A History of the American People

of the hill overlooking the harbor, enormous flags, each from a different shipping company,
announced major arrivals from the ocean. Fells Point was one of the most crowded shipping
wharves on earth, backed by 3,000 houses, most of brick, two or three stories high. Later, the
haughty French aristocrat Francois Alexis de Chateaubriand conceded that entering Baltimore
harbor was like sailing into a park.' There was a downside to all this bustle, needless to say. Land values shot up astronomically and people complained the cost of living was higher than London's and much higher than in Paris. There was a terrific stench from the harbor at low tide and the streets near it were crowded with Indian, black, and white whores-also said to be high- priced and insolent. On the other hand there were not one but two theaters, and the Indian Queen Hotel on the corner of Market and Hanover streets was one of the best in the western hemisphere by the 1790s: excellent food, boots and shoes polished by assiduous blacks if left outside the rooms, and slippers provided free for guests. There also grew up in colonial America, beginning in the last decades of the 17th century and progressing in stately fashion and growing confidence in the 18th century, a country-house culture, modeled on England's but with marked characteristics of its own. To begin with, these baroque-Georgian-Palladian houses were almost invariably at this date built on navigable rivers and creeks, to serve the plantation export economy. The wharf was as important as the drawing- roomindeed, without the wharf the elaborate furniture, imported from London or Paris or made in New England, could not be afforded. These grand houses arose naturally from the economic activities which sustained them and were not plonked artificially in the midst of a capdoffing countryside like Blenheim or Chatsworth or Althorp in England. Nor, until the arrival of the plutocracy after the Civil War, were American country houses on anything like the same scale as the English aristocracy's. Except when the Dutch patroons built them, they were rarely of stone. But in the deployment of brick the American house-builders, amateur and professional, have rarely been excelled. The greatest early 18th-century house in America was Rosewell, erected by Mann Page (1691- 1730) in 1726 on the York River. Page married a Carter, of the family ofKing' Carter (1663-
1732), the famous and rapacious agent of Lord Fairfax, proprietor of the Northern Neck of
Virginia. Carter amassed 300,000 acres of prime land, and he gave his fancy son-in-law, Page,
70,000 of them. Page had this superb house built using the designs in Colin Campbell's Vitruvius
Britannicus-published in London 1715-25 and quickly shipped across the Atlantic-as models.
Page overspent, his grand house was unfinished when he died in 1730, and his debts exceeded
the value of all his property, slaves included. Moreover, Rosewell, having triumphantly survived
the horrors of the Civil War, was burned down in 1916. But its ruins compel one to believe that,
in its day, `there [was] nothing like it in England.'
Almost as grand, and still in excellent condition (and open to the public) is Hampton, near
Baltimore. This was built (from 1783) by Charles Ridgeley (1733-90) and testifies to the failure
of the British authorities to carry out their intention of preventing the American colonies from
becoming a major iron-producer. Ridgeley was not only a planter with 24,000 slave-worked
acres, but the owner of a large ironworks. That was where most of his money came from.
Maryland not only had rich iron-ore deposits but plentiful hardwoods for making charcoal and
fast streams for power. As early as 1734-7 it shipped 1,977 tons of pig-iron to England; by the
1740s it had a huge forge and made bar-iron as well as pigs; by the 1750s it had multiple
furnaces and forges: in 1756 there were six ironworks in Baltimore County alone. Then it began
to push inland, with rich members of the local elite, like Daniel Dulany, Benjamin Tasker, and
Ridgeley, buying up gigantic blocks of iron-bearing land by patent, then moving in Swiss-