Pulled both ways in Civil War, Maryland tipped North
A nice vignette of Charm City in 1861 by Jamie Malanowski in the NYT:
And Virginia has nothing like Baltimore, whose 250,000 residents make it the fourth-largest city in the nation, behind only New York, Brooklyn and Philadelphia. Baltimore’s political and cultural sympathies are mostly southern, its economic interests entirely northern. Baltimore’s financiers think like New Yorkers, its manufacturers like New Englanders, and its railroad men like they were from Illinois. It is indicative of the waning presence of slavery in Maryland that there are 25,000 free persons of color in Baltimore, but only 2,500 slaves.
Comments
Look how far we've come.
Where do we rank now in terms of city population?
Where do we rank now in terms of people who earn enough to pay taxes ("free") and people who earn so little they receive money from the government?
How are out manufacturing and other business interests doing?
How much money are our railroads and buses earning?
And, of course, how do we compare to Virginia?
Posted by: John J. Walters | May 2, 2011 10:26 AM