FROM TOWN TO CITY
THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE posed two problems for Americans. One was obvious: waging war to transform the goal of independence into a political fact. The other was the need to fashion new systems of government for each of the independent states. The second task commands less attention today than it did among the revolutionaries themselves. State constitution making was one of their absorbing preoccupations. According to Gordon S. Wood, “Nothing in the years surrounding the Declaration of Independence—not the creation of the Articles of Confederation, not the military operations of the war, not the making of the French alliance—engaged the interests of Americans more than the formation of their separate state governments.”1 The Continental Congress stalled after the signing of the Declaration because so many delegates returned to their home states to design new institutions of government. The very idea that one could self-consciously write out a blueprint for government was one of the notions that made the Revolution revolutionary.
More than 10 years of debate about the rights of Americans and the powers of King, Parliament, and Lords Baltimore had primed Maryland’s political class to enunciate the principles by which they would consent to be governed. Like four other colonies, Maryland began its constitution with a “Declaration of Rights,” an innovation that anticipated the first 10 amendments of the US Constitution. Maryland’s declaration began by stating: “All government originates from the people, is founded on compact only, and instituted for the good of the whole.” It also established the people’s right to participate in government through elections, which “ought to be free and frequent.” But the declaration’s “people” did not include everyone, not even all adult white males. The electorate consisted of “every man, having property in, and common interest with, and an attachment to the community.”2
The connection between property and political status did not go unchallenged. Members of the state militia insisted that if they bore arms in the cause of their country, they should also carry the right to vote, no matter how small their property holdings. In 1776, a company of militiamen marched to a polling place in Annapolis and demanded the right to vote, even though the entire unit owned less than £40 in property.3 Charles Carroll of Carrollton, once the radical thinker who gave life to “First Citizen,” now saw only ruin in the populist turn of the Revolution. He wrote that “unless vigorously counteracted by all honest men, anarchy will follow as a certain consequence; injustice, rapine, and corruption in the seats of justice will prevail.” Reducing the barriers to suffrage would only “throw all power into the hands of the very lowest of people,” who would be manipulated by “evil and designing” political opportunists.4 Carroll may have been a rebel, but he was no democrat.
He had helped to draft Maryland’s revolutionary constitution of 1776—one of the least revolutionary in the former colonies. The terms of some elected officials were reduced. County sheriffs would be elected rather than appointed by the governor. Changes in property qualifications for voters were hardly revolutionary. To be a member of the electorate, a free male (including, until 1810, free black males) had to own at least 50 acres of land, or “visible property” worth at least £30. Pre-Revolutionary voters had needed £40 in property. This modest change moved some members of the state senate to threaten a boycott of the legislative session to prevent formation of a quorum, a move that they hoped would invalidate the new constitution. The senate’s president persuaded them to relent because he feared that their protest would lead not to suspension of the constitution but to overthrow of the senate.5
The new constitution increased the number of eligible voters by only about 10 percent in most counties, and in no county did the men eligible to vote for the lower house of the legislature exceed 15 percent of the free white male population. Under the new constitution, voters did not directly elect the state senate. They voted for delegates to an electoral college, which elected the senators. The electors and members of the lower house had to hold at least £500 in real or personal property. Members of the senate and county sheriffs had to own property worth at least £1,000. The governor was to be chosen not by the voters but by joint ballot of both houses of the legislature, and he had to be worth at least £5,000.6 In Maryland, men of middling means could vote, but they were allowed to elect only men of wealth.
For Baltimore, the most significant political consequence of Maryland’s state-building exercise was that the town finally won representation in the lower house of the state legislature. Its two seats were far less than its population would warrant, and even these were given grudgingly. They were a temporary grant, “properly to be modified, or taken away” if the town suffered “a considerable decrease of the inhabitants.”7 The convention considered a resolution to increase Baltimore’s representation to four delegates if the number of voters equaled or exceeded those of any county. But the measure was defeated by a vote of more than two to one.8 Counties, no matter how sparsely populated, got four seats in the assembly. For more than 60 years, Baltimore would continue to elect only two.
The state constitution’s guarantee of religious freedom extended only to Christians. But one of its more liberal provisions restored to Roman Catholics such as Charles Carroll the civil and political rights that had been taken away almost 90 years earlier. Carroll, however, was not much inclined to extend such rights to others. In 1779, as a member of the state senate, he sponsored a bill aimed at Baltimore that would make merchants ineligible to serve in the state’s delegation to the Continental Congress. The bill passed.9 Certain types of wealth were, apparently, not sufficiently respectable to earn their proprietors full membership in the political community.
FEDERALIST BOOMTOWN
By war’s end, the town’s 9,000 residents were sharing their crowded streets with a transient population of seamen, soldiers, traders, and other wanderers who greatly outnumbered the permanent residents. In 1782, one Baltimorean complained that, in addition to the local inhabitants, the town contained “10,000 swearing strangers and sea-farers.”10
The strangers were evidence of the town’s prosperity. Manufacturing had become a more prominent source of income during the Revolution. Industry expanded to fill the void that emerged when British goods disappeared from the market. Though the town continued to generate most of its wealth through commerce, local entrepreneurs added to the range of goods produced locally. A saddler branched out into making chairs and chaises; a printer went into bookbinding; a goldsmith hired a few clockmakers.11
In 1785, the members of the fledgling industrial sector organized the Association of Tradesmen and Manufacturers of Baltimore. Their immediate goal was to persuade the state assembly to enact a tariff on imported goods to protect them from the resurgence of British manufactures. In 1783, the legislature imposed a tariff on British goods, but only if carried by British ships. The purpose was not to protect domestic manufacturers but to retaliate against Britain for restrictions on American shipping to its possessions in the West Indies. Twice, the legislature failed to enact the protective tariff requested by the Association of Tradesmen and Manufacturers, and by 1787, the new industrialists had become ardent advocates of a federal constitution, hoping that a national congress might be more responsive to the interests of urban manufacturers than were the landed gentry who still dominated the state’s legislature.12
While the legislature remained unmoved by the demands of Baltimore industry, lawmakers were adding to the complexity and disjointedness of Baltimore’s government. The needs of the growing town demanded attention, but instead of expanding the powers of the town commissioners, the assembly created collections of “special commissioners” to perform limited functions with designated resources.
Special commissioners for street paving were appointed in 1782. Unlike the town commissioners, the special commissioners were designated a “body corporate and politic” with the power not only to file suits and impose fines but to levy taxes. In paving and grading the town’s streets, the special commissioners were empowered to charge property owners a fee tied to their street frontage. They also collected taxes on four-wheeled carriages, riding horses, billiard tables, exhibitions, and theatrical performances, as well as fines for littering, chimney fires, or selling liquor without a license. The revenue thus accumulated paid for street paving, the hiring of street cleaners, the appointment of constables to enforce fines and collect assessments, and the wages of a treasurer to handle the money. A subsequent act of the legislature empowered the special commissioners to bring water to Baltimoreans by hiring contractors to dig wells and install neighborhood pumps. The expense was charged to the surrounding property owners.13
In a legislative afterthought, a year after appointment of the special commissioners, the General Assembly decreed that the commissioners should stand for election every five years. The original statute of 1782 provided that paving commissioners, like the town commissioners, should serve for life, but the civic order summoned up by the Declaration of Independence seemed to call for more democratic arrangements. The newly devised electoral process was restricted to residents with more than £30 in real property, who would choose nine electors (with property worth at least £500), who would then choose commissioners for paving and pumps, who had to meet the same £500 requirement as the electors. The special commissioners, unlike the town commissioners, were paid public officials. Three comptrollers were elected each year to fix their compensation. The assembly created another set of special commissioners as wardens of the port. They were to make a survey of the harbor and oversee its dredging and maintenance, and were required to have property worth £1,000.14
Eventually, the General Assembly got around to enhancing the powers of the town commissioners. In 1784, the legislature authorized the commissioners to hire as many watchmen as needed to patrol the streets at night. The members of the watch were “to apprehend all nightwalkers, malefactors, rogues, vagabonds, and disorderly persons, whom they find disturbing the peace, or shall have just cause to suspect of evil designs.” The commissioners were granted the discretion to issue their own regulations for the watchmen “as the nature of the case may require.” The members of the night watch were to be supervised by constables. Under the same statute, the commissioners were authorized to contract with “fit and proper persons to . . . put up and fix” as many streetlamps as seemed necessary and to hire lamplighters.15
Acknowledging the cost of watchmen, constables, lamps, and lamplighters, the General Assembly empowered the commissioners to levy a tax of one shilling and sixpence on each £100 in property to defray the expense. The assembly also removed the disparity between the special commissioners, who were paid, and the town commissioners, who were not. It directed the same comptrollers who fixed compensation for the special commissioners “to ascertain what allowance the said [town] commissioners shall be entitled to for the time involved in the several duties required by this act.”16
While the General Assembly intervened to ensure that the town maintained its harbor, paved its streets, and preserved public order after dark, Baltimoreans were mobilizing to transform their city into a municipal corporation with expanded powers of self-government. An effort in 1782 and another in 1784 were defeated, allegedly by the town’s “laboring classes.” A writer in the Maryland Journal counseled his fellow citizens not to “be immediately hurried into [incorporation] by those who imagine they will be our rulers.” They should consider whether “the lower class of people, and the extremities of the Town will not be loaded with heavy taxes while they gain very partial advantages.”17
Critics of incorporation expected that Baltimore’s propertied elite, which dominated town politics, would play an even grander role in exercising the enhanced powers of a municipality. But both the mercantile elite and the more humble mechanics were unhappy with the status quo. They wanted a more coherent and vigorous political authority, and they wanted to locate it anywhere but Annapolis. The mechanics and tradesmen wanted to empower a national government; the merchant elite preferred to expand local authority.
The merchants nevertheless joined the mechanics in support of the proposed US Constitution. Merchants might be wary of tariffs, but duties imposed uniformly across all American ports were preferable to tariffs imposed by Maryland alone.18 Enhancing the powers of the national government also promised to advance mercantile interests by improving the nation’s credit in foreign markets. The promiscuous issuance of paper currency by state governments made European financiers wary of investing in American debt. Maryland’s debate about ratification, in fact, followed a two-year battle in the state assembly about a proposed “emission” of paper currency. The advocates of soft money generally became antifederalists.19
In most of Maryland, voters were indifferent to ratification. Statewide voter turnout to elect delegates to the state’s constitutional convention was less than 25 percent, but in Baltimore turnout was well over 100 percent of eligible voters. Property qualifications and residency requirements were simply ignored by election judges. There were other irregularities, too. Violence punctuated the four days of balloting. Federalist mobs took possession of polling places until driven off by antifederalist mobs. The mobs were led by prominent citizens, sometimes by the candidates themselves. It was, writes Dennis Clark, a “pattern stemming from the time of the Stamp Act crisis and Revolution . . . Violence in its various forms was an instrument readily wielded by the natural leadership of the community, that small group at the top of the socio-economic heap, for the furtherance of their own ends.”20
Baltimore elected two solidly Federalist delegates to the state ratification convention, where they joined an overwhelming majority of likeminded representatives. Ratification was carried by a vote of 63 to 11. Baltimoreans were exultant. An estimated 3,000 merchants and mechanics paraded through the streets carrying signs and banners. Members of each trade marched together. The silversmiths and watchmakers carried a flag with the slogan, “No Importation and we shall live.” The house carpenters bore a 13-story wooden tower with fluted pillars, arches, and pediments. In honor of Baltimore’s commercial heritage, there was a miniature sailing ship on wheels, the “Ship Federalist.” It would later be launched in the harbor, sailed to Mount Vernon, and presented as a gift to General Washington. The procession flowed around the west side of the town’s harbor and climbed a steep hill south of the Basin that provided a sweeping view of the town. Federal Hill has carried the name ever since.21
In 1790, Baltimore’s population of 13,500 made it the fourth largest city in the United States. Under Maryland law, however, it was still just a town and a dependency of the state legislature, which spent much of its time managing Baltimore’s affairs.22 The town’s legislative representatives exercised little influence in these deliberations; they were only two voices among more than 60 in the House of Delegates. But the townspeople had high aspirations—to make Baltimore the capital of the United States under the newly ratified Constitution. The town’s geographic location at mid-republic seemed a decisive asset. The residents’ hopes were so tangible that early in 1789, they arranged a loan to pay for the construction of the public buildings suitable to a national capital. Baltimore’s partisans saw their town as the obvious seat of national government. As a commercial center, it would make Congress an “eyewitness to the operation of their commercial laws.” “It is here that armies or fleets can be suddenly raised or recruited. It is here only that instant loans of money can be obtained to answer unexpected misfortunes, or great emergencies of state.”23 But the usual complaints about Baltimore’s squalid appearance undermined its commercial qualifications as a capital city. A letter in the Maryland Gazette asked, “What would foreign ambassadors think . . . when they observed but few tolerable streets in all the metropolis, and even those disgraced by such a number of awkwardly-built, low, wooden cabins, the rest of the town being divided by irregular, narrow lanes?”24
Nevertheless, Baltimore remained a front-runner as national capital. Congressional support was almost evenly divided between Baltimore and another site on the Potomac between Conococheague Creek and the Eastern Branch (today, the Anacostia River). In the end, however, Baltimore’s commercial prominence may actually have defeated its hopes. In a “large commercial community,” it was argued, the business of governing the nation might be disrupted, by “the mixed character of the population and the many elements of discord which existed there.” Congress might also be distracted from addressing national issues by the many local issues that arose in a busy port city. A motion to designate Baltimore the nation’s capital failed in the House by a vote of 37 to 23.25 The honor went to an imagined city on the Potomac, worse yet, a city that might compete with Baltimore for western trade. Baltimoreans blamed their state’s congressional delegation for insufficient exertions on their behalf.26
Maryland had six congressional districts. Congressmen had to reside in the districts they represented, but Marylanders voted for the entire half-dozen in a statewide, at-large election. In 1790, angry Baltimoreans drew up their own slate of “Chesapeake” candidates in opposition to the “Potomac” ticket selected at a convention of county delegates. Baltimore’s large population and its suspicious 99 percent turnout, together with votes from nearby counties, sent all six of its candidates to Congress. The town, wrote J. Thomas Scharf, “thereby took control of the politics of the State”—but only briefly. The legislature convened at the end of the year and voted to substitute district balloting for the statewide election of congressmen. Baltimore City and County would have only one congressional representative.27
Baltimore, deemed not good enough to be the nation’s capital, once again became a dependency of the tobacco aristocracy. The accommodation that had united the town with the state’s landed gentry in ratifying the Constitution now ruptured. Baltimore turned Jeffersonian and Republican, while state government remained Federalist. Unlike their counterparts in other cities, Baltimore’s merchant elite did not succumb to the elitist appeals of Federalism. Baltimore had merchants, but no merchant aristocracy. “No such group existed in Baltimore,” writes Frank Cassell. “The very newness of the city, the middle class origins of even the wealthiest merchants, and the opportunity for social and economic advancement available in the boom-town atmosphere prevailing up to the War of 1812 arrested the evolution of a self-conscious aristocracy.”28
But the town’s Jeffersonian unity was conditional. It stood as one against the gentry of Southern Maryland and the Eastern Shore. Baltimore Republicans turned against one another, however, over the issue of municipal incorporation. The more substantial citizens—mostly merchants—sought to consolidate their control of the town. In 1793, they renewed an earlier drive for municipal home rule and won legislative approval, but the vote had to be confirmed at the following session of the assembly, and by that time, the residents of Fell’s Point had risen in vigorous opposition. They feared that a strong city government would tax them to dredge old Baltimore Town’s Basin, negating the navigational advantages of the Point, where the water was twice as deep. The Mechanics’ and Carpenters’ Societies sided with them, and the artisans and shopkeepers of the Republican Society deserted the eminent merchants who led their organization to oppose municipal incorporation. The bill failed.29 People of the city’s outlying neighborhoods worried that they might get the short end of city benefits, but not of city taxes.30
The mercantile elite made another, more devious attempt at municipal incorporation in 1795. A town meeting produced a draft city charter, but the version that later surfaced in Annapolis differed sharply from the one presented to the public in Baltimore. The Annapolis version specified high property qualifications for office-holders and required indirect election for the mayor and the upper house of the city council. The stealth charter produced an immediate uproar in Baltimore, but the state assembly adopted it in 1796, perhaps because it promised conservative government immune to the radical tendencies that ran through the town’s lower orders. The charter denied the city its own court system. Judicial authority would continue to lie with Baltimore County at large. But even limited municipal autonomy seemed preferable to the regime that required recourse to Annapolis for almost every local need. Two serious fires, a yellow fever epidemic, and a major flood increased local support for an “internal power” necessary to preserve “good order, health, and safety.”31
Apprehensions about elitist government proved justified. Five of the city’s eight wards were narrow slivers of real estate that carved up the mercantile residential areas close to the Basin. None held as many as 300 adult white males. The remaining three wards covered Fell’s Point and the outlying areas of the city. Each held close to 600 adult white males, but got no more representation in the city council than the less populous mercantile wards. A special commission appointed by the governor had fixed the ward boundaries. As a concession to Fell’s Point, its inhabitants were exempted from any taxes to deepen the Basin.32
The city’s first mayor, James Calhoun, was a leading light of mercantile Baltimore and, like his five successors, a member of the Ancient and Honorable Mechanical Company that had served as Baltimore’s unofficial government since 1763.33
The first branch (lower chamber) of the new bicameral Baltimore City Council consisted of two members elected from each of Baltimore’s eight wards for a term of one year. Each man had to own taxable property worth at least $1,000. The second branch of the council included one representative from each ward who served for two years. Each member of the upper house had to own at least $2,000 in taxable property. The mayor also had to own at least $2,000 worth of assessed property. He and the members of the second branch were chosen by a board of eight electors, one from each ward, who had to meet the same property requirements as members of the council’s first branch.34
The men elected to govern Baltimore had no trouble meeting the property qualifications. Between 1797 and 1815, the average wealth of members of the first branch was more than $6,000; for the second branch, more than $9,000. James Calhoun owned $12,600 in real estate and 11 slaves.35
In spite of the potential for political strife between the city’s elitist government and its less prosperous inhabitants, Baltimore did not divide sharply along class lines. Its politics—even its riots—had been sustained by cross-class alliances at least as far back as the formation of the Mechanical Company. The continuation of this democratic tradition was partly the work of Baltimore’s US congressman, Major General Samuel Smith, a wealthy merchant and revolutionary notable. Smith had fallen out with the Federalists, who had threatened to unseat him in the congressional election of 1796 because of his uneven support of President Washington. He had opposed ratification of the Jay Treaty with Britain, for example, because it did little to curb British harassment of American shipping, a vital concern of his fellow Baltimoreans. In response to the opposition of his former Federalist friends, he converted himself “from gentleman-politician to . . . a brass-knuckles, nuts-and-bolts politico.” He did not abandon his friends among the city’s elite, but he reached out for the support of the Baltimore Republican Society, the Carpenters’ Society, and the Society of French Patriots. His military status gave him a base of support in Baltimore’s militia companies.36
International conflict cemented the coalition that stood behind Smith. The European war precipitated by the French Revolution in 1793 had reawakened Baltimore’s endemic Anglophobia—not just a holdover from the American Revolution, but a by-product of the city’s ethno-religious composition. Many Baltimoreans were Britons, but they were Scots, Irish, and Scots Irish rather than English—Presbyterian, Methodist, Quaker, or Roman Catholic, rather than Anglican. None of these groups held much affection for the English, and the city’s merchants were irate about the British seizure of American ships in the Caribbean, Baltimore’s traditional trading region. Pro-French sentiment ran so strong that one local militia company called itself the Baltimore Sans Culottes. The port welcomed French warships and the prizes they captured.37
Congress soon decided, however, that the maritime insolence of the French was no less obnoxious than British seizures of American ships and impressment of American seamen. The Federalist Congress and the Adams administration steadily turned up the alarm concerning the French threat, both external and internal. The Baltimore Sans Culottes became the Baltimore Independent Blues. Congressman Smith resisted Francophobia. Though he supported some of the defense measures aimed at the French, he spoke out against the more repressive provisions of the Alien and Sedition Acts. His constituency of Acadian émigrés had been augmented by 1,500 French refugees from the Haitian revolution, carried to Baltimore in 1793 by a procession of more than 60 ships. The city’s immigrant population in general would have been vulnerable to deportation under provisions of the Alien Act.38
In 1798, Smith fought the most difficult political campaign of his career. The Federalists began the attack months before the election, portraying Smith as unpatriotic, even Jacobin. The contest drew to a close, in the Baltimore manner, with mob violence. When a Federalist and a Republican parade crossed paths, Smith’s supporters charged the Federalists and drove them from the streets. Some of his partisans broke into a private home to disrupt a Federalist meeting. Smith himself led a mob attack on a Federalist rally—not a new role for the congressman. More than 20 years earlier he had led an assault on the office of an unpopular newspaper editor.39
Smith won reelection, comfortably though not overwhelmingly. The Federal Gazette brushed off the violence: “Unfortunately, heated as the minds of the people were at the election, and as they ever will be in large cities where votes are taken viva voce and at but one poll, we can for the honor of Baltimore say but one house was assaulted, and that the contest terminated more peaceably than could reasonably have been expected.”40 The next state legislature mandated the creation of eight polling places in Baltimore, one in each ward, and in 1801, voice voting was abandoned for paper ballots.41
The city went for Jefferson by more than 75 percent in 1800. It was joined by the “Chesapeake” counties of central Maryland. This time, however, the formerly Federalist voters of Western Maryland shifted toward the Jeffersonians, too. The area’s large German population took offense at the Alien Acts, and western sympathizers of the Whiskey Rebellion nursed an antifederalist grudge of their own.42
After the Census of 1800, Maryland’s representation in the US House increased from six to nine seats. Baltimore County got two of them. Both went to Jeffersonian Republicans, as did a majority of the seats in the Maryland House of Delegates, whose members voted to elevate Samuel Smith to the US Senate. The General Assembly abolished all property qualifications for voters in elections for county sheriffs and state delegates. In 1805, Baltimore’s two delegates, citing the city’s population of 30,000, proposed that the city be granted an additional seat in the house. The two Baltimoreans cast the only yes votes.43