and that held out in Fort McHenry during the anxious night of September
12th. When day broke upon Fort McHenry, the flag was still there. And
in the gray dawn, Francis Scott Key, detained upon the _Minden_ in an
effort to secure the release of a captive friend, wrote upon the back
of a letter the thoughts which were passing through his mind. Printed a
little later, and first sung in a restaurant near the Holliday Street
Theatre, the song of _The Star Spangled Banner_ was caught up in
intense enthusiasm, till now, following the flag it celebrates, it is
sung in every portion of the globe.
No less important with respect to the final outcome of the war than
the repulse of the British at North Point and at Fort McHenry, was
the offensive warfare carried on by the privateers of Baltimore,--the
clippers turned fighters. The log-books of these illusive craft make
interesting reading. “Chased by a frigate: outsailed her,” is the
entry that seems to occur most frequently, and thrilling accounts of
hairbreadth escapes are numerous. The English Channel was a favorite
hunting-ground of the privateers, and many a British vessel was taken
or burnt outside of and in view of her own port. The amount of property
taken or destroyed in this way was enormous, and the moral effect of
American success exceeded the material.
With the return of peace, overtrading led to a commercial crisis. In
1818, the Baltimore branch of the Bank of the United States became
insolvent, and the darkest period in the history of the city ensued.
But in less than ten years the shock had been so far forgotten that
Baltimore was again seeking to develop commercial connection with
the West. “The enterprising citizens of Baltimore,” we are told,
“perceiving that in consequence of steam navigation on the western
waters, and the exertions of other States they were losing the trade of
the West, began seriously to consider of some mode of recovering it.”
The means adopted were twofold: the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, and the
Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. The amount of money which Maryland and,
relatively to a greater extent, Baltimore invested in these schemes has
perhaps been more than subsequent events have justified; but the effect
of the idea of internal improvement cannot be overestimated.
That the troublous times of the war between the States should bear
upon Baltimore with especial affliction was but the natural result
of her geographical situation. In the more southerly cities, popular
sentiment was usually nearly unanimous; in Baltimore, the combination
in municipal life of the foreign with the native Southern element
involved the existence of two ideas, two ways of looking at things.
When, therefore, the great question had to be decided, the citizens
of Baltimore, ever characterized by an excessive political activity,
immediately divided into two camps, in which were often ranged in
deadly opposition those who before had been bound by common ties of
Church, of State and of kindred; while beneath and between the better
elements of both parties, the turbulent mob, well schooled in political
lawlessness, eagerly embraced every opportunity for riot and disorder.
The most serious cause of difference was not the question of slavery,
for Baltimore was, it has been said, “the paradise of the free colored
population.” In 1789, Samuel Chase, Luther Martin, Dr. George Buchanan,
and in fact most of the leading men of that day, formed one of the
earliest of American abolition societies; and to the same cause, in
later times, Charles Carroll of Carrollton lent his influence and
William Pinkney his eloquence.
The most powerful stimulus to secession lay in the policy of Lincoln’s
administration. While the attack upon the Sixth Massachusetts was the
work of the mob, the passage through Maryland of the Northern troops
made sympathy with the South temporarily predominant. The excitement
subsided; the city, like the State, was held for the Union, but the
military policy of the national Government inaugurated a period of
bitter oppression to those whose hearts were across the Potomac.
Newspapers were suppressed, all exhibitions of sympathy with the
Southern cause were rudely brought to an end, and the personal liberty
of the individual was destroyed by the suspension of the _habeas
corpus_--a suspension which henceforth estranged the executive and the
judicial heads of the nation. Yet in spite of this military policy, or,
more properly, because of it, the Union sentiment increased, and in
1864, in the city where four years before each of his three opponents
had been nominated for the Presidency, the Union-Republican convention
chose as its candidate for a second term the President, Abraham Lincoln.
* * * * *
With the development of the policy of internal improvement began the
modern city. In spite of financial crises, periods of bitter political
disturbance and the shock of the Civil War, the expansion begun by
the uniting of Baltimore town first with Jonas town and then with
Fell’s Point, has been continued over the neighboring hillsides to the
north, east, and west, until the hamlet of two hundred inhabitants
has now become the city of more than half a million souls. With this
numerical increase has come a proportionate commercial development;
the advantageous situation of “the northernmost southern and the
westernmost eastern city” is as potent a factor in its life to-day as
it was of old. In the higher things, also, that enrich the life of a
great city, progress has been no less constant. The schoolmaster, to
whom, in 1752, “encouragement” was offered by advertisement in the
Maryland _Gazette_, has been succeeded by a thorough system of public
education, while the ideas that found expression in the “Stevenson’s
Folly,” and the “Murphy’s Circulating Library” of a century ago, have
subsequently inspired the foundations of McDonogh, Shepard, Watson,
White, Wilson, Peabody, Hopkins and Pratt.
Of all the institutions, charitable or educational, with which
Baltimore has been blessed, none have brought her more honor than
the Johns Hopkins University and the Johns Hopkins Hospital. Founded
upon the bequest of one of Maryland’s sons, who had amassed his great
wealth in the city he loved so well, the University was fortunate
in the selection as its President of Daniel C. Gilman, a man with
extraordinary genius for educational organization. Fortunate, also,
was the bringing together, at the start, of a faculty of eminent
specialists: the first were Gildersleeve, Sylvester, Remsen, Rowland,
Martin and Morris. These men, and their successors, have fostered
a spirit of intellectual advance which has made the importance of
the University in the educational history of this country assume a
proportion simply incalculable.
[Illustration: BUST OF JOHNS HOPKINS.
FROM THE ORIGINAL IN JOHNS HOPKINS HOSPITAL.]
Across the city, upon a site open and commanding, stands the Hospital,
with its ever-growing Medical School, and its Training School for
Nurses. Equally successful in its first choice of leaders, and in
the character of those who follow them, the Hospital has been far
more fortunate than the University in the financial stability of its
endowment.
Between the two, and lying almost at the base of the Washington
Monument, is the Peabody Institute, with its magnificent library.
Farther downtown is that of the Maryland Historical Society, and these,
with the Congressional Library in Washington, only forty miles away,
afford every advantage for study and research; while the more popular
demands of Baltimore’s readers are met by the great Free Circulating
Library endowed by the late Enoch Pratt.
In the solution of the problems that arise from the organization of
modern society Baltimore has done pioneer work. It was a Baltimore
lawyer, Hon. John V. L. McMahon, who drew up for the Baltimore and Ohio
Railroad the charter which “formed a model for the organization of all
future railroad corporations.” It was in Baltimore that a municipality
first “secured a valuable revenue from street-railway corporations, and
applied it to the purposes of public parks.”
The ploughman and the fisherman that, upon the Great Seal of Maryland,
support the shield of the Lords Proprietary may be considered as
typical of the influences which have combined to further the growth
of the city of Baltimore; while to the happy result that has crowned
their joint endeavors may be applied the words of the motto that
surrounds the whole:
“SCVTO BONÆ VOLVNTATIS TVÆ CORONASTI NOS.”
[Illustration]
FOOTNOTES:
[3] John Fleming was a tenant of the Carrolls. This homestead is
supposed to have been located near the point where now Lombard Street
intersects the east side of South Charles Street.
[Illustration]
ANNAPOLIS
“YE ANCIENT CITY”
BY SARA ANDREW SHAFER
Neither of the North nor of the South, of the Old nor of the New, the
fair State of Maryland possesses a thousand charms that are all her
own, as she clasps the blue, river-fringed Chesapeake to her breast,
and stretches out her lovely leagues of hill and vale, of field and
forest and rocky glen, from where the sun rises out of the ocean beyond
her “East’n Sho’” to where he sets behind the mountain ramparts of her
western frontier. And of Maryland surely the heart lies in the quaint
old city on the Severn, where the days are longer, the nights stiller,
the sunshine more full of peace, and the moonlight more fraught with
mystery than any place else in the world. To saunter through the
streets of “Y^e Ancient City” of Annapolis is to take a University
Extension course in American history; to gaze upon her old houses is
to behold the finest type of colonial architecture; while to read her
annals is to be fired with the truest patriotism and to mingle in the
best society of the picturesque days of long ago.
[Illustration: GEORGE CALVERT, FIRST LORD BALTIMORE.
REPRODUCED FROM AN OLD PRINT.]
From our New World point of view, Annapolis is very old, dating back
to 1608, when Captain John Smith, exploring the Chesapeake Bay, sailed
up the Severn in search of favorable sites for settlements. She is
fortunate in the figures that stand on her threshold, for next after
the gallant Captain come the noble Calverts--George, Cecilius, Leonard,
than whom were never lordlier men. To Cecilius, pledges made to his
father were redeemed when, in 1632, Charles I. made him vast grants
of lands beyond the Atlantic, in return for which all that was asked
was allegiance to the English Crown; one fifth of all gold and silver
to be discovered in the new domain, and an annual offering, to be made
at Windsor Castle on Easter Tuesday, of two Indian arrow-heads. The
charter thus given was the freest ever bestowed upon any colony, and
in return Lord Baltimore named his new possessions in honor of Queen
Henrietta Maria, whose bigotry and arrogance had so much to do with
the loss of her husband’s crown and life, and which--so strange are
the relations of cause and effect--formed one of the broad foundation
stones on which the modern superstructure of civil and religious
freedom rests.
[Illustration: CECILIUS CALVERT, SECOND LORD BALTIMORE.
REPRODUCED FROM AN OLD PRINT.]
On November 30, 1633, two little ships, the _Ark_ and the _Dove_,
set sail from Cowes, under command of Leonard Calvert, brother
of the Lord Proprietary, and having on board a goodly company of
gentlemen--adventurers. It was but the common sight of the putting out
to sea of two insignificant boats to those who watched them from the
shore that autumn day; but it stands out as marking a great era in the
history of human progress. The pious and catholic Cecilius Calvert,
carrying out the designs of his great father, had decreed that all
men living under his protection should be free to serve God according
to the dictates of their own consciences,--a decree so far in advance
of their times as to place the names of the Calverts forever in the
foremost rank of the world’s greatest and wisest men.
After many adventures, on the 25th of March, the Feast of the
Annunciation, the colonists landed. A precious early chronicle tells us
that
“Heere we went to a place where a large tree was made into a Crosse,
and taking it upon our shoulders, wee carried it to the place
appointed for it. The gouvernour and Commissioners putting their
hands first vpon it, and then the rest of the chiefest aduenturers.
At the place prepared wee all kneeled downe and said certain Prayers,
taking possession of the Countrey for our Savior, and for our
Soueraigne Lord the King of England.”
The early relations between the new comers and the aborigines seem to
have been of the most friendly character, and the _Relation of the
Successful Beginning of the Lord Baltimore’s Plantation in Maryland_,
from which we have just quoted, is full of the praises of the climate,
the soil, the flora and fauna, and the general goodliness of the land.
An Eden it must have been in its primeval loveliness!
As ever in Eden, there were serpents. The world was not yet worthy
of the lofty ideas of the founder of the _Terra Mariæ_. The first
Provincial Assembly, which met in 1637-38, had many grave questions
to discuss, and these grew only graver as the political situation in
England became more complicated--the power of the King waning while
that of the Puritans waxed.
In 1642, the Churchmen in Virginia passed a Conventicle Act, which bore
so heavily upon the non-conforming Puritans that, in 1648, Governor
Stone sent an invitation to the persecuted men to come and enjoy
the liberties which, in the next year, were to go upon our Statute
Books, and to be their glory forever, as the Toleration Act. In 1649,
therefore, ten families crossed the Potomac, and on Severn-side built a
few huts, to which they gave the name of Providence.
Affairs were moving rapidly. The King had laid down his life. It was
declared treason to own allegiance to his exiled son. The shoe was now
decidedly on the Puritan foot, and without loss of time they proceeded
to re-read the Act of Toleration, and to make out a case for everybody
but Church of England men and Romanists, who were now proscribed. This
act of bigotry and ingratitude makes the darkest spot on the escutcheon
of the Palatinate, nor is there much that is pleasant to read in the
jealousies, bickerings and aggressions of the next few years. A county
was formed in 1650, and named in honor of the gentle Anne Arundel, wife
of Lord Baltimore. A treaty of peace between the white men and the red
was signed in 1652, and the name of the village was changed to “The
Town at Proctors.” These things are about all we need to know until,
the Revolution of 1688 having been accomplished, Maryland became a
royal province, and the first royal governor, Sir Lionel Copley, came
over. In 1694 the seat of government was removed from the original
seat, St. Mary’s, to the place which, after bearing three or four
names, finally settled upon that of Annapolis, a mongrel title, assumed
in honor of the then heiress to the Crown.
There is but one rational way of beginning a sketch of the old town,
and that is to look first, as did the wise-hearted early Annapolitans,
at the Church, the State House, and the School, and to picture them as
they stand on smooth green lawns, high on the little peninsula, almost
encircled by the silver marriage-ring of the Severn and its estuaries.
The Church (for although the praise of God arises from many altars,
the interest naturally centres in the eldest born) is a long, low
structure, giving an odd impression of some seaworthy craft cast
adrift upon the green tideless sea of its spacious Circle. It was
named, we fancy, for various Annes: the mother of the Virgin, the
Lady Anne Arundel, and the Queen-to-be. St. Anne’s it has ever been,
bearing the name through three baptisms of fire, in one of which, it
is said, the bell, Queen Anne’s own gift, rung its own knell in a most
weird and pathetic manner. Once upon a time its yard was the village
burying-ground, but its early tenants have all been disturbed in their
rest, and only one or two box-tombs remain, on which the sparrows,
which have built themselves nests in the ivy on the walls, hop and
chirp contentedly. The only relic still possessed by St. Anne’s is the
Communion Plate, which bears the arms of William III. and the date,
1695. It, too, was a gift from that “great Anne whom three realms
obeyed,” who seems to have had a special fondness for sending like
mementoes to the infant colonies. The first clergyman, Dr. Bray, sent
out to care for the souls of the Annapolitans, received ten thousand
pounds of tobacco as his stipend--this, of course, after the Church
of England was made the Established Church. Seats were reserved in
the sacred edifice for the Governor and members of the legislative
bodies; and in addition their attendance was made compulsory. The first
missionary meeting of which we hear in America was held in St. Anne’s,
when a pious annual five-and-twenty pounds was voted to be applied to
the conversion, not of the heathen Susquehannoghs, as one might have
expected, but of the Quakers of Pennsylvania!
[Illustration: ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE AND THE TREATY TREE.]
Not far from the Church stands the first free school on the
continent, once King William’s School, and under the direction of the
Archbishop of Canterbury, but, for many a long and useful year, St.
John’s College. Its principal building, McDowell Hall, was built in
1744, for a royal governor, and is flanked by dignified houses standing
well back upon the green campus, a picture of ivy-clad repose that is
very pleasing. A part of a gift of books sent by the good King William
is still cherished in the library, and on the roll of students are
many of the brightest names the State can boast. On the campus stands
a very old tulip-tree. Tradition says that under its shadow the treaty
with the Susquehannoghs was signed in 1652, and it is certain that
it must have been of great age even then. A fire burned away part of
its trunk years ago, but the hole was boarded up, a friendly ivy has
done its best to hide the scars, and the brave old tree yields its
toll of blossoms to each passing June, and bids fair to do so when
the grandsons of the youngest lad now playing beneath its branches
shall come to visit this lost monarch of a vanished forest. Here were
pitched the tents of the French troops which came to aid us in our hour
of peril, and here were camps again during our second struggle with
England, and during the Civil War. Nor did all leave when the order to
strike tents came.
[Illustration: THE STATE HOUSE.]
“Under the sun and the dew,
Waiting the Judgment Day,”
the tenants of some low grassy mounds here sleep in nameless peace.
If Annapolis is the heart of Maryland--its _cor cordium_ lies in
the State House standing in the great green circle which overlooks
the city, the river and the bay. Like the Church, it is now nearing
its third outward and visible form, fire having destroyed the two
earlier structures. The corner-stone of the present edifice was laid
in 1772, and it was designed in the best spirit of the style we
call colonial. Ample spaces of English patterned brick divide its
rather small windows, a simple pillared portico guards its doorway,
and it is covered by a curious but very agreeable dome. Under its
roof the various executive, legal and legislative branches of the
State government find lodging. Its rotunda is decorated with the
most elaborate stucco work, and throughout the old pile are many,
many memorials of days gone by: none of them more interesting than
the Great Seal, brought over by Governor Stone in 1648, and which
is, substantially, the coat-of-arms of the Calverts. From the dome
and the portico fine views can be obtained. There is a dignity and
consequence about the building which not even the noisiest session of
the Legislature can wholly dissipate; in a word, the old State House is
the pride and glory of the commonwealth.
We have not even touched upon the gallant part played by the citizens
of the town and the colony in the Revolution; but at last the war was
over, Washington had bidden adieu to his troops in New York, and had
come hither to lay in the hands of the Congress of the States, in
session in the chamber in which the Treaty of Peace was to be signed a
year later, his commission as Commander-in-chief of the armies. That he
had been nominated to that high office by a Marylander, Thomas Johnson,
who had, in 1777, become the first Governor of the State, added not a
little to the interest of a scene described by every pen that writes of
the times. The simplicity, manliness, pathos and true dignity of the
event have never been better portrayed than in the vast painting which
adorns the historic room. Portraits of our four signers, Paca, Stone,
Chase, and Carroll of Carrollton, are also seen here, as well as those
of other men who fought with pen or sword to make us free.
[Illustration: CHARLES CARROLL OF CARROLLTON.
1737-1832.]
An odd little building, with flagged floors, huge bolts, and most
ponderous keys, still stands on the Circle, and serves as our Treasury.
It was once the home of the House of Burgesses, and is perhaps the only
building left to us from the seventeenth century. And there are statues
here of Chief Justice Taney, and of Baron DeKalb, who fell at the head
of his Marylanders in the battle of Camden; but, more distinctly than
these, we see the figures of Washington and Lafayette and all that
goodly fellowship, and it is they who will walk the State House green
when the bronzes are dust.
[Illustration: THE OLD HOUSE OF BURGESSES, NOW USED AS THE STATE
TREASURY.]
Wandering through the leafy streets, with ever a glimpse of bright
water, or a white sail shining between the trees, one notes the Old
World flavor of their names; Cornhill, Hanover, Prince George (of
Denmark), King George (the First), Duke of Gloucester--in honor,
this, of the pathetic little royal child whose early death broke the
heart of William of Orange, and left Queen Anne a childless woman.
And the houses that border the streets, sometimes set close to the
pavement, sometimes half hidden by trees, are worthy of them, and of
the air of unspeakable contentment and aloofness from the cares of
this world which is characteristic of the place. Here is one built by
the Proprietary Governor, Ogle, spacious and elegant, in whose garden
are yet some bits of the box-bordering of a forgotten labyrinth, and
here is one whose carved doorway arrests every eye. The Paca homestead
has wings that are little houses of themselves, joined to the house
proper by long, low corridors; and opposite to it, in the delightful
little Iglehart house, there is a panelled room where ghosts might
walk. The façade of the Brice mansion, built of English brick, as is
many another in the town, with long corridors and transverse wings,
is said to be two hundred feet long; while within, the drawing-room
situated in the old fashion at the back of the house that it might
overlook the garden, is yet the delight and despair of architects, so
noble are its proportions, and so fine the carved work of its cornice
and chimney-piece. The fame of the latter is, indeed, international.
On the State House Circle the Randall or Bordley house, built in 1740,
stands in a proud seclusion of magnolias and ivy-hung trees, and behind
a tiny paddock where a pretty Jersey cow sometimes grazes. Not far away
the Lloyd or Chase house lifts its walls in a haughty consciousness of
being the finest specimen of its class in America. It not only boasts
of mahogany doors with wrought-silver latches, carved shutters and
cornices, noble drawing-rooms and chambers, a vast hall with a curious,
double-flight of stairs, but has also a carved breakfast-room which is
ideal.
[Illustration: THE BRICE HOUSE.]