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From Tobacco Landing to Port City, 1729-1797 21 with Their Own

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From Tobacco Landing to Port City, 1729-1797 21 with Their Own Chapter 1: From Tobacco Landing to Port City, 1729-1797 With their own newspaper, Baltimoreans could follow closely the growing rift between the colonies and the British government. It is no surprise that they immediately embraced the patriot cause. Beginning with the Stamp Act in 1765, its merchants, along with almost all other voters in the town, voiced increasingly bitter complaints about what they believed were the unjust and selfish policies of the British government. During the Stamp Act Crisis the local stamp distributor, Zachariah Hood, was burned in effigy and threatened with death. William Lux wrote to a friend that Hood “has been obliged to resign his office to save his neck. I should have been glad they Stretched it only that I hope he will live to be the outcast of Fortune for 20 years.”22 In addition to the town’s Anglo-American merchants whose anger focused on Britain’s commercial regulations and tax policies, the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians harbored resentment towards the Crown for treating them as second class citizens in Northern Ireland and collecting taxes from them in America to support the Anglican Church. The town’s Germans had no historic grievances, but felt little loyalty to what must have seemed a foreign government and as Lutherans they too resented the subsidized and privileged position of the Anglicans. The imperial crisis that arose in 1774-1775 with the Boston Tea Party and Britain’s harsh reaction pushed Maryland’s rural elite to the brink of revolution and sent Baltimore’s leaders right over it. In June, 1774, as soon as they learned of the Bostonians' call for a boycott of British goods, a committee headed by Charles Ridgely, William Lux, Samuel Purviance, John Moale, Jr. and several other leading figures passed resolutions to support this action. In November a meeting of the town’s freeholders voted to create a permanent Committee of Observation to enforce the boycott and act as an agent of the Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia. Leaders of the movement included the great majority of Baltimore’s merchants, professionals and artisan manufacturers. Chief among them were Lux, Daniel Bowley, John Eager Howard (Cornelius Howard’s son), the Moale brothers, the Purviance brothers, James Calhoun, William Smith, David Poe, Mordecai Gist, Philip Rogers, David McMechan, Dr. Wiesenthal, George Keeports, John Merryman and William Spear. By June of 1776, when Robert Eden, Maryland’s last British Governor, departed for England, essentially leaving the colony free to establish its own government, Baltimore’s revolutionary leaders had been acting for some time as if it was an autonomous city-state. Governor Eden called them “the most rebellious and mischievous” group in Maryland.23 Any opposition to independence among the town’s residents quickly disappeared. The small band of Baltimore Loyalists, taunted by death threats and roughly handled in the streets by patriot gangs, left town. Even those favoring independence but who were judged to be insufficiently fervent in their views, suffered at the hands of Baltimore’s version of the Sons of Liberty (called the Whig Club). William Goddard, an avowed supporter of the revolution and publisher of the Maryland Journal (the actual printing of the paper was managed by his very capable sister Mary Goddard) was beaten and his shop wrecked for publishing an article deemed to be unpatriotic. This sort of vigilante justice and the general tendency toward independent and sometimes violent action brought stern reproaches from the state’s more conservative 21 .
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