More Early Baltimore History

Soon, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was created. Back during the early 1800’s, Baltimore faced economic stagnation unless when it opened routes to the western states, as New York had done with the Erie Canal in 1820. By 1827, 25 merchants and bankers studied the best means of resorting the part of the Western trade that has been recently diverted from it by using stream navigation. They wanted to build a railroad. It would be one of the first commercial lines in the world. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O) was the first chartered railroad in America. 20,000 investors purchased $5 million in stock to import the rolling stock and build the line. It was a commercial and financial success. It invented many new managerial methods that became the standard practice in railroading and modern business. The B&O became the first company to operate a locomotive built in America with the Tom Thumb in 1829. It built the first passenger and freight status (Mount Clare in 1829) and was the first railroad that earned passenger revenues (December 1829), and published a timetable (May 23, 1830). On December 24, 1852, it became the first rail line to reach the Ohio River from the eastern seaboard. The railroad was merged into its former rival (the Chesapeake and Ohio or the C&O) to form “The Chessie System Railroad.” The Chessie System merged with the Seaboard System Railroad to create CSX in 1987. The letters CSX refers to “Chessie,” Seaboard,” and “much more to come.” After B&O’s start of regular operations in 1830, other railroads were built in the city. In the early 1830’s, the Baltimore and Port Deposit Rail Road started running trains in the Canton area. Later in the decade, it reached Havre de Grace. Also in the 1830’s, the Baltimore and Susquehanna Railroad operated trains initially to Ownings Mills, and later into Pennsylvania. Both lines were later controlled by the Pennsylvania Railroad. In the mid-1850’s, the Western Maryland Railway started constructing a line to Westminster and points west, reaching Hagerstown in 1872. The Baltimore-Washington telegraph line was established along a B&O route in 1843-1844.


From the 18th century into the 1820’s, Baltimore was a city of transients. It was a fast growing boom town that attracted thousands of ex-slaves from the surrounding countryside. Slavery in Maryland steadily declined after the 1810’s as the state’s economy shifted away from plantation agriculture, as evangelicalism and a liberal manumission law encouraged slaveholders practiced “term slavery,” registering deeds of manumission. Yet, there was a postponing of the actual date of freedom for a decade or more. Baltimore’s shrinking population of enslaved people often lived and worked alongside the city’s growing free black population as “quasi-freedmen.” There was unskilled and semiskilled employment readily available in the shipyards and related industries. Back then, some had little friction with white workers. There was poverty among the city’s free black population. Compared with the condition of those black human beings living in Philadelphia, Charleston, and New Orleans, Baltimore was a city of refuge. Many enslaved and free African Americans had an unusual amount of “freedom.” Churches, schools, and fraternal plus benevolent associations were created as a way to go against the hardening white attitudes toward free people of color after Nat Turner’s revolt in Virginia in 1831. There was a flood of German and Irish immigrants going into Baltimore’s labor market after 1840. This drove more free black Americans into more poverty. The Maryland Chemical Works of Baltimore used a mix of free labor, hired slave labor, and enslaved people held by the corporation to work in the factory. Since chemicals needed constant attention, the rapid turnover of free white labor encouraged the owner to use enslaved workers. While slave labor was about 20 percent cheaper, the company started to reduce its dependence on enslaved labor in 1829 when 2 slaves ran away and one died. The location of Baltimore is in a border state. It created opportunities for enslaved people in the city to run away and find freedom in the North. Frederick Douglass did this. That is why slaveholders in Baltimore frequently turned to gradual manumission as a means to secure labor from slaves. In promising freedom after a fixed period of years, slaveholders intended to reduce the costs associated with lifetime servitude while desiring the slaves' cooperation. Enslaved people tried to negotiate terms of manumission that were more advantageous, and the implicit threat of flight weighed significantly in slaveholders' calculations. The dramatic decrease in the enslaved population during 1850-60 indicates that slavery was no longer profitable in the city. Slaves were still used as expensive house servants: it was cheaper to hire a free worker by the day, with the option of dropping him or replacing him with a better worker, rather than run the expense of maintaining a slave month in and month out with little flexibility. By the eve of the Civil War, Baltimore had the largest free black community in the nation. There were about 15 schools for black people operating including the Sabbath schools (which were operated by Methodists, Presbyterians, and Quakers) along with many private academies. All black schools were self-sustaining, receiving no state or local government funds, and whites in Baltimore were generally opposed to the education of the black population. Many people taxed black property holders to maintain schools from which black children were excluded by law. Baltimore's black community, nevertheless, was one of the largest and most divided in America due to this experience.

Baltimore in the Third Party System had two party competitive elections. There were powerful bosses. There was political violence and an emerging working class consciousness at the polls. The fierce politics of the 1850’s caused many white workers, most of them Germans, to oppose slavery. The American Party started in the mid-1850’s to represent Protestants and to counter the Democratic Party, which was increasingly controlled by the Catholic Irish. When Baltimore erupted in violence at the time of President Lincoln’s 1861 inauguration, for example, the pro-Union “Blood Tubs” that took to the streets were veterans of political rioting. The nativist American (Know-Nothing) Party captured the Baltimore government in 1854. The party promoted modernization, including professionalizing police and fire departments, expanding the courts, and upgrading the water supply. The party used patronage and, especially, coercion and election-day violence; its armed gangs scared off Democratic voters, but the Irish and Germans fought back. Voters elected a congressman and governor nominated by the party during its short life. In 1860 the Democrat-controlled legislature took back the city police, the militia, patronage, and the electoral machinery, and prosecuted some Know-Nothings for electoral fraud. By 1861, the Know-Nothings had split over secession. The Civil War divided Baltimore and Maryland’s residents. Much of the social and political elite favored the Confederacy and they owned slaves. In the 1860 election, the city’s large German population voted not for Lincoln but for the Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge. They were less concerned with the abolition of slavery (which was an issue talked about by Republicans). They were concerned more with nativism, temperance, and religious beliefs, associated with the Know-Nothing Party and strongly opposed by the Democrats. However the Germans hated slavery and supported the Union. 

When Union soldiers from the 6th Massachusetts Militia and some unarmed Pennsylvania state militia (called the “Washington Brigade”) from Philadelphia with their band marched throughout the city during the state of the war, Confederate sympathizers attacked the troops. This led to the first bloodshed in the Civil War during the Baltimore riot of 1861. Four soldiers and 12 civilians were killed during the riot. This caused Union troops to later occupy Baltimore in May under General Benjamin F. Butler of Massachusetts. Maryland came under direct federal administration (in part to prevent the state from seceding) until the end of the war on April 1865. When Massachusetts troops marched through the city on April 19, 1861, en route to Washington, D.C., a rebel mob attacked; 4 soldiers and 12 rioters were dead and 36 soldiers and uncounted rioters had been injured. Governor Thomas Hicks realized action needed to be taken. He convened a special session of the General Assembly but moved its location to a site in Frederick, a distance from the secessionist groups. In doing this and by other actions, Hicks managed to neutralize the General Assembly to avoid Maryland's secession from the Union, becoming a hero in the eyes of the Unionists in the state. Meanwhile, pro-Confederate gangs burned the bridges connecting Baltimore and Washington to the North, and cut the telegraph lines. Lincoln sent in federal troops under Gen. Ben Butler; they seized the city, imposed martial law, and arrested leading Confederate spokesmen. The prisoners were later released and the rail lines reopened, making Baltimore a major Union base during the war.

After the Civil War, Maryland was not subject to Reconstruction, but the end of slavery was a new era. Heightened racial tensions came as free black Americans came into the city. Many armed confrontations erupted between black people and whites. Rural African Americans came into Baltimore. There was competition for skilled jobs. There was black migration from other places too. Many black people were relegated to unskilled work or not work at all. Violent strikes erupted.  Denied entry into the regular state militia, armed blacks formed militias of their own. In the midst of this change, many white Baltimoreans falsely interpreted black people’s legitimate opposition to injustice as disrespect for law and order. So, many of them wanted more police repression. By the 1860’s, Baltimore had a larger population of African Americans than any northern city. The new Maryland state constitution of 1864 ended slavery and provided for the education of all children, including black people. The Baltimore Association for the Moral and Educational Improvement of the Colored People formed schools for black people that were taken over by the public school system. Later, black people were restricted in education from 1867 when Democrats regained control of the city. The education system was unequal. Black people were subjugated in a system of oppression.  Baltimore's postwar school system exposed the contradictions of race, education, and republicanism in an age when African Americans struggled to realize the ostensible freedoms gained by emancipation. There was Jim Crow. So, black people wanted black schools to be staffed by black teachers. From 1867 to 1900, black schools grew from 10 to 27 and enrollment from 901 to 9,383. The Mechanical and Industrial Association achieved success only in 1892 with the opening of the Colored Manual Training School. Black leaders were convinced by the Rev. William Alexander and his newspaper, the Afro American, that economic advancement and first-class citizenship depended on equal access to schools. That ideal is true.


By Timothy