WSA SC r HALL Of RECORDS LIBRARY Summer 2003 M A T^NAHQtlS. ItfARYL^MD kj p. Historical Magazine THE MARYLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY Founded 1844 Dennis A. Fiori, Director The Maryland Historical Magazine Robert I. Cottom, Editor Patricia Dockman Anderson, Managing Editor Donna Blair Shear, Associate Editor David Prencipe, Photographer Robin Donaldson Coblentz, Christopher T. George, Jane Gushing Lange, and Mary Markey, Editorial Associates Regional Editors John B. Wiseman, Frostburg State University Jane G. Sween, Montgomery County Historical Society Pegram Johnson III, Accoceek, Maryland Acting as an editorial board, the Publications Committee of the Maryland Historical Society oversees and supports the magazine staff. Members of the committee are: Jean H. Baker, Goucher Gollege; Trustee/Ghair lohn S. Bainbridge Jr., Baltimore Gounty James H. Bready, Baltimore Sun Robert J. Brugger, The Johns Hopkins University Press Lois Green Garr, St. Mary's City Commission Suzanne E. Chapelle, Morgan State University Toby L. Ditz, The Johns Hopkins University Dennis A. Fiori, Maryland Historical Society, ex-officio David G. Fogle, University of Maryland lack G. Goellner, Baltimore Roland C. McConnell, Morgan State University Norvell E. Miller III, Baltimore Charles W. Mitchell, Lippincott Williams & Wilkins lohn W. Mitchell, Upper Marlboro Members Emeritus John Higham, The Johns Hopkins University Samuel Hopkins, Baltimore Charles McC. Mathias, Chevy Chase The Maryland Historical Magazine welcomes submissions from authors and letters to the editor. Letters may be edited for space and clarity. All articles will be acknowledged, but only those accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope will be returned. Submissions should be printed or typed manuscript. Address Editor, Maryland Historical Magazine, 201 West Monument Street, Baltimore, Maryland, 21201. Include name, address, and daytime telephone number. Once accepted, articles should be on 3.5-inch disks (MS Word or PC convertible format), or CDs, or may be emailed to [email protected]. Guidelines for contributors are available on our Web site at www.mdhs.org. ISSN 0025-4258 © 2003 by the Maryland Historical Society. Published as a benefit of membership in the Maryland Historical Society in March, lune, September, and December. Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted and indexed in Historical Abstracts and/or America: History and Life. Periodicals postage paid at Baltimore, Maryland and at additional mailing offices. Postmaster: please send address changes to the Maryland Historical Society, 201 West Monument Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21201. Printed in the USA by The Sheridan Press, Hanover, Pennsylvania 17331. Individual subscriptions are $24.00. (Individual membership in the society with full benefits is $45.00, family membershp is $60.00.) Institutional subscriptions are $30.00 per year, prepaid. MARYLAND Historical Magazine VOLUME 98,2 (SUMMER 2003) CONTENTS Joseph Hopper Nicholson: Citizen-Soldier of Maryland 133 SCOTT S.SHEADS The Pratt Street Riots Revisted: A Case of Overstated Significance? 153 ROBERT BAILEY Physics and Fly-Fishing: The Reamarkable Career of Baltimore's Alfred Marshall Mayer, 1836-1897 173 JOSEPH F. MULLIGAN Park Visions in Conflict: Baltimore's Debate Over the Leakin Bequest 187 MICHAEL p. MCCARTHY Maryland History Bibliography, 2002: A Selected List 204 Compiled by ANNE S. TURKOS and JEFF KORMAN Book Reviews 220 Durr, Behind the Backlash: White Working-Class Politics in Baltimore, 1940-1980, by Edmund Wehrle Sklansky, The Soul's Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820-1920, by Michael Henderson Crawford, ed.. The Naval War of 1812: A Documentary History, Volume III, by Christopher T. George Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations, by Jim Downs Jr. Cimbala and Miller, eds.. Union Soldiers and the Northern Home Front: Wartime £xpene«ces,PosfvrarAdj«sfwenfs, by Charles W.Mitchell Moloney, American Catholic Lay Groups and Transatlantic Social Reform in the Progressive Era, by Sandra Strohhofer Pryor Painter, Southern History Across the Color Line, by Christopher M. Paine Buckley, The Great Catastrophe of My Life: Divorce in the Old Dominion, by Ryan K. Smith Harrold, Subversives: Antislavery Community in Washington, D.C., 1828-1865, by Jeffrey W. McClurken McDermott, Charles Carroll of Carrollton: Faithful Revolutionary, by Mary Clement Jeske Books in Brief 243 Letters to the Editor 244 Notices 250 Editor's Notebook World Opinion "I am willing to love all mankind, except an American." While the sentiment might at first evoke thoughts of world opinion circa 2003, that particular blast emanated from the pen of Samuel Johnson in 1778. At the time, of course, he was not alone in disliking Americans—more than half his country felt the same way, as did approximately a third of our own. Over the next decades, numerous Euro- peans journeyed to the new republic to see whether a land filled with unmannered, uncultivated, brawling, rapacious, self-interested provincials could survive. More than a few stopped by the junction of the Patapsco and the Chesapeake for a closer look. Baltimore was a fast-growing town of nineteen hundred houses, fifteen thou- sand whites, six or seven thousand slaves, and nineteen hundred shops when Ferdinand-Marie Bayard visited in 1791, but the French officer was unimpressed. The wharves, he noticed, were "constructed of trunks of trees. When the tide falls it exposes a slime which gives off foul vapors. There are no public or private buildings which are better than second rate." Thomas Twining, exploring from Britain, quickly fixed upon southern bar- barism. When not dueling or betting on cockfights, southerners practiced eye- gouging. One Virginian staying at the Indian Queen in Baltimore showed Twining how gouging was accomplished, and when Twining later returned from George- town and Alexandria the hotel's proprietor congratulated him for having re- tained both his eyes. Richard Parkinson tried farming here at the turn of the nineteenth century but gave it up and went home. "Upon the whole," he groused, "America seems to me to be a most proper place for the use to which it was first appropriated — namely the reception of convicts." In 1818, Baron von Klinkowstrom arrived in Baltimore by stagecoach. The "unattractive" houses and "gloomy weather" were enough to put anybody off, let alone a sophisticated Scandinavian, but things rapidly got worse. "On top of everything we got a drunken driver at the last station who drove insanely over the slippery roads. He did not fail to stop at every other tavern along the road to replenish, so that when we arrived at Baltimore he was so drunk that I, sitting next to him, took the reins in order to protect life and limb. Tired and frozen I arrived in Baltimore ... in time to stop at the best hotel in town, the Indian Queen." The hotel's staff of forty slaves shrewdly man- aged the dinner table. Klinkowstrom complained of "the haste at meal times . ten or eleven courses were served in rapid succession. A man could hardly sample one course before another was served." The reason, someone explained, was that the staff ate what the guests did not. No one was going to put one over on the worldly Klinkowstrom, so he went to see for himself. Sure enough, "Once I came down to the Negro dining room directly after dinner and found them leisurely consuming with great delight the almost untouched dishes which had been served on the table d'hote." In 1830, Frances Trollope, mother of British novelist Anthony, complained that Baltimore's theatres were closed and that going to plays was apparently un- fashionable here. "The cause, 1 think, is in the character of the people. 1 never saw a population so totally divested of gayety; there is no trace of this feeling from one end of the Union to the other. They have no fetes, no fairs, no merrimakings, no music in the streets, no Punch [and Judy], no puppet-shows." In other words, we worked too hard then, too. By the time Matilda Charlotte Houstoun made the trip to Baltimore by rail from Philadelphia some years later, little had improved. "A more uninteresting road, a more uncomfortable conveyance or, altogether, a more tiresome journey I never witnessed. The sun blazed into the cars, which . .. are all windows and are moreover totally deficient in blinds. The long-bodied carriage was crammed with people who, one and all objected to the admission of fresh air, and evidently enjoyed the oppressive heat of a red-hot stove placed in the centre of the carriage." Houstoun went to Barnum's Hotel in Baltimore, and took her meals in the women's dining room. Her colleagues at the dinner table were pretty and charming enough, she allowed, but their manners were atrocious. Elbows planted squarely on the table, using knives and two-pronged forks, the American ladies delighted in spear- ing oysters—much larger then than now—and swallowing them whole. Houstoun was aghast. "It matters not that the hand is small and delicate and the mouth one of the most beautiful in the world," she huffed, "that they are so only serves to render the atrocity of the deed more apparent and striking.. ."* History, as they say, is all about perspective. R.I.C. Cover The Waterloo Inn, 1827 This first stage service, from Baltimore to Washington, stopped at the Water- loo Inn, where passengers rested and enjoyed a good meal. The building stood where present-day Md. 175 intersects U.S. Route 1. The inn enjoyed a fine reputa- tion among frequent travelers and offered such amenities as hot baths in indi- vidual rooms—until July 3,1835, when fire destroyed the building. The Baltimore American reported that although travelers had saved the furniture, this well-known landmark "was entirely destroyed." (Maryland Historical Society.) PD.A. ^Quotations fromRaphael Semmes, Baltimore as Seen by Visitors, 1789-1860.