870.10
While the Republicans struggled back from obscurity, Freeman Rasin, though still deliberately obscure, quietly continued to build his organization. Since his political base was in East Baltimore, he worked steadily to extend his strength west of the Jones Falls. One Democratic strong point in West Baltimore was the old engine house of the New Market Fire Company. Though there were no longer any volunteer fire companies to provide election-day organization and muscle, the alumni of the New Market Company still maintained an organizational existence. As firefighters, they had fought Know-Nothings on behalf of the Democratic Party. Rasin recruited the New Market veterans and their leader, Augustus Albert. With Rasin’s support, Albert won two terms as sheriff, and in the 1880s he became the city’s fire commissioner.11
Baltimore wards, 1872
Rasin’s respectable family background earned him a slot in Baltimore’s social register and gave him access to heights of society out of reach for ward leaders like Sonny Mahon.12 Rasin enjoyed access to the politics of the prosperous Eleventh and Twelfth Wards, embracing the mansions on Mount Vernon Place and the stately townhouses to its west, where he won friends at the top of the legal profession such as Bernard Carter. The attorneys were useful as wordsmiths, and they handled political litigation when Rasin’s rivals alleged irregularities at the polls, as they frequently did.
Rasin’s first six-year term as clerk of the Maryland Court of Common Pleas expired in 1873. He won reelection over his Republican opponent by a margin of two to one. In 1874, Rasin and Gorman used their influence in the state legislature to place Governor Whyte in the US Senate seat he had longed for. The legislature’s vote for Whyte was unanimous.13
But, just a year later, the Democratic consensus that Rasin had achieved in Baltimore was under attack and in danger of disintegration. A rally of independent reformers during the mayoral campaign of 1875 prompted the Sun to warn of “a popular movement, hardly yet defined and active, being worked into shape, and destined to protest against the shyster politicians and the incompetents who have had entirely too much control of public affairs.” Rasin’s Democratic candidate for mayor, Ferdinand Latrobe, declared that he was in favor of reform but had yet to learn whether any reforms were needed in the city or the state. He did, however, promise a parsimonious administration.14
The reformers achieved even greater strength than the Sun imagined. After the votes were counted, the first branch of the city council was evenly divided between organization Democrats and candidates running on the “merchants’ and citizens’ reform” ticket. The regular Democrats still held all but 2 of the 10 seats in the second branch. Latrobe managed to win the mayor’s office by only 2,700 votes, with almost 54,000 cast.15 His opponent, local merchant Henry M. Warfield, filed suit in Baltimore’s superior court alleging fraudulent votes and intimidation at the polls. The evidence was rather thin. There had been some irregularities. Some “pudding ballots” were detected—contrivances by which organization men enclosed several fraudulent ballots inside a legitimate one, shaking the counterfeits loose as they dropped them in the ballot box. Warfield was unable to reverse his defeat, but the reformers would get another shot at the Ring in the state election only a month later.
“POTATO BUGS” AND PARTY POOPERS
Republicans, by themselves, posed no threat to the Ring. They were so weak, wrote Frank Kent, that “they would fuse with most any disgruntled element of the Democrats that chose to put up a set of candidates.” But there was no shortage of disgruntled Democrats. Some of them gathered behind the gubernatorial candidacy of William T. Hamilton, the Western Maryland Democrat ousted from the US Senate to make room for Whyte. Hamilton made his move in the defining election of 1875, a contest that would shape the contours of politics in Maryland and Baltimore until the beginning of the twentieth century. Allied with the Republicans, the “reform” or “Independent” Democrats challenged the Gorman-Rasin ticket, from governor down to city council. The contest would be known as the “Potato Bug Campaign,” after the insects that destroyed the crop of 1875. Democratic regulars likened Democratic adherents of the Reform Party to the yellow-striped pests—craven parasites who aimed to destroy the party that had nurtured them.16
Rasin, Gorman, and Senator Whyte supported the gubernatorial candidacy of John Lee Carroll. He owned a manor in Howard County, once the property of his great-grandfather, Charles Carroll of Carrollton. The younger Carroll also had a fashionable city address on Mount Vernon Place. His family name, his social prominence, and his reputation as a “fine southern gentleman” all contributed to his attractiveness as a candidate. He had another asset of special interest to Arthur Gorman. Carroll represented Howard County in the state senate, and Gorman wanted the seat for himself so that he could advance his ambition to enter the US Senate. Gorman promised Maryland’s other seat in the Senate to James Groome of Cecil County, a third Democratic aspirant to the governorship. Groome had become the gubernatorial stand-in after Governor Whyte moved to the Senate. In return for the promise that he would get a Senate seat of his own, Groome agreed to remain a candidate for governor until just before the Democratic state convention, when he would withdraw and throw his support to Carroll.17
William Hamilton had his own backers in Baltimore. Severn Teackle Wallis was a distinguished attorney and literary figure whose Confederate sympathies had earned him 14 months’ imprisonment during the Civil War—and the admiration of the city’s numerous ex-Confederates. His biting oratory stood in sharp contrast to the silence and invisibility of Boss Rasin. John K. Cowen provided more than oratory. He was chief counsel (and later president) of the B&O Railroad. His corporate interests set him at odds with the Gorman-Rasin Ring, which fed on the resources of the C&O Canal. A railroad tax imposed by the state legislature in 1872 was particularly galling to Cowen and the B&O. It was intended to quiet Democratic farmers, who charged that their lands were taxed too heavily while Maryland’s wealthy corporations enjoyed low taxes or exemptions.18
The Ring swept both state and municipal elections in 1875, but not cleanly. The Democratic state convention had been reduced to riot. Die-hard adherents of William Hamilton delayed balloting and chipped away at Carroll’s majority with a filibuster that extended over days and nights, persisting over catcalls and insults. Fistfights broke out, and the police were summoned. Through it all, Gorman remained imperturbable, until finally, the Hamiltonians were exhausted and John Lee Carroll won the gubernatorial nomination, his support augmented, as promised, by delegates originally committed to Groome.19
Carroll carried Baltimore by more than 15,000 votes of 60,000 cast. His margin of victory was suspiciously large, more than five times that of Ferdinand Latrobe in the mayoral contest just a month earlier. Accusations of electoral theft reverberated long after election day. Almost a month after the polls closed, the Reformers held an “Indignation Meeting” to protest the conduct of the election and point out evidence of fraud. Black voters, who had been expected to support the Reform candidates, had faced harassment and fistfights at the polls. But the most glaring indications of electoral irregularity lay in the voting results themselves. The total vote increased sharply in precincts where population had declined, with the bulk of these odd increases favoring Democrats. J. Morrison Harris, Carroll’s Republican opponent, won a majority of the votes cast in the counties, but the margin of his defeat in Baltimore turned the election in favor of Carroll.20
The extent of the fraud came to light only seven years later when one of the Democratic election officers, in a voluntary statement before a local judge, confessed that on the night after the election, a court clerk had admitted him and other Democratic election officials to the basement of the courthouse where the ballots were secured. He and his colleagues sifted through them, removing reform ballots, burning them in a stove, and substituting votes for organization Democrats, taking care that the total vote count remained consistent with the figure reported when the polls closed. Several other election clerks corroborated his account.21
The state legislature did not wait for this evidence to come in. In 1876, the General Assembly enacted a new election law that, like its predecessor, applied only to Baltimore. It removed the supervision of elections from the purview of Baltimore’s three police commissioners. The governor was to appoint, and the senate confirm, three supervisors of elections who would appoint three election judges in each precinct, one of whom had to come from the minority party.22 Under the new law, Governor Carroll nominated the officials who were to prevent the frauds that allegedly got him elected in the first place.
TRAIN WRECK
Baltimore, which had given Carroll the governorship, would also present him with the most grievous trouble of his term in office. It began on July 16, 1877, at Camden Junction, just outside the city, where the B&O’s Washington branch diverged from the main stem. A fireman abandoned his locomotive and walked off the job. July 16 was the day set by B&O president John W. Garrett to reduce the pay of railroad employees by 10 percent. Just before cutting his workers’ wages, he had granted a 10 percent increase in dividends to stockholders. B&O workers were already in a bad way. Even before this latest pay cut, their wages were substantially lower than those paid by other railroads. It was the second pay cut in eight months. During the long recession following the Panic of 1873, B&O wages had dropped by almost 50 percent.23 The July reduction converted workers’ discontent into rage. More firemen joined the first striker at Camden Junction, and then 38 engineers walked off the job.
A surplus of unemployed workers meant that the B&O had no trouble recruiting replacements for the strikers, and the trains continued to roll. The strikers tried to dissuade their replacements from taking their jobs, but committed “no actual violence,” according to the Sun. Mayor Latrobe, however, was readily persuaded to send his police officers beyond the city limits to Camden Junction, where they arrested three workers for threatening a riot—just before a Howard County judge ordered the city officers out of his jurisdiction. The B&O circumvented that problem by commissioning the city police as railroad constables.
B&O vice-president John King urged Governor Carroll to discourage any further disruption of rail traffic by mobilizing the state’s National Guard, but Carroll did not think the situation serious enough to warrant military intervention. According to the Sun, after all, the strikers at Camden Junction “were all in good humor, and no bad feeling was exhibited.”24 But down the line, in Martinsburg, West Virginia, the mood was a good deal less mellow. The town’s police force was smaller than Baltimore’s, and railroad workers made up a larger share of its population. As crews jumped off incoming trains, hardly any railroad workers could be persuaded to replace them. B&O officials urged West Virginia’s governor to call out the Berkeley Light Guards. Many of its members were railroaders themselves, however, and some of them were strikers. After a brief exchange of gunfire, the commander marched his Berkeley Guards back to town and dismissed them. Another guard unit, accompanied by West Virginia’s governor, turned back at Grafton before it reached the defiant strikers at Martinsburg. Governor Mathews telegraphed President Rutherford B. Hayes to request federal troops. B&O president Garrett did the same.25
Garrett also met with Governor Carroll to urge, once again, that the governor mobilize the National Guard. This time Carroll agreed and called up two Baltimore units—the Fifth and Sixth Regiments. They were needed in Cumberland, where a motley crowd of railroad workers and others had stopped all train traffic. The two regiments had to march through the streets of the city from their armories to Camden Station. To ensure a rapid response, the regiments’ military commander insisted that the 5–1–5 signal for militia mobilization be sounded on the bell at city hall and on all the fire bells in town. They rang out just as factory and mill workers were leaving their jobs for the day. The signal mobilized thousands of civilians as well as soldiers. Crowds collected around the armories, and when the militia emerged, they encountered a rain of brickbats and cheers for the strikers. Though 25 members of the Fifth Regiment were injured, the unit managed to hold its formation and reach the railroad station, only to find that a mob had torn up the tracks to stop any train from moving.26
The Sixth Regiment faced a more difficult march to Camden Station. Its armory was in East Baltimore, more distant from the station than the Fifth Regiment’s. The crowds here began to stone the armory even before the regiment emerged. The soldiers’ first attempt to break out failed, and when they finally began the march to Camden Station, they encountered a sustained barrage of missiles. Against the express orders of their commanding officer, they fired into the angry crowd, killing 10 people and wounding many more before a handful of soldiers reached their destination. The rest—about two-thirds—had shed their uniforms and melted away into Baltimore.27
The mayor, the governor, a number of police officers, and about 350 guardsmen were now trapped inside the Camden depot surrounded by a crowd of approximately 15,000, some of whom seemed intent on setting the building afire. B&O president John Garrett, perhaps the most hated man in Baltimore at that moment, was nowhere to be seen. Among the notables held captive in Camden Station, the only railroad executive was a B&O vice-president. Governor Carroll wired President Hayes to request federal troops. Two thousand federal soldiers and 500 marines were called in to reinforce the local regiments, and a US Revenue Cutter patrolled the warehouses along the waterfront. But even before the regulars arrived, the forces already gathered in Camden Station went on the offensive. National Guardsmen advanced with fixed bayonets, and police officers waded into the mob to arrest the most obvious troublemakers. Inside the station, the gentlemen’s waiting room began to fill up with arrested rioters. Outside, the crowd broke up and moved away. Only the railroad strikers, who seem to have taken no part in the disorders, stood firm at the depot with their grievances. Their strike collapsed. Management made no concessions.28
The city added yet another riot to its record. It was succeeded by a 14-state contagion of railroad strikes and riots. Some observers saw the emerging outlines of an American proletariat behind the disorders. In Baltimore, July’s uprising produced a new contestant in October’s municipal election—the Workingmen’s Party. It offered a full slate of candidates, led by a charismatic blacksmith. The Workingmen’s mayoral candidate, Joseph “Honest Joe” Thompson, addressed enthusiastic crowds in every ward and finished the election in second place, far ahead of the Independent Democrat, who received fewer than 1,000 votes. Thompson claimed that he had been denied victory by electoral fraud and his party lacked the money to challenge the outcome in court. He declared that he would never run for public office again, and was soon appointed deputy clerk of the court of common pleas, as Rasin’s assistant. He was known thereafter as “Ex-Honest Joe” Thompson.29
POLITICAL PERFUMERY
The patronage and particularism of machine politics tended to dissolve working-class solidarity. But machine politics had no such effect on the town’s reformers. Though the Rasin-Gorman-Whyte forces had defeated the “Potato Bugs” in 1875, they were chastened by the battle. Freeman Rasin adopted the practice of nominating reformers for visible municipal and state offices in order, he said, to “perfume” the ticket. That may have been Rasin’s design when he supported—or permitted—the nomination of George P. Kane as Democratic candidate for mayor in 1877. Kane had been the city’s police marshal during the Civil War until federal authorities arrested him. He was not one of Rasin’s political creatures. In fact, he had run against Augustus Albert, Rasin’s West Baltimore ally, in two primaries for sheriff and prevailed in one of them. Rasin himself was not in evidence at the city’s Democratic convention in 1877—no surprise—but neither were any of his captains. In accepting the mayoral nomination, Kane asserted that he was “under no obligation to any man, or set of men. I have said repeatedly that I would make no promises nor enter any stipulations whatever regarding the trust for which you have put me in nomination.”30 It is more than likely that he was telling the truth.
Kane succeeded Mayor Ferdinand C. Latrobe, who was temporarily out of favor with the Rasin organization. He had run in 1875 as a candidate of the regular Democrats, but the Sun observed, hopefully, that he represented “the respectable members” of the organization. He was, after all, the son of B&O attorney John H. B. Latrobe and a B&O attorney himself. Latrobe may not have run as a reformer, but he behaved like one once in office. Perhaps the reformers’ unexpectedly strong showing in the municipal election of 1875 and his own narrow victory moved him to reassess his position. He infuriated the Democratic regulars when he abolished the office of port warden and replaced it with an unpaid harbor board to oversee docks and dredging operations. At the same time, he closed the City Yard, the base of operations for the workers supervised by the port warden, and turned its work over to private contractors. Latrobe thus saved the city approximately $400,000, but also eliminated a fertile source of patronage for the city’s ward bosses. In retribution, the organization denied him the Democratic nomination for reelection in 1877 and surrendered it, at Rasin’s direction, to George Kane.31
Kane had sided with the Potato Bugs two years earlier and therefore provided Rasin’s municipal ticket with some of the reformist “perfumery” that the Democrats needed. But one of Kane’s principal assets was his close friendship with Severn Teackle Wallis, who had run in 1875 as the reform candidate for state attorney general. Kane and Wallis had spent time in the same federal prisons during the Civil War. Rasin hoped that Kane’s candidacy would mute Wallis’s fierce attacks on the Ring. It did even more. Wallis deserted the Independents to support Kane and the rest of Rasin’s ticket.32
Kane died after a year in office, but he had time enough to make it clear where he stood. Like Latrobe, he struggled to reduce municipal expenditures. He vetoed a city council ordinance that would have created an additional hook-and-ladder company in the Fire Department. He announced that he intended to reduce the size of the police force. Instead of building an expensive sewer system, he favored a good system of “surface drainage.” He recommended an electrical system for igniting the city’s gaslights to eliminate the need for lamplighters, and he insisted that the general economic malaise after the Panic of 1873 demanded a rigorous control or reduction of city expenditures to accommodate the decline in municipal tax revenues. Like his predecessors, he also noted that the city’s considerable investment in internal improvements—chiefly railroads—was producing no return.33
On Kane’s death, Ferdinand Latrobe returned to the good graces of the Rasin organization. He easily won a special mayoral election. In 1879, however, a reanimated Republican Party chose to run its own candidate for mayor rather than collaborate with the Independent Democrats. William A. Hooper fared better than any Republican mayoral candidate since 1867. Latrobe won, but his victory margin was less than half the one that carried him to his first term as mayor,34 and he obligingly stood aside from the mayoral contest in 1881 so that William Pinkney Whyte could take his place. Arthur Gorman had incurred Whyte’s enmity by taking his seat in the Senate. According to Frank Kent, Gorman believed that making Whyte mayor “would be the most effective way of permanently sidetracking him as a political factor and preventing him from coming again to the front as a State leader.”35
Whyte, however, still exercised influence in some quarters. Most of the city’s trial judges—known collectively as the Supreme Bench—stood ready to do the bidding of the mayor and the Rasin organization that stood behind him. One of the judges was Whyte’s brother. In 1882, the terms of four judges expired. Some of the leading attorneys among the Independent Democrats and their Republican allies launched a “new judges” campaign to place the court beyond the “polluting touch of politics” by defeating the three judges most clearly identified with Whyte and Rasin. Although the Rasin organization united with Mayor Whyte in defense of the old judges, Gorman remained inactive and remote. Kent claimed that Gorman was secretly backing the reformers. One of Rasin’s most distinguished allies, attorney Bernard Carter, also defected to support the new judges, though he subsequently rejoined the organization Democrats. In a campaign illuminated by the pyrotechnic oratory of the city’s best lawyers, the reformers handed Rasin his first political defeat, while serving Gorman’s purposes by destroying what was left of Mayor Whyte’s influence. It was not just that Whyte lost his allies in the judiciary. By openly campaigning for them, he seemed to violate the principle of judicial independence and alienated many Democrats, as well as the Baltimore Sun. Whyte’s brother won fewer votes than any of the judicial candidates.36
The “new judges” victory raised hope among the Independent Democrats that they might win a controlling share in local government. The struggle also convinced some prominent Democrats to desert the regulars and side with the Independents. The campaign was the first to enlist Charles J. Bonaparte among the machine’s challengers. Bonaparte, grandson of Napoleon’s youngest brother and Baltimore belle Betsy Patterson, would hit his stride as leader of Baltimore’s progressive movement in the 1890s. His prominence among the reformers grew in the municipal election of 1883,37 when even Whyte turned against Rasin’s organization, repudiating the machine that had secured his election as mayor. Mayor Whyte supported his fire marshal, J. Monroe Heiskell, as his successor. Heiskell, who had served as Mayor Whyte’s personal assistant, ran as a fusion candidate against Rasin’s default mayor, Ferdinand Latrobe. Heiskell was another ex-Confederate—like George Kane and Severn Teackle Wallis—who somehow managed to find common ground with Baltimore’s Republicans. Latrobe defeated Heiskell, but by less than 3,500 votes.38 After his loss, Heiskell left town and moved to the far West. The Independents remained and looked forward to a showdown in the municipal election of 1885.
FADING TRIUMPHS
“By long odds,” wrote Frank Kent, “it was the fiercest municipal election ever fought in Baltimore.” The mayoral nominee of the reformers in 1885 was George William Brown, the city’s Civil War mayor and one more local politician who had burnished his political credentials by serving time in a Union prison—where he kept company with Kane and Wallis. The Independents, who had been steadily narrowing the victory margins of the Ring’s candidates, seemed to be closing in on electoral triumph. The most distinguished political orators in the city spoke on their behalf, and they were backed by Independent Democrat John K. Cowen—no mean orator himself—and his B&O Railroad. The reformers’ prospects seemed so good that Rasin’s last remaining rivals in the regular Democratic organization, Robert J. “Doc” Slater and J. Frank Morrison, deserted and went over to the Independents.39
Both men were Democratic ward leaders, but they had influence beyond their wards. Slater’s base was in the First Ward on the eastern edge of the city, but he owned an upscale gambling casino downtown on Calvert Street. He was generous with cash, of which he seemed to have plenty. His hand-outs and contributions were made quietly, but widely recognized. Local opinion held that Slater “carried the whole of East Baltimore in his pocket.”40 Morrison had founded the Crescent Club in West Baltimore’s Fourteenth Ward in 1874. By 1886, the organization had about 1,600 members and an impressive treasury. Morrison was a telegrapher, inventor, and successful businessman. A combination of expertise and political exertions earned him a position as superintendent of the police and fire departments’ telegraph alarm systems. In 1878, he supervised the building of the world’s first long-distance telephone line. At the request of Arthur Gorman, president of the C&O Canal, Morrison extended the line along the route of the canal from Georgetown to Cumberland. Later, as Baltimore representative of the Brush Electrical Company, he won the contract to light Baltimore’s streets with electric lamps.41
Before 1885, Morrison, Slater, and Rasin were generally regarded as a triumvirate that governed the city’s Democratic organization, though Rasin was clearly paramount leader. The three bosses had not always been united. In 1871, Slater had supported Mayor Robert Banks against Joshua Vansant, Rasin’s mayoral candidate. In 1884, soon after Rasin’s defeat in the “new judges” election revealed his vulnerability, Slater and Morrison joined forces to challenge Rasin’s control of the city Democratic convention.42 In 1885, they declared their support for anti-organization candidate George William Brown. Rasin recruited James Hodges to run for mayor as the candidate of the Democratic organization. Hodges was a local businessman of high respectability who had never run for public office. Rasin also organized a political club of his own, the Calumet, to counter Morrison’s Crescent Club and Slater’s gambling palace, whose patrons could be mobilized for politics as well as other games of chance.
But even with the backing of Morrison and Slater, the Independents once more came up short. Their defeat was due in part to the meticulous management of Sonny Mahon, now Freeman Rasin’s righthand man. Mahon assured Republican politicians who held federal patronage jobs that they would keep their positions under the incoming Grover Cleveland administration if they agreed to “lie down” on election day. Mahon was able to offer such assurances because his boss enjoyed close and cordial relations with President Cleveland. Rasin was an early beneficiary of the Cleveland administration’s patronage. He abandoned his courthouse job in 1885 to take a comfortable customhouse appointment offered by the first elected Democratic president since James Buchanan. Mahon became a special agent of the US Treasury. A city hall purge replaced Slater and Morrison men with Rasin loyalists.43
The Independents and their Republican allies charged that the organization had once again fabricated its triumph through fraudulent electoral practices, and after the 1885 contest, some of the most prominent enemies of the Ring founded the Baltimore Reform League to sustain the campaign for clean elections. Charles Bonaparte was one of its early adherents. Electoral fraud was the leading issue in the city election of 1887, its importance underlined, just before the balloting, by the conviction of some city election judges and clerks for conspiracy to defraud. Though sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, they were pardoned by the state’s Democratic governor before serving half their terms. Other election officials were spared prosecution altogether when the General Assembly repealed the law under which they had been indicted and then reenacted it without making any provision for ongoing cases.44
The election judges who stood at the windows of the city’s polling places seemed to play a more decisive role in determining the outcomes of municipal contests than the voters themselves. In one of his rare public statements, Rasin acknowledged as much: “Give me the windows, and I don’t care who has the votes.”45
The city’s electorate was expanding. After several negative votes, residents of the “Belt,” an area surrounding Baltimore on the north, west, and east, finally approved annexation to the city in 1888. A constitutional provision introduced in 1864 required that annexation be approved by the voters in the area to be annexed. Belt residents were initially wary about assuming the burden of city taxation, and business owners east of the city line were concerned about municipal regulations prohibiting coal oil refineries, distilleries, and slaughterhouses, many of which had been driven to the eastern suburbs by city ordinances. Becoming part of the city would also mean that the saloons and beer gardens of Highlandtown and Canton would have to close on Sundays. An annexation proposal was defeated in 1874, with voters in the eastern Belt voting nine to one against. Annexation succeeded in 1888 only because the three sections of the Belt—east, west, and north—voted separately, so strong opposition in the east could not cancel out support for annexation in the other sections. The suburbs were also promised substantial tax abatements if they joined the city. Like the absorption of the “precincts” 70 years earlier, the annexation of 1888 provided that property with less than five houses per acre would be deemed “undeveloped” and not subject to municipal property taxes. The northern and western suburbs voted in favor of annexation, but the eastern Belt rejected it. The tax exemptions for the two newly annexed wards imposed burdens on the 20 wards already in the city. Though the annexation added approximately 38,000 residents to the city’s population, Baltimore won no additional representation in Maryland’s General Assembly.46
The assembly, prodded by the city’s Independent Democrats, enacted new electoral safeguards applying (again) only to Baltimore. The minority party was guaranteed a spot among the three election judges in each precinct, and to ensure the appointment of authentic Republican judges, minority representation was mandated for the citywide board of election supervisors that selected the judges. To prevent the majority Democrats from simply outvoting the minority Republican, each supervisor was to have a veto over proposed appointments. A final touch was the requirement that all of Baltimore’s ballot boxes be made of clear glass.47