Part 4

It was such spirit as this that checked the land attack at North Point, 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.]