“CALAMITIES PECULIARLY INCIDENT TO LARGE CITIES”
THE MARYLAND LEGISLATURE might deny Baltimore the representation warranted by its size, but the newly incorporated city could at last manage most of its own affairs without having to consult the General Assembly about such details as the widening of streets or the regulation of hogs. Still, the charter approved by the legislature failed to grant some elementary powers to the city. It denied Baltimore the power of eminent domain. It empowered Baltimore to tax the real and personal property of its residents, but the legislature controlled the rate of taxation.
The city used much of its revenue to pay a legion of public officials. The procedure for appointing them was unusual. The second branch of the city council nominated candidates for office, usually two for each opening. The mayor selected the appointee from those put forward by the council.1 Some of the new public servants carried the same titles as those who had served the old town but did not have the same functions. Five city commissioners were to take over the responsibilities of the five special commissioners for street paving. In addition to the commissioners’ existing duties for paving streets and installing pumps, the new commissioners handled the contentious business of establishing the boundaries of city lots.2
In other cases, job titles changed but the functions did not. An appointed harbor master, for example, took over the responsibilities previously assigned to the elected port wardens. One of his vital duties was to direct the operation of the “mud machine,” an ungainly wooden contraption for dredging the city’s shallow basin, which was always silting up with runoff from the muddy and refuse-strewn streets and the murky streams that flowed through them. The machine was a raft or barge topped by a wheel big enough to accommodate a horse. The wheel was connected to a string of scoops that scraped up muck from the bottom of the harbor as the horse walked in the wheel. The spoil was transferred to scows, and much of the foul sludge was dumped to create a “City Block” east of Fell’s Point.3
The mayor and council continued to regulate trades and transactions. They appointed inspectors of mahogany and ginseng to serve alongside the cullers, garblers, and gaugers who inspected goods sold in Baltimore’s markets or shipped from its port. The regulatory regime of the commercial municipality encouraged interest-group politics. In 1797, for example, the corders of wood protested an ordinance requiring that all firewood be cut in four-foot lengths. The law, they argued, “prevented thousands of cords of wood already cut from being brought to market.” Moreover, “any person acquainted with woodcutting cannot be unacquainted with the difficulty of chopping to an Exact Length.” The council amended its firewood ordinance.4
The brick makers challenged the regulations governing the clay that they used, its tempering, and the size of their bricks. They filled three folio pages with double columns of signatures to protest not just the burdens imposed by these requirements but the inferior bricks that resulted from their enforcement. Brick making, they argued, was difficult work. A visitor to the brickyards “no doubt observed four black men for one white man, this is not owing to the wages, no labour in the City affords better wages than brickmakers give to their laborours, but merely because of the extream hard labor, if this could be lessened it would encourage poor white men and boys to come to the brickyard.” The council repealed the brick ordinance.5
The lobbying activities of the woodcutters, brick makers, and other trades constituted only one arena of city politics. In the early nineteenth century, Baltimore, like many other cities, began to create a new regime that redefined the municipality as a provider of public services rather than a sponsor of markets and regulator of goods and trades. As the need for public services became more pressing, city officials began to regard the oversight of tradesmen and their products as a burdensome distraction. One official complained that too much of the city council’s time was being spent “in digesting and preparing different inspection Ordinances.” The ordinances occupied “not a little of the mayor’s” time as well.6 As the city’s population grew, problems of public health, order, and safety became more acute. In its first session under the municipal charter, the council approved 64 ordinances, some quite lengthy, to address the hazards that arose in a dense, dirty, combustible town. Mayor Thorowgood Smith referred to these problems as “the calamities peculiarly incident to large Cities.”7
At its next session, in 1798, the council created the office of city constable. Unlike the constables who supervised the night watch, the city constable was concerned exclusively with the enforcement of municipal ordinances, not state law. He was “to walk through the streets, lanes, and alleys of the City daily, with his mace in his hand, and give information to the Mayor or other magistrates of all nuisances within the City, and of all impediments in the streets, lanes and alleys.” The constable was to report these violations of city ordinances, with the names of the offenders and witnesses, “to the end that prosecution may be commenced.”8
The office of city constable was one token of a shift in Baltimore’s government. The constable’s jurisdiction was the entire city, and his responsibilities extended across the entire spectrum of municipal law and authority. Unlike the inspectors, gaugers, and graders who confined their surveillance to particular goods or trades, the constable represented an encompassing public sphere. Still, the constable only reported the violation of ordinances. He did not enforce them. But “calamities” of city life would energize the authority of Baltimore’s government. The two most notable were epidemic disease and fiery conflagration.
PLAGUE
In the summer of 1800, an epidemic of yellow fever killed at least 1,200 Baltimoreans in just 65 days—more than 4 percent of the town’s population. The city was already acquainted with the disease. In 1793, an outbreak of “American plague” in Philadelphia had prompted Maryland’s governor to appoint a health committee for Baltimore. It consisted of two physicians: one responsible for preventing Philadelphia’s epidemic from reaching Baltimore by water; the other, to prevent its entry by land. Enforcement of the embargo was strict. A visitor from Philadelphia reported that he had been stopped by a guard at the city’s outskirts and refused entry. When the traveler asked for food, he was offered a piece of toasted cheese served at the end of a pitchfork.9 Neither the precaution nor the quarantine was necessary. Yellow fever is spread by mosquitoes, not interpersonal contact, but quarantine continued, for a time, to be the principal measure to fight the disease.
Baltimore’s municipal charter of 1796 empowered the new government to enact ordinances “necessary to preserve the health of the city” and to “prevent the introduction of contagious diseases within the city and within three miles of the same.” Baltimore’s officials put their new authority to use not long after the charter took effect. In 1797, the mayor and council approved an ordinance providing for the appointment of nine health commissioners and a physician to serve as health officer. The physician was to visit every ship that entered the port from April through November, and he could detain a vessel in quarantine for up to 20 days. The health commissioners were to convene monthly at the courthouse from May through November to “collect and receive every possible information of the healthiness” of the city, some of which was to come from the health officer. The commissioners were responsible for providing “persons laboring under infectious diseases” with “meats, drinks, bedding, and clothing,” if they were not already provided for, and they were to remove such patients to a quarantine hospital at Hawkins Point or some other place at least three miles outside the city. The law indicated that Baltimoreans had learned something, but not enough, about yellow fever: “all ponds of stagnant water” and “all cellars and foundations . . . whose bottoms contain stagnant and putrid water” were to be “declared common nuisances, productive of offensive vapors and noxious exhalations, the causes of diseases, and ought to be regulated, restrained, and removed.”10
An outbreak of yellow fever nevertheless struck Baltimore in late August 1797, concentrated in Fell’s Point. Health officials established an encampment of tents and shanties on high ground so that the Point’s residents could get away from the stagnant pond and marsh that lay between their neighborhood and the mouth of the Jones Falls.11
At the height of the contagion, the commissioners had to deal with unauthorized burials in potter’s field, a cemetery for paupers located on the north side of today’s Patterson Park. They gave the cemetery’s official gravedigger, Edward Agnew, sole custody of the key to the burial ground and specified his fees and practices like those of any other regulated trade of the time. He was authorized to charge one dollar for an adult grave and 75 cents for the burial of a child, and he would be entitled to an additional dollar “if he attends with his carriage, to remove the corpse to the grave.”12
In 1798, with financial support from the state, Baltimore established a public hospital “for the relief of indigent sick persons and for the reception and care of Lunaticks.” A committee headed by the mayor chose the location for the hospital and supervised its construction. The site, at today’s intersection of Broadway and Monument Street, is now occupied by the Johns Hopkins Hospital. The property had previously served as the location of a “retreat” for sick seamen and travelers.13
In 1799, the nine health commissioners notified the mayor and council “that having principally gone through the duties of our appointment for the late season [we] do now resign the same.” The commissioners made no bones about the reason for their collective retirement. If the city wanted citizens to serve on any future health commission, “we would . . . propose the propriety . . . of being allowed a Salary as might in some measure compensate for the danger and time to which they are subjected.”14 A month later, the council assembled a new board of health; its members would receive two dollars for each day spent on their duties.15
In August 1800, the Federal Gazette published a “caution” for Baltimoreans. One of the paper’s correspondents felt it “a duty I owe to the public (as the sickly season of the year is now approaching) to advise them to be particularly careful in their manner of living.” Readers were warned to consume very little “animal food . . . and to drink lemonade” rather than other beverages. One week later, the paper carried a detailed description of the mosquito and advice about treating its bites, but failed to make the connection between the seasonal disease and the seasonal insect.16
On Fell’s Point, the board of health found “inflammatory bilious fever”—yellow fever. It “made its first appearance along the water next to the cove . . . progressing gradually up Bond and Fleet streets, and thence spread . . . into other adjacent streets.” The Gazette tried to minimize the bad news. It assured readers that no disease had spread west of the Jones Falls and reported that a healthful summer rain had halted the progress of the fever even on Fell’s Point. The paper insisted that the disease was transmitted “entirely owing to our own local sources of filth, vegetable and animal putrefaction . . . and not to any imported or human contagion.”17
The Gazette’s effort to avoid creating a panic was unsuccessful. The sickness spread. Local businesses suspended operations, and Baltimoreans who could afford to move elsewhere left the city. All but two health commissioners fled along with the other refugees. The city’s hospital was still incomplete. It could accommodate only about 130 patients. A temporary camp of shanties housed the overflow.18
The two health commissioners who had remained at their posts—Adam Fonerden and Joseph Townsend—drew praise from Mayor James Calhoun and the city council for their “extraordinary exertions” and their “unwearied diligence.” But a Fell’s Point physician who signed himself “Humanitas” complained that he had never seen either of the two health commissioners as he made the rounds of his neighborhood, and charged that “they kept themselves at home, and out of danger.”19
“Humanitas” was Dr. James Smith, a medical gadfly, who had opened his home to yellow fever victims. His quarrel with the health commissioners extended beyond nonfeasance to incompetence. The members of the board of health, he charged, were “men inadequate to the task . . . without information, without talents, ignorant, illiberal, insincere.” He later presented a comprehensive plan for a new board of health that would have a president and secretary who were respected physicians and include three “resident physicians.”20 The existing board of health had no medical professionals. Adam Fonerden was a shoe merchant, and Joseph Townsend dealt in dry goods, ranging from pots and pans to schoolbooks and textiles.
The sad case of Polly Elliott may have done more to mobilize sentiment against the health commissioners than Dr. Smith’s professional criticism. Polly was an orphan who had been taken in by a Baltimore family. She was too sick to accompany them when they fled the epidemic, so they left her in the city. She staggered through the streets until a local grocer gave her shelter in his storehouse. A stonecutter, William McCormick, learned of her plight and approached health commissioner Joseph Townsend to get Polly admitted to the still-incomplete city hospital. Townsend refused to accept her without a physician’s certificate affirming that she had yellow fever. With some difficulty, McCormick obtained the document. Townsend approved her admission to the hospital, but declined to provide her with transportation there. McCormick attempted to leave Polly in Townsend’s custody, but the commissioner insisted that he take the girl with him. As McCormick recounted the episode, Townsend followed him to the door “and taking the child by the shoulders put her, again, out into the street!!” McCormick was unable to find any stage driver willing to carry the sick child. Stopping frequently for rest and water, McCormick walked her the long mile to the hospital, where Polly died a few days later.21
Polly Elliot’s case produced a tempest in the columns of the Federal Gazette. Denunciations of heartless health commissioners provoked testy responses from the commissioners themselves and their allies in the medical profession. In January, the Gazette’s editors called a halt. The dispute, they noted, had “become extremely lengthy and personal, and . . . so uninteresting to a great portion of . . . readers and irksome to the editors” that they asked the combatants “to find some other vehicle for the dissemination of their pieces.”22 Besides, the yellow fever season was long past.
PUBLIC INVESTMENTS IN PUBLIC HEALTH
During its next session, in 1801, the city council approved a comprehensive health ordinance providing for five health commissioners, two from the east and three from the west side of the Jones Falls. They were to divide the city into five districts, and each commissioner was to be responsible for one district. They did not have to be physicians, but they were expected to be much more watchful than their predecessors. During the “sickly season” from April through October, they were to meet weekly rather than monthly. The law “invited and requested” Baltimore’s practicing physicians to assist the commissioners “with their counsel and advice in all matters that relate to the preservation of the health of the inhabitants.”23
The new law extended the health commissioners’ authority and responsibility. Unlike their predecessors, the commissioners of 1801 had “full power and authority to enter upon any lots, grounds or possessions of any person or persons . . . and inspect the same as far as it respects the health of the city.” They were also responsible for “removing all offensive substances and nuisances,” and they could command the assistance of constables and the superintendents of streets, who were “to obey without delay all orders of the said Commissioners of Health.” The most telling difference between the old and new commissioners was their compensation. The new health commissioners received an annual salary of $400. The job was no longer a two-dollar-a-day sideline for dealers in dry goods or shoes.24
The yellow fever epidemic of 1800 made a lasting impression on Baltimore’s government. In August 1802, at the height of the fever season, Mayor Calhoun wrote that there was “no duty more incumbent on the City Commissioners at this particular season than attention to the repairs of paved streets where they are sunk so low as to retain stagnant water.”25 Another sign of the city’s heightened concern about public health was a new quarantine hospital, the Lazaretto, which replaced the Hawkins Point quarantine station. It could accommodate people and cargoes on ships suspected of carrying contagious diseases. The Lazaretto stood on the east side of the entrance to the harbor, just across from Whetstone Point and Fort McHenry.26
The city hospital for the indigent sick and insane provided seasonal accommodations for the victims of yellow fever, but apparently fell short in its care of the mentally ill. In 1807, Mayor Thorowgood Smith complained that too many “maniacs . . . have appeared in our streets to the dread of some and the annoyance of many of our fellow citizens.” Though caring for the mentally ill had been one of its original responsibilities, the hospital had been “very badly constructed for that purpose.” Among other things, it lacked a fence or wall to keep the inmates from wandering away. Smith urged the city council to appropriate the funds “required to make the indispensable alterations in the building.”27
The council could not bring itself to spend the money. The hospital stood almost empty. An agreement with the local customs collector to care for sick and injured seamen ended in 1807. In February 1808, the board of health reported that the hospital had only two inmates; they were both private patients of the superintendent, whose expenses were not charged to the city. The board concluded “that the City hospital is at present no expense to the City: but it is equally true, that it is of no public utility.”28 This was the situation in February, of course. When the “sickly season” arrived with the spring, the patient population might increase sharply.
It was in early spring that two local physicians—Drs. Colin MacKenzie and James Smyth—offered to “take in Charge & Support such an Institution” as the mayor had proposed for the care of the mentally ill. MacKenzie was familiar with the hospital, having served as its attending physician.29
The ordinance formalizing the new arrangements for Baltimore’s hospital stopped well short of complete privatization. The municipality controlled admissions to the institution. MacKenzie and Smyth had to accept “Maniacs and diseased persons of every description . . . that may be placed under their care, or sent to the said Hospital by the Commissioners of Health or other persons authorized by the Corporation.” The hospital would receive 50 cents a day for each of these patients, less if the patient population exceeded 30. The city retained the right to revoke the lease on six months’ notice. Unlike most lessees, Smyth and MacKenzie paid no rent. But they were to “use their best endeavours to obtain from the Legislature of the State of Maryland a sum of Money or a Law authorizing a Lottery to raise a sum for erecting additional buildings and improvements on the said Grounds.”30
MacKenzie and Smyth seem to have developed the hospital according to the city’s rather complicated plan. The state provided much of the money needed to build the kind of asylum that Mayor Smith wanted. The city later promised that, if the physicians completed the new asylum building before their 15-year lease expired, the lease would be extended by another 10 years. The state later provided more money to expand the facility, and finally, after paying Baltimore a sum equal to its investment, Maryland took control of the hospital.31
BURNING QUESTIONS
Until the middle of the nineteenth century, most cities relied on volunteer fire companies. The Mechanical Company formed the first of Baltimore’s firefighting units in 1763 and sponsored a lottery to raise money for the purchase of two fire engines, hand-powered water pumps on wheels to be pulled through the streets by the company’s volunteers and fed with water by buckets. But the lottery failed to raise sufficient funds for the engines, and the firefighters had to make do with water buckets alone for six more years—then made the unlikely purchase of an engine from a Dutch sea captain who happened to have one on board his ship. The engine was named “The Dutchman.”32 Returning Revolutionary War veterans formed the Union Fire Company, the town’s second, in 1781. Its engine, also a hand-powered suction pumper, was called “Tick-Tack,” perhaps because of the sound it made. The Union Company’s firehouse was on Baltimore’s west side; the Mechanical was further east. After the Union came the Friendship, the Deptford (on Fell’s Point), the Commercial (formed by local merchants), the Liberty, the Vigilant, the New Market (near Lexington Market), and the Independent, whose firehouse at Gay and Ensor Streets is still in use as the city’s fire museum.33
Weeks before Baltimoreans were to vote on municipal incorporation, in 1796, a fire broke out on Light Street. The flames consumed a furniture factory, several homes, two schools, and a Methodist meeting house where a funeral was under way. A nearby hotel was saved only because one of the guests suggested that wet blankets be spread on its roof. All six of the city’s fire companies worked to prevent the spread of the fire. In the end, several unharmed structures had to be pulled down to check the flames.34
The Light Street conflagration transformed Baltimore’s arrangements for coping with fire. A town meeting appointed a committee to suggest “such measures as may appear best calculated . . . for the preservation of the town from fire and other calamities.” In a report submitted two weeks later, the committee recommended a voluntary night patrol of citizens in each of eight districts to report fires in their earliest stages. It urged that the street commissioners “cause to be established immediately a competent number of large, good pumps in each street” along with “deep and spacious wells.” The committee requested that representatives from all of the town’s fire companies meet to “digest some system that may tend to insure a uniform government of companies in time of fire,” so that they would be prepared to work together at fires too big for one company to handle.35
The new municipal government also took up the issue of fire prevention. It was not a new concern. As early as 1748, local householders could be fined for “any Chimney found blazing out at the top,” and each household with a chimney had to have a ladder that reached its rooftop.36 In 1798, the mayor and council adopted an ordinance to reduce the likelihood of chimney fires. They appointed three superintendents of chimney sweeps, one for the east side of Jones Falls, and two who divided the territory on the west. In return for posting bond of $100 and an annual $50 licensing fee, each superintendent gained a monopoly of chimney sweeping in his district and became sole employer for all of the neighborhood boys who worked as sweeps. Occupants of buildings with chimneys were required to purchase the superintendent’s services at least once every four weeks. Residents who failed to do so would have to pay the superintendent’s fee each day until they had their chimneys cleaned, and the city could fine them up to five dollars.37
The regulation of chimney sweeps occupied an intermediate stage between the commercial city of regulated markets and the modern, service-providing municipality that succeeded it. The city authorities had organized chimney sweeping as a regulated trade. The superintendents were licensed entrepreneurs. The city prescribed their fee schedule—8 cents for a one-story chimney, 12½ cents for two stories, 15 cents for three, and 18 cents to sweep four or more stories. The municipality also monitored the results of the sweeps’ work. If a blaze erupted from a chimney swept during the previous 30 days, the superintendent might have to pay a $10 fine.38 But chimney sweeping was a service, not a product, and its benefits were not restricted to the household that gathered around the hearth of a swept chimney. A chimney “blazing out at the top” was a menace not only to the occupants of that dwelling but to every building in the vicinity. Chimney sweeping was a public service, and that was why Baltimoreans had to be compelled to pay for it. The household bore the full cost, but the benefits were shared with a larger public.
The superintendents of chimney sweeps were soon required to perform other public services. They were to determine whether the residents of their districts complied with an earlier law requiring each household to hang two leather buckets near the front door. In the absence of fire hydrants and piped water under pressure, buckets filled at the neighborhood pump remained the principal tools in case of fire. The superintendents were also empowered to inspect stove pipes and report those that were “dangerous or defective” to the mayor.39 Later still, the superintendents acquired responsibilities that had nothing to do with chimneys. In 1810, for example, they were to conduct an “audit” of dogs in their districts and collect a tax on each.40 The superintendents of sweeps were both private entrepreneurs and public servants.
FIRE AND WATER
Baltimore continued to rely on part-time, volunteer firefighters, but the amateurs were now backed by a system of full-time vigilance and citywide coordination, and they received annual subsidies from city government to pay for firehouses, equipment, and maintenance. But the firemen continued to operate with their primitive engines fed by bucket brigades from neighborhood pumps, not water mains and fire hydrants.
Shortly after Baltimore became a municipal corporation, the city council formed a committee to “consider the difficulties of introducing pure . . . water into the City.” The committee evidently went well beyond mere consideration. Its report, issued in 1799, urged the mayor to “preserve and safely keep all the timber and materials that have been provided for the completion of the said undertaking.” An expert adviser had confirmed that the plan to draw water from the Jones Falls was feasible, but the committee was stymied by a legal deficiency. Lacking the power of eminent domain, the city could not lay water pipes on private property without owners’ consent, which some of them refused to give.41
The committee urged Mayor Calhoun to ask the General Assembly to grant the municipality the power to condemn property needed to supply the city with water, while paying compensation to its owners. Months later, the mayor reported that he had “made application to the General Assembly” to grant Baltimore the power of eminent domain, “but the Legislature was pleased to postpone consideration of the subject.”42
In 1803, Mayor Calhoun once again cited the deficiencies of the city’s water supply and proposed that the city council consider the possibility of forming a private water company to remedy the city’s water shortage.43 The council responded with an ordinance providing for the appointment of commissioners to “ascertain the force & quantity of water which issues from any sources . . . or streams within ten miles of the city.” The commissioners, together with the mayor, were to consider the “practicability” of drawing water from these sources and across “the tracts . . . thro’ which this water may be conducted to this city.”44
The commissioners surveyed privately owned springs and estimated the gallons per minute produced by each of these “fountains.” But they stopped short of “endeavoring to estimate the expense of purchasing & conveying the water into the city”—information clearly requested in the ordinance creating the commission. The commissioners concluded that “to discharge this part of their duty was impossible” because “so many persons” owned the water sources or the land through which the water would have to pass on its way to Baltimore. The obstacle, once again, was the city’s inability to secure property by eminent domain, which the commissioners saw as “indispensably necessary, if it should be the wish and decision of the City Council, to water the city from the springs in its vicinity.” It was up to the council to judge “the propriety of obtaining a law from the State” that would enable the city to take this real estate “upon equitable terms” of sale.45
Mayor Calhoun, like the commissioners, assigned the council responsibility for “introducing a copious and permanent supply of water into the city.” The council promptly returned responsibility to the mayor, authorizing him to accept proposals “by an individual or company” for bringing the “copious and permanent supply of water” to Baltimore. As on earlier occasions when public authority faltered, the citizens took matters into their own hands. Baltimoreans gathered at a public meeting “to devise some scheme to relieve the city from the unpleasant dilemma in which it was placed.” The scheme was a joint stock company in the water business. Local notables served on its board of directors. Samuel Smith was its chairman. On May 1,1804, they began receiving subscriptions for stock in the Baltimore Water Company.46
At first, sales were slow, a disappointment to the directors, but no surprise to the Federal Gazette, which observed that every “enterprise of this kind, in a city so devoid of public spirit as ours, must depend upon a few.” After a handful of notables, including Charles Carroll, made exemplary purchases, the stock took off, and a multitude of small stockholders helped to finance “the watering of the city.” But the state legislature once again proved an obstacle. For obscure reasons, the General Assembly seemed unwilling to grant the firm a charter of incorporation. The city council issued a charter of its own and the permission to lay pipes in city streets, provided that the streets were promptly returned to good condition.47
The council also considered the possibility that the city might purchase the Water Company, but concluded that it would be difficult to negotiate a sale with the company’s 500 stockholders. Besides, the council’s committee judged that “the great object of watering the City is full as likely to be effected by the present Water Company . . . as it can possibly be by the [municipal] Corporation with its present means.”48
In fact, the Water Company demonstrated the shortcomings of private enterprise in the water business. The company extended its service to those streets where residents were willing and able to pay for the delivery of water to their homes. As late as 1825, when Baltimore’s population was between 60,000 and 80,000, only 1,640 households paid the annual $10 fee for running water.49 Much of Baltimore continued to draw its water from neighborhood pumps. The city’s marshy situation meant that the water table was close to ground level. The pumps drew water contaminated by drainage from the town’s gutters and privies.50
The Water Company drew water from a mill race on the Jones Falls to fill a hilltop reservoir at the intersection of Franklin and Cathedral Streets, near the site now occupied by the Central Branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library. Gravity was supposed to carry water from this elevated storage pond through pipes and under the streets of Baltimore.51
The city had evidence that clean water reduced death rates. A local entrepreneur, George Waddell, had been collecting fresh water in “puncheons and pipes” from springs on the city’s outskirts and carrying it in his cart to “subscribers” in Baltimore. He reported that during a six-month period in 1805, “in the most unfavorable part of the year, only two deaths . . . occurred out of Two Hundred and Sixteen Subscribers; and what is still more surprising, both of these two were aged and infirm.”52
City officials might have paid more attention to Waddell’s evidence if they had been chiefly interested in securing a supply of clean drinking water. But their top priority was securing enough water to protect Baltimore against the threat of fire. Drinking water, according to Sherry Olson, “was a secondary matter, for convenience and for defraying the costs of the fire-protection system.” The joint committee of the city council overseeing the water supply seems to have been principally concerned about the purchase, placement, and repair of fire plugs.53
In the end, George Waddell may have had some influence on the council. While the council turned to a private company to make the capital investment for the city’s water system, it proposed to augment Baltimore’s water resources by exploiting natural springs. In 1808, it authorized the mayor to purchase five parcels of land on Calvert Street containing several small springs. One of these was converted into a municipal showpiece. Surrounded by Doric columns and topped with a classic dome, the “City Spring” became the focus of a downtown park. Its popularity led to purchase of still other springs. Although the city employed “keepers” to see that its springs stayed clean, the spread of pavement and buildings reduced the land area open to rainfall—a source of the springs’ fresh water—and the encroachment of privies made citizens justifiably suspicious about the purity of spring water.54
PUBLIC SERVICE, PRIVATE GOVERNMENT
Fires and epidemics propelled Baltimore’s government into the business of providing essential public services to its residents, but it did so without much expansion of the public domain. The city depended on volunteer fire companies that relied, in turn, on water provided by a private corporation. The superintendents of sweeps, who functioned as agents of fire prevention, were private entrepreneurs licensed by the municipality. Although the threat of yellow fever had moved the mayor and council to increase the powers and pay of the city’s health commissioners, the city’s supposedly public hospital was under private management.
Baltimore was not entirely distinctive in this. New York and Boston relied on private water companies and volunteer fire companies. Like them, Baltimore was, in some respects, a “private city”—a public enterprise dedicated not to delivering public services but to supporting its residents’ pursuit of private prosperity. “Privatism,” according to Sam Bass Warner, was the dominant motif of urban political culture in America. Warner’s classic study of Philadelphia shows how this preoccupation with individual independence and prosperity undermined public initiatives and left the city ill-prepared to meet its twentieth-century problems.55
At least one historian, however, suggests that urban privatism was not so prevalent as Warner claims. E. Digby Baltzell acknowledges that it was characteristic of Philadelphia, but it was much less powerful in Boston.56 More generally, some widespread features of urban political economy seem out of joint with Warner’s culture of privatism. The public markets of Baltimore and other cities during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries certainly created opportunities for private profit, but the markets also stood at the center of a far-reaching regime of government regulation that covered goods, trades, and transactions both inside and outside the markets.57 Against Warner’s account of the private city, one must place William J. Novak’s case for the “well-regulated society” in which municipal authority encroached on many matters seen today as decidedly private.58 Baltimore lived in both worlds. On the one hand, it had regulations for brick makers, butchers, and lumber and mahogany merchants; health commissioners empowered to enter private property and command the removal of nuisances; and a night watch authorized to apprehend nightwalkers and people suspected of “evil designs.” On the other hand, it had volunteer fire companies, a privately managed city hospital, and private entrepreneurs who provided public goods such as fire prevention and water.
Some relatively consistent patterns emerge from this complex interaction of public authority and private institutions. In general, Baltimoreans seemed to avoid large-scale, long-term public investments. The town turned its public hospital over to private management precisely to avoid making the capital investments necessary for the institution’s operation. The municipality settled on a private water company for the same reason. Even the authorities’ decisions about the purposes of a water system focused on the immediate need for water to extinguish fires rather than its less proximate role in preventing disease.
The city was prepared to pave and to install pumps. These investments were made in incremental installments—street by street and block by block—and the costs were borne by the property owners who benefited most immediately from these improvements. In fact, they frequently indicated their willingness to cover these costs by petitioning the street commissioners for paving or pumps. In a sense, the special commissioners “privatized” the financing of these public improvements by relying on user fees to pay for them. Even more private were the fire-prevention efforts of the superintendents of sweeps. They paid the city to practice their trade and supported themselves and their chimney sweeps with income from their clients. In general, the city made public investments to meet immediate perils posed by conflagration and epidemic disease. More distant objectives were left to private finance and initiative.
The town’s powder magazine was a token of its willingness to exercise public authority and expend public funds in the face of immediate, explosive danger. Citizens were allowed to keep only two quarter casks of gunpowder in their homes or shops, stored in at least four separate tin canisters. Anything above that amount had to be deposited in the city’s powder magazine, at a storage cost of 12 cents per barrel per month. The location and construction of the magazine and measures against the possibility of its explosion were subjects of vital concern to the mayor and council. They paid particular attention to the duties of the magazine’s superintendent and the extent to which his public responsibilities restricted his private pursuits. He would forfeit his position if he were to take out “any license for the sale of any wine or spirituous liquors or any tavern license or a license for any kind of entertainment or amusement or shall sell or cause to be sold any Cider Beer or berry meed.”59
The original plans for the powder magazine had even prescribed the superintendent’s place of residence. He was to live in a brick house within the brick wall that surrounded the magazine. The superintendent expressed reservations about the housing arrangement. He did not mention the possibility of an explosion but noted instead that the site did not have an adequate supply of water, which made the place “an unhealthy situation to live on.” He suggested that the city save itself the cost of building his house and allow him to rent another nearby “in an eligible location, near a good Well of Water, and sufficiently convenient to the Magazine.” The mayor and council apparently approved the modification of their plans.60
Baltimore’s residents and political leaders were prepared to spend public funds to manage the clear and present dangers posed by urban contagion and combustibility, but they resisted investments for public purposes with payoffs further in the future. Perhaps the most pointed expression of this temperament applied to government itself. Its officials met in rented rooms, and when the city council approved an ordinance to build a city hall, Baltimoreans—especially those living in Fell’s Point and the former Jones Town—rose up to condemn this. A petition accompanied by yards of signatures denounced the project. The signers declared that there was “no present necessity for such a public building.” Four days later, the council allowed that “it might be inexpedient at this time to go to the expense of purchasing a piece of ground and erecting a city hall thereon.” Two weeks later, it passed an ordinance to postpone construction of a city hall for three years.61 In fact, Baltimore would not have a city hall until the 1830s, and it was not even a new building, but a second-hand museum.
“Present necessity” was the driving force in Baltimore’s public decisions. In a town with a short-term history, short-term calculations were the only kind that counted. Between 1790 and 1800, Baltimore’s population grew by more than 96 percent; by 1810 it had added another 75 percent. In a city where nothing stood still for very long, plans for a faraway future seemed unrealistic. Baltimore was a boomtown on the make. A majority of its residents were not natives of the city. As they had little past in common, they could imagine little collective future.