Qualla: Baltimore Bank Riot

Baltimore Bank Riot: Introduction

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

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Baltimore Bank Riot: The First Window

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 f...

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Baltimore Bank Riot: The Glenn House Comes Down

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

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Baltimore Bank Riot: The Bonfire of the Law Library

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 th...

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Baltimore Bank Riot: Sam Smith Takes the City Back

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 Fo...

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Baltimore Bank Riot: Aftermath and Legacy

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 t...

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