The Bank of Maryland failed on March 29, 1834. Thousands of Baltimoreans - clerks, shopkeepers, tradesmen, sailmakers, widows with their late husbands' savings - lost millions of dollars in deposits. The bank's creditors waited seventeen months for a settlement that never came. The bank's directors, meanwhile, kept living in the city's finest townhouses, untroubled by their losses, while news kept leaking that the failure had been the result of fraud and self-dealing. By August 1835 the patience of the depositors had run out. Over four days they tore Baltimore's wealthiest neighborhood apart, brick by brick, while the city authorities watched and could not stop them. The Baltimore Bank Riot of 1835 was one of the most violent and destructive incidents of civic unrest in any American city before the Civil War.
On Thursday evening, August 6, a small crowd approached the home of bank director Reverdy Johnson - U.S. Senator, future Attorney General, future Minister to the United Kingdom - on Battle Monument Square. The house had been built in 1799 as the townhouse of James Buchanan, the future president, and stood opposite the old Courthouse Square at the corner of North Calvert and East Fayette Streets. The crowd broke Johnson's windows and went home. Mayor Jesse Hunt, anticipating more trouble, began posting citizens to guard the property. The crowd returned Friday evening and broke more windows in the mayor's presence. Hunt addressed them, talked them into dispersing, and went home thinking he had managed the crisis. He had not.
On Saturday evening, August 8, a large crowd assembled on Baltimore Street and marched north on Calvert. Hunt had summoned thirty armed horsemen to form a cordon across the entrance to Battle Monument Square. The crowd, unable to break through, peeled off and went to the home of Judge John Glenn, another bank director, a few blocks away. They smashed his windows, broke through a barricaded front door, threw his furniture into the street, and tore down the entire front wall of the house brick by brick. Police arrived and fired into the crowd. The crowd refused to disperse. Some accounts say several people were killed and many more wounded in the police volley. The crowd, having destroyed Glenn's house, melted into the city and went home to sleep. Hunt's authority was finished.
On Sunday, August 9, the mob returned in greater numbers, overran the guard at Reverdy Johnson's home, and got inside. They threw his furniture into Calvert Street and set it on fire. They threw his books out window after window - law books, most of them, in a personal library that was supposedly one of the finest in the country. The books fed the bonfire that burned for hours in the middle of the square. With the city effectively surrendered to the crowd, the destruction spread to the home of bank director John B. Morris, then to Mayor Hunt's own house, then to the homes of bank-affiliated merchants Evan T. Ellicott, a Captain Bentzinger, and Captain Willy - the last for the offense of having publicly protested the rioting. Jesse Hunt, watching his own house dismantled and his city collapse around him, went to the Merchants' Exchange building on South Gay Street and resigned the mayoralty.
At eighty-three years old, General Samuel Smith was a living relic of the American Revolution. He had served as a Continental officer at Fort Mifflin in 1777, where his garrison of about 400 men had held off a British siege long enough for Washington's army to escape to Valley Forge. He had been a U.S. Senator from Maryland and a Baltimore mayor. He had organized the defense of Baltimore in 1814 against the same British force that burned Washington. Now, in August 1835, Smith stepped forward to take the city government when no one else would. He gathered volunteers at Howard's Park, north of town near the recently-completed Washington Monument, on the estate of his late friend John Eager Howard. He ordered the volunteers to arm themselves and assemble at City Hall, then housed in the Peale Museum on Holliday Street. Three thousand armed citizens responded. They outnumbered the mob. Smith had already sent for federal troops from Annapolis and Washington. By the time those reinforcements arrived, Smith's volunteers had dispersed the rioters and the city was quiet.
The mob's leaders were identified, brought to trial, fined, and imprisoned. The property owners whose homes had been destroyed sued the State of Maryland for failing to protect them and won. The state paid $100,000 in compensation, a figure equivalent to several million dollars today. Baltimore rebuilt. Reverdy Johnson restored his house and his library and went on to a long career in national politics. The bank directors who had escaped the worst of the destruction were not, in fact, ever held legally accountable for the fraud their depositors believed they had committed. The riot foreshadowed the Panic of 1837, the broader national financial crisis that would expose the same kinds of speculative bank practices in dozens of American cities. The reputation of the Andrew Jackson administration, which had famously gutted the Second Bank of the United States and contributed to the regulatory vacuum that produced the failures, suffered. So did the early days of Jackson's successor Martin Van Buren. The Baltimore Bank Riot was, in retrospect, an early warning. The country did not listen.
The Baltimore Bank Riot of 1835 took place in central downtown Baltimore, primarily in the area around Battle Monument Square at North Calvert and East Fayette Streets - approximately 39.2890 N, 76.6112 W. The historic site is now within walking distance of Baltimore's modern City Hall and the Inner Harbor. Reagan National (KDCA) is 35 miles south; BWI Marshall (KBWI) is 9 miles southwest. The area is well outside both the Washington Flight Restricted Zone and the Special Flight Rules Area. From altitude, Battle Monument itself - the Aquila Randall column dedicated in 1815 to the defenders of Fort McHenry - is still visible at the center of the small square it shares with the courthouse.