Chapter IV: Introduction: By W. P. Trent (2)

The “rus-in-urbe” life of Baltimore was nearly ended; with the close of the Revolutionary War began a new period in its history. Soon streets were paved and lighted, better bridges built, and a watch was established. Commerce sprang up with renewed vigor. The tobacco trade found other markets than the mother country; the West Indies bought flour, Spain and Portugal, wheat. By 1790, Baltimore skippers had rounded the Cape of Good Hope and cast anchor in the harbors of the Isle de France. The year 1793 brought another foreign addition to the already polyglot population of Baltimore. The revolution in San Domingo drove fifteen hundred of the inhabitants to Maryland, to develop a great trucking and garden trade, with Baltimore as its centre. The Baltimore clippers, too, with their jauntily raked masts, showed their heels to the craft of the rest of the world, and the reign of Baltimore’s merchant princes began.

Previous to this time, all large payments of money were made in bags of heavy coin: in 1790 a bank was organized. Several papers were now published, and a circulating library was established by Mr. Murphy. A series of medical lectures was preparing the way for the University of Maryland, and education in general was receiving more attention. Population increased continually, and in 1796, the change from town to full municipal life was made legal by the incorporation of Baltimore city.

Now, also, began again the improvement of internal communication. For many years the white-topped Conestoga wagons had rumbled down to Baltimore from west and north; and from time to time efforts had been made to improve the main roads. In 1805, the main routes converging in Baltimore were turnpiked. Western Maryland was now becoming thickly settled, many thriving towns had sprung up, and in a few years the “National Road” joined Cumberland, on the Potomac, with the Ohio River. The connection between Cumberland and Baltimore was completed by means of a curious tax on the banks of Maryland. Thus the line of communication between Baltimore and Wheeling was continuous, over one of the best roads in the world. This and six other turnpikes were as seven great rivers, bearing their precious freight of grain, tobacco, dairy products and whiskey to Baltimore for foreign shipment; and in spite of overtrading and the resulting period of depression, such was Baltimore’s progress that in 1825 Jared Sparks could say, “Among all the cities of America, or of the Old World, in modern or ancient times, there is no record of any one which has sprung up so quickly to so high a degree of importance as Baltimore.” At this time the population of Baltimore was five times as great as it had been thirty years before, and commerce had increased proportionately. The causes of this remarkable progress were enumerated by Sparks as the advantages of Baltimore’s local situation, the swift sailing-vessels, the San Domingan trade, the two great staples, tobacco and flour, “for which the demand is always sure, and the supply unfailing,” and lastly, the energetic spirit of the people.

During all this period the city improved in appearance as well as in size. Especially characteristic of the new Baltimore was “Belvidere,” the residence of Colonel John Eager Howard. Belvidere was completed in 1794, and only a few years ago was dismantled by the ruthless hand of the city surveyor, to make way for the progress of the ever-expanding city by the extension of North Calvert Street. From Belvidere, which at the beginning of the century was a half-mile from Baltimore, one could look down, as from some mediæval castle, upon the bustling town below. In the view from Belvidere, we are told,

“the town,--the Point, the shipping in the Basin and at Fell’s Point,
the bay as far as the eye can reach, rising ground on the right and
left of the harbor,--a grove of trees on the declivity on the right,
a stream of water [Jones’s Falls] breaking over the rocks at the foot
of the hill on the left, all conspire to complete the beauty and the
grandeur of the prospect.”

Here, as at many of the country-seats near Baltimore, a lavish hospitality brought strangers from America and from Europe into pleasant association with the leading Marylanders of the day. A little to the south of Belvidere, in what was then the woodland of “Howard’s Park,” there soon rose the grandly simple column of the Washington Monument.

If Maryland escaped actual invasion during the Revolutionary War, she bore the brunt of the second contest with England. After the British had sailed up the Patuxent, laying waste the manor houses and wide plantations along its banks, after they had burned the national Capitol and routed a body of American militia, they proceeded to attack Baltimore by land and sea. The story is told that some faint hearts came forward with a proposition to compound for the safety of the city with a heavy ransom, when Colonel Howard replied, “I have as much property at stake as most people, and I have four sons in the field; but sooner would I see my sons weltering in their blood, and my property reduced to ashes, than so far disgrace the country.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

“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.

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.

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.

On Hanover Street is the stone mansion of Anthony Stewart, the merchant whose brig, the _Peggy Stewart_, came into harbor one October day in 1764, laden with the repudiated tea. So incensed were the stout-hearted Annapolitans that, to escape their ire, poor Anthony, with his own hands, set fire to the ill-starred brig, his wife, the Peggy for whom the boat was named, watching from her chamber window the sacrificial flames mounting from the water’s edge. We keep a Peggy Stewart Day, now, in Maryland, and some of us like to remember that Peggy, too, was once the mistress of a breakfast-room which was ideal.

At the foot of Duke-of-Gloucester Street, in 1760, John Ridout built for himself and his children three houses that are like a castle; and just across, hidden by the beautiful St. Mary’s Church, lies Carrollton, the home of Charles Carroll.[4] It is occupied now by the Redemptorist priests, and the profane shoe of a woman can gain for its owner no nearer view than that to be had from the bridge that spans the waterway below. It looks a very charming place, built in the Dutch rather than the Georgian taste: gray, small windows, high-roofed, and set in a garden which is what all Annapolis gardens are, and what all gardens everywhere ought to be, an ordered wilderness of hollies, box, magnolias, roses, lilacs, more roses and yet more lilacs, jessamine, wallflowers, iris, lilies, violets, daffodils,--all the old-fashioned flowers which ever were and ever will be the dearest and sweetest flowers in the world.

FROM THE PAINTING BY FRANK B. MAYER.]

It is hard to come back even to the first days of the century just closing. The defence made by the guns of Fort Severn, which kept Admiral Cockburn at bay, seem but recent history in the light of other years, nor can the stirring scenes of the Civil and Spanish wars claim even a glance. Filled with the spirit of the golden days of the Athens of America, we sit in the deep window-seat of a panelled room, looking out across intervening lush and flowery growths, at the dome of the State House and at the aërial procession of the old denizens. What a procession it is! Indians, explorers, Lords Proprietary, Governors Royal, Republicans, Puritans, Cavaliers, priests, shipowners, sailors, slaves! Ships sail out with rich freights of tobacco and other Colonial produce, and ships sail in, bearing yet richer stores of silks and spices, wines and perfumes, silver and porcelain and sumptuous household furnishings. We see the growth in aristocracy, in wealth, in hospitality, in luxury, the plenty of those lavish boards, the splendor and courtliness of dress and manners of the gentry. Sedan chairs, carried by the liveried servants, attended by link boys and by bowing, perruqued gentlemen in gold-lace waistcoats and buckled shoes, bear the patched and powdered ladies to balls and routs. We hear the gossip of the playhouse--the first in America--or of the races. The _bon mots_ of the Tuesday Club are told again; the wit flashes at the dinner given in honor of the King’s birthday; the defeat of the Pretender, the birth of the Dauphin, the repeal of the Stamp Act, the coming of Washington. Anything would

“Serve as excuse for the glass”

in those

“Very merry,
Dancing, drinking,
Laughing, quaffing, and unthinking times.”

We hear, above the grave tones of the men who are talking of the affairs of state, the clear voices of the women--fair, slender, sweet, in pearls and brocade, singing to the accompaniment of spinet or harpsichord music, as unlike ours as were their faces or their thoughts, and we all but forget that the Past is dead and can come no more, and that these are but echoes and shadows and the ashes of roses.

Behind a long brick wall, gated and sentried, lies the United States Naval Academy, and another world.

“But that,” as Hans Andersen says, “is another story”; a story familiar at a thousand American firesides where the life of a son dedicated to the navy is lived over by fond hearts; a story told on every wave of every sea where our American ships ride on their mission.

(WHERE THE BATTLE-FLAGS ARE KEPT.)]

On the 13th of June, 1845, James K. Polk, being President of the United States, and George Bancroft, Secretary of the Navy--a letter was written by Mr. Bancroft to a Board of Examiners of Midshipmen, sitting in Philadelphia, proposing the foundation of a naval school, and suggesting Fort Severn as a suitable site. Urged by Commodore Thomas Ap-Catesby Jones and Captain Isaac Mayo, the Committee approved the suggestion, and, although the usual congressional and sectional opposition had to be overcome, the School was opened on October 10th of the same year. During the war there was a temporary flight to Newport, and there have been, from time to time, various schemes for removing it permanently from Annapolis. It has long since become a permanent fixture, and additions have been made to the Fort Severn property (purchased in 1808), making an ample and beautiful home for the cadets and their corps of instructors.

Time ceases to be subject to clocks when one enters the green, shady Academy grounds, beside which the waters flash and gleam, and bells divide the hours of the busy lives of the lithe young sailors who are forever marching under the trees to this duty or to that; and whose four years of residence are crowded with ten thousand things which a landsman need not know, but which go to make a finished seaman. Among the officers, gravely saluting them as they go to classes, one sees many a famous face, for many of the simple, quiet gentlemen have done great deeds in their day.

There are some memorials of older days--the monument which recalls our victory at Tripoli, some cannon captured in some

“Sea-fight far away,”

and some figure-heads of ancient ships. Most precious of all is the worn flag, guarded jealously in the Naval Institute, which bore the wonderful message

“Don’t give up the Ship.”

By the docks lie various craft needed for the instruction of the midshipmen; and with them the old _Santee_, dismantled, a ghost of herself, lies at her last moorings. She has seen strange sights in her day, the old _Santee_, none perhaps stranger than the trim young steel giants of our modern navy which steam up the Bay at times.

Historically, the gem of the Academy is the Library building, which was built by Edmund Jennings, and served as a home for our governors from 1760 until 1868. It has had Washington for its guest, and many another great man of his time. And so, no doubt, had the fine old home of the Dulanys, near by, which was built as early as 1751. An iconoclastic superintendent ordered its destruction in 1883,--a loss irreparable to the lovers of the old town.

And all are its lovers, who have once felt its abiding charm.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] Of all the deeds whereby Charles Carroll served his country, none, perhaps, was more noteworthy than the writing of the four letters to the _Maryland Gazette_, in 1773, signed “First Citizen.” In them he pitted his young strength against the marvellous learning of Daniel Dulany, the greatest lawyer of all the colonies, whose letters to the same paper were signed “Antilon.” His brave defence of the rights of the people brought Mr. Carroll the unprecedented honor of an adjournment of the Legislature that that body might visit his house _en masse_, to express its thanks and appreciation.

FREDERICK TOWN

“THE GARDEN SPOT OF MARYLAND”

BY SARA ANDREW SHAFER

Long after the lower counties and the eastern shore of Maryland had been turned from a wilderness into a rich and prosperous country, and after Annapolis had grown to be one of the most brilliant and important cities of the New World, there lay in the western part of the domain granted to the Calverts and their heirs forever a vast and beautiful region, which was not only _Terra Mariæ_, but _terra incognita_ as well. Noble mountains, the remains of far older and nobler Alps, guarded the valleys worn by innumerable streams, and rich with the detritus of uncounted ages of erosion. Vegetation flourished under the kindly skies, and green things of every kind, from loftiest oaks to humblest mosses, grew in rank luxuriance over the heritage of the wild creatures of earth and air, and the scarcely less wild Indians. The Susquehannoghs, who chiefly lorded it here, were of the fearless and noble Iroquois stock, and, whatever they lacked, had certainly “a genius for nomenclature.” Their

“Love of lovely woods”

has left in one fair valley such names as Catoctin for its long western mountain range; Linganore for its eastward hills, and Potomac, Monocacy and Tuscarora for its rivers and streams. Vanished, like the red leaves of an autumn forest, in these soft syllables we hear, even yet, the voices of the “First Families” of Frederick.

One of the far-reaching consequences of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in 1685, was the unrest and fear which spread all over Europe, and scattered to the four winds tens of thousands of the best men, not only of France and the Low Countries, but of Germany, Switzerland and Bohemia. It is to one of these waves of emigration that we must look for the hardy pioneers who came southward from the settlements in Lower Pennsylvania. With the land-hunger and the land-judgment characteristic of the Teuton, they “took up,” as the phrase goes, the lands lying along the river they--and the Carrolls, long after them--called Monnokasi, or Monockessy. Certain traits they brought with them as a matter of course, these Palatines,--as they were indiscriminatingly called,--industry, economy, honesty, and an absolute devotion to the principles of civil and religious liberty. Some were Labadists, some Mennonites, some Lutherans, but for the greater part they were of the Calvinistic churches, and held the Helvetic Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism next in honor to the open Bible. Hardly less picturesque than the Indians were these pioneers: the women in homespun kirtle and linen bodice; the men in the deerskin costume of the frontiersman, tomahawk, rifle and fringed leggings included. It was not long before they had built roads, cleared fields, sowed crops, built houses and barns, and had planted those countless lovely orchards that make the valley one drift of rose and snow when May-time comes.

In 1745 another settlement was begun along one of the newest roadways, the first house being built by Thomas Schley. There is a glimmer of doubt as to whence came the name of the village and the county formed a year or so later. There was, it is true, a very dissolute Frederick Calvert who died--the last Lord Baltimore--in 1771; but there was also a Frederick, Prince of Wales, father to King George III.; and it was no doubt in his honor that the name was given by Charles Calvert, then bowing and smiling at the English court.

In 1766, the frontier troubles known as the French and Indian War had assumed such proportions that General Braddock came over to see what could be done about it. A young surveyor from Virginia, tall and brave, with splendid physique and a judgment which impressed all who came in contact with him, was invited to act as _aide-de-camp_ for the British commander. The meeting between Braddock and George Washington took place in Frederick, in April of the ill-fated year 1755, as all men may read, not only in the pages of more serious historians, but also in a chronicle steeped with the very spirit of the eighteenth century, wherein William Makepeace Thackeray has recounted the adventures of _The Virginians_. Another visitor at the same time was Benjamin Franklin, Postmaster-General of the Colonies, who came to arrange for the delivery of despatches to and from the expedition, and who then first saw the younger soldier. A court-house was building, by the way, but, by fair means or foul, Braddock, whose angry bluster and loud oaths we can yet almost hear, aided by the wily Franklin, impressed so many hundreds of horses, wagons, teamsters and servants that the work was delayed for some years after the testy General, in his coach-and-six, drove off over the mountain on May-day morning. He left a memorial on Catoctin,--a walled-in spring of icy water, covered by a great flat rock, under whose shelter tiny ferns and silvery-green mosses love to grow.

There was a road to Baltimore and to Annapolis as early as 1760, and a curiously large commerce with the Saltzburgers who had settled in Georgia. The town flourished apace, and, besides the Palatines, some Scotch-Irish and many English began to arrive. The gentry had not been slow in obtaining patents to the fertile lands. In 1723 the Carrolls received the splendid manor of Carrollton, ten thousand acres in extent. Daniel Dulany had eight thousand acres, and the last Lord Baltimore nearly twice as much, while other gentlemen had estates of immense value. With fortunes such as these figures represent a splendid style of living was possible, the effect of which was seen on every hand. In 1760, the Market House was built, and the Presbyterians had their pastor, while as early as 1764 the Reformed Church boasted of a belfry, which, remodelled in 1807, is yet one of the

“Clustered spires of Frederick”

that rise from what the enamored Washington called the “garden-spot of Maryland.”

In 1765, Father Hunter began the arduous duties of a priest whose flock was scattered over uncounted miles of wilderness; and even before that, perhaps, the whole county, which embraced all that is now known as Western Maryland, was one parish of the Established Church, with All Saints’ for its centre. Her clergymen had an annual revenue of five thousand pounds, and this rich plum was given to one or another of the beneficed clergy who too often disgraced the reign of the early Georges. The most notorious of all the New World incumbents was, perhaps, the Rev. Bennett Allen, who came to All Saints’ in 1768, greatly against the will of the people. On the first Sunday after his arrival the vestrymen left the church in a body. A peace-making worshipper ventured up to the pulpit with a remonstrance, only to be met with a drawn pistol in the clerical hand, and an oathful threat of immediate happy despatch if he interfered with the service. That his wild career included the murder of one Dulany in a duel, and the plotted assassination of another, and that he died an unknown, drunken outcast of London streets, is the shameful and pitiful ending of this o’ertrue tale. That he has been succeeded by a long line of devout and godly men has long ago effaced the stain he left upon the parish annals.

Some miles to the northeast of the town a young man, Robert Strawbridge by name, who had imbibed the doctrines of the Wesleys, formed a class after their ideas in 1764, which Bishop Asbury said was “the first in Maryland and America.” The small log chapel which they built antedated any other Methodist meeting-house in America by three years, which gives the county the right to the title of the Mother of American Methodism.

History was fast making in those days. In 1764 the Stamp Act was passed, and a commissioner was appointed to distribute the detested paper in the province of Maryland. Court was sitting in Frederick Town, but there was no paper of the prescribed variety on hand. On the 23d of November, 1765, twelve free men of Frederick decreed and declared that Frederick Court could attend to its own affairs without any aid from his Majesty the King, and that, paper or no paper, its work should proceed. John Darnell, the clerk, demurred, refused to issue unstamped paper, was committed for contempt, submitted, and thus the first repudiation of the Stamp Act was accomplished. The names of the twelve justices who, without hesitation or fear, took this great step, were these: Joseph Smith, David Lyon, Charles Jones, Samuel Beall, Joseph Beall, Peter Bainbridge, Thomas Price, Andrew Hugh, William Blair, William Luckett, Thomas Dickson and Thomas Beatty.

People took their pleasures gladly in those days, and in an old New York _Postboy_ (January 2, 1766), and a yet older Philadelphia _Gazette_ (December 26, 1765), we read of a right jolly mock funeral, in which the Stamp Act was buried with much ceremony, the chief mourner being the unlucky distributor, Zachariah Hood, in effigy, which, during the frolic, was hanged in the Court-House Square, near the stocks and whipping-post. The usual supper and ball of the period ended the day.

The skies grew ever darker, and, in the next old paper to which we turn, we read of pledges made to support the blockaded Bostonians, on whose shoulders the burden of a common injustice was laid. Next came the call to arms, and the start, on their long march to Boston, of two companies, in command of Captain Michael Cresap, whose father had blazed his way to the Ohio. One of his lieutenants was John Ross Key, whose son Francis, yet unborn, was to make his name forever famous.

On the roll of honor the county gives high place to Sergeant Laurence Everhart, who, in the battle of Cowpens, prisoner though he was, bore himself right haughtily in the presence of Colonel Tarleton. Escaping by good fortune, a better fortune enabled him to deal a blow at a British officer whose sword was lifted against Colonel William Augustine Washington, so saving that brave life. Long years afterward we hear of a meeting between the veterans, when “with tears and kisses” the old bond was strengthened.

At home work scarcely less patriotic was doing. Flax, hemp and wool were grown, spun and woven; a gun-lock factory was established, saltpetre was made and in the iron furnaces owned by D’Hughes and by Thomas Johnson and his brothers, cannon and bombs were cast. The Market House became an arsenal. Hessian prisoners, hundreds of them, were confined in a log jail built for them, and in some stone barracks, still partly standing. To reinforce Washington, and to share the perils of Valley Forge, seventeen hundred men left home, and until peace was declared, the people of Frederick bore their share of the danger and the loss with all bravery and cheerfulness. It is like a page from the history of the darkest ages, however, to read this sentence passed upon seven Tories, convicted of treasonable conspiracies:

“_You shall be carried to the gaol in Frederick town, and be hanged
therein: you shall be cut down to the earth alive, and your entrails
shall be taken out and burned while you are yet alive. Your heads
shall be cut off; and your body shall be divided into four parts;
and your head and quarters shall be placed where His Excellency the
Governor shall appoint. So Lord have mercy on your poor souls._”

This terrible sentence was in four instances executed!

A mile or so north of the town, where the lands are richest, and the view up and down the valley and the blue mountains is finest, lies Rose Hill, where Thomas Johnson lived and died. Born in 1732, of sires who had commanded ships against the Invincible Armada, this man had few peers in the era which his wisdom, his industry, his sterling honesty and his pure patriotism adorned. He had made a name at the brilliant provincial Bar, when in 1765, in answer to an appeal made by the Massachusetts Assembly, a Maryland Assembly was formed, and he took his place among the men who had set for themselves the task of righting the wrongs of the colonies. He became a member of the Committee of Safety and the Committee of Remonstrance, and, in 1774, he aided John Adams, Richard Henry Lee and Patrick Henry in framing the Address to the Crown. On the 15th of June, 1775, Thomas Johnson nominated George Washington to be Commander-in-Chief of the Continental armies. This act, which would seem to be glory enough for one life, was but an incident in his busy days, for his name is heard of wherever probity and wise-heartedness were needed. That it does not appear on the Declaration of Independence is owing to the fact that the serious illness of a member of his family made his absence from Philadelphia necessary on that fateful 2d of July.

When the partition from England was completed, and the Colony became a State, he was chosen to be its first Governor, an office he filled for three terms. He was an ardent supporter of the Federal Constitution, and was one of those instrumental in making Washington our first President. The portfolio of Secretary of State and the District Judgeship were earnestly and affectionately urged upon him by his old friend, who finally persuaded him to accept a seat upon the Supreme Bench. This he soon resigned, by reason of delicate health. Together with Daniel Carroll and Dr. Stewart he selected the sites for the Capitol, the President’s mansion and various other public buildings of the new seat of government, after which he retired to private life; his one subsequent public appearance being on the occasion of a commemorative funeral service after the death of Washington, when he pronounced a beautiful eulogy. His own life drew to its earthly close in 1819, and his dust rests in All Saints’ burying-ground, surrounded by the ancient tombstones of his friends and neighbors, overgrown with wild grasses and myrtle, swept by the pure mountain winds and brooded by the deep peace of the valley he loved so well. His best eulogy was the few words spoken by John Adams in which he said that “but for such men as Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Chase and Thomas Johnson there would have been no Revolution.”

FROM THE PAINTING BY CHARLES WILSON PEALE.]

After the peace the town grew steadily in wealth, comfort and luxury. The road which is called the National Pike, the great artery between East and West, was also the main street of Frederick, and was the scene of much life. Inns of great excellence divided the journeys into pleasant stages, wagons and coaches dashed out and in to a great snapping of whips, jangling of bells and blowing of horns, and while the horses were changed many a glimpse was had of the men who were talked about early in the nineteenth century.

In 1797, Frederick College was founded. The church on the hill was outgrown. The older gentry had worshipped there; Bishop Claggett had held there in 1793 the first Confirmation in the State, and the grassy churchyard was sacred with much holy dust,--but it was too small and remote for the growing congregation. Partly by gift, and partly by the curious aid of a lottery, a second church was built in 1814, still used and loved as All Saints’ Chapel. It had a ceiling of singular beauty, high-backed pews, a gallery for servants, and in 1826 the “new organ,” yet in daily use, was placed therein.

One of the faithful worshippers in the church was Francis Scott Key, who was born in the upper part of the county in 1780, but who spent some years of his early manhood practising at the Frederick Bar. Of his quiet, lovely life, but little is known, comparatively, although a few persons yet linger who remember him. A good citizen, a good master, a good lawyer, a poet of very sweet and true, if limited, powers, the deep spirituality of whose few hymns can never sound elsewhere as in the old church, he would probably have passed through and out of life as many other good men do, but for the strain of one September night in 1814, when his eager eyes watched for the first ray of dawn, if haply they might yet see the Star Spangled Banner afloat over Fort McHenry, and a nation’s love and loyalty found everlasting voice through his.